Digital Social Hour - Leaving the Mormon Church, Homeschooling Children & Starting a $30M Fund | Mark McCormack DSH #286

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Mark McCormack comes on the podcast to talk about how he scaled his businesses, the purpose of his fund and his thoughts on homeschooling children. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said you don't believe in fake it till you make it. I hate fake it till you make it. I'm in this men's group, you know, we were talking about earlier. There's like lies that people tell themselves. One of those is fake it till you make it. And really to shorten my answer to that is you need to find mentors when you're young. That's the time to learn. That's the time to grow.

It's not the time to, you know, make a million bucks and buy a library. You need to look like a man. Right. Wherever you guys are watching this show, i would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe it helps a lot with the algorithm it helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team truly means a lot thank you guys for supporting and here's the episode all right guys fellow podcast host here today mark mccormack all the way from utah not too far how's it going good man really man. Really good. We share some common

goals, I think, and some common investments. Yes, we do. For now. I know you got a $30 million fund, right? Yep. I'd love to hear about how you got into that space and what the goal with the fund is. Yeah, absolutely. So that fund is Tandem Ventures out of Utah. So it was started by Alex Bean and McKay Dunn. And Alex is one of the guys that uh started uh divvy and so sold to bills.com what does divvy do i've heard of that they're an accounting software okay it's one of the biggest unicorns out of utah if not the biggest one so wow they sold for like 2.6 billion damn after four years that's a good partner to have yeah so they're the managing partners i'm one of the venture partners so i really just raise money for them and you know go over like deal flow

and stuff like that nice how long you've been doing that i've been in the investment space for probably about 13 years okay so but i've been with tandem since uh september and i first started just investing with them my own money and then yeah and then you know it's kind of a natural progression into it so is it true the vc space it's like what 10 of the investments pay off or something low like that uh yeah i mean yeah it really ranges so you're kind of i call it placing bets you know you bring in as many companies as you can underwriting the best that you can you know mostly medium risk high reward and so we're really trying to basically three to five x every deal you know in about three to five years nice and so but when you seed so that you know with

the different rounds when you seed in there's a lot of deals you know you can get 50 x 100 x and so yeah it kind of makes up some of the some of the ones that go down wow any big exits so far no so that that fund has only been around for about 18 months oh got it so we're we're just kind of loading right now we did that first round of 30 mil um we're doing the next 20 million right now to close that fund go 50 million on that and we do let's see i think we've got about seven spvs wow what is that so that's when you just do a specific raise for one specific company. Got it. Instead of a pot of funds. Got it. I just had on, I forget his name, but he did the fundraising for Topgolf. He was on yesterday. Oh, okay, cool. And he said, yeah, he said it

was the best investment he ever made. Oh, cool. He actually didn't have any personal money. He raised it all for them. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So he just basically does what you do. Yeah. The cool thing with our fund. So we, um, so number one, all the partners, we represent 10% of all the money going in. So every deal that I raise, I have my own personal money in, and then we don't pay any carried interest forward or any of the upside for people unless we double their money. Interesting. Yeah. We're cause all of us are pretty wealthy guys that are partners, you know, like Jimmer for that's one of the partners. Awesome. Yeah. We've got some, that's my heavy hitters in there. So it's really fun. Wow. I want to talk about how you got to jimmer for that's one of the partners also yeah we've got some got some heavy hitters in there so it's really fun wow i want to talk about how you got to uh to that stage of your life where you had money like that so prior to this what were

you doing so my my dad's a scottish immigrant so came over and when i was three years old he started an athletic equipment company called adp lemco and so out of utah and so we make basketball backstop genovator curtains we do bleachers all sorts of stuff inside of new construction education market so subcontractor eventually got it and so i ended up buying that company from him um worked there my whole life i started working i was eight years old he didn't give you it you bought it i bought it yeah yeah we kind of talked about that back and forth and i i to me it was just a much better transition to um to sell it and or to buy it from him and the reason why is because one day i'll eventually sell it got it and so i don't want to have you know an annuity basically attached to it forever oh

interesting that makes sense yeah i never thought a business like that could be generating that much money we do well yeah we're about 35 states yeah damn so and i also saw you did the flooring for the nba and the ncaa is that a different company that's a totally separate company called professional floor systems and so i bought into that company i think about four or five years ago started with a real estate transaction i i the guy that owned well the guy that was in that industry came to me and wanted a loan uh and partnership into buying a commercial building that they were in and then we eventually started flipping wood floors and i love the business so i got into it so now we represent a lot of nba teams we're getting into ncaa really tight nice it's actually the reason i'm in vegas right now i bought another company called artsman sports it's got a you'll see a pattern here but okay um and we do uh

memorabilia for the nba we have a license with the nba and so we're actually branching into the nfl into uh soccer worldwide and they're at a trade show right now so that's where i'm going after this amps you gotta you wear a lot of hats i do man i get i get my fingers a lot of stuff a lot of these companies are all, I have really good journalists. Shout out to the Science of Scaling podcast hosted by Mark Roberge. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Mark, founding CRO at HubSpot CRO and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, interviews some of the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets, strategies, and tactics to scaling company growth. He recently had on the head of sales from OpenAI, and that was a very interesting episode on the future of AI.

Listen to The Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts today. Really good general managers, really, really good employees. So I'm able to kind of go around and do, I don't know the word for it, big level stuff. You know, people kind of go around and you know do i don't know the word for it is big level stuff you know people kind of do like you know long-term deals that take nine months to a year to kind of come to fruition and are you the one making these important hires or you've got a team for that too uh i don't do a lot of the hiring anymore um but like acquisitions absolutely do all of them i do all my own underwriting and it's all my own money too wow yeah you rarely see that i feel like with people in your shoes where's your own money yeah it's interesting you own money too wow yeah you rarely see that i feel like with people in your shoes

where's your own money yeah it's interesting you know i'm 42 currently and so a lot of my career was just kind of putting my head down and building the business and growing state to state and growing dealer networks and all this kind of stuff and then the last few years i've kind of realized i'm a little bit of a unicorn in the space i kind of figured most business owners would go buy verticals and stuff like that yeah yeah sounds like you've really got that balance of just passionate and making money, which is rare. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fun. I've kind of, uh, I just got to the point where I just want to spread my wings, but like in a very systematic way that I like. Right. So you don't deal with any stresses, anxieties. You've kind of mitigated most of it. Yeah. I don't have a lot of anxiety.

I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident, you know, i've got a good amount of money personally you know and so it's easy for me to like look at something to go and buy it and when you use your own money you don't there's not as much stress behind that right you have investors that are you know knocking on your door wondering what's going on you know none of my companies are publicly traded so it's you know all the accounting's done in-house and all that kind of stuff i see a lot of my friends regret going the public route actually yeah they're going through spax are they going usually spax yeah yeah and it usually doesn't work out good luck yeah i think that's all a finance thing right it just depends on how you're going to finance your business and bring

money in yeah but then you got to perform right i mean that's the big thing with spack if you don't perform the market will be trashed, basically. Yeah, I sold one of my companies, and part of the deal was a stock that was part of a SPAC, and I thought I was going to be loaded. Stock never happened, and yeah, learning lesson, right? Not to sell just for stock. See, and I would, my companies, two of them I'm trying to prep, actually, for an exit to a publicly traded company.

So when I do, I actually like getting the stock because then it's a non-taxable event. So you're not getting beat down with taxes. But I'm looking more like mid-level companies. You know, they're like doing 2 billion a year. Right. This was a brand new company and it wasn't established. There's risks there. I think you just, if you can make it happen,

you can make it happen. Yeah. You had an interesting take on your Instagram. You said you don't believe in fake it till you make it. I hate fake it till you make it. Yeah, I really do. I'm kind of doing this series. I'm in this men's group, you know, we were talking about earlier.

And there's a lot of guys in there. I'm a little bit, I'm one of the leaders in there. And so when I'm kind of mentoring some of the guys, there's like lies that people tell themselves. One of those is fake it till you make it. And really to shorten my answer to that is you need to find mentors when you're young. If you're in your 20s, that's the time to learn that's the time to grow it's not the time to you know make a million bucks and buy a lamborghini and look like a moron right

it's really establishing yourself in a career path so if you go to work for somebody and you're just honest with them and be like hey i'm going to be the most resourceful person that you ever hire it's almost like tom brady right walked up to robert crowd the very first day to be this is the best decision you've ever made it's because he just worked hard to became who he was right and that's really the principle that i think people need to get it's not about just fast cash and looking like you're wealthy on instagram it's really about establishing your processes and procedures and growing your your net worth yeah more people need to hear that because so many people want that fast cash and it it rarely works out you know what i mean the universe will punish

you if you make it fast because usually when you're making it fast it's a bit unethical and you'll lose it pretty quick and you also don't appreciate it right so then you start doing dumb investments you know i see guys fifty thousand dollars here a hundred thousand dollars here they don't know how to underwrite it they don't have anyone advising them right and you know because they're making some good money and then and they're just a deck of cards house of cards falls down no that happened to me honestly i made a lot of in crypto very fast and i was like let me diversify let me invest in restaurants let me invest in ai let me invest in all this lost all of it yeah because when you invest in stuff you don't know about it's hard yeah i actually think diversification

is another lie actually it's you know you take a mutual fund right it's got 1500 stocks into it right those things do not do well over the long. It's much better for you to go pick three winners and just ride them all the way. Wow. So you're not a fan of investing in the S and P 500 every year? No. Well, there's two lines of thought there, right? If you are an intelligent investor, absolutely not. But if you're running your business and you're growing in an asset class and you don't have time to really look into stocks, then yeah, you can buy the S&p right which i was you know index funds is where i'd go for that yeah do you invest in those uh what are they called it's like treasuries or whatever like five percent a year too low for you i don't touch bonds i don't touch treasuries i um yeah i'm just i've been i started investing on

when i was 21 wow so i have a massive runway and so it's like no i'd rather take more risk now and and it's worked out you know i've been able to buy apple and google it's like no i'd rather take more risks now and and it's worked out you know i've been able to buy apple and google and and not that i'm some genius anyone looking back in time can sound like a genius i bought apple you know 10 years ago i just knew it was a good company and so 10 years ago you knew oh i've been oh yeah i've been buying an iphone came out uh no well that was 2008 so um probably about 2010 2012 was when i really started going heavy into Apple. Got it. Wow. So to have that foresight, do you think it's just being around the right people,

reading certain websites? What do you think caused that? So I was a Warren Buffett guy. I studied Warren Buffett the way, so when I was in college, college was really easy for me. And so I just studied a lot of Warren Buffett and value investing. And so I just looked at companies that I think are great. And then that's where I put my money. I do a little bit of underwriting. I want to make sure that they can grow and that their top line revenue can grow and stuff like that. But really the end of the day, I just go, is this a great company? I'll invest in it. And I look, I'm a 10 year, 15 year horizon guy. So I don't, I put it in and almost set it and forget it. Wow. I wish I did that with Shopify.

I bought Shopify in college and if I still still had it now, it's worth millions. I think people think, oh, let me flip this within a week. I had some misses. Tesla was a major miss for me. I have maybe $10,000 in Tesla, just because it got really, really expensive, and the P-E ratio got wild. I think it was like $1,200.

But yeah, probably eight, nine years ago, when Tesla kind of started getting hot, that would have been a perfect time to jump in but i'm also a dollar cost average guy once i start buying a stock i normally buy it up to like five years right and then once it gets to a certain level i kind of leave it you dabble with any crypto i do yeah i tell people not to just because you got to understand the blockchain to understand cryptocurrency right right and so um but yeah i i have like 14 miners and oh wow bitcoin or ethereum i was doing ethereum to begin with you know but then they lost their minds and went to proof of stake or whatever it is and then uh most most of my almost 90 of my crypto is all in bitcoin nice um you had an interesting take regarding goals so you

posted never tell anyone your real goals until you accomplish them why do you feel that way because it's a dopamine hit so dopamine is the uh enemy to success and that is and if anyone doesn't know what dopamine is dopamine is a is a is a rush that your body is a chemical your body releases on the anticipation of a reward and so marketing is all dopamine right you're going to get this thing or something cool and you know luxury brands really play on your dopamine and what happens is once you have that dopamine hit it actually like slows you down and you get like a an elation to it instead of just like grinding grinding grinding grinding and when i

say grinding what i actually mean is being disciplined you know the way you lose weight the way that you build businesses it's disciplined right because you do the same thing every single day no matter what right it's a big thing i mean i'm sure you know who alex ramos yeah so i've been following alex for a while i he's one of my there's very few social media influencers i follow and he to me he's like the king right now agreed because he just he gets it and he and he he did it the right way he just builds and builds and builds and builds and there's not a lot of emotion to it there's just i know what works and even him himself he talks about the three things he does really really well and you just hire everything else out yeah it's very similar to myself speaking

of discipline and weight loss you lost 65 pounds you sent me a photo of you before i couldn't even recognize yeah i'm actually up to 70 now wow yeah i've got another 15 pounds to lose it was kind of funny i i was i uh in our men's group last year i we did a ufc kind of training where you know we were like kind of wrestling each other and fighting and i realized that day i'm like dude i am not as fit as i think i could be and so i'm six foot seven tall like you i was 344 pounds at the time and damn and the next day i just said never again and i just started a diet and then i've had little things along the way that have actually kind of steroid shot me not actually doing steroids but gave me a you know some more encouragement like jimmy and i were actually talking one time

jimmy rex who's the the leader of we are the day and it's his group yeah good friend of mine and i basically said dude i'm the most disciplined dude you've ever met and he looked at me and i knew it was coming right and he said well you know look at your look at your body essentially and at that point i'd actually been working out for about six or seven weeks and I lost about two pounds and it was mentally hard, right? To like, just go to the gym every day, eat. I ate 250 grams of protein, backfill my calories. And, and it was just really, really hard.

And so, but that was a moment where I was like, you know, he's right. Like I need to really, really never stop doing this. And then, um, and then Andy Frazella actually had this thing where he says when a fit person walks into a room everyone notices and they respect them automatically and i was watching that you know just on instagram i was like dude this dude's right like every time a super fit person walks in the room i just there's just an instant amount of respect facts yeah because it takes years to get to that physique so you respect it does and there's no cheating no you can't yeah you can't fake it one of my best friends is a plastic surgeon right so i can have plastic surgery done anytime i want and it's like you you actually just can't get there unless you do it i'm not a

fan of uh cosmetic procedures actually yeah yeah like even on girls like i just don't like it yeah how do you feel about them are you interested in coming on the digital social hour podcast as a guest we'll click the application link below in the description of this video we are always looking for cool stories cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life click the application link below and here's the episode guys you know i've got a bunch of different opinions on that really um there's a confidence thing with speaking specifically women um i think it's best for people to have a certain amount of confidence as long as it's real confidence if the only way for that person to get there is through plastic surgery i'm okay i'm okay with it it's probably a good thing really not

even that i'm okay with it do i like the plastic he looks no do i think facial stuff looks good no i'm not a big fan of big fake lips either i mean that's me personally right now does that woman look beautiful in some points yeah and if it makes her really feel better and she's increased her quality of life then i say that's a good thing for you right i can respect that i just mean from purely the health aspect like you don't know what like the plastic like you see the boob ones like the thing breaks and then they almost die yeah yeah so it's just no my wife has implants and uh she's had them redone and one of them had it actually ruptured wow and so but it's a maintenance thing once you do it man you have to always do it that's true but in regards to her she's kind of a good example she started working out really really hard when we first got married i've almost been

married 20 years and she lost them all they went down to an a cup and it was making her feel wait from working out yeah i didn't know that was a thing yeah because they're just fat basically right so the more lean you get the flatter they get and interesting and so she wanted she did fitness competitions and so she she wanted them we talked about it we you know bought them and she's she's had it made her and it makes her feel more feminine yeah that makes sense to me yeah um speaking of marriage 20 years rare these days talk to me about that journey and how you were able to make it work yeah so so to be fair 20 years hits in june so it seems to be smooth sailing i think um you know i i really

i got lucky in some aspects i married my best friend um we've done everything together we've got three kids together she's still my best friend um i love and respect her more than any person on this planet um it's interesting right being married for 20 years like you learn different stages of love you know right and that's the reason why i say i got lucky because i didn't love my wife the way i love her now wow because i've gone through so many things with her right i've watched her i've watched her be disciplined i've watched her birth three children raise three kids we homeschool so she homeschools our kids i just almost every day i think this will

sound cliche or romantic i just almost fall in love with her again every day because i just respect the person that she is and i get a front row to her all the time that's that's beautiful and the thing with relationships i'm in a six-year one you know you change a lot in those years yeah and you weren't the same guy when you met her so i think just evolving together and just constantly communicating helps a lot as well and she really helped me in through my twenties, right? I got married at 22. She was 20. We were wildly young. Yeah, that's super young. But you know, like all the business, all the times I was gone flying all over the country, meeting people, fixing things, I was breaking, building companies. Like she was at home holding it down, right? Just, you know,

she, I was, I always felt love when i come home my home to me i would call it my castle is like my peace so when i go home i get filled with all this peace and and it's gentle there and there's a lot of love and i go back out into the world it's kind of you know fight or grind or whatever you want to call it it brings a lot of like you know energy yeah same and that's so important right it took me years to get to that point and um i think a lot of guys you know that are single they're really missing that in their life. 100%, yeah. But you will make much more money if you're a married man.

Agreed. And it's a common thing these days to be single. And the numbers keep increasing. So it's a little scary to see the family unit being broken up. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. We'll see. I don't think it can keep going that way for long. Speaking of family, though, three kids.

Yep. What went into that decision in regards to homeschooling yeah so when hit um you know we had the kids had to come home i think for three or four months or something like that yeah and actually my little my little boy nicest kid you've ever met couldn't read he was in second grade now teachers kind of passed over him because he's very kind right and he's very fun and people love him right so he would just memorize a couple words and really couldn't read so as we were doing homeschool and my wife is very academic she grows up in a very academic family right and uh she just was like hey nixon can't read you know i don't think these kids are doing that well she's like what do you think if i

homeschooled him for a year and my honest first reaction to that was like oh are you sure because that's like a lot of time a lot of energy and you know i mean she's a she's a homemaker right so she can do whatever she wants all day she doesn't have a job and i just said yeah honey if you if you want to do it you know i'll support you 100 in that you know and it's actually expensive to do it because we don't get any kickbacks from the state we still pay our property tax right for all that for the general fund and i always just said to her i'm like hey if it ever gets too much we'll just pop in school no harm no shame and um and our kids have just really really really excelled and wow we also look at it as a blessing too because when you have kids right you know that they're eventually going to leave little kids love you they're all over you right and they just they're

happy to see dad and mom and all this kind of stuff and so instead of shipping them off for eight hours now she actually gets to be with them all day she only does for four, but she gets to actually spend all this time with them. And I just, as I'm looking down the road, I just like, this is going to pay so much dividends and the relationship and the, and I tell my kids all the time too, I'm like, you need to be grateful that you're not going to public school, that you have your mom who loves you, that's sitting here teaching you and you're getting a great education at the same time. Right. Yeah. Public school was an interesting journey for me. I feel like the one thing I didn't like was everyone learns at the same rate. So like I listened to podcasts and audio books at two X, 2.5 X, and I'm just a fast learner. And I feel like just being, I almost felt trapped,

you know what I mean? In certain classrooms. Cause I was just so jittery. I'm like, I already know this. Like, and I feel like it holds you back in a way. A hundred percent. My, my, my junior and senior year in high school, I did nothing. I was like a TA for my coach because I played football. I took stupid classes. I sloughed all the time, and I still graduate with a 3.9 GPA, 3.8 GPA. I mean, it's just as long as you hand your homework in, there's no big deal. I look at public school, and public school is not good,

and I don't care if that offends people. It's just not. It's one of the programs in our country that really needs to be revamped. Agreed. Part of it's that, right? Like, why don't we take our best learners and accelerate them? Yeah. And turn them into the future engineers and doctors and scientists and, you know, the

things that actually make our society much better. And it used to be that, right? My dad skipped two grades, but when I was in school, that wasn't an option anymore. And I feel like, I mean, years were wasted, let's be honest. I mean, there's nothing of substance that we learned there that we still use to this day other than like networking maybe. Yeah. A hundred percent. And college and university is almost as bad. The first two years are like your last two years of high school because people don't get that college really is a business. You know, and I sit on boards in colleges. I've, I've, I've done a lot

of work. I donate money to colleges and kids' education. And I'm not saying education's bad. I'm just saying that even university now, I mean, the ROI is horrible, right? You get a liberal arts degree and even half the business degrees, your ROI is just not there. Right. And yeah, I like that you said they're a business because they are making billions of dollars off those tuitions. I mean, 50K a year, some of these colleges, it's crazy. And the ROI, I mean mean the professor's salary is probably 100 200k so they're making a ton of profit oh absolutely and then they get you know the state all gives them grants you know and some of the big schools like harvard i mean i can't remember the number it's like a 40 billion dollar you know whatever that their pot of money is yeah it's it's crazy your story is interesting though because you were on the football

team you were really good in school and you're good in business i've never seen like like that mix of athleticism, you know, school smarts and street smarts. Well, my football career ended in high school. But yeah. And the reason why is I actually I used to be an LDS member of the Mormon Church, Church of Jesus Christ, Larday Saints. They've changed or they've gone to the full name now. And when I was on my mission in Scotland, I actually broke my back. Damn.

And so when I came home, I kind of ended that. And so I really poured into school after that. And in my career, I was actually going to be an attorney. Wow. And so I got into law school. I was going to go to Texas tech. And then my dad came to me and said, Hey, I want you to help me run the family business. And I wasn't loving, well, I didn't do very well in the LSAT. And so, and you know, being a white kid, you know, you just don't get ranked that well in these schools. And so I didn't want to go do the partnership grind of 80 hours hours a week and so i decided to stay at my parents company for a little while then i ended up buying it nice everything happens for a reason right yeah how'd you break your back dunking a basketball attempting to dunk over somebody just a nasty fall trying to pull a

vince carter yeah what really happened was is years and years of football training had weakened my discs and so when i went and i rimmed out on this dunk and it um it just ruptured a disc in my back yeah i'm in a couple leagues now i i don't play as aggressive as i want to just for that reason because the more you drive and dunk and just the risk for injury is too high and when you're in the air that high i mean well especially not when you're playing outside of organized stuff right you're right it's just dudes are gonna take streetball just stupid stuff yeah they don't care about you um going back to the Mormon stuff, you left the church, right? I did, yeah. Yeah, I left the church like 14, 15 years ago.

Really what that was is the way that I grew up was wonderful. I grew up in a very safe place, very highly concentrated LDS members. I got married in the temple to my wife, which is a thing in the Mormon culture. And then once my wife got pregnant my our values just didn't quite align with the church anymore and i really look at the church as a stepping stone right um i had no i hold no animosity towards the church a lot of people leave the church and they're mad they feel like they've been bamboozled or something and you know i mean look at marketing you know you've you've been tricked into buying all sorts of stuff your whole life

that's kind of how i view it so for me when i left the church i just basically just flipped the light switch. But I mean, I still have a contract with the LDS church. I still do business with them. Oh, nice. The community that I live in is full of LDS members. We're all friends. We're all, you know.

So it wasn't really like frowned upon when you left? Yes and no. Mostly the members are a little confused, right? Because I was a good member. I did what they asked me to do and that kind of stuff. And my parents still have a little bit of an issue with it. I don't know to what extent my siblings are fine with it. All my friends are fine with it now, but in my opinion, the church is having a little bit of a mass exodus. People that are 40 and under, you know, I don't, don't really report their numbers, but they, uh, there's not a lot of,

the membership's definitely going down. You aren't the first guest that has left that church on the show i'm sure yeah oh yeah it's and that's with religion in general i'm saying with uh millennials gen x they don't seem to be as passionate as the older generations yeah yeah and you know to me religion historically and it was kind of a way to control people and i don't even know if that was a good or a bad thing you know there's a lot of uneducated people you know back in the 1200s 1300s 1400s and so i just kind of feel like religion was used as a tool to control people or control society at some level and get people good but yeah i mean i think nowadays there's so many people can you access information on their phone it's just it's just too easy to like really understand how history and religion is all

tied into each other now you know we get one life? You got to live it the way that you want. Yeah. Yeah. It's so easy with the access to information. There's this one YouTube channel. I think it's called like Growing Up Scientology. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Have you seen that one? I haven't seen that, but I've watched Growing Clear a few times. Yeah. I mean, he just really exposes the Scientology religion. It's fascinating. And when I was in LA, I actually got pulled by one of the Scientology guys. I had no idea it was scientology oh really yeah he walked me inside i signed up and i was like what is this oh you

signed up yeah he got me i had no idea it was crazy but yeah this guy just stands outside his building and just exposes them yeah it's interesting but i don't know i kind of just studied different religions and spiritualities and just formed my own opinion yeah so where you where do you sit on it i I would say I'm just spiritual. You know what I mean? I believe there's a soul. I believe there's a greater purpose. Yeah.

I think where I'm at right now is I went atheist for a while actually when I left the church. Mostly because I just felt like I needed to reset everything. Because I grew up that way, right? So you don't really know what's right or left when you leave. But now I really just hope that there's a God. I just hope that I can be with my friends and family into the eternities. Right. It just feels a little empty that if we just die, then it's over. That's how I used to believe. I do believe there is an afterlife. Yeah. Yeah. I really hope there is. Yeah. It'd be kind of bad if there wasn't my opinion. Yeah. Or it won't matter. Right. Cause you're dead. Yeah. Do you

ever think about legacy? Like your kids, like providing for them when you're gone 100 yeah yeah i uh what i do for my legacy with my kids is i've been paying them as employees right for a long time they do certain things for me instagram models right whatever whatever and so i've been building a stock portfolio for them for years and years and years my kids are 14 12 and 8 wow and so when they turn 16 what they'll actually start coming to work with me every day and doing school from home from work and i will teach them how to grow businesses and real estate and all these kind of things through my employees and basically doing the mentor thing that i tell everybody to do i'm gonna i'm gonna force that with my kids because i can right and then hopefully i will i will eventually turn over their net worth to them when they're responsible

enough to do it. Interesting. Because to me, net worth is more important than how much cash you earn in a year, right? It's growing assets. It's looking at the different asset classes and seeing what you're good at and then playing in those arenas and really growing that over the years.

Right. I love that because money cycles every three generations, I believe. So the fact that you're doing this with your kids, hopefully their kids won't lose the money. You know what I mean? Correct, yeah. Yeah, because that's definitely concerning when I, cause when rich people have kids, you know, the daddy's money kids, it doesn't always end up well.

Oh no. You know, the trust fund kids is a real thing. Yeah. I've really looked at that. Cause I'm not the guy that's going to donate all of his money to a charity at the end. My kids will get it all. Okay. And I just, I feel that my responsibility is to educate them in my way along that way. Right. Assume I'm going to live

a long time, let's just say 80, right? So these kids should be 50, 50, 60 when they actually finally get that money. Right. But by then,

they should have so much of their own money, it won't matter. It'll just go, it'll just be more assets in their portfolio. Yeah. And I'll be

wherever I'm at. I love that. Mark, where can people find you man and what you're up to the place to find me is uh on instagram um i'm president mccormack is uh my handle on there it's also the name of my podcast the president mccormack podcast um feel free to reach out to me and all my companies are listed on there so if you need basketball hoops or floors or whatever thanks i'm gonna get a hoop from you man yeah sounds good let's do it thanks for coming on

man thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.