From Addiction to 9-Figure Exit ft. Eric Spofford | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby

0:00From an armed robbery charge to a$115 million exit, Eric Spofford didn't just turn his life around. He built one of New England's largest addiction treatment networks and sold it for nine figures. But after the exit, he got bored. So he built another empire. Yeah, it's not pretty. It's not sexy. They print them. Today, he's teaching everyday Americans how to invest in real estate while building recovery centers across the country. This isn't a business story. It's a legacy story. addiction, redemption, real estate impact. You're going to die. The only question is, will you live first from rock bottom to nine figures from deals on the street to deals on the deed?

0:49Welcome to coffee. What is your morning routine? God, I just got asked this on stage. I was speaking at a clever summit, a couple thousand people, and we did a big panel and everyone laughed i said i'm not one of these big i wake up and i check my phone then i pee and then i get to work like it's really that easy i'm i'm open my eyes zero to 100 miles an hour the second that i do um i'm eating breakfast on the phone sometimes i'm on my first zoom or teams meeting and i'll turn the screen off and wolf down my food real quick and so i don't have this big cold plunge burpees, meditation, red light, blah, blah, blah.

1:31I just wake up and it's for me, I have so much that I wake up with in my head. It's just go, go, go. And then what I do do though, is I break the day up. And so I put my workout in the middle of the day. And so I'll run hard till early afternoon and then check out for 90 minutes, hit the gym, you know, go sweat it out and then come back and kill the rest of the day. Yeah, that's unique. Not getting the workout done first thing in the morning. That's different. You get it down. Yeah. Because yeah, it's 10 a.m., which is 1 p.m. your time right now. And you're like, I'm going to go to the gym at 11.

2:08So you're breaking up your day with the workout. 100%. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay. So give the listeners just a 20 ,000 foot overview of your first business, the exit, and then what you're currently doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Grew up in the greater Boston area, lived a very crazy life, addiction, crime, you know, movie quality street drama back in the day. Got sober December 7th of 2006, caught an armed robbery charge, went on the run, got intervened, uses what he has possible. And at the time it was the entire police department of the city that I was in. And that started my journey of changing my life.

2:45And what happened after that was I personally got into recovery from addiction and alcoholism. I caught fire. I got absolutely more enthusiastic and excited about helping other people recover just like I had to than you could possibly imagine. And I turned that into a business. I started my home state of New Hampshire's very first sober living house at 23 years old 2008 right as the the entire economy was melt up melting down i'm sure you remember and we were spiraling into a recession is when i was starting my business and so october 2008 i two things happened i started my business and i did my first real estate deal i had saved up some money my dad agreed to help me with the financing uh and and get me into a property we bought a three unit uh building for Union Street, Derry, New Hampshire, for all the fact checkers out there.

3:42I bought that in October 2008 for$150 ,000 foreclosed from the bank. Moved in, fixed it up a little bit, furnished it, and moved a bunch of guys in, called it a sober house, and figured it out. 23 years old. Lived there for two years with all the clients. 2008? 2008 to 2010, I lived in that building. uh me and 11 men that were in early recovery from addiction and alcoholism did everything together uh cooked taught them life skills how to cook clean get jobs pull your pants up shave your face go to aa meetings do recovery stuff help other people all of it wanted to grow that business and then over the next from start to finish 13 years two months i grew that from that one little sober house with me and 11 guys to a multi-site collection of addiction treatment facilities uh 440 treatment beds we had 325 employees uh top line revenue at the end of it was about 50 to 55 million and i sold it for 115 million dollars off a 13 million dollar ttm ebitdo December 21st of 2021.

4:54Wow. Yeah. You're 36 years old. Big exit. 36. Amazing. Yeah. After that, you know, 36 years old, what happened? You were just chilling. You're like, I don't need to work ever. I didn't need to work ever again, you know, but, uh, I was in Southern Florida. I first started Fort Lauderdale at some point shortly after like 11 months later, moved down to Miami, uh, down the street and, you know, I was living the dream, man. I bought a boat. I was, you know, going all the nicest spots and hanging out with the cool people and doing all this stuff that people think they want to do and i made it like months and i was like this sucks i need to be yeah no i'm just not really built for that i'm a worker i'm a builder and so you know i bought a boat i bought a plane i bought a bigger boat i bought a jet i bought a bigger house i bought all the cars i wanted but all you know what i mean it's like i ran out of to buy it ran out fun shit to do and said we got to do it again and so jumped right back into the mix and i've been building two businesses since nice and what are those businesses another addiction treatment business currently open in ohio just open in california pennsylvania and then uh also second of that is a real estate business where we take average ordinary american working class people and make real estate investors out of them.

6:18And so we have a turnkey investments group that provides a white glove experience for people that essentially don't know a lot about real estate, but want to park their money in real estate instead of the S &P 500, 401ks, et cetera. And we put them into single family section eight properties that have great cash on cash returns. That's awesome. What is the cash on cash return on a section eight property right now? It really depends on the deals, but we target 30%. 30 % cash on cash on section. Hey, yeah, it's not pretty. It's not sexy. There's nothing sexy about it. But if you could just close your eyes and look the other way, they print money.

6:54I didn't even know that the cash on cash returns are that high. So there's this yin and yang to it. The, you know, the positives are the returns are crazy. You're not going to find those returns anywhere else. And that's in today's interest rate environment. But the cost of capital, what it is, we're still hitting 30 % on average cash on cash returns. The difficulty, which is what makes it so good for our audience, our clients, but hard for institutional investors to come in is it's very difficult to scale, right? These houses are less than$100 ,000. And so when you're using leverage, if you call it a hundred grand a house, which most of them are less, and a 75 % loan to value, you're going to deploy$25 ,000 for each deal.

7:38How do you deploy capital at scale? That's, you know, if you want to deploy 100 grand, that's four deals. And that's four offers, four negotiations, four closings, four, you know, or, or, or, or. And so that's why a lot of people end up in multifamily. But if you can get operationally good at scaling and doing all the hand-to-hand combat that it takes, there's a ton of money there. And that's great for the audience to know because I think most people, especially listening to this, probably wrote off Section 8. It's not really a niche. Everyone talks about multifamily. We had a panel yesterday at the conference.

8:14They're all multifamily guys. Some of the guys were doing some industrial, but Section 8 is definitely something that's just forgotten. And the cash on cash I'm hearing that you're offering, is it through a fund or is it through your group? Are they on the note themselves? They own the property. They own the property. Yeah, they purchased the property, they own the property, and we have a property management group that if they choose to use us, we'll manage it for them on the go forward. So walk me through the cadence here. I give you 100 grand, let's say, and that gets me two houses that I'm on the deed on.

8:49Yeah. Probably three houses, but yeah. And then you just send me a check every month on that money. Correct. That's it? That's it. What's the margin in it for you guys? How much margin is there? we charge a consulting fee up front because unlike you you're an experienced real estate guy you know what you're talking about right the majority of our clients don't yeah and so we have a team of vip transaction coordinators that they hold their hand through the entire process they help them order the appraisals help them you know apply for financing they they literally hold their hand. We call them transaction coordinators.

9:29They're more like transaction counselors. It's a very emotional process for a lot of them. They have a lot of anxiety. They're going into real estate for the first time. Many of them, the only deal they've ever done is buying their own home. And some of them have never done that. They're renters that want to own investment real estate. So we make money on that consulting fee. And then we have a little bit of markup in the houses. And it's really a volume game for us. We move a lot of units. We have a lot of clients. Yes. And it's amazing that you can offer this to really low level people. So this one need the full like amount to purchase a full unit or?

10:04No, we finance them. You finance. Okay. Yeah. Good. Good. Now 75 % or 80 % LTV. And so they're coming up with the other 20 or 25 % down. And so they're just coming up with five grand, 10 grand, you know, to buy a property. No, I mean, a lot of them, you know, say the property's 80 grand, they'll have a 75, so they need 20 ,000 down on the property, plus, you know, 5 ,000 for financing fees and appraisal and all that stuff. Now, I like to talk about, like, one's journey. Now, at what age did you realize you're going to be an entrepreneur? I mean, it must have been after. I've been born that way.

10:38Really? Yeah. I mean, at every memory since I can remember of my childhood, I had a hustle, a deal, I was constantly working something. I mean, in this third grade, I was selling fireworks, breaking down bricks of firecrackers and selling packs of firecrackers, making a profit on that. And, you know, this is a long, before the internet was the internet. And I had a stack of penthouse nudie mags. And I used to rent those out to the kids in the neighborhood. That was third grade, Eric. fifth grade eric 10 years old i actually hold my state's record if you call it call it that for the youngest individual ever charged with a drug sales crime and so in fifth grade 10 11 years old i was taking quarter pounds half pounds of weed breaking it down and i got caught selling weed when i was in the fifth grade that's great that's like my little babies now then like i can't imagine a little kid i was terrible i feel bad for my parents yeah but it was just one fixing bikes I would go to the dump, you know, where I was from.

11:50They had a place where everyone brought all their stuff and threw it out. There's a big metal section. And so people would bring old bicycles and I would go take all the bicycles and take parts from this one and that one and spray paint them and make them cool and sell the bikes. Like I just have always been thought in deals. Can't turn it off. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I, it reminds me like Pastor Joe Olsteen, he says like, you know, Well, if you're, huh? I know of Joel, a bunch of stuff. He's great. Yeah, yeah. He mentions it. Like, you know, if your kid's a drug dealer and you stop selling drugs, he's learning entrepreneurship.

12:26You know, he's learning how to hustle. He's learning how to. Listen, I will put my short-lived career as a drug dealer up against anyone's MBA any day long. All day long, for sure. Yeah. I mean, you learn a true hustle. A hundred percent. I mean, you learn, you know, acquisition, disposition, market share. You learn risk management. You learn operations. You learn supply and demand. Like, there's a lot to it, you know? There is. And you're excited about a real hustle that's actually teaching you a lot, which can get you into a lot of trouble. But thank God, knock on wood, you got out of that game pretty, you know, skeet-free.

13:07Yeah, man. God was good to me. Yeah, for sure. And we hint on that. Now, do you have any kids? Two, yeah. Two boys. Gavin, 13 years old. And Mace will be three this Saturday. Nice. Celebrating his birthday, yeah. Now, so I have four kids myself now. How are you teaching your kids? Because your kids are not like you. They grew up in a prosperity-driven lifestyle. Yeah. You grew up dirt poor like me. You know, we're poor. So grip came different when you come from poverty. A hundred percent. I mean, I tell my kids, I mean, my littlest one is he's still two years old, turning three. So he's a little young for it.

13:46But my oldest, you know, he's 13 years old. So when he was born, I didn't have money. And so he was by my side through all of the hard work, all the adversity, all the come up, you know. And so he got to grow up and witness all of that. So, you know, that's certainly he remembers what it used to be like and now what it's like now. But I tell him all the time, I said, you're not rich. I'm rich. You're actually poor. You have nothing. And so I make them work for it, man. Yeah. Yeah. He's got a job working on my boat with the boat crew and he's had since he was 11. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things, Eric, that I'm always thinking, I'm sure you are too.

14:26It's like, how am I going to instill that same level of grit? Yeah. Kids. How am I going to make sure that they're better than me? Yeah. You know, given like hunger. Yeah. How do you, you put hunger in kids that really don't need to be hung like they're rich yeah i my answer is i don't really know but i'm doing the best that i can yeah you know by not spoiling them not and it goes against intuition you work so hard you make it get all the success you want to spoil the people around you yeah especially your kids but that's good for us not for them yeah it feels good for us, but what actual impact does it have for the children?

15:03And so, you know, yeah. They see you grinding all day long and it's like, no, I'm rich. You're poor. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Um, now where do you think, like, where do you think you derive your, your, your strong work ethic? Where is that derived from? I won't say that I grew up with nothing, but my dad cut down trees for a living and I watched him get up every day early in the morning and put on a pair of work boots and go out there and run a chainsaw and he was a logger and come home covered in sweat and blood and you know wood chips and dirt and uh you know we always had a place to live we never had anything fancy we didn't go on vacations we didn't you know we didn't have any of that but there was always food on the table and a place to live and from my younger like you talk think about why i was selling weed at 10 years old i wanted back then they i don't know if you remember this but they have these jeans they're like these big baggy jeans called jinko jeans yeah of course i remember that yeah i wanted the jinko jeans man i wanted to be you know wearing these cool pants with the cool kids and i also wanted there was a pizzeria by my house that kids hang out with because that little arcade section and i never had money for it i wanted to wear the jeans and i wanted to be able to go to that pizzeria eat two slices of pizza a coca-cola and play as much pinball as i wanted to play and that was like my 10 11 year old thoughts and so i was like well i'll sell weed you know and that's the really i wasn't even smoking weed at the time and that that's what i wanted so i've always just had this like i want it all man you know like i want it all at a certain point i think that that that unfolded in phases for me where like i dreamt about owning a jet like obsessed over it for four years before i took my first private flight on my friend's challenger and then for probably four and a half years i was like i just need to make enough money that i could own a jet and the cars and a boat and all this stuff and i think a lot of it was that was the wanting all of this and to answer a question you didn't ask now it's shifted a lot for me where i just love the process in fact it started to go the other way i don't actually want any of this stuff like i don't want any more cars i don't want any more i don't know it just kind lost once you buy it all you've had it it's everyone should do it but it's kind of lost its pizzazz a little bit and so now it's allure it's like yeah yeah and so now it's just for a love of the game the love of the process i love the people i love to build i love to create value i love the mission i love like putting it on a whiteboard and going all right guys this is the play this is what we're going to do and then putting it all on the line and watching it all come together and come to life i mean entrepreneurship business is the coolest thing in the world because everybody's business this podcast this beautiful company uh your amazing office space by the way all of that at one point was just an idea that you had like you were sitting there and you just thought of it and you said i'm gonna go do this and i'm gonna work hard and i'm gonna take all this risk and i'm gonna do it and then to see it materialize in front of you and become a tangible asset and then to see these employees and and people come in and them make their livelihood through something that you created i mean it's just the most exciting thing in the world so that's what keeps me going it is yeah and it just brings you so much satisfaction that you can serve at such a great capacity something i love about the the journey that i'm currently on it through this podcast and um you know the social media and it's like just the networks now like it's all about the people like everybody in the circle that we we all know it's like nobody talks about money or no one cares you know it's all like we just how can i help you yeah what do you need yeah man you look at guys like dan fleischman he's just relentlessly trying to help everyone yep doesn't care about money like what can i do what can i do to help them i do to help the money comes it just comes yep you know i always say and i say this all the time i said it on the panel yesterday it's like just do god's work does your work every single time every single time and you You did it.

19:25You're living proof and a testament. You're like, you know, one of the biggest things people deal with that just destroys families is addiction. You're like, I'm going to take my knowledge, my expertise, and I'm going to apply it to it, you know, and I'm going to build a business out of it. You know, one thing like you built a massive business on serving others, like really, like what motivated you to start your first clinic? What do you think the underlying motivation was? Was it to help? Was it to help? Yeah, I didn't actually, I never, it never in a million years thought that that would become my full-time business.

20:05And I never even had a single thought that it would become a large business. Honestly, I was a construction worker. I was following after my dad's footsteps and I was cutting trees down every day. And so for the first two years that I had the sober house, I still got up and went to work and logged and cut trees down and, you know, ran heavy equipment and did all that stuff. And I thought that that would be my career. And this was just some side thing that, you know, that I had going on to help people. And then as it grew, you know, there was a pivotal moment that happened for me. It's a little morbid, but it was one of the most impactful things that's happened in my life was this country came under attack of fentanyl in 2012.

20:51And I will say that it came under attack because prior to that, overdose death was nothing what it looks like today. Today, we had 112 ,000 Americans die last year of accidental opiate overdoses. It didn't used to be like that. When I was getting high, I got sober in 2006. I didn't know anyone that died ever. It was real heroin. Real heroin left this country and it was replaced by a synthetic drug called fentanyl around 2012. And what happened from 2012 to 2015, 16, like that next three, four, even five years, a tale of it was that all these people that I grew up with that I love because I don't have a big family.

21:33It was just really me and my dad and i loved my friends but they were street kids just like i was troubled homes just like i was all of that i watched every single one of them die all of them like every i like i can go back to these memories of throwing parties at my dad's house and having 50 70 80 100 kids at my house all the time we used to throw these parties i can remember i'm gonna shut my eyes and walk through that party with the kegs and the big speakers with the wires running out of the basement blasting that old rap music with the philly blunts that we used to crack and empty out the the guts of them and put the weed in them and roll the shit up as a teenager right and i'm looking at the faces and every one of them is a fucking ghost now and i went to every one of their funerals and i hugged every one of them their grieving parents their moms their dads that were just shattered and broken and changed for the rest of their lives and so at that in that thing it was the most painful thing that you could imagine to go through and just watch your people disappear around you in a modern day black plague really and something switched in me and i went fuck this i don't know what i can do but i know how to do this and that's where i took the business from like these little sober houses and it's the identity that it was.

22:59And I blew that thing up. Cause it was like, it was the only way that I knew how to help. And like my people were dead, but yours weren't yours are still here. They have a chance. And if I can get my hands on them, I know I can help them. And so that's what we did, man. We did 500 admissions a month. We treated between five and 6 ,000 people a year, year over year for a long time. It saved so many lives. We made a lot of impact, man. That's a lot of what my personal brand was built about, too. I was at your event last night. I had posted it twice in my story, and so a lot of people came there that follow me to the event that you hosted, which was a wonderful event, by the way.

23:39And a gentleman came up just to take a picture with me. He drove like two hours. He said, Eric, just watching your content and following you around. I got off. I got cleaned off of Coke and Boots. That was last night at your spot. Wow. And so, yeah, I got the guy's picture right here, dude. you know, just to know that you're making that kind of impact, Eric, that's like, that's so much more beyond money. This guy, if you saw him. That guy came and we called him out on stage. He was like, we thought he was like a professional athlete. That guy came because he saw me post and he came there because he wanted to tell me that just my messaging inspired him to get sober and give up alcohol and cocaine.

24:16And so like, dude, like it's again, back to what I was talking about, about like the cars and the, the, the stuff that a lot of people that want to get into business want like dude that means more to me than anything there's not a tangible thing on planet earth that can give me that feeling of like looking at that man and being like brother that means the world to me like you know what i mean so that's what really was the the rocket fuel to go all in and build that business and we helped a lot of people couldn't help them all but we helped a lot of them we made a big difference. I'm proud of the work that we did there.

24:55And I'm proud. I'm honored and proud of what you've done. And I'm, I'm, I'm so stoked that you continue on with that mission. It's built a resilience in you that, you know, we were talking about this earlier that allows you to kind of withstand any turmoil. Like you're like, I'm a pro with section eight housing. Like nobody wants to deal with section eight, but you're like, no, I got this. You know, I'm a pro with, you know, drug rehabilitation centers. no but everyone's scared of both those businesses but what you're like you're you're running into the fire you know because you know that that's that that's where the most help is needed well when you look at both the businesses i love that they're both purpose-driven the addiction treatment stuff for obvious reasons we just discussed but then you know the business of section eight real estate and this kind of turnkey process that we have is a win-win for everyone we take i believe even real estate.

25:46I have my money parked and I have my money parked all over the place. The place I love it parked the most is real estate. And it's not accessible to a lot of people because they think they need to buy big properties. They think they need a huge amount of money to get into multifamily or whatever it is. They don't have the knowledge. They don't have the risk tolerance. They don't have the time. They're working, you know, nine to five jobs. They have children. They have spouses. They have life going on. They got to bring the kid to a soccer practice. They I got the other one in gymnastics. Like they just don't have it.

26:18And so we offer them a service where we're able to put them into real estate investing and manage the entire process for them. That's pretty cool. On the backside of that, we're attacking and providing a solution to an enormous problem in America, which is a shortage of affordable income for people that are at or below the poverty line. And the stigma around Section 8 is like, oh, they're all criminals or they're bad tenants or they're going to mess your property up or they're not good people. And I'm just going to tell you that may be true in some situations. Like, you know, a lot of times people think of Section 8 like the projects, big brick buildings, you know, drugs and all this crazy stuff.

27:02I know back in Massachusetts, they do. In Ohio, they do. But this is different because these are families, essentially. Like our tenants, like if you look at the avatar of who rents these properties, the section of tenants we have, the majority of them are three buckets of people, single hardworking moms that have one, two, three children that have, you know, many of them had their first children young. many of them are raising their children alone they have jobs but you know look look at america today how are you going to be a woman that say i think of a recent tenant that we at least do she had two children she i did the math they were like five and seven i think she had her first one when she was like 18 years old jork's at walmart and so she's got two children she was pregnant at 17 had the baby at 18, had another baby several years after, and works at Walmart.

28:02How are you going to survive in today's world? Like the middle class is evaporating, right? Like my grandfather worked at a steel mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He owned a home on two acres of land, had a stay-at-home wife, and raised three boys. You can't do that today. Not a steel mill. Not a steel mill. You can't be a roofer, a plumber, or an electrician. You could have a job in the union and still not be able to do that, right? You can't own a home, have a stay-at-home life, and raise three boys as a union carpenter, electrician. No way. And so, you know, like these tenants, they're actually really good.

28:35We screen them well, but they're actually really good people. We also get a lot of elderly folks. A lot of those elderly folks are raising grandchildren they didn't expect to raise because the life circumstances didn't go the way that they planned. And then a lot of people are just disabilities. And so the people, you know, that we're serving on that side of things, they're actually really good people and a lot of them work really like you know some of the ignorant stuff that people say in section eight and i hear it all the time of course like oh why don't those people get a job i'm like she has two she has two jobs she has three children what do you want her to do you know and so i feel good about that too i feel good about the work that we're doing for those people providing them high quality you know single family homes for families and stuff like that.

29:24I got to ask this question just because it's just a such a hot topic. Is there any room and there's room for this and I think any vertical like how is AI impacting the drug rehab business as a whole and housing as a whole? Haven't seen AI. Well, all right. I guess a couple examples of AI, AI and Section 8. We actually have a software that we use that shows us heat maps of properties and is able to gather all these different data points and find distressed properties and all sorts of different stuff. And so we haven't fully utilized it yet, but we have it and it's a project that's in the making.

30:10Actually, the CEO of Property Radar was on the panel. I don't know if you met him, but I need to put you in touch with him. Oh, cool. Because he has an AI that will create that heat map with distressed properties. Yeah. Yeah. Unbelievable information. So that on real estate, but on the healthcare side, AI is going to change the game on healthcare. Because in healthcare, I mean, healthcare is the most regulated industry in the world, right? We have licensing, accreditation, all these people. I think banking, we're pretty regulated. I always say mortgage industry is the most regulated. You should try healthcare.

30:47We deal with human beings, right? And so it's arguably maybe neck and neck, but healthcare is incredibly regulated. We have to document every interaction. And so if you're a patient and I'm a therapist and I come talk to you, I have to go make an entire note in your medical record of the conversation that we just had. You can go talk to your clients for your mortgages and you don't have to do it in a record keeping system that that is then audited by the state urine payers and accreditation bodies. It's wild. And so healthcare providers, half of their job is actually treating patients. The other half is documentation.

31:25And so now they've developed AI that it just sits there and gathers the entire interaction and types the medical notes for you. Oh, that's awesome. The best. And so we've just started to experiment with that and roll that out and getting that up and running. And so it just gives us so much time. I mean, think about how much more time the people, the people, the health care, the therapist, the case managers, you know, the doctors, the nurses, these people need to spend time with the patient. When does the patient benefit? The patient's not benefiting when you're sitting in their chart, typing the notes, the patient's benefiting when we're face to face, having our conversations, having our experience.

32:05And so it gives them their time back to go spend it with the patients. I actually was at a conference last week and someone introduced me to Plod, which is a thing that goes onto your phone and records your conversation plot is rolling out a neck wear where you just wear it you turn it on and it will record the conversation and transcribe it all it's just like a necklace crazy like so you're probably going to want to buy plot when it comes out with the new the new neck piece i think they're taking pre-orders right now and probably be out by the time the show is released and they just they all just walk in with their necklace and it just documents the whole thing for them that's crazy yeah it's called pl a ud plot i'm check that out yeah yeah i was i learned about it because they had the the phone one version that goes on your phone but now the neck neckwear one's coming out and you don't have to put it on your phone you just like rock it and yeah records everything and it transcribes it all crazy man and then like and then creates notes bullets out of it do you ever think that we'd get here when we're no you know what i mean like it's like i i laugh all the time like ai and all this stuff i remember when we had the dial-up modems with america online and you know your mom would pick up the phone and it would kick you off at aol you're not that old you're only 38 you know it's like we have grown so far and what are our kids gonna see it's insane like what are our kids gonna see i don't i have no idea because like even talking about plod like i didn't know something like that existed or would exist or ever can exist yeah totally so the the stuff that comes out every single day is but we had the the uh the tech founders and we had like you know we were AI was obviously within tech was a big, big subject.

33:39So everyone's like has different verticals of AI and being implemented in their tech platforms. So it's just fascinating how tech companies are implementing it into their current environments and tech stack. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you know, and you kind of brought this up, but you've accomplished such great success. Hundreds of millions of dollars, big exit. and we talked about this, but I really want to drive this home. It's like after all your success, how do you continue to find motivation?