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
Building the Future in Southern Utah: AI and Local Business with Blake Technologies
Ever wondered what it takes to build a tech company from scratch in Southern Utah? Meet Blake Kvarfordt, the local genius behind Blake Technologies who's shaking things up in St. George. From his early days studying business at UVU to diving headfirst into coding at Dev Mountain, Blake's story is anything but ordinary. After cutting his teeth at tech giants like T-Mobile and Nike's innovation team, he came back home with a mission: to create STGZ, a game-changing app that helps local businesses attract customers without the usual hefty fees. But here's where it gets really interesting - Blake drops some serious knowledge about how AI is transforming the way we build software, while keeping it real about why the human touch still matters. We get into the nitty-gritty of startup life and why face-to-face connections are more important than ever in our screen-obsessed world. Want to know what the future looks like? Blake's got some wild ideas about AR and VR that'll blow your mind, especially when it comes to education and everyday life. He's cooking up something big - think Groupon, but way better and focused right here in our community. Plus, if you're into real estate, stick around for his take on investment strategies and what's happening with manufactured homes. Trust me, you don't want to miss this one.
Guest - Blake Kvarfordt
Website - https://www.blaketechnologies.com/
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[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:01:38] Local Entrepreneur's Coupon App Journey.
[00:11:07] Tech Stack and Remote Work Trends.
[00:14:15] Remote Work Challenges and Community Benefits.
[00:25:42] Virtual Reality and Future Education Trends.
[00:30:14] Local Events Integration for Business Coupons.
[00:36:07] Real Estate and Investment Strategies.
[00:39:42] Manufactured Homes and Lending Laws
We're targeting St George, the Southern Utah area. It's called St Jeezy. Okay, the point of this is it's a coupon app similar to what you've already seen, like with Dixie Direct, I think it's called.
Speaker 2:Dixie.
Speaker 1:Direct Starving student cards Starving student cards Stuff like that. However, we're not charging businesses. Okay, this is one of the few models that you can still remain profitable and, you know, maintain or grow the company without having to charge businesses, which is very rare.
Speaker 2:From the Blueform Media Studios. This is the 435 Podcast the pulse of Southern Utah. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the 435 Podcast. Today I have Blake Carver with me. He is the Blake from Blake Technologies, a local tech entrepreneur here in Southern Utah, and we talk about a lot of different things his history with T-Mobile, with Nike and his latest edition of his app. That's a local based app. It's STGZ ST space GZ on the Apple iTunes app store. You'll want to download it. It's going to have coupons and promoting local businesses here in town, but we're on the hunt for unique ways People are making money in Southern Utah. We want to focus on the small businesses and Blake has a great story.
Speaker 2:We hope you enjoy this episode. We'll see you out there. You know this might sound crazy, but I hate real estate agents and after being with myself for the last 10 years, I know the good ones from the bad ones. If you're thinking about buying, selling or investing in real estate here in Southern Utah, we want you to interview us for the job. Go to realestate435.com and give us a call. We promise you're going to love us. Blake, what's your last name? It's Carford, carford. Yeah, carford. Is that a German Swedish? Yeah, carford, Is that German?
Speaker 1:Swedish. Yeah, If you look at the spelling there's a V and a T in there, okay, but yeah, it's pronounced Carford Carford. And where are you from? I grew up in Las Vegas and then moved here, actually just before high school, okay, so I went to high school at Desert Hills in St George here, desert Hills in St George, here, uh, and then, uh, just you know, after I went to college at Utah Valley university, um, and dropped out when I discovered my passion for software, yeah, uh, and then, yeah, started started my career there.
Speaker 1:So that didn't start in high school that you you went to Utah Valley and started doing classes and yeah, I was actually studying business and then, yeah, part of the part of the major was just one, uh, computer science class, which is like building websites. Yeah, uh, and I really really liked that. I ended up building like we were supposed to build one website and I built like five. I built one for my dad's medical practice and then, uh, you know other just little business websites that I wanted to build to learn it and yeah like after, after that class.
Speaker 1:You know, we just kept going to classes, you know, like business, and I hated it. And so one day my wife was just like stop complaining, like go do it. You liked that one class, like just go do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Uh, I ended up just yeah.
Speaker 1:So when I decided I want to do like technology, realized that the colleges don't really teach the latest and greatest stuff.
Speaker 2:The iteration of it is just so quick, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So did you go work for somebody first?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I went to Dev Mountain up in Northern Utah. That's kind of where I went. It was like a three-month boot camp and then from there my like job job was a senior level engineering position at t-mobile okay um where we worked on a lot of really cool stuff. So I was I was the in charge of a project where we rebuilt the payments infrastructure for all the retail stores in the country.
Speaker 2:Crazy, yeah, it was really crazy, and I worked for Verizon for like 10 months. My wife got pregnant and, like the as soon as we found out she was pregnant, I was like I gotta go get a job because I was studying to get my real estate license and I was like I need health insurance. So I went and worked for Verizon the day that she had my son. I was like this and I quit, and they didn't think.
Speaker 2:I was going to actually quit the system. That was probably the most frustrating thing. Working at Verizon is like everybody's got these tablets and you're having to restart them over and over and there's like 50 different ways of how you know getting into it. It was so confusing and so difficult. I was like how is it a company like Verizon horrible at this part of it?
Speaker 1:So I can imagine T-Mobile had to go through some upgrades. Yeah, same deal. I mean, it's not really a technology company, so the apps that they have on the iPads for all the workers not necessarily the best, and same with the payments, the security and the payments and stuff. So we really helped, we rebuilt that, launched it. So far I haven't heard any problems with what we've built in the past few years.
Speaker 2:Which is always nerve-wracking for an application, especially when it's rolled out, is those bugs. You don't know the bugs until you're going at scale, yeah exactly, so that seems to be going really well.
Speaker 1:When was that? That was 2021. So it was only three or four years ago. Yeah, when I left.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:That was a little over four years ago actually, but yeah, since from T-Mobile. When I left T-Mobile I went to work for Nike as a contractor in their innovation department and that's kind of where this kind of kicked off this whole like entrepreneurial spirit back in me, because I grew up and I was always doing businesses in my youth and so that kind of in their innovation department our job, like my team was in in charge of like we would build a new business every six months, like a new tech product, oh cool, and then if it worked out, like if it tested well with the few hundred thousand users, then it would be incorporated into the Nike ecosystem.
Speaker 2:This sounds so ridiculous. Have you ever seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? Yes, you know how he goes and works for the pseudo-Apple and he has to come up with as many ideas as he can just to get his gold jacket. I just think of that as like. This is literally how corporate America runs their tech stuff.
Speaker 1:Totally, and it's exactly how it works and there's many teams doing the same thing all the time and you know it's been really cool. Yeah, Like great experience Cause I get to work, like you know, on a on a big, scalable team and uh, kind of learn how to build a business also, and I thought that's like really the benefit to working in a position like that.
Speaker 2:So on those teams, were they giving you, like, parameters of, like what types of things that you could do? Or was it kind of this you come up with a good idea and you run with it and present it, or like, especially for Nike?
Speaker 1:I'm trying to think, yeah, well, they have an entire vetting process before it even comes across. Like our team, They've they've vetted out the idea with focus groups and all sorts of different process to get to that point. They come to us with what needs to be built and then we decide what technologies go into it and which ones are the best. So a large part of our job is just R and D, researching what's what's out there, what's new was just R and D, researching what's what's out there, what's new, and if it's new and works for our project we will determine whether or not it's uh viable enough for.
Speaker 2:Did you ever get one where you're like? This is a stupid idea.
Speaker 1:No really. They're all really cool ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was it? What was one of the coolest ones? Um, I would say I can't really give exact details.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think you can.
Speaker 1:I can give, I can tell you what we used and you can use your imagination so like augmented reality. Nike is a clothing company and mainly shoes, so we were working on a few, and who knows that they're still in development in certain stages, probably, yeah, I would say so. But being able to like see shoes, um, without being in the store, yeah. Being able to like try on shoes, yes, I think technology I think that's a.
Speaker 2:It's a cool technology, but then it's applying it to say is there a return? Like having somebody do this, is that going to lead them to a sale? Right, it's like crossing over the chasm of like does, is this actually going to increase the number of our sales to to be able to have augmented reality? And then you're relying on the consumer to have the technology to be able to actually see it in virtual reality. Right, they got to have the goggles or they got to have some type of way of viewing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or with your phone, whatever you know. Whatever technology seems is like the best as that vetting process that we go to before, or we go through that before we write code yeah, and they don't. They don't give us anything to build unless it has a minimum of a billion dollar.
Speaker 2:Like revenue option or like it's going to make them money Right. There's going to be revenue coming in from this idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, a billion dollars, holy cow. Yeah, and so I mean yeah. So every single project that a team of 10 people is responsible for building has has that potential on paper.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, yeah, that's crazy. So then you did that for just a couple of years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I still, I still do consulting for them, you do.
Speaker 2:Oh, you do. Okay, that's why you can't say anything. Okay, that makes sense, that makes more sense. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I was, um, uh, one of the ideas. I'm sure somebody's working on it and they're probably way far down the road. That's why I'm not doing it. But, uh, buying new homes, cause I'm a real estate agent.
Speaker 2:So it's like you go in, you want to build a house. You could put it on a piece of paper all day long, but you know the difference between I want a hallway that's 12 feet wide versus a 10 foot wide, or you know like how, how big is that hallway? Or you know, you can kind of spatially understand okay, this is probably like 10, 10 by 10 room. But when you go to like the difference between a 12 foot room it's 12 by nine versus a fully different floor plan where you know the the feet is a little bit different. When you walk into the room, how it feels is such a big chasm that people have to jump through. And I was like virtual reality could really change the way home builders build houses and then architects when they design them. So that was one of the ideas. I was like somebody's somebody's got to come up with that one pretty quick.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, a big reason why I'd say things like that will probably come about more often is because of AI. The amount of data that is available in our lives that is not being collected is astounding. The amount of data that is currently being collected by companies and researched and things is astounding, but there's still a huge gap. Yeah, Sifting through it and then being able to astounding but it's there's still a huge gap.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's sifting through it and then being able to. How do you use it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what AI is going to really help with and that ultimately will determine what products to build next or how to make you know current products better, and I think I think over the next 10 years we're going to see some pretty wild steps in tech.
Speaker 2:So you're using, you're using LLMs and AI at some capacity, I'm sure already Right. So so 20, 2020, I think it was like March 2020, maybe 2021. Was it when open AI, open sort, let, let out their platform for everybody to play with? Right? It was 21, 22.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know, I don't know for sure, but chat GDP yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Chat GPT came out and then we've had just so many different models come out. What, which ones do you use? As, as somebody that's working on application software, what, what are you using? Cause everybody uses. You know a couple of different versions of a couple of different things, but I'm curious like, what's your tech stack?
Speaker 1:My well, my day to day is I'll use chat TTP for uh like day to day problem solving. Um, I, I don't. Yeah, that's pretty much all I use. Um, there's other ones out there that integrate with you know, like code. There's some good code based stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so some that are known for helping out developers, uh, but in my opinion, like, if you go any further than what ChatGTP has given you, then you're probably relying on it too much, in my opinion, just because there's too many problems that you need to actually solve out in a chat. These AIs just simply don't know how to architect very well is what I'm trying to get to here. They don't think about scalability. When you're, when you're giving in these, these, these prompts, you know they can't really take into these, these complex factors of, like, our human element and what the end user is going to experience when we're working with it. So really, I I try to keep my, my human human code, yeah, my human self, as part of the project so that way it ends up that the end user can experience this, so you're not necessarily using any AI coding supplement to write code in any way.
Speaker 2:No, I do.
Speaker 1:For coding problems, individual problems. If I need to write a solution for whatever thing honestly, I can refer to ChatGTP. See what it comes out. Problems like individual problems. If I need to write a you know a solution for for whatever thing honestly, I can refer to chat gtp. See what it comes out with, determine you know and then make a determination of what I can take from it or use and modify and modify yeah yeah, uh, but as far as like doing creating experiences for the user, uh, I can't.
Speaker 1:There's no I can, can get, I can, you know, often put in prompts and get ideas or whatever, but it never really quite gets the whole. How do you feel when you interact with this product? Yeah, so I think it's still got a long ways to go to get to where it can like create experiences that we interpret as human to human experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so, uh, working at Nike, still consulting for them a little bit, and then now it's have you always kind of stayed local? You've always kind of worked remote.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah, ever since COVID. Yeah, I mean, I was at headquarters for T T mobile. Uh yeah, remote since then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of the things I think is so fascinating about Southern Utah is that we have we have a an economy that's so much more diverse now than it was even five years ago because of this remote work environment, and, even though a lot of it's getting pulled back, there's still a massive portion of the market to where it just makes more sense, especially for technology and coding and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. However, especially for technology and coding and things like that yeah, for sure. However, since now that I've got like Blake Technologies, I have an office and I've found that that's very, very useful when you're either starting businesses or your business is just small. In what way? Just being able to lean over your shoulder and like interact with another person, rather than scheduling a call, because oftentimes when we're working on these startup projects, it moves fast and what comes into my mind right now is not going to be there in an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or not even in the same way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so being able to like interact. I mean it's fast. I mean we use Slack, yeah, on our remote teams, it's, it's fast. I mean we use slack like, yeah, on our remote teams, it's pretty. Yeah, you know it's, it's efficient, but it's not as cool as uh like. You can't really get the same effect. I guess you can say like uh in a, that you can in an office, and plus, if you have, you know, maybe lesser uh, not lesser uh, but less experienced um engineers, it really helps them to be able to interact and see how maybe a senior engineer does their work or thinks through a process, cause I'm not going to be on a call when I'm on my whiteboard in my office at home, right?
Speaker 2:Right, you know solving a problem, and then you've done it and then it you. You can just poke your head and be like here, come check this out, watch as I go through this. Yes, it's not like you go through it and you're like let's have a call later and then we'll review what I just went over Exactly.
Speaker 1:That doesn't happen. So for, like for my, for the senior teams be remote, I don't care, Cause everybody kind of I can, I can look at another engineer's code and kind of see into their mind a little bit, Um, but that's, that's a skill I think that you develop over time more than more than just something that you're, you have going into it.
Speaker 2:So Nike can do it, but the smaller startup businesses there's probably going to be some challenges with being just fully remote, but team sizes have gotten a lot smaller too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, If there's less experienced engineers on a team like I think that you know you can get any rag tag team of experienced people and you you know they all live in different states and it can make something beautiful. Yeah, totally uh, because you don't need as much communication. It's almost like those like I mean it's a crazy analogy but like those navy seals that they train in silence because they're all so trained in what they do already individually that when they get together they don't really have to communicate in order to get the job done, yeah Um, whereas you know new people kind of have to.
Speaker 1:You have to speak out loud and and uh there's a lot of learning that goes along.
Speaker 2:That needs that interaction. What do you think about, like, just the social interaction? Do you feel like as an engineer? Um, I was listening to uh, I mentioned it before on the podcast. I was listening to Lex Friedman. I don't know if you know Lex Friedman.
Speaker 2:Um, he was, he was interviewing this, uh, engineer that did 60 startups. He did 60 startups in 60 days, okay, and he's just, he was just programming websites and like coming up with ideas and just pushing himself to like how many different businesses can I get people to subscribe for? Like, even if it's a dollar, right, and um, he's ended up making millions of dollars off, you know, catching a couple that have just really done well and been able to scale out. But what he was finding, which he caught on to, right around the time, kiln started building out their business model for basically this, this, uh, um, community workspace environment to where an engineer, it's one thing to just want to be a keyboard warrior and and just, you know, get in and do the engineering stuff on your own, even if you're an expert, but it's the social interaction that you come into. You just just got your office over at kiln. Is there that that community feel there Does that? Is there some value to that? Got your office over at kiln.
Speaker 1:Is there that that community feel there does that? Is there some value to that? Absolutely yeah. Um, I gotta give myself some credit because I've kind of I feel like I've been the one that going out and to the everybody's desks and like introducing myself and seeing what they're up to, yeah, but already I can see that there's. There's lots of value, yeah, uh, even in fields like people that are working just simply remotely or something from for their company. I've had conversations already in the first, in the first few weeks, with people that are working just simply remotely or something from for their company. I've had conversations already in the first, in the first few weeks, with people that have. That has, like, helped me with the way I think about my end users for my products. Yeah, cause I just don't know, you know how people think until I, until I interact with them. That's quite simple. That's a simple reality. But my nature is I'm very introverted, I don't like to talk to people. It drains my energy but it's so.
Speaker 2:you decided to come on a podcast and just suck all your energy right out. This is what you do.
Speaker 1:This is how you overcome these kind of challenges and get better at it? Yeah, because I think. I mean. Who knows if one day I'll be able to. How life is you know?
Speaker 2:yeah, everybody's experiences are gonna be differently and so you know. You have this bell curve of it and you're. You want to hit the margins as much as you can to try to capture the biggest user base. So what? What product? Uh, blake technology, as you said. What kinds of projects are you working on right now? Is that multiple applications or a?
Speaker 1:bunch of stuff, but right now I've got a startup that's based out of it's. We're targeting st george, the st southern utah area. It's called st gz. Okay, um, and the the point of this is it's a coupon app similar to what you've already seen like with dixie direct I. I think it's called starting receiving cards starting stuff like that um, uh, however, we're not charging.
Speaker 1:Uh, this is one of the few models that you could. You can still remain profitable and, and you know, maintain or grow the company without having to charge businesses, which is very rare. Yeah, I, it's. There's very there's rare cases where, in a marketing platform, you don't have to charge for marketing. Yeah, and this is one of those cases, because you're prep, you're providing enough value to the user where they're willing to pay a little bit to get more value out of it. But businesses, um, and this is kind of a problem with a lot of marketing platforms is they're they're so expensive to do marketing, uh, that smaller businesses can't really compete with the, with these, like chain restaurants or you know, larger franchise companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you know, as far as the numbers go, it's going to on paper, it's going to work out. We'll find out how it goes, but as of right now, you can go on the app, start on your phone and and search for St GZ and download it. And is it STGZ?
Speaker 2:Yep ST space GZ. I'm going to look it up right now as we're chatting about it. So, as far as like getting the businesses to it, is it basically just like you apply to have your business on there? Do you have like a cap as to the number of businesses?
Speaker 1:Where it's different from, like Dixie Direct or Starving Student Card, is the business just creates their profile all inside the app. So everybody that downloads the app can see a button in their profile screen that's like hey, if you have a business promoted here for free, and if you have a business, then go ahead and do that. You create your profile in there, you manage your profile in there, you manage the offers that you have. Uh, it's all on you as the business owner. At the beginning, when you first create your profile, we do a verification process, but that's it. You get to determine, like, all the deals that you want to put on there on your own time.
Speaker 1:Got it, and that's really cool because that makes it scalable. Yeah, and I think that's the big, that's a huge problem that these other companies probably haven't quite figured out is, you know, once you have a certain number of businesses on there, uh, um, it's very hard to manage these relationships like person to person. Yeah, they don't have technology, that's that's like doing this for them, right, and so I think that's where we're going to hopefully be able to scale much faster. Um, and the fact that we're not charging businesses like they do.
Speaker 2:Then I think so the user pays. So yeah, what's?
Speaker 1:the Eventually. I mean, we just got started, so it's free for everybody until we figure out what this thing is, but the businesses will never pay to have their profiles on the app. Eventually there might be services like analytics and like data driven softwares that they can subscribe to. Perhaps, to you know, help out their business, okay, but to have to do the marketing where that's going to be free for businesses, always Interesting, and once there's enough users and there's enough value on there, then we'll determine what users can pay.
Speaker 2:So the user, like the, let's say the user the idea would be the user pays, like you know, $10 a year or something like that, and they get the coupons that come up. Or is that the subscription model? It would be something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some sort of subscription. And then businesses, like I said, they determine which offers are available, which day, so like, for example, today is Valentine's Day. Yeah, they determine which offers are available, which day, so like, for example, today's Valentine's Day. Yeah, businesses would put on maybe a week before Valentine's Day they can put on their offers for Valentine's.
Speaker 2:Day. Yeah, it's like on Veterans Day. It's like there's certain businesses that will like free food for veterans. You know what I mean? Yeah, how do you go find that? Exactly when do you go to know what restaurants are giving you know veterans free? Free meals on veterans day and things like that and they don't need my permission.
Speaker 1:They don't have to come to me and say, can I put this deal on your app? They just do it. They're already approved, put the deals on there. And I just tell businesses like, put deals on there, put good ones on there. I'm not charging you for this reason. So give some value to the users.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's pretty cool man. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's pretty cool man. So, um, aside from that, what other kind of business ideas or what else are you working on?
Speaker 1:Oh, uh, uh, ever since the vision pro came out, I've been dabbling a lot with this VR stuff. Yeah, um, I've built a couple of games, uh, one of which you can download. Cool. It's called, uh, obstacle avoidance Nice, yeah, it's just. You just try to dodge all these cubes that come at you. Yeah, and it's kind of fun. But, yeah, I work with augmented reality as a big thing. I truly believe that that's going to be a huge part of our lives in the next 10, 20 years, once these headsets kind of get smaller and, you know, lighter, yeah, so people are more willing to use them out in public.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but adoption just gets a little bit more ubiquitous yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think Apple, I think these big companies kind of came out pretty early with these products. But it's, you know, it's with a purpose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, testing stuff out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're getting used to it and eventually they'll get to a point where it's just a huge adoption.
Speaker 2:I mean, meta's glasses are pretty incredible already, as they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great example. Yeah, I think the capabilities with these things are going to be outrageous. They're going to be crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so trying to get on the cutting edge of that kind of augmented reality stuff, yes, absolutely, Because whatever engineers or teams out there that are doing this now, they will be the the you name, your price type people. So, um, I encourage everybody that works for me or with me to like do this stuff on the side. Even though maybe our business projects are not involving that right now. Uh, do it because it's going to benefit us on my company. If you guys are still working for me, at very minimum it'll benefit you in your career. So, yeah, Cause, yeah for sure, Augmented reality will be pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:What do you see is? Is gaming going to be kind of the? It seems like the obvious headwater is going towards like gaming. But what do you think real world applications Like? Do you do you see like certain segments of the businesses that would benefit the most? Maybe that you know people don't really think about?
Speaker 1:Oh for sure, I mean well, I mean marketing in general would be pretty crazy, because you can. You'll be able to. If you have your glasses on while you're in your car, you'll be able to see going into a city, Like if you're driving down the hill to go into Vegas. You'll see these floating you know, these floating logos or whatever for the businesses. You'll, um, you'll be able to experience things like if you imagine driving down the strip in Vegas and you'll be able to like play a game in augmented reality, like doing a tour of Vegas. Yeah, yeah, Uh, you'll be able to. You know, uh, yeah, just like kind of get almost like how, on the app store when you see a preview of the app that you're about to download, you'll be able to like experience previews of experiences in life. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Which is pretty wild, yeah, If you think about that and then you know, once you know these headsets are going to interact with our, like our, you know things, so, like you could I don't know, I mean use your imagination right, Like whatever you can think of, it's actually going to be possible. Pretty much anything is already possible, but now it's going to, it's getting to the point where anything is possible, yeah.
Speaker 2:One of the things I was thinking about was like the, the food and stuff that we eat. My son has type one diabetes.
Speaker 2:Okay, I was like the food and stuff that we eat. My son has type one diabetes, okay, and so I look at nutrition facts every time, like you just can't help but do it Right, because that's what you're looking at all the time. But being able to like, understand and analyze you know what is this based on? This can right, the serving size is 355 milliliters. It's percent of daily value has it on there, and then milligrams per serving size, but you get a loaf of bread and my wife we're always doing like calculations and stuff like that and so I can't help but think like there's just going to be these like daily tasks that can really help aid in in the way that we function, you know, on our day-to-day life.
Speaker 1:You know on on how, how it can add totally it's gonna, and it's gonna start with our kids, like our. The education, education in general, is about to see a huge, like a huge leap in in how it's done. Yeah, uh, like I often think about the in star trek with like spock's world, and there's a. There's a scene in there where there's a bunch of kids in school and their own like their own little cubicles and it's just a giant screen around them and that's how they're learning and AIs just teach them everything about the world and they're super smart. That's pretty much how I imagine education is going in that way already, where kids are kind of I mean, it's not good to be on the screen all day, but if you're going to be on the screen all day, if you're learning something, that's well, I think it's a balance too between the screen and real life, right.
Speaker 2:I think that virtually virtual reality is a is a a bridge between that you know that screen and what's going on in real life, right it's it's this integration of the two things.
Speaker 1:School will start to be one hour a day, two hours a day, yeah, you know, because let's be honest, they probably only do one or two hours of actual work in their classes anyway, that's like the, that's the how people work anyway, in the in the real world, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's pretty interesting. Um so, so, uh, virtual reality is something that you're looking, looking at. You have this uh, st Jeezy app is local, and then you're doing the side stuff for Nike. Yeah, I've got a few.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've got a few apps on the App Store that I just haven't put my funding behind yet. But yeah, st Jeezy is kind of my focus right now, just because I find it to be scalable. It's already proven. These other companies are doing the same thing. I'm just making it better. I have the better software and better experience companies not to pay have you heard of that company?
Speaker 1:uh, while you were here yes I thought that was a pretty interesting, pretty interesting idea trying to attract, you know, the tourism port, you know, element to it is like, while you were here, don't forget about these different things, like uh, yeah, you know, eventually we'll think eventually we'll have a, we'll have these, you know, geo fence, this geo fence functionality where, like, if you're, uh, let's say, you're in Northern Utah and you're coming down here to visit, and if you have the app already, uh, then you'll, you'll get, like these notifications for, like you know, personalized notifications from our AI that tells you like, here's what you've experienced last time and here's this new thing that you experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's another thing too to the, to the. The adaptability of this is is really nimble, right, cause you get the Dixie direct and then it's, you have this book and you're like, okay, well, what are the deals? And I get, get to the book and I'm looking through the book and you can download the app. They do have an app, but it's the, the agileness of being able to have it at your fingertips and have notifications. You're like you're getting into Washington County. You're like, hey, you know these things are going on. I can't help but think, you know, integrating just the business coupons with events.
Speaker 2:I was thinking about this as I was driving down here. I was like, why is there so much traffic? Everybody knows why. There's all the traffic right, with the parade homes, but there's also a massive soccer tournament, there's baseball tournaments, Like every place I see, you know, kids in baseball gear, right? And so it's what are the events going on in town that I might want to take advantage of? Right, because there's just this gap and silo. We used to have a newspaper that said, hey, here's all the events, you know, you could easily go and look at it, and there's not really a single place to go find it, even Facebook. You know you'd have to scour 50 different groups on Facebook just to find all the different events that are going on in town, so totally having like a one stop place to say this event's going on and here are the businesses that are participating in that event.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here's a deal.
Speaker 2:And here's a deal. And here's a deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, Totally. That's on our list of to-dos Sweet. You know doing this whole events thing. So we'll be working with local influencers here in town as well as different, because there are Facebook groups and pages that where somebody is like posting these events. But we're going to be working with these people and integrating with these platforms to be able to make it easy to show all that on our app.
Speaker 2:If you're looking for a nice cup of coffee and you're in downtown St George, fs Coffee Co, that's where you're going to want to stop. It's right there on the corner of Tabernacle and Main Street in downtown St George. So if you've got a bicycle, ride it on down there and grab a drip coffee and tell them the 435 guys sent you. Is it easy to scrub? If I was to design a software, is it easy to scrub Facebook, for example, I want to find all the posts about events on Facebook. Is there a way to like, have like a crawler that goes through it and like scrubs, like what's getting posted, or is is there like blocks to that with Facebook?
Speaker 1:Well, it can be done. Yes, it can be done. Yeah, Uh for sure, Just uh. As far as how complex that is, I don't know, I'd have to do some research, but it can totally be done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, um, cause I was thinking where we were talking about, like, all the data. There's so much data already getting collected that isn't getting utilized, and then there's all this data that isn't even getting collected Exactly.
Speaker 1:And I would put that in the data that's not collected, because I think, within a town or a region like the southern Utah area, yeah, just having the data on what people are spending money on, where they are at, you know, at a during a certain time of the day, what, how much time they're looking at a specific event, like you, can determine a lot of data for a person just based off of what they're looking at on the screen. You know, yeah, and it's pretty, it's pretty incredible, and that's the kind of data that we're we're hoping to like be able to utilize to just better the experience of people that are coming into Southern Utah. But this is not even in Southern Utah. I don't really view this as a Southern Utah based and only exist in Southern Utah company.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it can be replicated everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're just we'll, we'll scale out to the whole country, to the whole world. Yeah, we're just we'll, we'll scale out to the whole country, to the whole world. Yeah, whatever you know, because, um, that's the way we've designed the software and that's the whole point of it. Yeah, uh, cause I, I personally I don't like to see companies like Groupon uh, charging so much to these businesses to just to be great, because it seemed like you got great deals.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it doesn't seem like they're as good of deals as they used to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they just charge so much that I think that if you give a, if they give a 10 of a sorry, if a company gives a 10 discount, discount on something, the remaining 90% Groupon charges 50% of that. Whoa, yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:So these businesses are maybe breaking, even, if not losing, a little bit of money on every single time we purchase a Groupon, yeah, so it's pretty wild, yeah, they just see that the cost of marketing is like you have a budget for this and I want to take every penny of that budget, if I can take it.
Speaker 1:So their model is the business pays every cent of the deal, we just get the discount and that's about it. Yeah, dixie Direct, and they take for both. Yeah, they take for both. Yeah, which is crazy to me.
Speaker 2:And it's crazy, it makes I mean if you're. It's a win-win. If it's a win-win, you know people are willing to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just. I mean, if you look on those platforms, it's only these big companies that are on there.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, like the.
Speaker 1:McDonald's and, yeah, you know. So, yeah, we's going to be free for you, but you're going to have to rank. You know that's a cool idea. You're going to have to, you know, provide good deals lots of deals and the users need to be using your deals in order for you to rank higher on the list in the app.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like user, you almost have like a user ranking for the if, the, if the user gives, let's say they give them kind of like what a Facebook does with like tokens, like if you it's almost like you're promoting, you promote them that kind of factors into the algorithm. You know as to how it places and exactly Facebook, like meta, does that to us.
Speaker 1:We are because we are the value to these businesses. Right, so they put they do. Their algorithm is applied to us. We're going to do that back to businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:We're going to give the best thing to the user.
Speaker 2:That's unique. Yeah, I like that. That's pretty interesting. That's a great idea. How'd you come up with that? Just laying in bed one day?
Speaker 1:Lots of thinking. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Yeah yeah, that's pretty interesting. Build it, though, to build it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I got ideas. I got a ton of ideas. I can have ideas all day long, but it's actually like when you go put the work in to actually do it, that's where the rubber meets the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, like, uh, like all of my experiences it's it's been kind of sort of part of a plan. I've been really paying attention at these experiences, at these larger companies and learning exactly what I wanted to learn to be able to pull stuff like this off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're going to make it happen. That's awesome, man. Yeah, well, I think you're going to do it.
Speaker 1:I know you're going to do it. Yeah, we're totally going to do it. You're going to crush it, crush it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What else should we talk about, man?
Speaker 1:We could talk about real estate. Yeah, I do a Uh. Yeah, we've got some property in in Vegas and outside of Vegas. There We've got some land Nice. Um, yeah, we, we got some land right, right beneath the, the old gold mine. Oh, really yeah. So, uh, who knows, maybe one day, who knows, got about 10 acres out there. That's, who knows.
Speaker 2:They'll kick that mine back up.
Speaker 1:Right, something, yeah, then it's like all right, well, I'll lease the land to you, you know, for how did you start getting into that. Just.
Speaker 2:Looking for opportunities.
Speaker 1:Honestly, it's just, you know, like you know, find myself with some extra cash and I try to figure out what's going to either be a value to me in the future or buy something that I can leverage now perhaps into some other better deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a long game. Real estate's always a long game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, um, it's a long game. Real estate's always a long game. Yeah, yeah. Or I just um like, early on in our, in my marriage with my wife, we were just like, let's, you know, let's try and find a place that we can buy, fix up, live in, and then when we move again, we'll just rent it out. Yeah, uh, so we did. We were doing that until we had our third kid, yeah, and at that point it's just like, yeah, no, we'll just let's settle down and St George, yeah.
Speaker 2:It can be exhausting. Man Right the buy, rehab, refinance and rent. Right the BRRRR method. Right Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the what is that Pockets oh?
Speaker 2:bigger pockets, bigger pockets. Yeah, they kind of they sensationalized it, but yeah, that method has been going on a long time, right, and it just makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does. It's an efficient way to get it done.
Speaker 2:Those guys have some weird obsession about mobile homes. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't understand it. They have, like this, mobile home parks.
Speaker 2:And then they pump it. It's like this amazing, like just it prints money, and I'm like this is not what everybody thinks it is. It is. So there are opportunities. In every business there's opportunities, but buying a mobile home park and becoming a slum lord is not what we need more of.
Speaker 1:Let's, let's, let's get that straight yeah, and if like and it seems like they did that based off some sort of federal regulation thing where there's not very many of them, so they're gonna buy them all up- yeah, because cities don't don't don't zone for that anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean they'll let like in washington county that there's no option. You, you can't have a mobile home. I mean, you could barely get an rv. These days Now, we've seen a lot of RV parks pop up in Washington County, especially since 2020, but we've gotten to a high water mark where it's like it, the profitability doesn't even make sense. But you're, it's a transient, specific type of business model. There's no expectation that somebody's going to park there and live there full time and rent out the land underneath them, and anybody who's doing that is burning up money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I've been looking into is this, this kind of newer concept that's like tiny home, the tiny homes that are built with traditional construction. Yeah, you know, I like that idea. Have you heard of box house? Yes, I have so.
Speaker 2:I. We had the CEO, jeremy Johnson. He was the one founder and came up with the idea. We had him on the podcast talking about what he's done, and it's great, great idea. It's a great idea. There's a lot of hurdles, though, that come along with it, because cities zoning the rules around it. What the neighbors think of, that right as soon as you say manufactured home. Right, because the difference between mobile and manufactured is one's got a tongue and comes in on it, you know comes in on wheels, and the other is comes in on a, in pieces, on a truck. You know, yeah, well what. Yeah, well what.
Speaker 1:I'm talking about is is one they're building it. They're they're building it on site and it's not. It's, it's a, but they're prefabbed as a, as a home, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but they're prefabbed in some kind of way. Right, and then they're put, put on a slab, but yeah, the smaller homes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, appraised as a, as a single family home, then which is so.
Speaker 2:You, the you know where that comes from. That comes from lending laws from the 40s. I'm not even kidding you, that's wild. They came up with these lending laws in the 40s and specifically, um, they were completely racist.
Speaker 2:That like, truthfully, these were like completely racist uh, laws, starting back down into the south, is that they made it basically impossible for you if you didn't have these specific rules, this they, they set up these criteria for the standard building you know code and they copied and pasted this code across the entire country, because the individual cities could just develop their own code for building codes. But the lenders wrote the rules, the banks wrote the rules and then the cities just adopted this like blanket zoning across the country for what their building requirements would be, and they set it to this bar to where, if you wanted to do a manufactured home, you basically couldn't do it, or if you did do it, you had to meet all these criteria and then for a bank to lend on that, you had to have this certain credit score and you had to have all these different line items. But we just carried that through all the way till today.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous. I wonder when that's going to change, because they're going to probably end up changing it sometime.
Speaker 2:I mean it would require the banks to be okay with changing the rules on how they can control new construction.
Speaker 1:It's difficult because the banks kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they don't want to make less money, right, like if the cost to build homes goes down, that doesn't mean they're making more money, right, and they're okay with it coming down a little bit. But if you look at over time, if you look over the last 50 to 100 years of building real estate only goes up. I mean there's a hundred years of of building real estate only goes up. I mean there's there's a few times where it's gone down, but it goes back up and it exceeds that. In Washington County we're up 65% in the last five years, which is absurd. That's wild.
Speaker 1:Absurd it's wild and we're maintaining it somehow. I don't know how we're maintaining it. Well, who knows what's going to happen in the next five years, but we're doing it there next five years.
Speaker 2:but yeah, I mean there was some benefits to the lending laws tightening up to you know the qualified buyers right, there was a lot of you know the quality of the lender, the person buying the home, but it's it's not even as stringent as it was back in the sixties and seventies. Back in the sixties and seventies you had to have 20 to 30% down to buy the house. Now, the house value was so much less but also the income was less and all these other things. But, um, I mean you can get into a house from $0 down now, right, and that's only been, that's only been true since the nineties, yeah, which is scary to think about.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, me as a person, if I'm going to buy a house I got, I'm dedicating. In most cases, I'm dedicating 30 years you know, uh, cause you know most people aren't thinking about the value they're thinking about. I want a home.
Speaker 2:You want a home and you want a stable mortgage, right, you want to know that a landlord is not going to raise the cost of your living expense, which is 30% to 40% of your income. You don't want that to get disrupted on an annual basis. It's that stability piece I think most people are wanting Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Stability in an in an unstable world? Yeah, and the banks are making money off of it.
Speaker 2:They're making so much money off of it, yeah, and they can give you zero down loans on it, because then they carry the note on it and then they roll it into a fund and then they sell it on the stock market. Right, subprime loans, like that, subprime loans isn't gone, like it. We think that in 2008 is like, oh, subprime lending doesn't happen anymore. It's like, no, no, it happens it happens if you go zero down on a house, you buy a house. This is a subprime loan, like there's no equity in that house.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's wild to think about, because, yeah, I mean, the old practices don't really die that hard. Do that now, do they? No, they just change the names. Right, it's pretty crazy and maybe make do it a little bit less to get away with it now, but yeah yeah, so this guy up in central.
Speaker 2:I was talking to him, uh, we were listening, we listed a house across the street from him and, uh, it was like the day that they brought the, the manufactured home, on, because it was built off-site, and then he put it on the site which he was. They were zoned to do it up in central. Yeah, but I was looking and he has all these anchors to the concrete. He had to pour a regular concrete slab and then he had to have concrete extend across the entire bottom of the manufactured house but it's designed to where it only needs footing on the outside of the home. So you would like the?
Speaker 1:subfloor. You only need concrete around the home, then yeah, you only need the footings and then the frame is set up.
Speaker 2:Because it's a manufactured house, it's set up to where it can sustain its own level, and so he could do a footing. That was like if he wanted to, or if the lender it was actually the zone the zone and the building code required that he pour a complete concrete pad underneath of this manufactured house when he's only tied into, like you know, 12 different spots, cause that's all he needs because of the framework of the house. Yeah, but he had to end up. It was like he told me it was like 25 grand.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just to put all this concrete that he's not using.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which ultimately you pay. You know, if it's all financed you're going to pay $60,000, $70,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he paid cash for the whole thing. But because of the code and the zone and the city requirement to like, oh no, you need concrete underneath the whole house. It's crazy, but why? It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like, these little tiny costs, they all add up, they all add up Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when you're done with the house that's a few hundred thousand most likely, you know?
Speaker 2:Yep, exactly. Yeah, that blows my mind. It makes me angry a little bit. Yeah, it was. It was upsetting me because I'm like, I mean, this is, it's in a rural area, you know, it's. It's him just trying to make do with what he's got, right. He's. He's an older guy, he's, you know, clearly, a fixed income. He had cash, um, and wanted to move out here, not have to have a loan, right and so. But the cost he was telling me a couple other things like requirements that he was having to do that were unnecessary, but it was like 25 to 30 grand worth of stuff that he was required to do just because of the code in the zoning that made him do that. It had nothing to do with anything else, not because it's makes sense, but it's because, oh well, that's how it's written down on this piece of paper that was designed, you know, 40 years ago. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:It's messed up. It is messed up. That's where I'm like. I hope. I hope AI and technology can help us with some of these crazy things. I don't.
Speaker 1:I. That's the human error. There is power to knowledge, right? So if you get enough people that understand it well enough, and that's what AI, I think, can help out with. I mean, everybody's learning so fast these days and you know you have to pick and choose. What's true. That's the first thing is you're going to figure out what's actual, like what's real, which is getting harder.
Speaker 1:I feel like, yeah, it is. But I mean, with things like law, like, yeah, understanding the law, and with the like regulate regulations and policies that you know, like these lending laws and stuff, uh, it's going to start becoming commonplace to understand and learn that, learn those things challenge people, yeah, and challenge, and that's what that's what that turns into is, once people figure out like how dumb it all is, then there's enough people to kind of overthrow this, this current state of things, and they're forced to change it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it takes a lot. It takes a lot and it's sad. It's sad that it takes a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is frustrating, yeah. But yeah, real estate's an interesting topic. There's so many different angles to it and I think technology is going to help in a lot of ways. But yeah, I'm interested to see how the next 10 to 15 years goes. It's going to be a crazy world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everything medicine, construction, you know, education, these major aspects of our lives. It's going to be pretty beautiful. Yeah, maybe we'll see some good like. Maybe we'll see custom homes become a regular thing again than track homes, you know, because it's kind of a shame to see like something that's going to last 100 years. Just look so ugly, yeah. Or look so copy and paste, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'd be pretty sweet to see like beautiful architecture once again, yeah, and it's a tough thing to do because it's so cost, cost intensive, right, it's like coming up with a design and getting it through an architect and an engineer and all these things. But I think technology is going to help us streamline those things totally. I think architecture I'm I'm pretty, I'm pretty convinced that architecture if you're an architect, ai, if you're not learning ai and how to leverage AI, ai, that's that's a job where I'm like, dude, a computer is probably going to be able to do all of that, yeah, and it's going to sync up with the code, right, the city code and be like this is what you can do and this is what you can't do.
Speaker 1:You're not having to cross-reference, and then city inspectors are like, I think when it comes to architecture, it'll be those 10% of architects that go that route that end up doing all the work and making all the money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so this could be a big disruption too, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if anybody listening is in an industry where you can use AI, like Jadji GP for example, just start there. If you can use that to make yourself more efficient in what you do, or do more in what you do, then you will be way less likely to be the person that gets dropped off yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, because, no matter what, there's always going to be a need for people to like make sure that things are working the way it is that it needs to. Um cause an AI is not going to give itself commands to run your business. It's going to. It's going to, you know, still need a prompt. Yeah, still needs somebody to tell it what to do and, oftentimes, how to, maybe how to do it or give it some guidance. Yeah, I don't think that's ever going to go away.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, definitely got to learn that yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, man.
Speaker 2:Well, you got to learn that. Yeah, okay, man. Well, thanks for coming on the show, man, I wish you the best of luck.
Speaker 1:It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me, stgz on the app store Yep.
Speaker 2:Download it, start getting with it. If you're a business, local business download it. Create a profile, get verified, start putting deals on it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It takes like five minutes to create an account and post your.
Speaker 2:You have to have the latest updated phone. I'm like if I update my phone, my battery is going to suck.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, but oh well, I just need to do phone. Yeah, you got to update your phone.
Speaker 2:You got to update your phone. Download the app S-T space G-Z on the App Store Apple, google, apple.
Speaker 1:Just Apple, apple. Yeah, we're still working on the Android version, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, that takes. There's a lot of hoops for both stores right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's quite the process to get your stuff approved.
Speaker 2:But yeah, most people hopefully have iPhones. So, yeah, I'm part of the gang gang, the Apple gang. There you go. Awesome, I was ridiculed into that. So, james, if you're listening, thanks a lot for ridiculing me into that. My Pixel worked great, I loved my Pixel.
Speaker 1:But now I got an apple.
Speaker 2:Okay, guys, thanks for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the episode. More businesses coming to you small businesses in Southern Utah. We want to feature them as much as we can. Thanks for listening. We'll see you out there, guys. Thanks for listening in. 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. 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.