MI335: A Winning Combination: Cashflow, Car Washes, & Zero Taxes w/ Kriss Berg

23:55And now I'm just selling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with. With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long-term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more.

24:26To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. So, and that takes up the brunt of your time, even though you've got all these other entrepreneurial ventures going on as well? Yeah. And right now, Patrick, I'm actually paring down. I think if you follow me for a while, you know that I had like five or six or seven things going on. I don't think. We sold out of the financial.

25:03I had a financial newsletter company. We sold that a month ago. We're looking to sort of pare down, simplify, really. And so if I had my druthers, it would be probably one or two online businesses and then the car wash thing over the next five years. And is that because it just became life was too much like doing all these different projects or why did you decide to pare down? Yeah, I think that the shiny object syndrome is fun for a while. And I think it's a pendulum. I swung into, especially when I got super active on Twitter, all these opportunities cropped up and I jumped into all these things.

25:40and honestly, they've been lucrative. I've made money off of them and I don't regret a single one of them. But now I'm swinging back, I'm simplifying, and I'm really enjoying focusing on just a couple of different things. But honestly, I think if we were to have another call in 10 years, you'd say, well, how many things you got going now? And you're like, I'm back to seven or eight things. Yeah. The shiny object syndrome is, I mean, it's a real danger on Twitter for sure. I want to get into Twitter a little bit. When did you get into it? Why did you get into it? Did you realize the power of it as you got into it, or did that develop over time?

26:16That developed over time. I got on in 2011, I want to say. And it was for years, it was just a way to argue about sports. And back then, it was a ton of people just telling jokes. It was like comedians workshopping their jokes. So it was just a fun thing. And then in about 2019, 2018 or so, guys like Nick Huber, Sweaty Startup, and some people really started posting valuable business stuff. And I realized, well, I could contribute to this. I have quite a bit of experience. I was learning a ton from these people. And I thought, well, I can share too. And so about two years ago, I want to say I started really sharing my stuff, my journey and my experience.

27:00And I shared, I mean, you know, my health supplement company at the time in 2022, it was doing like 18 million or something. And so I was talking about that, but nobody cared. Nobody wanted to hear about that. I think I had like 2000 followers and I would get like four likes on something and I thought, okay. And then about a year and a half ago, well, I'll rewind about two years ago, I started following, there's, Self-storage just blew up on Twitter. Everybody was doing it. And during the pandemic, it became just red hot. And so I thought, well, I can do that. I'm in a sizable town here. I'll find a self-storage facility.

27:34And I found a friend of mine who wanted a partner on it. We could do this, right? Well, we looked and looked and everybody who had a self-storage facility was so completely unrealistic about what that thing was worth that we couldn't make anything work. It was ridiculous what they wanted for their properties. And that didn't work. But in the process, I met an agent, a commercial real estate agent, and he said, you should look at this car wash. It's been sitting on the market. It's kind of a pocket deal now, but it was on the market for nine months and we just never got any action on it. And so I looked at it and kind of forgot about it.

28:08And I came back to it and we realized that it wasn't on Google Maps. They hadn't updated the pricing in a decade or more. The guys who worked there didn't even know how to update the pricing. That's how long it had been. And they had been there 12 or 13 years. And it was just your basic kind of case of neglect. The owners literally owned a bank. So they had much bigger fish to fry. And this was a side gig for them. And they just ignored it essentially. So we bought the first one in April of 2022, coming up on two years ago. And it was just fun. All these little levers you could push. The guys who work there, the attendant said, we haven't updated these soaps.

28:48We got to get better soap. Everybody hates our soap. Well, that was easy. We just buy new soap. We got to fix this thing. The old owners never wanted to spend any money. Can we fix this thing? Fix the thing. And before we knew it, we had increased the business 70%. We put it on Google Maps. We increased the prices a little bit. We just improved the customer experience. Before we knew it, we'd almost doubled the business. And so another car wash came up for sale. It was almost a carbon copy of the first one. The same builder and the same original owner bought that one. And then it was just this nice little side gig.

29:18And then in December of 22, I do what everybody, what every entrepreneur does is you email your accountant and says, okay, what's the damage? How much am I going to owe come March for tax bill? And she says, I don't think you're going to owe anything. And I had been used to a mid to low six-figure tax bill for years I've been paying. You know, I would pay the nutritional products and all the online businesses were generating this cash flow. And so I was just, we make our quarterly payments as you're supposed to, but there was always a big, big check to be written in the spring of the following year.

29:53And I said, what do you mean I'm not going to owe anything? And she said, well, there's this thing called bonus depreciation. Did you know about this? And I had heard about it, but two years ago, it wasn't quite, you know, there wasn't all these cost seg companies and like people were talking about it, but I didn't truly understand it. So I called her and I said, what are you talking about? And she said, yeah, the depreciation from these car washes are going to wipe out your entire tax bill and you're going to get back all these payments you've made out throughout the year. And that was when I was like, okay, car washes are pretty cool.

30:23I liked them to that point, but I was like, oh my God. And so January 23, I was like, hey guys, I just figured out this crazy thing. I had no idea it was going to be this cool. And so that caught fire. All of a sudden I had 12 ,000 followers and I was like, well, maybe I should just be the car wash guy. And then that's how it started. And so since then we bought one more, we're trying to buy four more this year and it's become a life of its own. So there's lots to unpack here. I want to talk about the first one. Tell me about just how you're finding these deals, how you're going about, I don't know if you're financing them with a partner.

31:01Talk to me a little bit about the mechanics of getting a deal done and getting one under ownership. Yeah. So the first one had been listed, but he basically unlisted it because it just sat for a year on the market. And so they had taken it off of all of it. But I had contacted him when I was looking at self-storage facilities. So the agent still knew I was kind of in the market for something, but it was what he called a pocket deal. And we see this a lot in bigger metro areas that a seasoned agent in a certain niche like car washes or gas stations or self-storage will not list it in the public listing because he doesn't want the tire kickers.

31:41They don't want the incessant phone calls and emails from all over the world that I'm sure they get on deals that are listed in LoopNet and Crexie and all this stuff. So when I tell people, if you want to look for a car wash deal, in general, you can kind of start asking around to commercial agents on who are the local people who handle these deals. There's usually in any major area, there's usually a handful of people who will handle the majority of car wash deals. And oftentimes they have pocket deals that they don't want to list, but are indeed for sale. So the next two deals actually we found were listed.

32:19They were both listed on crexie.com. And so you don't have to go off market to find these deals. But this year, We're going to be sending, we've had, I have a VA in Pakistan scrape all the car wash ownership listings. We now have the owner's home address or their headquarter address. So we'll be sending personalized letters to all those people. That's another way to do it. Now, is this all over? Is this just local to you or how do you? We're just looking in Colorado right now. I get a lot of deals sourced because of my Twitter profile from all over the country. And eventually I'm hoping to buy some of those deals.

32:56But right now, we like local because we're building up a system. The idea is to build up a system to manage a car wash from anywhere. And we're still in the process of doing that. So we financed the first deal with bank financing. We put down 25%. It was$650K. The second deal, we were only required to put down 20%. And these next couple of deals, we're hoping to do SBA. And there's a program for the SBA. I'm forgetting. I think it's 7A or something. Maybe you know what it is, but it's one of these classifications, but specifically for real estate businesses, based businesses. And for those, you can put down 10%.

33:31So we're going to do that on the next couple deals. So far, how have the banks been viewing, like in your experience so far, how do they view car washes? Are they pretty eager to lend to you? Well, yeah, certain ones are. It's funny that you'll come up across some banks and some of these banks we've had relationships with in my other businesses. So you'd think they'd be kind of primed to lend to me, but some of them say, oh no, car wash. And then others are like, car wash us. Let's do it. We love them. Bring us all the car wash deals you have. So I've always said you can't have too many bankers.

34:02I still believe that. I think you only need one accountant. I probably only need one lawyer for most business, but you need a ton of bankers if you're going to get deals done because they all have different requirements and different niches they like. And so we've got a great lender now called Oak Star. They're kind of a regional, they're based in Missouri, but they're regional, but they seem to love car washes right now. So we're working with them right now. But we know that it tends to be a kind of a localized regional lender. We have not had any luck with the big nationals, Wells and First and US Bank, and they don't seem to have any appetite for this kind of stuff.

34:37So when you're doing value adds on car washes, basically, right? It's a value add deal, essentially. It's a value add. Yeah. It's classic value add real estate. And so when you say car wash, I think of the big... We've got in Columbus, Ohio, the big one is called new car wash, where they go through the tunnel and you just sit there in your car, put it in neutral and go. That's not what you're buying, right? No. Those have been overbuilt. And I think a lot of your listeners would probably agree. Why are you buying car washes right now? They're building them everywhere. Those are called a tunnel or an express wash and the car pulls in and you're basically pulled on a conveyor belt through and you spit you out the other side of a clean car.

35:20Those have been overbuilt primarily because of this tax break that we'll get into that I'm benefiting from too. But we like the self-serve slash touch-free car washes. So when you drive in, you wash your own car. There are a huge percent of the population still like to wash their own car. They don't want to go through those big tunnels because they do tend to damage vehicles. And there's a ton of people who just get a lot of satisfaction from washing their own car. And then we have the touch-free on one side, and it's just what it sounds like. There's no brushes that can damage your car. So they're a lot better.

35:54We have this kind of dumbbell clientele. We have kind of the lower end who want to spend$2 on a car wash or maybe four and wash their own car. And then we have people with really nice cars who would never trust that car to go through a big tunnel. So our business is steady. This side of the business is growing generally, but it's a completely different niche. It's a completely different customer from those tunnels. I mentioned my uncle who had a couple of car washes. I think he built them in the eighties, had them nineties, you know, two thousands. He had a more like an almost like a tertiary market kind of out from, you know, in, I would say like a blue collar area.

36:32And it was like guys in their trucks. And like, that was his market. guys coming in with their ATVs or whatever, you know, like spraying down the back of the bed of their truck. Is that kind of your target market? That is 100 % our target market because that guy can never go through, he can't even go through a touch-free wash, right? And they have this big muddy vehicle, they need to spray it off themselves. A lot of contractors who have big trucks that just can't go through any kind of automated car wash at all. And then a lot of people who have just a custom car who just love to spend an hour on Saturday wiping it down.

37:06So that is 100 % our market. So we touched on the value add. You've mentioned a few things like new soap. What else are you doing to do the value add and boost the value of these things? Yeah. I break it down into the three M's. So it's modernize, modify, and marketing. So the modernize is upgrade the soaps. And it's really focused on improving the customer experience. and so much of it is just fixing little broken stuff. And anybody who's ever gone to a self-serve car wash will tell you they went up to them and this didn't work. My credit card wouldn't swipe. The soap wouldn't come out. The brush was broken.

37:43There was mud everywhere, right? So we're just improving the customer experience and then you can raise prices. That's the modify. We raise the prices. We're almost always slightly above market rate because our car washes work better and people who want a functional car wash are willing to pay more, right? Then we install a membership program that's been really popular. We started in November. We now have about 75 members between our two local washes. We're going to put it into the third wash probably next year. And then the marketing is get the Google listing up if it doesn't have it, get five-star reviews.

38:18And then we run a little bit of AdWords. We'll run some direct mail, stuff like that. We put a better signage. The new car wash we bought is one block off, really busy road. We just bought an A-frame sign and just put it right on the busy corner. And more people are aware of our wash now. So the marketing and all this stuff is really simple. If you have any experience marketing a business, you'll look at our methods and think, well, this is like 101 stuff, right? And that's all it is. Then car wash owners don't do it. Well, it's a little like just the mom and pop self-storage owners. They're just not optimized, right?

38:53And those are the ones you want to buy because you can do the value add, the three Ms that you're talking about, it's not like brain surgery, right? But it takes energy and effort. That's what you're doing to enhance the value. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole generation of people who thought when they bought real estate, that the real estate itself, the simple location of it was all the marketing you ever had to do. And they also thought that most of this real estate was passive. They were told that you just show up and empty the quarter bins, or you just show up and you cut a lock off on the self-storage unit every once in a while, or you show somebody a space once a week or something.

39:29And our generation and the millennials are now coming in and saying, if you treat these businesses as active and you're active in it, you can completely revolutionize the business in a matter of weeks almost. And you just show the most basic effort ever and you're rewarded. You can double and triple the value of these places in a short period of time.

40:17the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more. My colleagues Stig Brodersen, Clay Fink, Kyle Greve, Preston Pysh, and William Green each host their own We Study Billionaires episodes and bring their own unique perspectives. A whole new world of insights awaits you. Just go ahead and type in We Study Billionaires into your podcast app and see what you've been missing out on. Seriously, go ahead. I promise you'll like what you find. Bonus points if you show your support for our work by clicking follow. If something piques your interest, just start listening.

40:51No hard feelings. I'll be waiting for you back here. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor. And I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

41:19With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more. To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks.

41:55And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. Not to be cliche, but building a market-beating portfolio really doesn't have to be a mystery. at least with the right tools. If you've listened to our podcast for a while, then you know we spend a lot of time learning from savvy investors. So why not use the same tools we do? With TIP Finance, you can. Screening for great companies, calculating intrinsic value, keeping up with legendary investors' portfolios, and more are all not just possible, but easy to do. TIP Finance was created by investors for investors.

42:33It's quite literally the tools we wanted to use ourselves when researching investments in a simple-to-use interface. You can get started by creating an account for free. Who knows, maybe TIP Finance will help you find your next 100 to 1 investment. Between the screener and Legend Investment Portfolios to reference, I've gotten a ton of ideas from TIP Finance. What are you waiting for? Take the next step in your investment journey today with the right tools at your fingertips. Grab your device and type into your browser, theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance to get started. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance.

43:14All right, back to the show. So what's your end game or exit strategy with these? Are you going to just continue to hold on to them? Are you going to package them up at some point and sell them off? What's the end game? Yeah, it's kind of a classic roll-up scenario now. So I'm hoping within the next decade that we can get somewhere between 20 and 30 of them. And if we can do that right now, these places, I'm going to do some math here. Hopefully you can follow on if you can't, but hopefully your audience knows a little bit about a cap rate. It's basically a multiplier for what a property is worth.

43:48We're paying a 10 cap, which is 0.1%, 10%, sorry, not 0.1%, 0.1 or 10%, which basically means a 10X multiple price. So if it EBITDAs, which is profit before debt service, if it EBITDAs 50 grand, we'll pay about 500 grand for that property. So we hope to get somewhere 20, 30 of these, and we hope to get the EBITDA of the entire roll-up somewhere in the$3 or$4 million range. Let's just say for easy math, it's$3 million EBITDA across all these locations. They're all branded the same. A member who is a member at one car wash can go to any of them in our network. And we have done the classic 3M strategy to all these places.

44:34We've increased the EBITDA radically. If we had a$3 million EBITDA, now the cap rate gets compressed. And we're seeing some of these chains sell for a five cap, which is 5 % or 0.05. Now, if you take 3 million and you divide it by 0.05, it's the same thing as multiplying it by 20. Now, all of a sudden, this is a$60 million enterprise. And we've paid far less. We've paid somewhere less than half of that. And we'll still have some debt on it. But the numbers get really interesting on some of these roll-ups. That's the plan. Nobody's really done this for self-serve car washes though. Not at this scale.

45:13So there is no precedent that I know of here. If one of your listeners does, please tell me because I'd love to do a case study on it. But we may be a pioneer there. And if that happens and nobody wants to buy this thing, fine. We'll have this tremendous cash flowing asset and we'll just keep it. Right. And so you're branding them all the same. You're using the same name. I like the idea of the membership that you can go to any of them. What's the biggest challenge right now? Is it finding them, finding the ones that could be a good value add? Is it the operations? What's the hardest thing right now?

45:47Well, it's a little bit of a mixed bag. Probably the biggest issue is the pricing. Most people are selling one unit for a six cap, which just doesn't work for anybody right now, especially with interest rates where they are. So you have to wait for them to come down. You got to wait for them. You got to find one that's a little bit of a pig, that's got some kind of problem on it. The one we just bought, somebody had crashed into the mechanical room in 2021 and wiped out any kind of business for that place for nine months. And so they didn't have three years of clean books. So we had to do some fancy financing there, but we got a good price for it.

46:25Now, the one we're looking at in Denver right now that we'd like to buy, it's got some issues with the pricing and the ownership. There's kind of no labor involved. Nobody knows who's going to actually work there. So it's got a little bit of a problem. And anybody who's done real estate for any amount of time knows that you want those deals with a little bit of hair on it. You don't want some big, hairy, like environmental disaster going on. Well, you want the ones that are going to scare off the retail investors that are like, no, I don't know how to figure that out. We know now we know how to figure out this stuff.

46:58So that's where we're kind of deals we're looking for. So as far as operations go, who's handling that aspect? Let's say the hose goes out or the water's down or soap's out. So we always have an attendant on site. Not always, but I would say about 40 hours a week, sometimes 50 hours a week, there's an attendant on site. That differentiates our car washes too, because most of the self-serve car washes you go to either, it looks like they've been abandoned, right? You don't know if anybody's ever been there. The trash is overflowing and all this stuff. So we have attendants on duty during most of the busy times, and they are fixing that stuff.

47:33They're emptying the trash bins. And then my partner, Alex, really handles a lot of the mechanical issues that crop up. How are we going to fix this? That kind of thing. Let's get into what makes car washes attractive. You kind of backed into it, it seems like. Go into cost segregation for me. Talk a little bit about it and what the advantages of it are. A lot of people don't even know about cost segregation. So kind of bare level. The bonus depreciation allowance that is now, it's going to be 60 % this year. It was designed to spur investment. And so it was basically telling business owners and real estate investors that you can deduct a certain percent right now.

48:14And normally when you buy a capital asset like this, a big expensive asset like this, there's a schedule that you get to depreciate it on. And commercial real estate is 39 and a half years. That's a long time. So what this bill did, it says you can depreciate all of the improvements and equipment on certain assets in year one for 100%. Now, last year was 80 % and this year it's 60%. Okay. It's kind of confusing, but follow along. So for a lot of assets like a storage facility, that meant certain percent of the buildings and the improvements, the gate, that kind of stuff. And what a lot of people ended up having to do was get a cost segregation study because you had to figure out what was depreciable when.

49:02And you literally need a certified engineer on some of these properties to go in and figure out this is depreciable this way, this is depreciable this way. And it was a kind of a calculus. Car washes. For whatever reason, the entire property, except for the dirt on the ground, is depreciable under this rule now. That means the building, the equipment in it, the hoses, the paving, the concrete, everything. So you don't need to cost segregation study. All you need to know is what the dirt is worth. And that's on the auditor's website, right? Yeah. That's on the auditor's website a lot of times, or that's, you can find an empty lot in a similar neighborhood and say, okay, that's worth.

49:44That's what it's worth. Yeah. And so you just subtract that from the price and there you go. That's really what you get to depreciate. So that's one reason why car washes have become very popular over the last few years. They're the easy part. So, I mean, of all the potential real estate assets you could invest in, in terms of cost segregation, car washes seem like the easy, you know, like no brainer. It's like juiciest ones to do, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now, a lot of people are afraid of them because there's a lot of mechanicals involved. You need a full-time employee. You can really run a self-storage facility with somebody part-time for the most part, right?

50:21There's probably a guy who checks in on it, maybe daily, but there's a lot of, I know a lot of operators who don't have many full time employees at all, and they have five or six properties. But with ours, you kind of need, we do have somebody answering the phone all the time. We have somebody on the site the vast majority of the time. So it's definitely more involved. It's a little more business than real estate, but it's a nice combination of it. And you kind of backed into it. It sounded like you were trying to find self-storage and nothing was coming up and this car wash popped up on Crexie.

50:53Yeah, we don't let the tax tail wag the dog. We're not in it just for the tax benefits. It's a very good cash flowing business on its own. And it's a relatively easy business to run and to grow. But the tax benefits really kind of tipped it over into this. Okay, now this is all I want to do. I want to generate income with my online business, spin that into the car washes, and the car washes will then remove the tax bill from the other businesses. And I have this beautiful flywheel. Right. So you had mentioned you're used to paying a pretty big tax bill. Buying these car washes, doing the cost segregation, or not cost segregation, but because of the bonus depreciation, what's your tax bill look like now?

51:35Well, I had zero tax bill for 22. For 23, it looks like it may be 40 to 50 grand when I should have paid probably 450 grand. It's massive. I had a call today with a guy who is a tax attorney and he was talking about cost segregation and he was actually working for a cost segregation company like early in his career. He told some investors about it. Like their first question was like, will I go to prison if I do this? Like, it seemed like too good to be true. It was like, nope, this is like part of the IRS code. You can do this. Yeah. And honestly, I have a little bit of guilt about it because I mean, I use the roads and I use the government services.

52:15My kids go to school and all this stuff. And I do have a little bit of guilt in that. But we also drop off some big checks to our local homeless shelter, the local animal shelter. And so we support a lot of our local charities in our own way. But it's wild. I mean, it's legal, right? And that was my big question too, is how is this legal? Yeah. But the idea though, is like to, like you mentioned earlier, it's to incentivize real estate investment. And like you're buying these crappy car washes and turning, doing a value add, making them nicer, like going on to buy more, you know, like it has a net benefit, obviously.

52:50Otherwise the IRS wouldn't have it in place. I totally agree. And now, now this bonus depreciation thing is working its way through Congress. Looks like they may re-up it and may go back to a hundred percent bonus depreciation. So I do think it's a net benefit, but like I said, this is still a great business without that tax benefit, but it's really nice. Any other parts of the car wash business that we didn't touch on that you'd want to talk about? No, that's probably it. If you're interested in learning more about this, I would go to taxfreecashcow.com. I set up a website where I talk about, I'll give you the whole playbook on how to do this, how to find, buy, and run your first car wash.

53:28Taxfreecashcow.com. I'll give you the whole playbook of it. It's a course that I've created. I get a million DMs on this when I started posting about it. And so I had to build a course to really do that. And you can set up a time, you can get a one-on-one consult from me as well. And I heard, maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like 300 bucks. And if people don't like it, whatever, you're giving them their money back. Yeah. My reputation is, it's actually 200 bucks right now for a little bit of time. But yeah, my reputation is worth way more than 200 bucks. So if you get into the course and think it's crap, I'll just give you your money back.

54:01I don't want people to be unhappy. So I've only given like two refunds and we've sold about$45 ,000 worth of it. But if you're not happy, just email me. I'll just give you your money back. I wanted to talk a little bit about masterminds and groups and talk to me a little bit about, are you involved in a mastermind? Has that played a big part in your development as an entrepreneur? Yeah, I've done masterminds on and off. My first one was Entrepreneur's Organization in 2004 or 2005 when I had that excavation company and it transformed it for me. It's hard to find the right mix of people. Entrepreneur's Organization actually does a really good job of that.

54:41And if you're a young entrepreneur, I would encourage you to check that out. Now I'm doing the psilocybin therapy with a group of entrepreneurs. It's called Breakthrough. And we take psychedelics, psilocybin, which is known as magic mushrooms. Which is legal in Colorado, correct? Is it? It's legal in Colorado. You can do it legally here. I'm getting certified in this. It's one of the other certifications. So it'll be completely legal. Well, I guess it won't be completely legal, still illegal at the federal level. But in any case, it's been transformative for me and the other people that are doing it.

55:12We have one guy whose life has completely changed. He was completely kind of lost in his marriage and his business. And now him and his wife are closer than ever. He's completely changed how he parents his children for the better. Another guy, military veteran with a lot of trauma and everything was really lost. He's just eight months later, he's got a successful business, a coaching practice of his own, and is completely off medications. Another guy had a lot of issues with his business. Do I sell this? Do I scale this? What do I do? He's now doubled his business in the past few months. So it's been transformative and it's an instant community.

55:49We lack this so much. You know, this is what we really all want on Twitter, right? As a community, a tribe, and it's got, it's given this for these people. We've been texting all day. One of our members has a kind of a family crisis right now. So we're all kind of helping him through that. So it's radically changed how all of us live. So you call it like a breakthrough event and tell me a little bit more about it. Like you guys are getting together like in a retreat type setting or how's it, what's it look like? Yeah. The name of the organization is Breakthrough. We'll grab an Airbnb somewhere in the mountains, kind of remote, and we'll all gather there for two nights and two and a half days.

56:25And there's no alcohol. It's not a party. It's not a rave. We take the substance very intentionally. And some people take a little, some people take a lot, some people don't take it at all. And we all just talk about what we're experiencing. And then the next day, we set intentions for how we're going to integrate these findings. You get a lot of insights, both during the trip and after. And you can really set, you can really change your life. And so we have another session coming up in July. We have a couple open slots if anybody's interested. We'll show you how to contact me at the end of the show here.

56:56But it's been transformative. It's like control all delete for your brain. And for some people, it's like 10 years of therapy, 10 years of talk therapy. Not everybody. And I'm careful saying that, But there are some people who have done therapy for years and just two nights with this group has done way more than they could ever gotten from a psychotherapist. That's awesome. I've heard it described as kind of like a reboot, rebooting your brain in a way. Control-alt-delete. And it's another, you mentioned for our work week and Tim Ferriss, that's another thing that he's into. And I think, you know, spends a lot of money actually on encouraging and supporting psilocybin research.

57:35That's right. Yeah. He has funded, because he is very wealthy now, and he has funded a lot of the studies that are going on at Johns Hopkins that shows how this works. And so, for people who are skeptical, jump on Johns Hopkins, which is one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world. And they are conducting randomized controlled trials every day on psychedelics. And the findings they're coming up with are just mind-blowing. It's absolutely revolutionary. for people who are on death's door and are struggling, people who are not responding to any other kinds of therapy. They're having their lives changed by this stuff.

58:13It's really cool. You had a really interesting post about friendship and loneliness that I wanted to touch on a little bit. Tell the story about it. You had a birthday party and... Oh, yeah. I think it was 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. My wife said, your birthday's coming up. Do you want to have a party? And I said, sure. And the date is approaching and we hadn't talked about it. And I think it was actually the next day. And I said, so who's coming? And she kind of broke down. She said, babe, I'm so sorry, but nobody's coming. There's nobody. And I just realized that I just didn't have a lot of friends anymore, or they were far away, or I was ignoring them.

58:49So why wouldn't they ignore me? I hadn't gone to their birthday parties. So it wasn't their fault that they weren't interested in coming to my birthday party. So I made it pact then that I was going to find more friends. And so what that entailed was I was living off the grid in the middle of nowhere and I was becoming this proud loner. I don't need anybody. I realized I was really lonely. I started being more outgoing. I started going to my son's birthday parties. Are you an introvert? On your Myers-Briggs, are you an introvert? Yeah. I was right in the middle. I would be extrovert, introvert at different times, but I hated mingling.

59:26I hated small talk. What do you do and where are you from? in like that 90 second interaction that just gets awkward really fast. I hated that. So I would avoid it. So the revolution for me was like, I would go into those situations now and just try to have an interesting conversation. I realized the best way to do that was to just ask interesting questions and not worry about telling my story. Get it out of my head. Because so many people are just waiting to talk. They ask a question and they're just waiting to answer it themselves. right like what do you do i can't wait to tell you what i do and so i just wipe that away forgo any intention of talking about myself and i just ask people interesting questions and it can start in a traditional way what do you do but then you take it in well did you study that in college oh well what did you want to be in college what did you want to be when you grew up where did that take you why aren't you doing that you know and you really get into people's motivations and and thoughts and what they started off doing it's always interesting to see what they studied in college versus what they're doing now.

1:00:24And it's always an interesting journey how they got there. Right. And then you can get into, you know, where did you grow up and what was that like? And naturally would progress to, well, what do you do for fun? And that would transition into usually, especially when you're in the mountains of Colorado, people have really fun hobbies. And I would ask them what that was. Sometimes it was mountain climbing or backcountry snowboarding or, you know, motorcycle riding. And I said, oh, well, that sounds fun. I'd like to try that. And invariably, if they were nice, they would invite me. And eventually, I would go.

1:00:54And all of a sudden, I would have one friend and he would introduce me to his other friends. And now I have this groups of friends that we go motorcycle riding, we go backcountry snowboarding, we do all this stuff, and we go and eat mushrooms in the mountains. And so, I now have several tribes of friends. I have great birthday parties. And I feel like I'm really close to probably 20 people that I didn't even know back when I was having terrible birthday parties. So just getting out of my own shell, asking people interesting questions, being willing to do weird things and follow people into weird activities and hobbies has completely changed my social life.

1:01:33And now I feel really fulfilled and I definitely don't feel lonely anymore. Yeah. And it makes for a really interesting life. But to your point about conversations, I think people are starved for this. People aren't listened to. And when someone actually asks real questions like you do and is actually curious and interested, it's like, whoa, this is new. Because to your point, most people are just ready to one-up you. Like, you did that? Oh, well, let me tell you about what I did. Exactly. That's exactly the problem, Patrick. That's exactly it. It's the one-upping and the let's turn the conversation back to me now.

1:02:09Enough about me. What do you think about me? That's how a lot of people... And so, yeah, if you can show a genuine interest in people, First of all, you're instantly likable. Even if you don't ever talk to that person again, and if you never see them again, or if you never hang out with them again, they're going to like you because you showed an interest in them. Okay. And that's a big part of just having a social circle is having people like you. And I, men in particular, like, I don't need people to like me. I don't give a hell. I don't give a damn what anybody thinks of me. That was so toxic for so long.

1:02:39And it just ended up to a lot of loneliness for me. Yeah. Well, it's a trap for entrepreneurs too. You get so caught up in your business and growing it. You don't make time for your friends and maybe even family. It can be a real trap. Yeah, absolutely. You have this self-reliance that you think should carry over to everything that you don't need friendship and companionship. And it's completely wrong. It's a horrible way to live. This is a good place to put a pin in it. I really have enjoyed talking with you here today, Chris. So for our listeners that want to learn more about you, learn about car washes, what you're up to, what's the best way for them to get in touch and reach out?

1:03:16So jump onto X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and search for Car Wash Guy. You'll see my face with a yellow background, kind of hard to miss. My name is Chris Berg. You'll see it on the video here if you want to search. It's Chris Berg Tweets. It's my handle on there. And check out, go ahead and follow me. And then check out the highlights. Twitter has a cool new thing called Highlights. If you jump onto my profile, you'll see the highlights. It's all of the threads that I've done over the years. Not all of them, but most of them are in there. The loneliness thread is in there. The big rundown on all the car wash stuff we're doing, my supplement business, a lot of stuff is in there.

1:03:49You'll also see a link for my newsletter. These days, I'm breaking down interesting businesses. I just broke down my friend's business. He does, he profits$600 ,000 a year working 10 hours a week on his plumbing business. I actually did a thread on that today. This today is February 26th. So you can kind of rewind the clock when this comes out. Check that out. And that's it. And, you know, talk to me on Twitter and DM me and say, hey, I enjoyed the pod with Patrick. Here's my question and I'll probably answer. Yeah. You know, I've DM'd you and you were real quick getting back to me. And I really encourage people to follow you.

1:04:21Your content's really great. You're a really good writer. And I appreciate the craft of writing, just being able to write on Twitter and provide value. You're definitely doing that. So thank you. I mean, I've gotten a lot out of it. Anyway, thanks for your time. This has been fun. Thanks, Thanks, Chris. Me too, Bradshaw. This was great. Thank you. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes.

1:04:53To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.