Real Estate Underground

Unlocking Real Estate Wealth Building Innovation - Damian Lupo's EQRP and Frametech

• Ed Mathews • Season 4 • Episode 121

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Unlock the secrets to optimizing your retirement investments with our latest episode featuring Damian Lupo, founder of the EQRP company. Are you ready to take control of your financial future? Damian breaks down how Enhanced Qualified Retirement Plans (EQRP) outshine traditional Self-Directed IRAs (SDIRAs), especially when it comes to real estate investments. Learn how EQRP can offer you unparalleled control, flexibility, and significant tax benefits, including exemptions from the dreaded debt-related UBIT tax, allowing you to maximize your investment potential.

Ever wondered how innovative technology can reshape the construction landscape? Damian and I spotlight FrameTech, a trailblazing company that is transforming traditional framing methods with its patented technology. Discover how FrameTech is addressing the housing shortage by reducing construction time and waste, while ensuring precision and quality. This segment will inspire you to think creatively about investment possibilities within your retirement funds, from bullion and art companies to groundbreaking advancements in the construction sector.

Lastly, we delve into the powerful intersection of self-esteem, success, and emotional resilience. Drawing from personal experiences and insights from thought leaders like Tom Bilyeu, we explore the importance of self-awareness, therapy, and maintaining an abundant mindset. We also highlight the profound connection between leadership and reading, discussing books like George Leonard's "Mastery" and Jim Buford's "Halftime." Join us for a rich conversation that encourages meaningful connections, significant living, and actionable steps toward achieving your goals. Listen in and transform the way you approach both your investments and your personal growth.

New outro for Season 4 (2024)

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Ed Mathews:

Greetings and salutations. Real Estate Undergrounders. It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very excited about today's conversation. This is something that dovetails with something that me and my partner, Mike Meyer, are doing here at Clark Street. It's something I think you, as the audience, will certainly benefit from in terms of helping you grow your retirement. Damian Lupo, thank you so much for your time today. I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak with you and it's good to see you.

Damian Lupo:

It's great to see you too. I'm really excited about this. When you were talking about just the show title the Real Estate Underground I was thinking about my podcast called Financial Underdogs, the FU show, and so there's always, whenever under is under in anything, it gets me excited, so I'm glad to be on the show.

Ed Mathews:

Awesome Welcome. So for those folks, I think if you've been in this space, if you've been on BiggerPockets or listened to their podcast or read any of their books or really look to invest into real estate using your retirement funds, your name has most likely come up at some point in those travels. But for those folks that don't know who you are, why don't you tell us all about you and your business?

Damian Lupo:

I'm the creator founder of EQRP company and basically it's a disruptor in the self-directed retirement space.

Damian Lupo:

It was imagined a decade ago to create a better way of taking 401k and IRA money and investing it in things like real estate and alternative assets outside of wall street, so it gives everybody the chance to do the things that they're already doing, plus people that say I want to invest in an apartment or physical gold or bitcoin or manufacturing plant or jimmy johns all those things that we're familiar with that we really haven't ever thought about until we get introduced into the self-directed space.

Damian Lupo:

Eqrp was the brain child of that idea and it was. It really stemmed from watching my parents retire and retire broke because they played by a system inside of the government, working in the military, in the school system, bought a bunch of mutual funds and then at the end of their working years, they said, wow, there's not a whole heck of a lot here. Most of their money went to fees into a system that's corrupt, that feeds on people, and so EQRP is meant to give people more freedom and less feeding on them by the matrix, and so EQRP is meant to give people more freedom and less feeding on them by the matrix.

Ed Mathews:

I had grandparents who lived nearly the identical experience and it taught me a valuable lesson as well.

Damian Lupo:

So let's start with this. There is EQRP, there's SDIRA. What's the difference? So EQRP is a type of a 401k and it's a whole system. So it's an EQRP system. So IRAs are governed under section 408, a little bit technical here in the code, the tax code and 401ks are under 401k, as they say, and there's different rules. You can contribute a lot less to an IRA. It's about 10 times less than an EQRP or a traditional 401k, and there's certain consequences of investing in certain things. It depends. I'm like, hey, I have a question. He's like it depends. I'm like, great, here we go With 401ks and IRAs.

Damian Lupo:

Self-directed IRAs are the default because the industry is so big. It's basically built up on a lot of fees and a lot of marketing and so when people leave a job they had but there are limits and the big differences are especially in real estate. You can't totally control your self-directed IRA. You are not allowed to custody and hold that money. With an EQRP, you can actually be the one that writes the checks. You're in control, it's very private, it's protected. An IRA has different limits. You have to have a custodian driving the thing and one of the biggest things if you're like I, like real estate. I want to do real estate with my retirement money.

Damian Lupo:

The big problem with IRAs is and here's the thing real estate tends to have debt. That's one of the reasons we like real estate, because we can leverage it. When you have real estate and you buy a piece of it or all of it with an IRA, you trigger this debt tax called UBIT that can be up to 37% of your gains. That's a huge problem. Most IRAs do not talk about it. They say we're not a tax advisor. They won't even tell you, and an EQRP is exempt from that.

Damian Lupo:

If somebody said I want to invest $100,000 in an apartment or a rental house or whatever, and they did it with an IRA, and then that 100,000 literally turned into200,000 over a period of time, they could literally be paying up to $37,000 in taxes in addition to whatever else they might pay. With an EQRP, the number would be zero. So it's crazy to think about why you would do it, and the reason people don't do IRAs is because they don't know better, and that's probably one of the biggest ones. In addition to you can put a heck of a lot more money into it, and I think that's what hits home. People go wow, I didn't realize there was a tax I was going to get hammered with and I could actually avoid it completely with an EQRP.

Ed Mathews:

And so sorry, I didn't mean to step on you earlier, but and that's all triggered by the debt component of the deal- say there is some type of debt.

Damian Lupo:

If you don't have debt, you don't trigger that. And then there's other things that are. There's a whole aisle of things and reasons that you'd want to use an EQRP over an IRA. One of the big ones is simply control. Personally, I don't like having somebody tell me what I can and can't do with my money, and I think I'm an adult Most people are, too. Nobody's going to care about your money more than you. I just don't like creating friction and putting other people in between you and your money.

Damian Lupo:

Now, let's be fair with some people. They probably should have somebody in between them and their money because they're going to go buy a Ferrari or do something dumb, and that actually does happen with people in their retirement money. Once they get ahold of it, they do things like that. The great thing, though, is that you have the ability to absolutely do deals and do things that you want to do. If you want to go buy physical gold or you want to go buy Bitcoin, you can do that. You can take custody of it. You cannot do any of that stuff with an IRA. You're completely at the will and the whim of the custodian or the bureaucrat inside of a custodian that says what you can and can't do, some 25-year-old kid that says, oh yeah, you can't do that, and then you're just stuck. So we get rid of all that friction and that's. People love that.

Ed Mathews:

So how did this come to be? It's something that I learned about a few years ago, actually listening to you on a different podcast, but I'm curious how this all came into existence.

Damian Lupo:

Years ago and I still have this company run by a team we were. It was a precious metals company selling gold and silver, and I noticed that there were some people that were voicing interest in buying metals, but all they had was retirement money, and so some of them started buying some silver primarily from the company, from my gold advisor using their retirement account, and I said that's very interesting. I bet you, if I told more people about this, they would probably buy more metals. Then I realized there was nobody doing a really good job in this space and the IRAs were not a great tool because you couldn't take custody of it. You had to put it in a depository or something.

Damian Lupo:

I saw a gap in the market. I saw subpar institutions and companies that weren't really providing the ongoing support and guidance and mentoring and they weren't building communities, and I said there's got to be something here that we could do. That's way better, 10 times better, not incrementally better. That we could do that's way better, 10 times better, not incrementally better. And so I said, all right, I'm going to build it. It's not there. The market is missing it.

Damian Lupo:

People want it At least I presume they want it and ultimately, thousands of people. Later they definitely want it. So now they have the ability to get their EQRP and they can go buy metals. They've got it's a fully integrated system where they can go buy the assets. They've got a team around them that's ongoing, supporting them, making sure they're in compliance, doing all the stuff every year that you have to do with the government, and we've built a community so people get to interact with each other. There is no other company that's out there that I'm aware of that does that, and even if they did, we have an amazing culture of connection we just had here in Arizona. We just had a hundred of our investors in one of our projects that came out and that came primarily from the community that was built from EQRP. People got together and they're like this is incredible that not only is this a place I can invest, but I get to connect with like-minded people, and so I think that means a lot today, when we're so disconnected and broken apart as humans.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, and one of the things I talk with a lot of. Having spent 20 some odd years in tech world, in Silicon Valley, I tend to know a lot of people in that space, and some of them the folks that have been blessed to have gone through an IPO or two, are fine right. This vehicle seems to be a pretty good opportunity to do. Can you talk about the limits in terms of what you can put away and how that works?

Damian Lupo:

Yeah. So there's a couple of things. One, it's new money that you're contributing. So if you're, if you have self-employed income or you have a business and you're an employee of your business, you can put over $60,000 a year away, depending on your income and how much money you're making. And then same thing with spouses and kids. We've seen many families that are putting away a quarter million dollars a year with a family of four, and then that could be pre-tax or it could be Roth, which is very cool. When you do Roth, you're putting money in that is never going to be taxed as it grows or when you pull it out. So that's like the ultimate tax shelter. And then there's no limit on how many rollovers, how much, how many.

Damian Lupo:

If you have four or five or 10 or 15 different 401ks from different employers you four or five or 10 or 15 different 401ks from different employers you can take all that stuff and roll it over. Whether that's a traditional 401k or a Roth 401k, all that stuff can be rolled over. Same with 457s and 403bs. There's all these different retirement plans. If you're a cop or a teacher or a firefighter, you can take all this money, consolidate it. It's crazy.

Damian Lupo:

And how many times people say, oh yeah, I forgot, I had that thing. And they're a 50 or a hundred thousand dollars sitting orphaned, that the system loves it. When I say the system, I'm talking about Wall Street. They love it because they get their little fees and they just they're sitting there and they just feed on people and unfortunately, people look at this money like it's almost fake because it's something I can't touch until I'm 60. The reality is we have a lot of people taking their money out of their 401ks through the EQRP and using it to basically tap into that wealth years and sometimes decades earlier than age 60. And there's all these different things that we can do and people aren't told about it because the system wants to keep the money trapped so that it's indefinitely being feed.

Damian Lupo:

And we have a different approach to that. So you can put unlimited rollovers in. You can put potentially $60,000 plus a year in addition from your income, and then there's some people that'll do it's kind of a step up. If you're a high income earner, say you're a doctor, or you have a business and you're making $500,000, a million a year, in those cases there's defined benefit plans, which is like a pension plan you can create for yourself that we can set up, so that you could put potentially two $300,000 a year in your and your EQRP 401k money. There's ways to put almost everything you make into these things. Now I'm not suggesting you should, I'm just saying once you have a holistic team that can tell you all these options, then, wow, it's like freeing, because you have all these cool choices and you're not being told oh, it's just this one thing, because we just make money on this one thing, so we're not going to tell you about anything else. That's what most of the system does.

Ed Mathews:

That's what benefits the person on the other end of that phone or conversation, and so I'm curious about the asset classes. You've mentioned metals, you've mentioned crypto. I know nothing about those things and I'm a real estate guy but what are the asset classes that you can buy into with this type of product?

Damian Lupo:

Virtually anything that you can invest in with your regular dollars. If you think about whether it's your friend's startup lawn care business, or it's a house, an apartment, a manufacturing plant, land it could be cacao farms in Panama it's really limitless. There's a few things that you can't do, and the IRS is interesting, because the way that they run this system is they tell you what you can't do. They don't really tell you what you can do, and that's on purpose. They want to disqualify certain things and then leave it open to you to come up with whatever else you want to do. So there's certain types of gold that you can buy Pretty much bullion, like not collectible coins but real bullion. That's just okay, it's just a commodity. And then there's certain like you can't do collectibles. You can't buy collectible rugs or some. You know.

Damian Lupo:

It's funny how many people have asked me can I flip a car in my EQRP? And I say you know it's a collectible, but you could buy a car dealership and that car dealership could literally could be in the collectible car dealership business and you can invest in those things. It's virtually anything you can imagine. Art is one of those ones. But again, you can invest in an art company, just not art itself. Yeah, you just have to. You have to have people that think deeply and understand the code and understand that the legalese. The answer is usually yes. Here's how.

Ed Mathews:

Okay, and that is. That's music to my ears. I always, I always listen to the people that are thinking in terms of okay, you can't do it that way, but here's how I would do it and that usually you can get to an answer if you get enough smart people in the same room. So you have a company, frametech, and I am fascinated by it and I'm just curious so how does that fit into this part of the world?

Damian Lupo:

FrameTech was this idea that came up. It was actually in the original inventor's mind for about 30 years and my partner and I came across this about three years ago and we ignored it for about six, seven months, which is pretty funny. It's pretty funny story that, like the best deal we've ever seen, best deal we've ever done, we were too busy to look at it very closely and then when we did look at it, we said something is wrong here. This like literally, is going to change the construction industry and everything looks so good and the returns looks really great and there's something wrong. And so we and then that's the job of any investor, especially a professional investor we all look at things skeptically. Everything is going to lose us money until proven otherwise. Everybody's going to screw us until they prove otherwise. And it's not necessarily a super jaded approach. It's a practical, pragmatic approach that you just yeah, I love everybody, but I don't say come into my house, here's the keys, I'm going to leave for a month when I just meet somebody, and so that's the same approach. And we did this. We flew out to Arizona and we met with this team and over lunch we said we like you guys, we awesome, thank you. And they walked off and they said you guys are full of crap in their heads, like that was there was there's no way that a lunch meeting. And that's exactly what happened. So over the next couple of years it was actually more, because we expanded the deal, so it turned into about 65 million.

Damian Lupo:

And what frame tech is? It's a disruptor in the construction space because we have a huge problem. We have a lack of housing and apartments and four to 7 million units are missing. So why is that? Because builders can't build enough. They can't get enough framers. There's just a problem. And so we need all the innovation that we can. And what is? You don't have innovation. You have financialization. So basically, you have companies buying other companies instead of creating and building new plants and new operations. So what we're doing is we're we're vertically integrating the framing for housing and apartments.

Damian Lupo:

And what that looks like is somebody a builder comes to us with their plans for a house and they say here's the house or here's the apartment. I'll give you an example. Somebody says here's a 2000 foot house we want to build. They give us the plans, we convert those into our CAD system and then we build the floors, the walls, the roof, trusses, all the bones inside. This is custom. This is not like prefab manufactured housing. We build all the bones of the house and then we stack them on our truck and then our team takes them out to a site and we put it all together. This whole process takes about two weeks. Normally that's a two to three month process. So we've cut 75% off of this time.

Damian Lupo:

And not only that, we have almost no waste. Typical 2000 square foot house has three 40 yard dumpsters full of wood. Our process cuts that down to one-third of a dumpster, so it's 90 percent less wood because of our patented technology, putting wood together through a finger joining system, and so we have one continuous board that we cut to spec. We don't have two foot chunks that are just thrown away and then so there's almost no waste. And when you build all these pieces, these components, these walls and trusses in a manufacturing plant with tolerances that have lasers and cameras and everything monitoring, your tolerances are so tight. You don't have these boards that are warped, you don't have all this stuff. You have tolerances that are one 32nd of an inch, so everything lines up like everything is 16 inches on center, everything of an inch, so everything lines up like everything is 16 inches on center. Everything is.

Damian Lupo:

It's good. The quality is literally the best of any. It's better, I would, and I will say that very seriously. It's better quality than anything that's constructed on site in the world, because it's in a controlled environment. There's no rain, there's no snow, there's no sun. It's and it's lasers and robots that are doing this thing. So you have a better quality product, it's 80% faster and you're not wasting a bunch of forests, throwing them away.

Damian Lupo:

So the whole industry is paying attention, the whole country, all the builders, and they're saying dang. So not only is this going to help the communities and the impact on these communities, we put these plants in rural communities so that you create jobs in places that the jobs are not, and so people are like this is amazing, I don't have to live in a city, I don't want to live in a city, so they can live in a place, raise their families. Everybody wins. The stakeholders, all win and we're solving this huge problem. So the team gets like kids in the candy store. The team's just all excited every day and we're in there and a hundred of our investors came in a couple of weeks ago. We're in Arizona and we get to show them around and they're so happy to be able to be part of something that's making such a big difference and the vision of what we're doing. So it's deeply meaningful to be able to be a part of that.

Damian Lupo:

And that came from the EQRP community because we were building a community and then we were looking at the community and asking what else can we do for our community? What do they need, what do they want? And what we realized because they kept saying it we want great deals that we believe in, that are going to do great, that are asymmetric, that are going to grow, that we can trust the people running. And we said, all right. So then our reticular activators like on and we're looking around and this shows up and we go, we're ready. And that's where FrameTech came together with this community and then boom magic happened.

Ed Mathews:

It's fascinating. So obviously there's a huge win in terms of time, and everything that follows that framing exercise gets accelerated as well. You get weather tight in a matter of probably three, maybe four weeks, and once that's done, you're off to the races. So you're literally knocking a six-month project down to three and a half four months.

Damian Lupo:

Yeah, and for builders. They look at that and so our modeling is based on the same pricing as the entire market. So then why would a builder want anything other than frame tech? The answer is they would. The answer is we have more builders saying we're ready to order and have you do all of our stuff. We're going to be. We're already the moment where we have the capacity because the lights go on. In fact, the machine will be. Machines will be running at the end of the summer. When that happens, we're at capacity. As many people as we can bring into hire and as many shifts as we can run, we'll be building because there's no reason that you wouldn't want to do this.

Damian Lupo:

It's when you can shave off that kind of time and have that certainty. Think about the amount of lawsuits for bad quality that you avoid because it's consistent. Imagine how easy it is to deal with inspectors when inspectors show up and, oh, this is frame tech, check, signed off, it's done. Because they know every single time the quality is consistently the same. It's not. Let's see what kind of mistakes and tweaks we have to find and things we have to fix. So the builders are like losing their minds, excited. I don't know who's more excited than they are. We are, but it's everybody's excited except the archaic legacy system that wants to go out there with nail guns on site and frame things because they're like oh shoot, we're not even remotely competitive to this new model. So I think this model changes things in the United States and ultimately spills out worldwide, because it just it's not an incremental change, it's an exponential, disruptive change for the better.

Ed Mathews:

And the thing is, you mentioned the lack of housing, the fact that, depending on who you talk to, it's half a million or 5 million to 7 million. I've seen numbers as high as 8.5 million and the problem is that in 2008, when the Great Recession came, it killed so many general contracting businesses that never came back. They went off and opened subways and did other things, and so that dearth of capacity has never returned back to the market. And here in the state of Connecticut our problem is far smaller, but last I checked it was about 30,000 housing units, affordable housing units, that's just affordable housing units short of where we need to be in 2030. And there's no way to close that gap.

Damian Lupo:

There aren't enough hands and feet to do it now that's a consistent problem, and so you, outside of the politics of the immigration thing, we have millions more people here than we had a few years ago. Those, all those people need housing and so that's just a further pressure on the supply. We have more demand and we don't have supply growing, and and so you have. So people are like the housing prices are crazy. We have to fix the problem of supply. If you fix supply, then you drive down pricing. It equalizes Demand continues to go up and supply isn't going up. So ultimately we have to. People will come in and they'll say what about competitors in this space? And I was like bring them on. America needs more solutions. Like you could bring out a hundred of these plants right now, today, and the problem is still not solved. That's how big the problem is.

Damian Lupo:

So it made me laugh, and I was so when I look at this, one of the questions I had was well, what if somebody duplicates it? And I was like do you have any idea how hard it is to build a manufacturing plant? It takes years to get the equipment. It took 50 years of a guy running these things, these plants, and then dreaming this stuff up and having the vision to put it all together. I was like, if somebody wants to attempt it, there was a company that attempted it in California spent close to $2 billion a bunch of Google guys, so they had a bunch of money. They're like, oh, they had Google money and they didn't have industry intelligence. They blew the company up, $2 billion lost, and so I just laugh. I'm like God bless him. If somebody wants to go, attempt to do this and if it works, even better.

Damian Lupo:

The reality is we're not. There's zero concern, because we don't live in a scarce world, we live in an abundant world. This is not Malthusian economics. There's a zero sum game. There's an unlimited opportunity, we're renewable resources and we're solving a big problem and we're coming together, so it's very synergistic, very cool to be in that space, not thinking how do we and we obviously have protected patents through the process. The reality, though, is there's we don't live in a space of fear, and I think when you're in that space, it keeps you very small.

Ed Mathews:

Agreed. Yeah, it is a big world out there. Even in my small part of the world, people are talking. I was just on an interview earlier this morning and they were saying because I always tell people I'm a cheap cup of coffee, right, I'm a cheap date, I will buy you a cup of coffee and meet with you for half an hour, 90 minutes, whatever. You can ask any question you want about real estate and if I know the answer I'll tell you.

Damian Lupo:

And if I don't, I probably know somebody that does. I'm happy to do it, the person I'm sitting with. They're never going to catch me by the time they get where I am. I'm years. You've already lost the years until that point. We've innovated and disrupted and grown and imagined, so it's really interesting. A lot of business has to do with philosophy and how you perceive the world and whether you think it's limited or it's not. It's funny how big of a deal that is in people's success, their happiness, their joy, overall significance in life.

Ed Mathews:

It's so true that you say that, and the fact is that there are plenty of people out there. When you see someone succeed most of the time me I'm happy for them. Good on you and fantastic, and let me learn from you. How'd you do it? Whereas occasionally you run into people that are a little bit green with envy, and it's funny that the ones that tend to want to learn from you tend to be more successful than the ones that are not feeling great about who they are when they see you succeed.

Damian Lupo:

Yeah, it's funny, a lot of this comes back to self-esteem and just it's really. Most of our problems are just baked up ideas. They're really not even true, but we've made them true, we've decided that they're true. And what's the outcome? What do you do with all this? Probably therapy. The reality is a lot of stuff in life. I think about that.

Damian Lupo:

In 2008, I lost a $25 million chunk, so it took me from $20 million to negative five and I lost everything. My life was a country song, so I probably should have sold it to Nashville. The house, the car, the girl, the dog it all went away. And so it was interesting going through that process because on the other side of it, a couple of years later, when I acknowledged, okay, there was a problem, I couldn't just ignore it anymore, I went and spent a couple years in therapy with a therapist coach and really we spent two years asking one question what is true? And that's? I think that is the ultimate question. That's what my book Reinvented Life was based on that question what is true? When you dig into that, you can solve your problem.

Damian Lupo:

I happen to agree with the title of the Netflix Tony Robbins show I Am Not your Guru. You know who your guru is you. You have it inside and so the job of anybody else, a great coach, mentor, is somebody that asks great questions, because they pull it out of you and they allow you to explore what you know Deep down. We know these answers Technical stuff yeah, we can learn that from people, but the thing that we should do not the thing that we can't how to do it, but the thing that we should do we know what that is. If we actually got to the truth, then we got past all the fears and the anxiety and the depression and everything else. So the guruness is really interesting because it's really inside.

Ed Mathews:

You know, I was at a conference a month and a half ago and I saw this gentleman his name's Tom Bilyeu. He's got a fantastic podcast as well Actually has several podcasts with his partner and one of the things he said two things and he did the classic. Hey, if you're going to remember anything, remember these two things. And because they're profound, the first one he said was that the human experience, your ability to see, your ability to hear, specifically, sight, he said 0.00359% of the electromagnetic spectrum, in other words, light. Right, and how you perceive it is how you perceive it, but there is so much going on 99 plus percent of what is going on in this world that you have no ability to see or experience. So that was the first thing. Second thing he said was no ability to see your experience. So that was the first thing. Second thing he said was you need to understand that you are in the middle of a biological experience and what he meant by that.

Ed Mathews:

And it had a unexpectedly profound impact on the way I see things, because it lined up with something that I too, having been in therapy. It lined directly up with what I had been talking with my business coach and therapist about for years. And that is that. The good, the bad, everything that occurs to you, that feeling of anxiety, that feeling of excitedness, that feeling of empathy, sadness, depression, whatever it is. All it is chemicals firing off in your brain based on what you are perceiving, what you're hearing, what you're seeing. None of it's real right, because the fact is, you couldn't possibly know all the factors that have gone into the current circumstance that you're in.

Ed Mathews:

And the moment I realized and I connected those dots, sitting here watching this guy I'd never seen before, never even heard of him before that uh, that when something really good happens or when something really bad happens, allow the chemical reaction to occur. Experience it. It's important to experience those things, but then understand that you can't possibly understand what's all of everything that's happening or what's about to happen and catastrophizing it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Intellectually, logically, right. You let that pass, take it to breath. Actually, logically, right. You let that pass, take it to breath.

Ed Mathews:

Work the problem, work the opportunity, and somehow it tends to work out. It's going to be okay. It's the same philosophy around my grandfather always used to talk about is it a big deal now? Is it a big deal in 10 minutes? Is it a big deal in a year? Is it a big deal in five years? And the same kind of concept, right? How big a problem is this? And it's just interesting that when you finally break it down and realize that our caveman brains work a very specific way and they all work the same way we're not unique in that respect it makes work in the problems and becoming unstoppable which was Tom's premise becomes a lot more manageable, for sure.

Damian Lupo:

Yeah, I love that. I was thinking about this having a conversation this morning about problems that if somebody asks you right now and you're bitching about something, that's a problem in your mind. The reality is you don't have a problem right now. You have a projection of something and there's this anxiety about the future. The reality is you don't have a problem. If you're sitting here, you're not having a heart attack. You might be worried about a heart attack, you might be worried about your money, but the reality is what's the impact on that thing right now? Are you starving? Most people that think that they have a problem aren't? They don't. Actually, they don't have a problem right now. They have a fear of something happening.

Damian Lupo:

And it's interesting when you stay in that one of the greatest tools ever. Everybody should be thinking about this and remembering this and then when they start getting panicky. When you're doing something, you can't think about something else. When you're doing the thing, if you're focusing on the thing, if you're actually in the in motion and human beings are meant to be in motion when I'm teaching martial arts, when I'm out on the dojo and I'm moving and I'm present, this comes to present. We are very not present in society anymore. We're just constantly chasing things and looking to things and being depressed about the past. The other phones are just throwing us off and when you're in motion, it's like when you look at special forces teams they're not thinking, they're not in their head, they're not worried about getting shot, they're literally doing what they're executing. When you get in the habit of executing, which is being in motion, you truly can't be in the space of fear at the same time as the motion. That doesn't work. We don't, we can't. That's like people saying so I can chew gum and walk. I'm like that's not. You're not consciously thinking about chewing gum. You're, and you're probably not even consciously thinking about walking, so you're thinking about something else. These two things are happening unconscious, like breathing, and so I'd always I always encourage people to take motion, take action, do get motion happening, because it doesn't matter what you do and you go. What if I make a mistake? Cool, then you're gonna learn from something and then you're gonna take more action. It doesn't make any difference.

Damian Lupo:

There's this concern that we have, and it's baked into us for millions of years, that if we make a mistake, something in the bushes is going to eat us, and I grew up in Alaska and I worked in Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic circle, and when I went outside there were literally polar bears out there when I was taking the trash out, if I didn't pay attention, if I wasn't present, they would eat me. So I go are you working in the Arctic Circle? Do you have polar bears? And they say no. And I said then what are you worried about being eaten? For I'm not worried about being eaten. I'm like, yes, you are. You're literally frozen in fear. What's the worst thing that's going to happen Now? Being eaten is a problem, but all the other stuff people are worried about is not a problem. It's really not. It's just, oh, it's an opportunity to grow and expand 70 companies.

Damian Lupo:

Later I've started and run more than 70 companies. I learned from all of these things. Frame tech didn't happen overnight. It was a napkin two years ago and today it's this incredible half billion dollar valued company in two years. That's an overnight success story. That took 30 years and 70 companies of stepping stones and I went out there and took action. And that's the work. Is this four letter word? People are so freaked out that I don't want to work, man, I want the hack. I want the four hour work week and I'm like no, that's not how it works. You have to work. That's not the work. And I love Tim Ferriss, love the book. It's just really interesting. People are getting in their own way because they're chasing everybody's highlight reels instead of going out there and creating their own life reel, and I think that's a huge shift for most people. Okay, what is the work I need to do today? Forget about whether it's the perfect thing or it's the end game. It's literally part of your process. Today, there needs to be motion.

Ed Mathews:

That's the thing focus on and then do something, not just think about it all day Right on. I could go on for days talking about this stuff, so I appreciate it. So let's get to the final four, and then we'll start to land this plane. First one I ask is I want you to finish this sentence. My purpose is freedom for more people. I love that. Yeah, On your website it talks about how your plan is to affect the lives of three million people. Is that?

Damian Lupo:

it's a. It's a million people's financial shackles broken, so we're breaking the financial bondage of a million people. That is that that's the first step wow, fantastic.

Ed Mathews:

I'm always interested in when I meet. I've been blessed with amazing mentors and coaches and I'm curious about the folks that have affected your life and giving you advice. What is the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you?

Damian Lupo:

I. I heard a. A couple of people said I don't know where it originated, but it was a mentor that said you can't fix. You can't fix a lie. So you got to tell the truth to yourself and when you're in the truth you can do something with it, but if you're in a lie, you're dead, and so it's. The first thing is we have to stop lying to ourselves, and that's probably biblical, like ultimately, a lot of stuff just goes back and it's it. There was a source, the origin source, and it wasn't from the current guru of the month or the current influencer on Facebook. It was literally something that was pulled and it went through 50 different people and different generations. But that is a core thing you cannot fix a lie.

Ed Mathews:

Right, right. The other thing that I've always noticed in my travels is that leaders, almost universally, are readers, right, and reading these days can be a lot of different things physical books, audio books, youtube videos, whatever. I'm curious how you consume information and also I'm really interested in who you're paying attention to from an author or a career perspective.

Damian Lupo:

So I tend to study books. I'll tend to read a book and I read it through my ears. I can do it a lot faster and it's just. It's how I process. We can be auditory, visual kinesthetic. We learn different ways.

Damian Lupo:

In martial arts I was very kinesthetic. I didn't like somebody talking to me. I said, let me touch, let me feel. So I'm a kinesthetic, but there's not really a way like you can try to eat a book. You're not really going to consume the information if you eat the book or if you just rub yourself on it or lay with it like probably not going to work Auditorily. That's how I get books and so I go over them over and over again, that there's more value in going deep and going wide. I think wide is useful. I just think that most people, when you hear somebody saying I've read 50 books this year, and I'm like, yeah, okay, cool, what have you applied If I read 10 books this year multiple times and then I'm studying them and I'm thinking about them and I'm writing about them, I'm talking about them, I'm so integrating the stuff there. That's a big difference. And so if you're like I'm a slow reader, great, read one book. Read one book a month, one book a quarter, and then go find somebody to talk with them about it and then integrate it. That's what I spend time and it's going back to anything from Proverbs to.

Damian Lupo:

There's a guy named George Leonard that wrote a book called Mastery and I love that book because it's all about the process of mastery.

Damian Lupo:

We tend to focus on success and this moment in time, crossing the finish line, and then we get obsessed Our life will be happy when this happens. I can't wait for this and I think that's an incredible mistake, that the ultimate joy and happiness is falling in love with the process and the process of mastery in everything, in terms of your relationship with your spouse, with your kids, with your neighbors, in terms of your business, your investing. Mastery it's not about doing everything. It's about doing something, doing it incredibly well and getting better and better, not to get to a 10th degree black belt, but continuing to refine and refine. It's called an asymptote in math, where it gets closer and closer to that zero or to the one never quite gets there. That's the whole point of life Getting there. What does that mean? You're dead. What's the point? So that's why I love that book and why I read it over and over again George Leonard's mastery is incredible.

Ed Mathews:

Excellent, I am putting that on my reading list immediately. So last thing is I'm always curious about success and what it means to folks, so finish this sentence. Success means what?

Damian Lupo:

Success means no regret. Success is the worst possible focus. Significance is what and this came from a book called Halftime by Jim Buford that I just read and really, when you stopped for a minute, our twenties and thirties tend to be about creating, building, making money, and when you and the sooner that you can get to a place where you're asking yourself about the significance of your life, and not just the success, not just the dollars, not just the things, it goes past that the significance. So I think success means no regrets because you're focusing on significance. So there's a little bit more to that. It's not just no regret, it's because you're moving towards significance.

Damian Lupo:

That's why we're here. We're meant to build things, we're meant to have an impact on other people and the planet. We are not meant to be hedonistic consumers which is, I think, that's what George Bush said after 9-11, go out there and shop Really. So that's what our purpose is to go shop. And, quite frankly, our entire goofy, fiat money system is we need to shop and go into debt or the whole thing collapses. So that's the opposite of truth. That is a lie that perpetuates a system that is fraudulent. And I think that when we really understand significance and connecting. That's where we find our deepest happiness.

Ed Mathews:

Right on, all right, damien. So when you are not saving the world from manual framing and financial errors, what do you like to do? How do you have fun?

Damian Lupo:

I like going and connecting with God and nature Really, truly. Where I live is that nature is out there and I'm tripping over havelanus, which is a giant rat it looks like a pig, but I'm tripping over those or coyotes, or deer elk, like just being out there, surrounded by truth. I don't think there's anything that's more honest than nature, whether it's an animal or a tree, and humans are very good at manipulating things. So I like to go to the deepest place of truth. And there's nothing about a tree that lies, there's nothing about an animal in the wild that lies. They're free. They don't think. They don't have a future thinking process. Like humans, they have a present. It's like the ultimate present thing. A tree is not thinking about 10 years from now. A tree is being and same thing with every animal.

Damian Lupo:

I think there's something for us to appreciate and emulate about that. So the more that we can spend time in whatever nature that could be in the ocean, with dolphins, it could be, on a hiking path I think, the more that we get away from concrete and the artificial stuff that we've invented the phones I think the phones are not just a good and a bad, but I think they're a lot more bad than the way that they are now. They're a trap. They keep us sucked in like in the matrix. So my favorite thing is to go out there and then to share that with people having the experience of truth and God with other people. I think that's incredible, versus going and doing something that's more artificial. The more we can get away from artificial, I think, the more we find ourselves and the more that we can experience what we're actually supposed to be experiencing, so that we get to the end of our life without regret.

Ed Mathews:

Actually supposed to be experiencing, so that we get to the end of our life without regret. That's. It's an amazing way to live your life. I, frankly, if people, more people did that restaurants right. You see the kids with the phones buried, mom and dad phones buried. They don't talk anymore and it's to be able to recognize that and to be able to A experience nature, either by yourself or alone, or with someone else. But also one of the themes that I hear in all the comments you're making is presence right, being where you are at the moment, not worrying about what's going to happen in 10 minutes, not worrying about anything that's going on. Just living your life in that moment is it's. It's an. It's an interesting and very unique way to live your life. I wish more people did it.

Damian Lupo:

Yeah, me too, and I'm hopeful that people. I think there's there is a bit of an issue waking up. I think that a lot of people are, and I'm hopeful that more and more people will wake up and they'll disconnect from all of the electronic stuff that's seems to be taking over our lives and find their deeper truth and happiness. It's not going to be in a phone, it's not going to be on a screen, it's. It's going to be with people, it's going to be in in nature.

Ed Mathews:

I really believe that yeah, the relationships you have, and exactly so, damien. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I this is one of my favorite interviews of all time and I'm grateful if people want to learn more about you, learn more about one of your, any of your companies, or just get in touch how. What's the best way to do that?

Damian Lupo:

so if you're curious, you're like I'm curious about how do I, how would I use my retirement stuff go to eqrpcom and learn more. And if you're like I want to understand what the heck you're doing, disrupting the industry, construction industry, frame tech is a really interesting thing to use, both as a place to learn and, potentially, a place. Maybe you invest in it, maybe you just you say this is how I want my investments to look and so use it as a tool. Frame tech, frame teccom, go check it out. And when you're looking at other investment opportunities, I think it's a really useful thing to compare everything to and say, okay, does this thing have what frame tech has? Does it have the team? Does it have skin in the game like all these things? Does it have an asymmetric which means they're really high upside? Are all those things there and go explore those.

Ed Mathews:

And if you're, like hey man, I just want to talk to you.

Damian Lupo:

You can hear me more on Financial Underdogs. You can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm breaking every rule around interviews, giving you too many things to do and whatever with you and, if you're like, I just want to connect with you and send me an actual, real message. I love those. What I hate is the canned crapper sends me the same thing they sent to a hundred other people. Then they go oh look, I see you're doing frame tech. Tell me more and I'm like you're wasting my time. I'm very interested in people. I really like connecting with people that are just open, that are curious and are real. That's why I'm doing this. I'm more money. There comes a point where money is just it's a thing, it's a measuring tool, but it doesn't change my life.

Ed Mathews:

What changes my?

Damian Lupo:

life are people.

Ed Mathews:

Exactly Enough is a real thing. So, damian Lupo, thank you so much. Like I said, I've really enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to learning more about frame tech myself.

Damian Lupo:

Sounds good. Thanks, ed, I appreciate you.

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Ed Mathews - Clark St Capital

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