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435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
From Indictments to Innovations with Box House CEO Jeremy Johnson
Ever wondered how entrepreneurs tackle both legal nightmares and ambitious projects? Today, we promise an enlightening conversation with Jeremy Johnson, the CEO of Box House, who shares his harrowing experiences with government indictments and the relentless pressure of ever-evolving charges. Jeremy also lets us in on his personal venture of building a custom house in the woods, contrasting it with the hands-on approach he now takes at Box House. With the support from Atwood Innovation Plaza, witness how Box House morphed from a small team into a thriving workforce.
Explore innovative housing solutions that Jeremy and his team are developing to address the affordable housing crisis. From transforming a 380-square-foot construction office into a cozy home to considering robust housing for oil field workers, this episode delves into practical and creative alternatives to traditional housing. We also tackle the financial strategies that make homeownership accessible and discuss the challenges of navigating city regulations and the potential of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to alleviate housing shortages.
The episode dives deep into the transformative experiences of facing government prosecution and finding purpose in unexpected places, like prison. Listen to Jeremy recount his battle with the Federal Trade Commission, shedding light on the power dynamics and procedural challenges of such legal confrontations. Discover how these experiences have shaped his role at Box House and the company’s innovative approach to overcoming regulatory obstacles. We'll also touch on the profound impact of providing support to those in need, and how Box House's future plans aim to create lasting, positive change.
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https://www.boxhouse.com/
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[00:00:00] Intro clip.
[00:10:07] Affordable Housing Innovation Solution.
[00:20:16] Affordable Housing Business Development.
[00:28:28] Challenges With Affordable Housing Solutions.
[00:36:54] Entrepreneurship Success and Challenges.
[00:44:55] Unfair Government Seizure and Legal Battle.
[00:51:02] Legal Battle Against Government Prosecution.
[01:02:35] Finding Purpose and Forgiveness in Prison.
[01:06:49] Building a Community of Support.
[01:12:12] Box House Growth and Future Plans.
[01:27:16] Housing Crisis Solution Through Collaboration.
And so what happens is the government would say, oh, you committed mail fraud, you know, or whatever, and we'd say, okay, well, you know. I would say, no, no, we didn't. Here's the evidence, here's the proof that we did it. Oh, and so what they do is they do a new indictment. They change it Like, oh, then you did this. I'm like, no, no, I didn't. Here's the proof. Oh, okay, nevermind. Then they come up with a new one and I finally realized that, like there's no amount of evidence they're going to accept where they're going to say we made a mistake. So they re-indicted me three times and by the end they just kept figuring out more stuff and adding stuff, and so by the end it went from one charge to 86, right, and they just anything they could think of money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, I mean, just throw it all Like six different federal agencies, right, or something?
Speaker 1:like that yeah, Throw it all as much mud on the wall as you can and just hope something sticks.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the 435 Podcast. Today we have a great, exciting episode with a legendary figure here in Southern Utah, jeremy Johnson. His current project is the CEO of Box House. It's right here out of St George. They're doing projects all over Texas. If you don't know Jeremy Johnson, you will know him after this episode. If you do know him, I think he's going to surprise you with what he has to say. We don't get into whether he buried gold in the desert that's going to be for the next episode but we hope you enjoy this one. Thanks to all our partners Blueform Media, our production team they're amazing Blake and Mallory, fs Coffee Company, tuacon Amphitheater. We have so many sponsors for the podcast. We're so grateful for their support. Um, we're grateful for all of our followers or subscribers and and uh, all the people that are uh supporting the show. We we appreciate you. Uh, we can't wait to keep this rolling. Uh, enjoy this episode, guys. We'll see you out there. Tell me about the house in the woods.
Speaker 2:So okay, tell me about the house in the woods. Okay, so I walked through it in probably 2018, 19? Might have been 19. 19. And obviously hadn't been lived in in a long time, but it's a beautiful house. I mean the architecture and the ideas and like everything, all that was put into it. Was that kind of like your first run at building a house, or was it? Yeah?
Speaker 1:So I mean a house, a custom house, right? Yeah, I'd had one built prior. That was just someone else's design. That one was mostly my idea, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you went to the architect and, yeah, went through that process. Yeah, so was that kind of uh, is there any tie to like that experience of building that? And then what you're doing right now with the box house is there? Is there any like when you were? Because going through building a house, man is hard, there's a lot of things that people don't think about, and then you built a 19,000 square foot resort.
Speaker 1:Yeah, aside from what I wanted to have, I didn't have a lot to do with building it, actually. I mean, I wasn't even. I was working in Santa Monica at the time. Oh, okay, and so that house was supposed to be a three and a half million dollar project ended up being nine and a half, and so it just you know a little bit over budget Um and it was.
Speaker 1:You know know it was a, it was a friend of mine that was building it and he was like, hey, what about this idea? And I'm in california. I'm like, yeah, whatever, go for it. You know, sounds good, it just so that, so that one wasn't necessarily a hands-on build uh, no, no, no, uh, and so the correlation between the two is that there is none. That is the complete polar opposite end of what I'm doing now. Okay, I'm very hands-on, uh, with this um project.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I first saw it, uh, at Atwood Innovation Plaza, I think you guys were have had some offices there in the makerspace or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, yeah, we actually just just recently moved out of there.
Speaker 2:So, oh, cool. So what was it about that? Because a lot of people still don't know about it. I had Rick Atkin on. We talked about it. I've been wanting to have Provost on and talk about you know his idea, but what I mean? What was it? Just a available space and that's where yeah?
Speaker 1:it was somebody, um, you know, uh, new provost over there and uh, they, you know, kind of hooked it up for us and uh, you know, they were great. Um, I think that's a really cool tool for us to have in the community. I would have loved to have had something like that with some of the other businesses that I started, you know, years ago, so I'm a huge supporter of it and a fan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was helpful in getting the business company going Very helpful.
Speaker 1:I mean, for us it was more like that. There just wasn't any office space available, and so, you know, we probably it was really fun to be there and be with a lot of other entrepreneurs, um, and you know, uh, hopefully, cause, you know, we started there, I think, with uh, five employees and we left, you know, with around 60 or maybe even closer to 70, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of growth in a short time, and anybody there saw that, and we moved office spaces in there a few times, three times I think, and so, um, but that I think it's a cool example of whether you're utilizing maybe all of the tools that are there versus okay, maybe it's just office space that you need and then having a place to start, um, being around like-minded people, you know have energy right, cause I think all of that kind of goes together and having something you know get off the ground successfully. So it seems like it's a great case study, because you were one of the first ones that kind of took it sat in the space, right, you know, when it first kind of started, is that right?
Speaker 1:Um, I'm not exactly sure how long it's been I think it's been around for a couple of years, but I have a feeling we're probably one of the more better success stories that's come out of there. Yeah, and I hope that we are and I hope that we can promote that and I actually hope we can. I would love to see a little more like collaboration there. You know, and you know I think we'll pretty soon be the point where we would want to go and maybe help fund some of the businesses in there. You know the office space is great. It's helpful.
Speaker 1:The maker space probably in a lot of situations could be as well, depending on what your business is. But you know a lot of these guys in there need capital, uh, capital, yeah, and that's tough when you're starting out. That's real tough, and the people who understand that best are people that have been through that experience and now have some right. So a guy like me would be perfect to have something where let's let's hear what you got and maybe I could be of help with capital and maybe I can even help steer you and save you from some of the trauma and hardships that you know I had to learn some of the lessons, some of the lessons on that so I would actually really, in the future, love the opportunity to get involved with that, that space, and help other businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that'd be cool. I wonder if they do like a almost like a Y combinator, where you do like a picture idea and you have business people you know in Southern Utah there whether it's venture capitalists or whatever, where you know in that space you do a little presentation and you pitch and then you kind of seed round you know a couple of small businesses Like a St George shark tank, kind of like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, That'd be kind of cool. I think something like that would be really great and I think you know myself and I think there's other people that would participate in that and want to help see some of these businesses help get off the ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a cool idea, that's a great idea. Somebody should run with that.
Speaker 1:Somebody should maybe someone listening will, someone should run with that.
Speaker 2:So you know, moving from the initial idea. I mean, where did the idea come from?
Speaker 1:I think there's some things that jump into my mind that seem obvious. But where did this idea start? With Box House? Well, so I got out of prison. Wait, you went to prison.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1:I'm just kidding. I got out of prison right in the middle of COVID, okay. And so I, you know, didn't really know what to do and I was like, well, I'm going to try being a farmer. So I just went and started working on my farm over in Hurricane Dixie Springs area, yeah, yeah, um, and I'm learning how to grow corn and watermelons and pumpkins and trees and all this stuff, right, and uh, uh, on this farm there's like maybe 100 people that live there and they all live in just substandard housing, like RVs, and just junky housing. Um, and it's leftover housing from, like, uh, when it before I owned it when it used to be a tomato farm.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so, you know, I mean, I've got grannies that live down there that live off of social security, right, $1,200 a month. I can't even charge them rent. How are they going to pay it? What are they going to live off of, right? And I'm like, how, how do you get in this situation? I don't come to find out. You know, they've been renting for 50 years and now they're old, they can't work anymore. And you know, I'm like calculating what they've spent in rent over their lifetime. And you know, I'm like calculating what they've spent in rent over their lifetime and because they never got into a house. Now they're old and they're stuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're going to buy a house one way or another. You're going to buy the landlord's house or you're going to buy one for yourself. Right, you just got to pick.
Speaker 1:And so you know I'm like geez, this is a horrible problem. And then I've got other situations. I mean there's a family of seven down there, still Five kids. Dad works full time. He's like a tow truck driver, you know, makes $2,500 a month or whatever it is. It's not a whole lot of money. How do you pay for rent for a house in this town on that salary and then feed five mouths? You can't, or seven, I guess.
Speaker 2:Impossible, speaking from experience. Yeah, impossible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, jeff's got five kids, yeah, so they literally live in an RV on my farm, wow, because they have no. And when they came to my and that's an upgrade for them they were living in the desert no running water, no electricity, good grief. And someone said, hey, you know, I mean words kind of out Any sad story that shows up there, I'll do my best to accommodate, yeah, yeah. So I'm like, yeah, there's got to be a solution. Like, how can a house be affordable enough for these situations, right, mm-hmm? And so I started thinking I mean, I just think about that as I'm working down on the farm and I was like, well, how would pioneers do it? They didn't have any money, right? Well, they built out of logs and Adobe and stuff. So I did one out of logs. Took forever, that's for the birds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean collect sticks up and stack them together.
Speaker 3:You just did it on your own.
Speaker 1:No, I didn't, because I don't have all the yeah, yeah, expertise. But I thought, okay, I'll have one built, maybe I could replicate this and cool, uh, just no way in heck that's gonna work right. So then I tried an adobe one that I did do enormous amount of work, uh, and you know, yeah, I didn't pay much for materials, but the labors it's just never going to work right. Um, and so then I took this little like uh, construction office that was made like in a factory in china, and I converted one of those to house and I was like, oh, this is, this is okay. I mean, I could see myself living in this, you know. And I I thought I wonder if there's a market for that. So we put it on facebook, on like the little free ad thing on a marketplace, and it just blew up. I mean, hundreds of people are hitting us up wanting to come and see it and there's a huge market. How big was it? The house?
Speaker 3:yeah, uh, 380 square feet, okay, 19 by 20, and um, so I was like, well, it's a standard bedroom yeah, uh, it's a kind of a big bedroom, maybe a garage standard garage, yeah, garage yeah, 380 square feet, yeah um, I mean that's staying under 400 square feet is the magic number, right?
Speaker 1:if you go over that, then you get into all kinds of regulations and inspectors and permitting.
Speaker 1:If you stay under that, you can kind of slide under a little regulatory regulatory, probably radar that helps keep it affordable, right right um, and so if you see like a teeny home, you know that the ones that you see, the traditional, what we think of a teeny home they have wheels and they they make them. They're kind of narrow and long because they got to go down the road. What's unique about this house is it's square, okay, and so it doesn't feel so claustrophobic. When you go inside, you feel like you're in a kind of almost in a normal house, yeah, and so you don't waste any space on a hallway or it's an open floor plan. Um and uh, it doesn't sit high off the ground like most do. It's like an inch or two off the ground. So you step in you feel like you're on a slab you're not, but so it feels much more like a stick built house than any teeny home or manufactured type of product out there.
Speaker 2:And so you found, you found the, the first idea, kind of the prototype, if you will, that that was a canned you know. Uh, what was it made for? Like a, like a shop, or what was? What was the original intention it was made to?
Speaker 1:go on like a construction site, as a kind of like a temporary building, while you're building, yeah, so you can have your plans and stuff in there and you just have a little office.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense. So a rugged design, a rugged build. It's made out of steel tubular frame and it's got its own. A big thing is it's all supported on its own subframe. You don't need a foundation. So now, when you talk about turning it to a house, now you can cut out the cement truck, the footings you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:All these things add to the cost of the house. You know the average house takes six months to build and 22 subcontractors. So with 22 subcontractors, 22 hands in the pie, how is it ever going to be affordable? Right? The answer is it's not. It's not Right, the answer is it's not. It's not Right. And so if you can cut a lot of the need for all these different subs out and you have it mostly made in a factory, you know, now we can set this house up. Takes a crew of three guys, a couple of days and you're done, you're living in it. Yeah, you can really control the cost of that. You can really control the cost of that. And you can put it in areas where land is cheaper but far away, where normally you can't afford to build because you can't pay a cement truck to drive 150 miles, right.
Speaker 2:Or you're like I need, I want power in the power lines, I need to put 12 poles up and they're eight grand a pole and you got to pay for the whole thing just to run power to your property. It's like, well, it cuts out margins in these, these ways. Granted solar, there's all these other you know, off, off grid type stuff, but there's so many different factors. Where land is cheap to develop it Like enterprise is a prime example where you know I was 10 acres selling for 20 grand, you know.
Speaker 2:And burl, you know where we have tons of land and, truthfully, when you put a clock to it, I'd be driving. You know it took me an hour when I wasn't living in Huntington beach, california, it took me an hour to drive downy, you know, in traffic, bumper to bumper traffic versus driving from Burrell down into St George, same hour, no traffic, beautiful view, right, but we're not building out there, right, and we're not building out there, right, and so it's. I always, I'm always thinking of the questions like well, why, why, why don't, why aren't people going out there? And there's a lot of different factors, civilization being one of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and the money you save on land a lot of that cost savings is eaten up by the extra costs to build Right, exactly. Extra cost to build Right, exactly. Have construction guys hard enough to get a construction guy to come here in town and do something for you? Yeah, and give them to go out to Burrell, yeah, exactly, I mean.
Speaker 2:So that's that's the, that's the difficult thing, and so so so as, as you've gone, as you started going through that process with identifying, obviously there's a product that the consumer needs and wants and is willing to pay for. What other hurdles along the way? Because it sounds to me like, okay, well, what, what classification is it? Is it a mobile home? Is it a manufactured home? What? What are the rules with financing and allowing people to, you know, continue to make it accessible because they're not paying cash for these things. Are they? Are people buying them in cash?
Speaker 1:um, currently, right now, we don't offer them for sale to the public. Uh, um, a couple of reasons for that is that, uh, when we do, I want it to be a very highly refined product that has been tried and tested and is going to be a good experience for the person that buys it. Right, this is going to be probably a very significant investment for these people and, um, uh, I, I, I I'm really sensitive about our reputation and I want it to be good. So, up until this point, the only people that have bought them have been investors, and so we've been deploying them in really difficult to build in areas like in the oil fields in West Texas and stuff like that. Why is that difficult to build there? Because you're competing with the oil companies for labor. They'll pay an unskilled labor a hundred bucks an hour to work on a rig, right, whoa. So who wants to go get a job?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Side note I worked alongside the oil field for a few years. You don't want to do that. Yeah, okay, okay, you talked me out of it.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Perfect.
Speaker 2:So so the it's you're competing. The labor to build the property is what you're saying is like finding a framer and things like that. It's difficult. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1:It's difficult and if you do, you're going to be paying a lot for them and nobody really wants to build there, because these are not areas anybody really actually wants to live or raise a family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most of the workers there are seasonal, like they'll come for six months out of the year. They'll make enough money in that time, they can go home and they, that's their job, right? They work half a year and they chill half a year, and so they're not looking to invest in a house in that area. They get paid a per diem, usually for their housing, and so that ends up being a pretty significant amount of money because there's no options, right, right, um, and so you know, we could put a box house down there, rent it for anywhere from two to three thousand dollars a month, and then we sell it off to an investor, right, and they'll pay premium dollars for that, because they don't really care what it is, they just see how much it's bringing in.
Speaker 2:And you know, I mean the oil field is going to keep going right.
Speaker 1:So there's, there's, there's always going to be somebody to live in it Exactly, and and so, um, you know what would you have to spend on a house in this town to get a return of two or 3000 a month? It's quite a lot of money, right, so we can offer something more attractive, but yet it's probably like 600 grand right, 550 600, yeah, 3 000.
Speaker 2:I mean the townhomes in red mountain vistas. They get about 2019 to 2000 a month and right now you'd be at 400 to buy one of those townhomes yeah, I was thinking 650, 700, if you want to, you know, bring 2800 to three grand a month yeah, it's significant, yeah, it's not cheap, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's where they've been going. That's what's propelled. Uh, you know the growth that we've had. Um, we make a lot of money doing that, and the other good thing that's happened is that, um, oil field workers are notoriously hard on housing. These are. They don't call them roughnecks for no reason. These are rugged people. They are hard on things. They wear steel boots. They, you know they bring mud in the house.
Speaker 2:They track in oil and mud and you know they are rough and so you take they're not going to spend their off time dusting and vacuuming?
Speaker 1:No, no, not at all.
Speaker 2:Fixing, you know, scratches on walls Right? No, not at all. Fixing, you know, scratches on walls, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you take like a traditional manufactured home down there. That's got the cheap wood paddling and you know I mean they just crumble. You know the kind where you can just put your fist through the door. They don't hold up to the abuse that these guys dish out at all. And that's what's unique about our product it is rugged. I mean you can't put your fist through the wall, you just break your hand if you try and and and.
Speaker 1:We've found from them using these. We found some things that need to be improved and we've done that Right. But now I could deliver a house to a consumer that will stand up to an enormous amount of abuse and I can feel confident they're going to have a product that's going to last a long time. Like you know, 100 years from now, that thing is still going to be in great shape. It's going to need a coat of paint, but that's it. There's nothing on it to deteriorate. There's no wood, you know there's the things that deteriorate on a house we don't use, yeah. And so I'm confident that once we staff up our production to meet demand for consumers, we'll deliver a product that people will be happy with.
Speaker 2:So is the goal to be able to sell direct to a consumer?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to finance them for people who otherwise would not be financeable. Um, I believe we're going to be able to offer them a house, you know, uh, for less than a thousand dollars a month, Um, and, and the unique thing is that the house will rent for more than the payment and no money down. Don't care what your credit is right, and the theory for me is that you know, whatever your situation is, if your payment is less than what it would rent for at market value, you're always going to make that payment.
Speaker 1:And if you don't, fine, somebody else will Take it back and sell it to someone else. Or maybe we'll just rent it out and put more money yeah, right. But even if you move, the smart thing to do is put a renter in there, put that extra money in your pocket and keep making the payment, right, yeah, makes sense. And so now you've got the old grannies at my farm that were renting their whole lives. If they were paying on this thing for 30 years and then they owned it when they were old, they'd be thrilled to have something like that that they own, free and clear. Yeah, right, there's a way. And so that's the.
Speaker 1:That's the dream for me, for box house is to provide that to people who right now have no option except rent. Yeah, get them something, that's. Even if it was the same price as rent, right, but I think we can do it for less. So so they're number one. Their costs are fixed, because trepidation for someone who's renting isn't just that their money's going down the drain, it's that. Well, I'm paying 1500 a month now, but what am I going to be paying in two?
Speaker 2:years. Right, yeah, that was when I was living in California. It was every year. I was going to the next place to get the intro uh, you know rental rate. And then I'd know they were going to jack it up a hundred $200 that next year and I just go to the next place. So I was hopping around trying to keep my rent costs down.
Speaker 2:But it's always that future it's not secure, right? You can't build a community around you if you're only there one year at a time, or even two years at a time and having to move on back to that community. And what makes the community awesome is the people that live there and care about what's. You know if there's a stop sign right there or if the speed limits too fast because there's kids or you know the, you know there's, there's real care about where you live and you can't create that with a bunch of rentals and so thinking of the smart thing to do renting that out, you know, in a future situation as an investment.
Speaker 2:That's one side and I think that's probably where city councils and city governments that's that's where they they start to look at when that road occurs. What are the? What's the fallout from that? And are you finding? I can't imagine in the oil fields, you're dealing with cities that are like, no, you can't build that right now, you're not dealing with that, but there's going to be a time where that road's going to have to get crossed. Have you? Have you started thinking about that? And yeah, we actually tried to start here, right.
Speaker 1:Well, actually, you know, they were actually really interested in it and they even talked about some property the city had. They liked the idea of having a way for people who are under house now to be able to actually own something and we're looking at some property down by the sewer treatment plant in Bloomington, and so it seemed like we had some pretty good progress. Then they found out I was involved and they were like no, we're not interested. So I you know which is fine story in my life, right?
Speaker 2:But that's crazy, that's understandable A little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'm not offended by it, it just is what it is Right and in the end it worked out better for us, right? Instead of trying to start out with affordable housing. Then I was like, all right, well, let's just go put them somewhere where people want housing and test the product, like when you've done good and we ended up getting way more money for the house than we ever would have got here, so that's capitalized the company. It's put us in a better financial position to be able to. Now, if we did an affordable housing project, we're actually on a lot more stable ground and we can realistically do that and we can deliver a much better product than what we would have otherwise. So I'm not upset. I'm not trying to talk down to any city people and and and they are coming around now.
Speaker 2:Now they're. I think I can understand, because if you're not familiar with the story, that is um, you're a legend in Southern Utah, man, when I, when I when I, when we came up with the idea I was talking to Jeff. The first person that popped in my mind is I want to talk to Jeremy Johnson.
Speaker 2:This is like almost two years ago because the story, the story has so many layers and it's very well known by a lot of people that have, you know, been around this area, cause you were born and raised here, right, yeah, and so I can see how, okay, maybe with past experiences, maybe we don't just jump all in on this right out of the gate. Let's see if we have, if there's a proven track record of success with the business, and it seems like you're well on your way to do that, right, and so it's a timing thing, yeah, and so, yeah, yeah, because I kind of want to go back, but I want to keep going forward, at least from the perspective of what. What do you anticipate are going to be some of the challenges with the cities? Do you think not having a foundation like, is that going to convincing a city council that you don't need seven million dollars in concrete to go underneath a house?
Speaker 1:is Well, I mean, if they require it, go ahead. I mean you pour a slab and throw it on top of a slab. Um, we've been uh experimenting with uh helical piers and ground screws. You know that's a quick, easy, cheap foundation.
Speaker 2:but I guess I I'm still confused. Why do they need, why do we need a foundation?
Speaker 1:well, well, you don't right. Um, I'm like. None of the ones that we put in texas are on foundations. Uh, you know, these things weigh 10, 12 000 pounds. They're sitting an inch off the ground there's. If a tornado or something's picking this thing up and moving, it is destroying any house on a foundation as well.
Speaker 2:You know so uh, what about maybe floods? Do you think maybe that could be something that they're like? Well, you know, how does the foundation help you to flood that just makes it harder to I mean. I don't know anything.
Speaker 1:You can potentially go if there's a flood coming, you could potentially go get a crane and pick this thing up off the ground and avoid it getting flooded, you know yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I would think, like you know from a, you know, like trying to get financing on like a mobile home right, on like a mobile home right, the risk from a lender is well, someone could come and just hook up to it and take it away and then our investment or our-.
Speaker 2:But they have to be strapped down. They have to have an engineer strapped down.
Speaker 3:Right, I'm just thinking like maybe that's where the question's coming from.
Speaker 2:On the foundation thing, it has to be like anchored to the property.
Speaker 3:Yeah, lenders like well this isn't technically a house, so we're not going to finance it, we're not going to lend on it.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying it's right, but like maybe that's where the Well, so the way the house is designed, you can go either or you can anchor it, or you can choose not to. Okay, and so it rests on 16 adjustable feet and it's got a hole in each foot, and if you want to anchor it, put a bolt in there and you're real property now. Okay, take the bolt out. Guess what? Your personal property, yeah, right.
Speaker 3:But there's also. It's not technically, it's not a mobile home, right, there's no axles, there's no wheels, there's no trailer tongue, anything like that, right.
Speaker 1:Well, it got there on wheels and axles, but there's nothing in the law that says you have to leave them underneath it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the mobile home idea just came out of. You know, you had vagabonds, right. You had gypsies that were roaming around the world in caravans where they lived on wheels. And then they move from town to town, right. And so you get evolution into the fifties. Now these people are stopping and they're like well, I'm just going to set up shop right here, I can buy this land and I'm just going to put it right here and I'll put a skirt around it and I don't ever plan on moving. But now then the government's like well, you have to for us to lend on it. You know, if you go to resell it, you have to anchor it to the property. So then we evolve into that, that track. But this is something totally different, right, yeah?
Speaker 1:totally different and also, it's never been my idea to use traditional lending anyways, because they're already going to reject 90% of the people who need it, based on their credit.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, you know what I'm saying. That's a good point. So for me.
Speaker 1:I was like what does your credit or your income have to do with whether or not you pay your rent, right, I mean, you just you got to figure it out. One way or the other. That bill has got to get paid, whether you're renting or you got a payment. Yeah, so you know why can't we come up with a financing mechanism that just disregards that and looks at what is the market rate rent for this house and what is the payment.
Speaker 1:As long as the payment's less, who cares who you're at the risk is essentially gone, yeah, and so you know, now we're working with some uh funds where we say look, finance these houses. If anybody is even 30 days late, we buy back the loan, we'll take it. Okay, yeah, so far it hasn't happened.
Speaker 2:Nobody's, I mean. Well, I guess. I guess the only other thing would be cause in 2008,. I heard stories of like renters pouring concrete into the toilet and like damaging the property on the way out. Right, so I can see how there's some mechanisms in place for banks to be like. You know, I lent on this much and I have an outstanding note, but the value of the property is significantly less than that, so therefore I'm not going to recruit my investment as the bank goes. So how do we protect against that? Credit scores are some arbitrary way of identifying whether somebody's not a horrible person or not, which we all know. That's not true. It seems so obvious. But I like this idea of just just getting out of the traditional financing arena altogether. But then we still got like city ordinances and things like that. So, thinking about some of those hurdles, do you think it's more difficult in St George than say you know?
Speaker 1:I would say that anywhere in the entire country, including California, because we're doing projects in California. They're much easier than working with St George Interesting. I haven't found a place anywhere that's as difficult as here, wow, and so for us it's like hey, we'll go where we're wanted. There's a lot of communities that are begging. Yeah, anything we can do to accommodate you, to get you to come here. What can we do? Can we donate some land? And we used to be that way.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say it's kind of a bummer.
Speaker 1:But I think they'll come around. They're going to have to.
Speaker 3:What are they going to?
Speaker 1:do? They're trying to make this place like a Scottsdale, Okay that's great. Where are the guys going to live, to cut the grass and work in the restaurants and stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't have a metro to support, we don't have a big city to support that labor force. It's all just too far away. We are the city.
Speaker 3:Right, Like in Park City. Everybody lives down in Salt Lake. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And in California, right, All the riversides, suburbia, Ontario, all that area is what supports LA and Orange County. Right Is the outlying areas, Orange County, right Is the the outlying areas. And if we want to, if we want to turn ourselves into Southern California, then I guess we could do that and make Burrell full of a bunch of houses and build a super lane highway going from enterprise and Cedar city down this way. Right, we could do that. It's a horrible idea. Nobody really wants that. So how do we? Where do we find the balance we got to to find affordable housing at some capacity? Right, Ironically, you know who.
Speaker 1:I think has most got it figured out is California, because they've realized the error of their ways. Now and now, if you own a home in California, regardless, state law overrides whatever city ordinance that says you can't do this. And you can put a box house in your backyard, you can subdivide the property that the box house is on, you can rent it, you can sell it if you want, right. And so now every house is actually two houses, maybe it's three, and Austin, I can put three of these in my yard. And so what you're doing is dramatically increasing the supply of homes in the metro, the density, and that's going to bring down prices for rent, for housing, because you're increasing supply, right. So they're thinking smart. As dumb as a lot of things California does are, they're at least learning from their mistakes. They had to go through the growing pains.
Speaker 1:They had to go through the pain of things.
Speaker 2:California does are they're at least learning from their mistakes. They had to go through the growing pains. They had to go through the pain their failure right In order to get to that spot is there. I've said this a couple of times, but you know, if we think eliminating a place for somebody to live, they will just get creative and live in the desert, right, or they'll put six families in a three bedroom house, and that's what they did in California.
Speaker 2:I mean, truthfully, it was you packed as many people in as possible and in as small space as possible, just because that's the only way you could afford to do it, and that that isn't changing the culture, that's not changing the you know neighborhood any differently than if we had a house. But if you have a house that you're invested in, you care about, you're going to care about your community, you're going to get a better quality of a citizen when you give them their own kitchen and a place to do their laundry and and uh and a bathroom right, instead of sharing it with 15 different people. So it's this weird mindset shift that everybody has to be okay with, because it's inevitable that we're going to get to that route. So I mean going along the lines of lessons that you've learned. Kind of take us back to how many businesses you said one in five work. How many other businesses Like what are? Your other business I works is the most famous or infamous?
Speaker 2:I guess, and infamous right, but what other? What other uh businesses have you done um?
Speaker 1:oh wow, you want the whole list.
Speaker 2:I mean, uh, you know uh, which ones were good where you're like this one worked. This one worked um I works was.
Speaker 1:Uh was a really profitable business. It was fun. Um. I got into banking, um, and that was a highly lucrative uh business and uh and finance, uh did some solar finance. Uh, that was a good business. Um didn't make a lot of money farming yeah, I would probably count that. A lot of money farming yeah, I would probably count that as one of the failures. I've heard that stuff. I've heard that stuff. That is a rough, rough way to make a living. Um, I don't know how they do it. You know, I don't think very many people do Uh, but it's, it's rewarding work. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 3:Um, I was happy. I spend all day working hard with my dog. Sometimes I go down there and I like working on stuff and fixing things. It's like you can't really make money at it. I mean, I guess to some extent you can, but I don't know. It's just kind of ironic that way. Maybe it's a personality thing or something, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think that's true for most people. I think we get told as kids, at least, uh, over the last couple of generations you know you can be whatever you want, find your passion and then find the you'll find a way to make money at that. It's just the amount of money has ceilings, right. It's the market for that thing can be difficult to break into. So the the quality of life that you expect out of doing that thing that you love, sometimes they don't match right. You want to have you. You know go on vacations. Or you want to go get a boat, or you know wave runners jeff jeff's in, he's, he's in the market for wave runner right, okay and so.
Speaker 2:So when we think about these fun things that we want to do, can farming supply those fun things in addition to the thing that you love? And sometimes it doesn't match up. So iworks, what? What was the idea around? Iworks, I mean, how did that get started?
Speaker 1:um, iworks got started. Uh, this is like way back when, like ebay was kind of a new thing, right. I don't know if you remember people would sell stuff out of their garage and make all this money on ebay yeah, I remember I I think it was probably around 2007, 2005, really yeah, yeah, I think that's kind of ebay kind of kicked off.
Speaker 3:Maybe I bought a jersey at university of utah. When alex smith got drafted in 2005, I got on ebay and I bought a jersey yeah, so I remember.
Speaker 2:I remember like early on, like e eBay was the cool like as a younger guy you know that it's like looking for deals and things like that was a great place to go Right, and so you guys both bought stuff on eBay, right, yeah, early on to sell stuff on there.
Speaker 1:It was kind of complicated. You know a little HTML and it was actually a bit out of the wheelhouse for the average guy. And so I was like, hey, a lot of people are hearing these stories and they might have stuff they want to sell. I'm going to make a program that makes it easy for them to list their stuff on eBay, oh, cool. And so I made a little HTML editor and a little auto-responding email thing and just little pieces of software right, simple softwares and put it out there. Sure enough, it does good do about $30 million in sales. Um, ebay's quickly figures out, hey, what you know like how are you doing?
Speaker 1:this. Yeah Well, they just came up with their own program that was like 10 times better than ours and made it free.
Speaker 2:Oh right, of course they did. Right, that's. This is the software as a service, right? The sass company. That's exactly what happens, right?
Speaker 1:um, and so you know that was fine, uh, and by that point it was like we had all kinds of other uh things that we were doing like uh so you made 30 million in that first run uh, top line revenue, top line I, I don't know what we made.
Speaker 1:I'm sure we did pretty good. You did a lot, you did okay. So then the next thing was like you know you could go when you go to the library, there's in the reference session there's these, all this, these green books, and what they list is all the different kinds of grants and stuff like that that are available. And so grants are really specific though, like if you're a female in St George, utah, and you want to try and get a grant to go to college for your art degree, right, there's not grants to just like, oh, I want a new car. You know what I'm saying? They're for specific purposes, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you've got to dig through all this information and try and find what you might qualify for based on your circumstance and situation. And I mean, nobody would buy those books it was like $3,000 to buy. So you got to go to the library and just thumb through, and so I'm just in there like this is the most you know ridiculous way to try and find information possible. You know ridiculous way to try and find information possible. So I just bought a set of the books and ran them through an OCR machine, loaded them up into a SQL database and made it searchable. And then I just put that online and said, hey, now you can just type in what you're looking for and it'll just pull up everything that fits your criteria and you just have instant access to it right away. You know, pay me $30 a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, uh, you know, to the tune of $280 million. People did that and so, um, you know, and then that, then then you know, next thing, you know, we're just getting inundated with people hey, sell my thing, do this, you know, and, and so that was what I works was.
Speaker 2:Ah, okay, so that's how it started. I had no idea that's how it started. So where did it? Where did it start getting off the rails? I kind of I kind of that idea from. There's a podcast from a private investigator that worked on the case and I not to disparage her it was a very difficult podcast to listen to and I imagine there's somebody listening to this like, yeah, bro, your podcast is hard to listen to but I, I couldn't. I couldn't get through it because there were so many episodes and she, she went down so many different, um you know, non-consequential avenues. That was hard to stick with it. So I wasn't ever really able to flush out the whole thing. I read some of the case files and some things like that, but it sounded to me like once things started rolling, it started to almost get unmanageable. Is that fair to In?
Speaker 1:some respects, yes, and what the unmanageable part was was that we started allowing affiliates to sell our product for us, and so we've just focused on fulfilling and and and processing all those transactions and handling all the customers, cause, you know, we're talking millions of people at this point. That's an enormous undertaking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at one point you were, it was like in in a single month. Yeah, yeah, I think, for a single year. It was like 168 million in a single year you know in revenue coming in Right, it's a big number.
Speaker 1:Yeah, big number, lots of people, lots of people, and um and so, uh, that the affiliates were really difficult to manage and, um, I would say, only a small percentage of them were problems. But you know, a small percentage of millions is still really difficult. Yeah, and so, um, I, I, I, at the end of the day, I don't, I wish, I mean, that is a hundred million dollar. Question is what? Where did we go wrong? What made the government, you know, so upset to come after us? Because you know, at the end of the day, it boiled down to almost nothing, right, what would you boil it down to? Well, I'd just go right to the case. What were we convicted of? Right, you know what it was? I don't. I would rather have you state it yeah um, so well, back up a minute, right.
Speaker 1:First thing the government does is come in and say they go to a judge ex parte meaning we're're not there, okay and they tell the judge hey, judge, we're going to sue these people and they've got a lot of victims and we need you to give us an order so we can freeze all their assets and save all that money for the victims. So is this the FTC? This is the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. Federal Trade Commission.
Speaker 2:Triggered by. I think there were chargebacks. Right from what? I understood, there was like some mechanism that, like alerted them that there was something going on and then they investigated, or something like that.
Speaker 1:Well, at the end of the day, I mean there's, we could go through a list of things that because they just the story kept changing. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Over time.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know. I actually that's what I'm saying I wish I knew. I wish I knew what was the actual trigger that started it all. I don't know. Okay, Right, I don't know to this day.
Speaker 2:So the FTC goes to a judge.
Speaker 1:They go to a judge. They convince him there's a lot of victims customers and see how many of them are victims. There was none of this. Right Ex parte means it was just one-sided. It's a very unfair process. So the judge just assumes the government has good intentions and says okay, no problem, boom sees all of our assets. So before we know anything, our bank accounts are frozen, we're getting kicked out of our offices, that's it, and we don't need to have money to hire attorneys.
Speaker 2:I had to represent myself. They didn't notify you at all. No, wow, no, and so who like Federal Trade Commission? How are they appointed? Maybe help me dig into that?
Speaker 1:So keep rolling. Well, what they told the judge, how they justify it, is they say look, we'll bring the proof at trial, judge um but this is an ongoing.
Speaker 2:There's victims. Right now it's like there's hostages.
Speaker 1:So that when we bring the proof. You know you got to take this draconian action, but trust us, we're going to have the proof in trial and then you'll see you did the right thing by allowing us to do that Right. A lot of people actually really had a problem Like, how's the government taking all this guy's property before there's been a trial, illegal search and seizure? It seems like, yeah, right. So a lot of people are actually whatever you thought about me, most people were pretty uncomfortable with it because nobody wants that to happen to them. Right up with that idea, because nobody wants that to happen to them. Right, like if I did something wrong, okay, let's have a fight about it and let's hear both sides and let's have a jury decide or a judge and then let's start taking away your property. But don't take away the property first. Most people don't like that idea. But that's not how the government worked in this case. Right? If it's a fair fight, if they have good evidence, that is what they'll do. They'll put up a fight. If they have bad evidence or they don't have the evidence, they'll go this route and they'll try and tie your hands so you can't fight them. Right. And so most people at that point settle.
Speaker 1:And the FTC offered me look, you can keep some of your money in your house and all this stuff and just sign this thing saying you did something wrong and we're good. And I'm like what you guys are saying happened, didn't happen. And I know for a fact it didn't happen because it's my company, right. So I believed in the justice system at this point, by the way, and I was like no, I want to go to trial because I know you can't prove this. You know I got 6 million customers. I bet you don't get a single one to come to trial and say that they were harmed or defrauded. And I know this because if somebody bought something from us and they were unhappy, call us up. I'm unhappy, Guess what? Hey, no problem, we'll just refund you. Do I have to give you a refund? No, but if you don't want what we gave you, no big deal.
Speaker 2:So at this point you're selling all kinds of stuff. Is that right? And was there something that was being sold through iWorks that, in your mind, was illegal? Illegal, yeah, because I'm trying to think like what would they be? If there's victims, what are they? A victim?
Speaker 1:of. That's the irony. So, at the end of the day, out of 6 million customers, guess how many of the government got to come to trial and say that they were harmed or victimized? Zero, not a single one.
Speaker 2:Zero, okay, so, there we have that. There's another case in my head that I'm going through. I was like this sounds familiar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So now when I say I'm not going to settle with the FTC, that's upsetting to them, because that's the whole plan. Right, Tie his hands and give him no choice. If I'd done something wrong, then the decision to settle is easy, right. The problem is, if you don't really believe you've done anything wrong and you believe in a system of justice that I get my day in court, well I'm like no, under no circumstance, I'm not settling for anything. I haven't done this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Cause at that point you're like it's a personal thing, where you're like now I'm doing something wrong.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, well, or or or you're um folding to a set of you know being strong armed Right, and so I can't help but think out of the gate you've put, you've put somebody into a corner, right, it's like you don't want to, you don't want to trap somebody that's willing to fight. Unless you're ready to either fight or expected they're just going to roll over and and, like a possum, just pass out and just be like, oh, what happened? You know they wake up from that, but that's not you were. You're going to come out swinging right. You're going to fight back.
Speaker 1:I'm going to fight back, and maybe they thought maybe they didn't know for sure that I'd done something wrong. They thought that I did, and so you just assume you know something must be wrong. So we'll shoot first and ask questions later, Right? And hopefully it just works out.
Speaker 2:And in this era of online purchasing, we're still in kind of uncharted territories in some ways at this stage. Is that fair?
Speaker 1:Yes, I don't think they would bring this same case. In fact, I'm certain they would not bring this case. Yeah, I can't think of like Amazon. This was not a good experience for the government.
Speaker 2:Amazon is essentially what? From what you're describing, it sounds to me a lot like what Amazon does as a business model. Right, you have affiliate sellers that put items on a marketplace and then you buy it.
Speaker 3:Right, and then you know- it's exactly this, essentially a forced upsell right, like if you want your stuff, you got to pay yearly for it, and we're gonna. I mean it's 150 bucks a year.
Speaker 2:Now right used to be what 50 bucks a year, 100 bucks a year so what I'm thinking about is like okay, maybe, maybe there's something that's happening on online sales and there's some pressure from the ftc to squash some of these online sales type businesses or they're they're not getting. Yeah, it's a control thing. It seems like. I would love to know what the reason is.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to like what started this? Yeah, they're never going to tell me. Right yeah, Someone made a bad call. And the problem is once the government comes in and damages the company in that way. Right yeah, there's no circumstance they're going to say we made a mistake. Because if they say that, guess what Countersuit they got to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They just wrecked a $300 million company. Yeah Right, Someone's liable for that and it's the government and they're not going to look like fools.
Speaker 3:It's going to be a lot more than $300 million to put it all back together.
Speaker 1:So when I said I'm not settling, guess what happens next? I get arrested. They put the. They decide we're going to up the ante, let's bring criminal charges. And so they charged me with, started out with one count of mail fraud. Right, no grand jury, no investigation. Let's just, if we up the pressure, maybe he'll settle right. I got to put the charging investigator on the stand and he'll settle Right. I even I got to put the the, the charging investigator, on the stand and he admitted he hadn't done any investigation. He just arrested me because he was told to.
Speaker 2:You, you uh represented yourself. I heard, uh, I did Uh shout out to Tyson Haven. He uh, yeah, he lives next door to me and I know he listens to podcasts as he drives to work every day go to.
Speaker 2:Vegas. Um, he lives next door to me and I know he listens to podcasts as he drives to work every day, going to Vegas. But he, he had mentioned that you had represented yourself and I thought that just knowing that one thing I felt like told me a lot about you. And so I'm curious what, what, uh, not inspired it? I was trying to think of a different word, but, like, what inspired you to say I'm not going to hire somebody to do this. I'm going to think of a different word, but, like, what inspired you to say I'm not going to hire somebody to do?
Speaker 1:this. I'm going to do this myself. Well, the government made that decision for me. When they take your money and you're not allowed to use it to hire an attorney, you can't. Oh, so they froze all your assets, your assets. Now I can't hire an attorney. Now, in a criminal case, you you have no right to an attorney, even if the government seizes your assets. You can't use your own money to hire an attorney In a criminal case. You have the right to attorney, even if you can't pay for one Right. So the government gave me the attorney they wanted me to have and I initially did have an attorney.
Speaker 1:And as we're getting close to trial, I sit down with her one day and I'm like hey, what do you know? What do you think the best evidence is? The government has, like, what do we need to mostly worry about? And she goes I think it's a, I think it's a false testimonials. I think that's the big thing they've got on you. And I'm like what, what? What do you? What do you mean? I mean we had thousands of real ones. Why would we make a false one? That's not even in the indictment. There's nothing about that in there. Why would you think that she just read that in a news article or something, somewhere right, and I go wait, chelsea, do you know what we even did? And she goes was it something with mortgages? And I'm just like, oh my gosh, we're done here. This is the person I'm, my life is in her hands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and she doesn't have a clue and we're going to go to trial. She's not going to know what to ask any witnesses. She's not going to know anything.
Speaker 1:And so it wasn't like I was being arrogant, like I'm going to represent myself. I wanted an attorney. It wasn't like I was being arrogant, like I'm going to represent myself. I wanted an attorney. What I wanted was to have access to my money to hire an attorney of my choosing, right? But that's not part of the government's program here, right? That is who they wanted as my attorney, yeah. And so I was like, well, at least, if I represent myself, as hard as that's going to be, I don't know anything about the law. I mean, I'm not actually a very educated person. I was lucky to graduate high school and so I'm scared, I'm nervous, but I know what. To ask a witness yeah, these are, I know these people.
Speaker 2:You know so and you have the advantage of I know exactly what happened. You're right, so you're pretending to know what happened, and I know exactly what happened, so you felt like you could do this.
Speaker 1:Well, I felt like it was the lesser of the evils. Yeah, right. And so what happens is the government would say, oh, you committed mail fraud, you know, or whatever. And we say, ok, well, you know. I would say, no, no, we didn't. Here's the evidence, here's the proof that we did it. Oh, and so what they do is they do a new indictment, they change it Like, oh, then you did this. I'm like, no, no, I didn't. Here's the proof. Oh, okay, never. And I finally realized that, like there's no amount of evidence they're going to accept where they're going to say we made a mistake, so they re-indicted me three times and by the end they just kept figuring out more stuff and adding stuff, and so by the end it went from one charge to 86, right, and they just anything they could think of money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy.
Speaker 2:I mean just throw it all Like six different federal agencies right or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Throw it all as much mud on the wall as you can and just hope something sticks Right. Yeah, and so that's. I defended myself against 86 felonies. The government had teams of attorneys and investigators. They spent $19 million prosecuting me. The government had teams of attorneys and investigators. They spent $19 million prosecuting me, and it was just a classic David and Goliath.
Speaker 2:Right, I'm literally seething at my desk At the end. Blake's in the background. He's like he's going to blow a gasket. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:He's like the Boston Tea Party. They burned ships over two percent. Yeah, in the end, what they got me on was there was an application for a merchant account and it asked a bunch of questions how many employees do you have? I don't know who filled it out. Someone in my company filled it out. I'm liable for it, I own the company, yeah, and, and they, you know, put on the application uh, 250 employees or whatever the number was. And the government proved at trial no, no, no, at that time they had 268. So you got to find him guilty of false statement to a bank because this is not the correct number. And you know that's what I was guilty of.
Speaker 2:And you got eight years for that. Well, here's the ironic thing, right? You know you don't get any time for that. That's a non. That's what you got, and eight years you got eight years for that?
Speaker 1:Or well, here's the ironic thing. Right, you know you don't get any time for that. That's a non men's rate of charge, meaning there's no criminal intent. Anyone who fills out a application for a car loan or anything you're not going to go to jail for that.
Speaker 1:You, every, every single person in, lived in your house. Oh, three years, and three years and two months, false statement of bank right, and so it's like a. It's like a meaningless crime. It's the, the, the, the victimless crime, maybe victimless, and uh, and it's also. It's not mens rea, meaning not intentional, okay, uh, or no criminal intent, okay, and um, and so it's like the punishment would be like probation or something. Here's what I didn't know at that time.
Speaker 1:The reason the government will charge somebody or overcharge them with like 86 things that they know didn't happen, is they only need one. If they can get you guilty of one, they can sentence you to the crimes that you were found not guilty of. Right, and so it doesn't happen. Often they don't like to do it. It's obviously embarrassing for the government to sentence somebody for a crime that the jury specifically found you not guilty of, but if they don't have a choice, believe that they will do it. And so I was sentenced for what's called acquitted conduct, which is, yeah, you're not guilty of those crimes, they're not going to go on your record, but we're going to make you do the time. Oh, my God, now the government's not allowed to do that anymore. They brought that same case today. I had done no time right, but back then they were able, they were still legal. But there's been enough outrage about it. As there should be, as there should be, that uh it's. It's no longer permissible.
Speaker 2:So you got sentenced um and then it was reduced. That's right. So yeah, I think it was said 10 years, and then they settle on seven.
Speaker 1:Uh, no, I was only only four.
Speaker 2:Only four yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then I mean it took that long to get an appeal done. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:So thinking about the lessons that, you learned from that?
Speaker 3:did you have anything else? I mean, you know, I think about how hard it is to start a business and then be successful at a business. And then you know talking about kind of the the tip of the iceberg with with your story. And here you are, you know, with box house. That seems like it's on the up and up. I mean, most people can't even start and run a business. But I mean you started multiple businesses and been through all of that and running a successful business. I think it's it's pretty respectable and and we've, I mean we've kind of talked about how you've gotten to where you're at and I don't know it's it's pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:Having the having the rug get pulled out from under you, like that has got to mess with your head a little bit. It seems like, yeah, I think it would meet. It would meet me for sure. I'm probably easily rattled. I think my wife said that the other day. But yeah, I can imagine that. I mean that was a massive disruption. I can't imagine going to prison over something like that.
Speaker 1:It's difficult. I won't deny that it was unfair, it was unjust, but it was also the best thing that ever happened to me and if I could go back and somehow avoid that, I would. I got that much out of the experience. It was important for me to be in there and believe that I didn't deserve to be there. Right, that was an important part of what I got out of that whole experience. So I'm not angry with the government. I told the story and it sounds like you know, I'm upset about this injustice. I'm not. I mean, if I, if I saw the judge, I even reached out to him afterwards and told him, you know, if I saw the judge, I even reached out to him afterwards and told him you know, um, this was a good experience for me and uh, and, and the people that uh did this, I, if I saw him, I, you know, I would be kind. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not upset.
Speaker 2:So um, what? What do you think you brought through it? Like what, as you cause there was, there was for sure. I always think about the 12 step program, but like the, the acceptance of, of being in the situation you are now and being able to cross over and forgive you know, and and go through that process. How were you able to work that out?
Speaker 1:Uh, time, time and nothing else to do. Uh, the the most difficult thing about being in prison for me was having an active mind and and used to being very productive, and being locked in a cement box and being forced to be unproductive. Yeah right, uh, that was by far the most difficult. Did you write? Did you like? Did you get it?
Speaker 2:get it out in some kind of way.
Speaker 1:And I thought and think about what your day looks like right now. Right, you wake up. It's a series of small decisions. What am I going to have for lunch? Maybe you're worried about making the mortgage payment? Right, your mind is consumed with all these little things. Well, guess what? In prison, you don't worry about what you have for lunch. They've already decided for you, right? You worrying about a mortgage payment? Nope, I got that covered for you too, right? You literally have nothing to worry about, and so the only thing left is those things in the back of your mind. We push them all back there because our day is just so busy with Facebook and our phones and our jobs and all these things.
Speaker 1:Right, the big questions are what is the purpose? What am I doing here? Right? What is all of us as humans? What are we doing here? What's my connection to you humans? What are we doing here? What's my connection to you?
Speaker 1:You know, um, and so that's what I spent all this time thinking about, and I'm in here with people who I've been taught my whole life are. These guys are all going to the hot place, right? Um, these guys have. These are bad dudes, they've messed up and I'm not seeing a big difference between us at all. And so I'm pondering this and I'm like what you know and the reality is, when I listen to their stories and how they were raised and you know what happened to them as kids or whatever, there was no place else they were going to end up than there, right, that's just that was their path, and so for me, this was mine. So when I was able to start to get something out of being there and I started to, you know, start to get a uh, understanding and getting answers to these big questions, the anger and the injustice left me. Hasn't my family, right? Hasn't people who know me that kind of peripherally went through the experience? But for me it's gone?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I I've I gained so much from it, I can't be upset about it.
Speaker 2:So so you're married, I am. How many you have kids? Two, two daughters, two daughters.
Speaker 1:How old are they? Uh 21 and 16, 21 and 16.
Speaker 2:So you missed a big chunk of them. So they so. Do they still feel that? Were you able to kind of see them on a semi-regular basis?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, quite often. You know. I was fortunate in the fact that a lot of guys are in there. You know, 10 years I haven't seen their kids. It's tough, I got to see him almost as much as I wanted. Years I haven't seen their kids. It's tough, I got to see him almost as much as I wanted. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So it was.
Speaker 3:I'm kind of curious, was it while you were in? You said you got out early because of COVID. Was it like someone came and knocked on your door Like you thought you had three years left, or two years left or something? Someone came and knocked on your door and you're like, hey man, let's go. No, how did?
Speaker 1:that kind of go down. Uh, it went down in that the, the, the 10th circuit court of appeals, agreed that, uh, there was a problem and that this was not an appropriate sentence, and so okay so.
Speaker 3:So it was kind of a process where maybe over the course of a couple weeks or months or something like that, where you thought, hey, I might, might get out, yeah, a couple, okay cool, so you could prepare for it then a little bit mentally Cool.
Speaker 1:And it was pretty anticlimactic, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're just, that's tough. See you later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I feel like I could have stayed in there longer, and I feel like I was in there the exact amount of time that I needed to be to gain what I needed to gain from it. Right, and once I'd gained that, my lessons were interesting that's cool. It could have went the whole 11 years or whatever, if it, if I'd allowed myself to take that long to get what I needed out of the experience, yeah, right, if I stayed angry and bitter for five of the years, and you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:So that that was my feeling, that was my general feeling of it, uh, but so so you, when you got out, uh, chris Weiler actually was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and he was relaying to me about how a lot of the lost boys from Hilldale and Colorado city, you, you took them in. Is that, um, is that a fair assessment? Is that is that kind of? Is that something?
Speaker 2:that you've done, yeah, and so, thinking about that community that you built, while you were building, I works, um, I've heard a lot of different stories, uh, all rumors Cause I I just don't know where true or not. Right, but I mean, as a philanthropist goes, as as a member of, uh, the community, you were a giving member of the of the community. You, I think, from what I understand you, you took a shepherd's role in a lot of people's lives. Is that fair? I think so. I try to yeah, yeah, and so, um, maybe help help me understand where, where did that kind of start and where?
Speaker 1:um, you know uh that started with uh of start, and where, um, you know uh that started with uh, someone brought a, a girl to us and asked if we could uh take care of her. She's living on uh random people's couches, couch surfing, I guess. Um, and uh, you know, like, yeah, sure, of course, and she was a exile from Colorado city, I think I can't remember she. She was 19, I believe, or something like that Young, very uneducated, very unprepared to deal with, you know, the transition out of that community into the real world. Yeah, and so we, we took her and then, I guess maybe word got out and this more started showing up and you know yeah, yeah, kind of kind, of Kind of blossomed from there, blossomed from there, so we did what we could.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as an as an organization, was it you and the people that you worked with that were kind of was that kind of how it.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, this is kind of a, this is kind of a normal thing for me. Quite honestly, I'll take any stray off the street, I mean much to, uh, my wife's dismay. Um, you know, especially when I had that big house, I just bring home whoever and you know it was a world's nicest homeless shelter in a lot of ways, and so you know, those kids were in a tough place in life.
Speaker 1:I don't know that I really significantly impacted any of them. Quite honestly, I think more or less gave them a place to land for a minute while they figured out what was next. I would love to send one of them to an Ivy League school or something, but just none of them were interested in that. It wasn't in the cards. So I think mostly it was like trying to keep them from throwing out the dishes with the dishwater, because everything they know has just been broken Right, and so you can go too far the other way and you're like well, I'm already going to hell.
Speaker 1:Family just sounds wild. I might as well just go party it up and drink and do drugs. And so I think, if anything, I'm like hey, everything you believe and taught wasn't bad, like you know not that you know there's nothing wrong that you decide to live a different path, but let's not, you know, don't, don't ruin your life just because you know you, you think you're going to hell. You're not going to hell and you're still a good person and God still cares about you.
Speaker 2:And that was more or less kind of what I was trying to you know uh transition them uh, I guess.
Speaker 1:but yeah.
Speaker 2:So, um, I'm I'm curious about you know taking, taking box house, uh, to that next level and thinking about the steps you know leading up from that. Um, what's what's next on the horizon, like what? What are you trying to accomplish next? What is that next goal for you?
Speaker 1:Uh, well, the dream for box house and me is like actually make an impact for people who are under house now, right, um, and, and you know it's growing at, and I've never had a company of all these different companies with the kind of growth and the potential that Box House has. Yeah, and that goes back to the whole experience of the government too, right, without that experience, guess what? I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be doing Box House, um, where, where, uh, we just closed, uh, around uh funding of $25 million at a, uh, a $1 billion, uh price cap valuation, right, wow, um, that's pretty phenomenal growth for a company that's not even two years old.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:You know, and so, because the market is so big, there's so many people and so many applications for this, we're able to attract capital and funding, and I think we're going to be able to have a logistics network and a supply chain to be able to massively produce very affordable, very well-built home and finance it. Yeah, and so that's. I don't know how long that's going to take to get that up to where we can meet the demand it's going to be. It's going to take an enormous amount of capital and and smart people to do that, and and and facilities, but we're well on the way of doing it and I think we will.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know. So hopefully we can become the Tesla of housing right A new way to build a house, a new way to look at it and attract the talent that we need to meet that.
Speaker 3:And as an outsider looking in, from my perspective. You know I'm not from St George, I wasn't raised here, but I, I love St George, I love this area. Hopefully that dream can most of it can happen in the area, right With the facilities and the manufacturing and and all that stuff. And I mean, you know, as an outsider looking in, it'd be pretty cool if that could happen. Is it in the cards? Who knows right?
Speaker 2:But it'd be pretty cool. Right now they're kind of being put together in China, is that right? And then they're.
Speaker 1:We're sourcing components for the house from a half a dozen different countries. Actually, we can find the places where they specialize in, you know, whatever the component is. So the the portion done in china and guangzhou is like the steelworks right, and you know we're getting uh cabinets, uh in through nafta being built in mexico, and you know, appliances from cambodia, furniture from india, and and so so we're finding the best places to do the specific thing, bringing it all here, putting it together sending it out, got it?
Speaker 2:So like going back to that, you know, sustainability, getting, you know, sourcing closer to home, that's not, uh, depending on if the, the boats are going to make it across the, the ocean or not, right, I think sometimes as a is some nerve, you know where it's, it's less out of our control. So bringing it closer to home, is that something that I mean? Do you even see it financially?
Speaker 1:I don't even think that it financially would even make a whole lot of sense, significantly right um, show me an american that wants to work in a factory. I've never seen one. It's a real bummer uh is it.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's there's some luxury in that, right we've we've evolved as an economy, in a society, um, and at the same time, hopefully we don't have to get back to the place where we have to go back working in factories, but, um, you know, coming up with creative technological ways in doing that. Because my, my thought would be is it working in a factory or is it working in a, in a laboratory? Right, I think of tesla. He, you know, he's got factories built up, but they don't look like factories from, you know, china. You know they don't all look the look the same. So is there a higher tech version of this that we can bring, you know, jobs here? And stuff.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of the work is done here. Still Right, we're just outsourcing what we can, but still a lot of it has to be done here.
Speaker 1:A lot of it has to be done here, um, but uh, another once again. Uh, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don't know what uh, that's not something that St George is interested in having here. Uh, and so we tried. We had property out of the industrial park. We were going to build a facility there and they're like oh no, you know, our ordinance says no containers. Well, everything we get comes in a container, so there's nothing we can do about having containers.
Speaker 2:So like you can't have containers on the property, right what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I was like it's okay, I don't even fight them. I could probably fight them and get it, but I'm like, hey, you don't want us here, no big deal. You know, we have an operation in Austin now and that's where I spend half my time, and so what a bummer. Yeah, it's a bummer.
Speaker 2:But at the same time.
Speaker 1:We're always going to have a presence here because all the administration people are here. We just bought an office building downtown, right next to the city office. It's getting built, ironically, nice, nice, that's cool, you know we'll have some presence here. But I believe by and large, our workforce in the future is not going to be in St George. It could possibly be in Cedar City. Yeah, they're definitely a lot more receptive to us. They're cool with containers. They're okay with containers in Cedar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they want jobs. Right, they want jobs.
Speaker 1:They want jobs and we can actually. You know, what's different about Box House than any other company that I've ever had is Box House is employee owned, right, so you can work for us and you can make a normal wage and if the company really goes big, well guess what? You become a millionaire. And I'm talking about guys that are used to working construction jobs that would never have that opportunity. And what you get from that is people who are interest aligned in seeing this company succeed. They're invested, they're invested in seeing this company succeed. They're invested, they're invested and they are excited about the opportunity and they are doing everything in their power to see that that happens.
Speaker 1:And that's how you see the kind of growth that we have in such a short time is. We're all on the same team here, yeah, and so you know we're trying something unique and we have a committee, and that committee is not internal, they are external. They're not employees, smart guys local here, and they're going to decide who gets what, including me, and so whatever you put in this company and getting it to be a successful business, you're going to get your portion back. That's the idea, right. So that's, I believe, a big portion of how and why we've been able to pull off what we have so fast. Yeah, and I think that's what it's also going to take for us If we've got the lofty goal being the largest home manufacturer in the world. Yeah, it's that kind of a structure that makes that happen.
Speaker 2:So that's cool. It's exciting to watch. Yeah, it's definitely something that we need. I mean, um pull up the video of. So this is the, the latest model. Yeah, it's called the loft. Um this.
Speaker 1:This isn't available for purchase yet everybody, we're planning january 1 to to be able to you'll be able to uh to buy this and have it hopefully delivered within days or weeks and uh so this is this is on the farm, right.
Speaker 2:This is you can. If, if you're interested in this, um yeah, you can go down and see it. This is this is on the farm, right. This is you can. If, if you're interested in this, um, yeah, you can go down and see it.
Speaker 1:This is a prototype, uh, but it's gonna is that a couple of different models?
Speaker 2:size? Is that a couple models like around it?
Speaker 1:yeah, they're all prototypes, so you can kind of see the history and the evolution of box house by going there. Oh cool, they're all different, they're all like this one. We're trying a different set of cabinets in you know what I'm saying and they just kind of by nature turned into models because people want to come and see them and I was like, well, I didn't go down and look at our prototyping and I will probably eventually have somewhere where they actually have real models set up, but for now they work a dual purpose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. It's tough for me because you could go online, you can look at the floor plan and, being a real estate agent, you just can't tell until you walk through it.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:So we were Jeff and I were talking about and I'm sure this VR company is is moving forward with this but being able to upload a set of plans and video and then be able to throw on a virtual reality headset and then just like walk through it and kind of get spatial, you know, understanding of what goes, what and where, because, like Matterports, they're good but, they're still a little skewed Right, and so you got to be able to walk through it still.
Speaker 1:And you're right, and even people to see the videos and the Matterports and everything else. When they actually go into one in person, they're just like wow, the videos and the pictures didn't do it justice. I could live here. This is a great video too, it's a great video yeah, but I always encourage people, if it's something you're interested in, just go. These go. Look at one. These are all unlocked. There's nobody there. You just go down there and it's a self-guided granny's not living in that one yet.
Speaker 2:No, uh, granny doesn't want that one, she wants a different one.
Speaker 1:Well, hurricane city is not going to allow anybody to actually live in these uh so you got concrete piers under the feet.
Speaker 2:Those are just blocks, just blocks sitting on the ground. You have like a, if we imagined, back that up just a little bit, if. If we imagined, um, you know, pause it right there. So like you can kind of see the feet under. Imagine that that would be a helical pier or something that would be able to be strapped to the ground. You wouldn't need, you know, a 500 square foot pad of concrete that's four inches thick. That is rated for hurricane Andrew in St George. Um, so, hurricane city. They, they're opposed to having something like this in city limits, is that yeah?
Speaker 1:I mean how we've been able to get away with it is. These are farm buildings. Nobody lives in them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right Not occupied.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I mean they still hate them and want them gone and everything else.
Speaker 2:But when I look at this, when I looked at the setup of all of the houses next to it, this is the village. Right, if you think of a village, there's the mobile home park. If you're driving through Ivans, there's a mobile home park. It's right at the base of red mountain. It's not far away. It's stacked, you know, rows of, you know rectangle, classic mobile homes, yeah, and some of them have been pulled off and stick built homes built in their place. But that that's like the traditional idea of a mobile home park. That doesn't look the same, that doesn't feel the same.
Speaker 1:No, but you could do it the same if you want. I mean, you do however you want. You could put 16 of these on an acre, right? So even take our ridiculously inflated price for an acre of dirt around here and call it what? Two 300,000, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, raw land probably 300,000. Divide it by 16.
Speaker 1:It's not so bad, and so the whole point is you live a live a little smaller. Are you gonna have a big, spacious yard? No, you know, but you can have four walls that you own and, uh, it's better than an apartment that you're renting. Yeah right, it's a better alternative to that. Is it the the dream sleuth? Is it the american dream?
Speaker 2:probably not, you know, but for some it might be right, uh it's odd to me that they won't allow that, but they'll allow, uh, six connected townhomes, two stories in these rows that have zero landscaping, horrible concrete ugly walls.
Speaker 3:That is something that blocked the view.
Speaker 2:The block, the block the view, but then are also just like, I just think, think of a concrete room, like going back to the prison, you know like it's like why are we putting concrete block? Why is that a requirement in a subdivision? Like, why is that a necessary requirement? Now? Does the neighbor want to live in that house? No, but they're not being forced to live in that house. Somebody could live in that house and be just fine, right, and and there's there's challenges with living in a tight community. Yes, of course there is Sure. However, is it going to lower the value of the homes around it because of that? I just can't imagine that it will. I don't know, I don't imagine that it does. So it's. It's just odd to me where we split hairs with we can allow that, but we, you know the townhomes, but not that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's coming. I mean, they've never had this, they've never had the opportunity to have a single family home for price less than an apartment, right, so there is no zoning or coding for it because this product's never existed before, right, right, um, so I think they'll come around. I think, uh, you know, uh, we're running out of time. Jeremy, we're running we're running out of time.
Speaker 2:Well, the market slowdown is upon us. Yeah, I think we're all aware of that, but this is the time where you know housing, we can't, we can't, stop building dwellings.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I read an article, uh, I think it was out of the Kim C Gardner Institute from the? U that said that they're anticipating the median home price in St George in eight to 10 years being a million dollars. Oh, I'm sure, Like Park City right, I mean where Park City's at now, St George will be in eight to 10 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're out of land? We are, and we aren't right, because I think about even taking what you were talking about in Texas, where you could put three of these on their half acre or maybe a quarter. Is it a quarter acre? I don't know how many you could fit on a quarter acre.
Speaker 1:I don't think three, right? Well, it depends on how big your house is. Oh yeah, I guess that's true. You could put 16 of them on an acre, because.
Speaker 2:I think, of downtown. So Escaping the Housing Trap is a book that I've gone through a couple of different times. It able to get tradesmen, labor costs being extreme, um, building costs being high, coupled with lower wages, increased inflation and everything all these other categories and we're underbuilt, when we've been underbuilt for since the market crash, because we stopped building houses for several years. And so we're trying. There's, there's, uh, uh's the ability to get a home up out of the ground, like you said, with six months, right, and that's rocking and rolling right, and so the speed at which we can grow that inventory isn't matching the demand and it's just further, getting further and further away. Even as prices have pulled back, we're still, over the last 12 months, appreciating in home values across the county, even though interest rates are three times that of what they were two years ago and all these other reasons why you'd think housing prices would come down. They have not. They continue to go up. So that's what I mean by we're running out of time, and so one of the ways in which we can solve that problem is we need rooftops, we need dwellings. That problem is we need rooftops, we need dwellings, we need beds for people to sleep in, and that will lower the cost, um, or keep the cost from running at an extreme pace, right, you know.
Speaker 2:So in redevelopment, like I look at these and I think of redeploying these, there's a bunch of these long, rectangular half acres, or like 0.4 acres in downtown St George, where the house is on the very front, but that then there's this big, long, unused lot behind them that's not even a landscaped.
Speaker 2:You know, if you didn't stop and like, look in the backyard, you wouldn't even see these. But Google earth, you can easily see you could put two of these for sure on those properties. But as an ADU, you get back into these ordinance issues, right, and so, yeah, we've passed ADUs in St George, but the limitations it has to be a primary resident for the person putting it on, so you, the owner of the property, has to live there. So not only is it a primary residence, but the owner themselves has to be living there in order to put it. Once it's there, though, they can move and there's nothing they can do about it. But it's these hurdles, to where these infill lots, these these lots that are not getting used, that the homes are truthfully deteriorating. I mean, there's a whole block in St George. Not Katie, I was calling you my wife, that's your wife's name, don't, don't tell Katie Jeff and I analyze this.
Speaker 2:This it's basically eight acres and most of the homes should be torn down like cracks in them. They're old, they're, you know, those manufactured homes, putting your fist through the wall, that kind of a thing. And it there's not. There wasn't a cost benefit to the zoning allowed in that neighborhood to put to do anything different, so it's just going to continue to be a dilapidated block in the middle of downtown St George, in a primary location where we could probably house, you know, a hundred students, you know, in that space easy.
Speaker 2:And instead we get five story massive apartment buildings connected to the, you know, to the university. That doesn't build community in my mind. That doesn't build community that builds, you know, students that come in, they go to school and then they leave. So I think we're just missing some of this opportunity and I think this is a great solution to that. But the cities have to be able to to allow those things to unfold in front of us. Is that fill lot? So it's not even just developing a massive hundred home track of these, Right, it's sprinkling these in Exactly Throughout the community. You know that could really go a long way, but it's just one of the levers that we need to pull.
Speaker 1:It seems easy. It seems logical it seems easy, but then we go back to. We're dealing with government here. Things don't always compute the same way for them, right? Also around here, where these work great is areas that building is difficult, like blue clay.
Speaker 2:That was my exact thought is that you have, especially in santa clara heights, right where we're at right now, there's still a bunch of lots that are not built on because it's expensive to pull that blue clay out and so.
Speaker 1:But when you're on a floating foundation, well, let the ground move and shift all at once, doesn't, doesn't matter. The house, nice thing. Even if the ground drops here now the house isn't level. Well, those 16 adjustable feet, well, you need to go adjust it. Level it back up again. It's brilliant, right? And instead of having to over x, out 15 feet, put these massive retaining walls.
Speaker 2:In that we do, it's on top of the blue clay and let it go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, that's cheap dirt, that's cheap dirt it gets right now, so and and it's uh, honestly, you to take it out, you have to go take it to a specific place, because you can't just go dump it anywhere, because now it's blue clay, and so you take it from one place, you put it somewhere else. Eventually, you're going to want it moved from that spot too, right, and so just leave it where it's at. Seems so logical. It seems so logical. But how do we get past these hurdles, right, if somebody has to take up the torch and, you know, run it through the governmental systems and processes, and that's where that's what Jeremy's doing.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, he skipped it he skipped it.
Speaker 2:They already told him no.
Speaker 1:If I get involved, it'll never happen, but you know. You know there's that's going to change, yeah, In January. Part of the thing that we're doing is is come up with a dealer program. Let's say you're a contractor here and you build houses for a living, right. You're trying to squeeze out a 10%, 15% margin or something, I don't know. It's hard, right. You compete against everybody else. You've got to deal with all this stuff. But you're a smart guy. You know you can do houses Well. We can offer you something that you can go out and put this up in a fraction of the time, a fraction of the cost, but it's still tremendous value. And let them deal with getting it through the cities. Let them put the pressure on the cities to make that happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and really they're the ones that have relationships. That's right they know the people that you know whether it's right or wrong, right they know the people who know the people who know the people.
Speaker 1:And let me just stick with delivering you the absolute, very best product I possibly can for the least amount of money possible and let you make you know most of the money and you deal with getting it through the city.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's the model, yeah Well that's, and that's a good way to tip over a movement, right? Is? There's a video online. I think a lot of people have seen it. It's this uh, it's at an amphitheater and this band is playing and everybody's just sitting on the grass all just enjoying the music and this one dude is just dancing, just like a fool, just enjoying the music and dancing, and it's just him. And somebody runs up to dance with him. And then they immediately get embarrassed Because everybody's watching him. Everybody's got their camera out. He can tell he's causing attention. So another person runs up and starts dancing with them and then you can see him get scared. And then they like, go to sit back down. But then another person runs up and then all of a sudden, like in in seconds, the entire crowd is around this guy.
Speaker 2:Everybody's dancing to this music, right, and it's, it's this perfect, you know, three minute unfolding of of starting a movement, like what it takes, right, that courage to get out in front of everybody and and sound, sound maybe a little crazy, but people can see that he's enjoying himself and they want to join in on that too. And so you can get contractors that can see the vision, that want to take a little bit of that risk out front and say, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to lead from this. It might be, might not go exactly well, but then the next, next person joins and the next person. Then all of a sudden we have a movement. Right, it doesn't, it doesn't take much, but that's also what the city needs.
Speaker 2:The city needs to see that there is enough of a movement there for them to act right, because they have risk. They have risk, they have risk on their on at their point is, if we make a bad decision. Bad decisions are very costly for the cities and sometimes, unless you're the FTC, there's no punishment. But, um, the city, the cities don't have that luxury, right, they don't. And so, um, I just, I, uh, yeah, you're, you're at the tipping point of another movement, just like you were with I works man.
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully this one's going to this one's going to pan out differently. I think I think so too. I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on and talking about this. Is there anything that you know, like a setting the record straight or you know? A plug, maybe A plug, but I think, maybe, maybe just an appeal to. There's a lot of stories out there. There's a lot of articles you could read about Jeremy Johnson and who he is. Maybe something that you want to say, that you never said before, that you want to say.
Speaker 1:This is how I usually address that question. I don't see myself as this anomaly that I understand most people do. Right, I seem like I'm a regular guy, just like everybody else. Yeah. So I always say look I'm. I'm not as good or as bad as what anyone thinks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know I'm not trying to say I'm some perfect saint and I'm. I'm not the guy that government tries to paint me out to be either. So you know, take that for what it is.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that man. I appreciate that Well, I'm excited for box house to see it grow. I'm excited to watch that movement happen and it's cool that it's your. You're here in St George while you're doing it. So, hopefully you can keep us updated on the progress.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, yeah, for sure, I mean you. I mean you did not have to do this. We, you know, we'd been talking about it for a little while and finally we were like, hey look might as well.
Speaker 2:Just let's ask him.
Speaker 1:Let me come back sometime, yeah, man.
Speaker 2:Keep, keep me updated on on how it's going and hopefully we can get a couple of these in St George and in and start that movement rolling Awesome. Yeah, Okay, man. Well, hey, thanks for listening everybody. We'll see you guys out there. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going.
Speaker 3:Find us at realestate435.com. We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.