0:00 [Music] and welcome back to the camera boys we got an amazing episode of the hot seat here featuring mr eric him over here here we are in the hot seat where we got the hottest seat in the game with the harder questions and all that ████ but we like to start off the the questions on the hot seat very cold and then throughout this video we're going to turn up the heat but uh to start we always have bart with the coldest of the iciest questions which flavor of starburst do you hate the most it's got to be the lemon the yellow one a lot of people are like me too i don't like that one you don't like the taste of plates i care about our skin color so we don't like the lemon that's why it tastes like lemon i could throw that one away yeah it's like lemon pledge you know as a kid you know your your mom would be walking like clean downhouse 11 pledge yeah and when they spray it you get that flavor
0:50 in your mouth and then when you open up the starburst everyone loves the pink right like the pink and red pink is the good yeah when somebody gives you a yellow like ████ not the or the orange one the orange one's like why you know what the yellow one is banana in the blue colored starburst got it got it okay but in this classic it's lemon no more banana candies i'm not mad at the orange one okay i'll turn up a little bit you're a finance guy right you're still fine ass guy what what uh uh what age did you earn your first six figures and how did you celebrate that's a good question yeah that's a really good question um it was when i started my i've been an entrepreneur since i was 16. i'm like 43 now i didn't get my first six figures until i started my tax business 13 years ago and how do i celebrate i really didn't
1:41 celebrate i just kept grinding it like i was i had this this toxic hustle culture like work type of thing and i was just so lost in the sauce that like when i got it and i saw my bank i'm like just another number just kept going oh ████ wow that's cool and now like i'm finally at a point where i'm like i should start celebrating my wins and stuff like that but back in the day dude i celebrate ████ how do you celebrate your wins now um either go out to grab something to eat with my son yeah or um you know i'm not like a big like buy myself something cool although i i do buy myself something cool every now and then yeah um but yeah i usually go out to eat with my son or something like that i'm like dude we made it we did this what's the last coolest thing you buy yourself oh it's gotta be my porsche what kind of porsche is it it's a uh so it's a 987 boxster it's like a canyon carver i love the thing it's slammed to the ground got coilovers big wheels all that stuff so much freaking turns like a champ yeah it's so much fun your uh son's 18 right
2:32 yeah have you guys ever thrown down before oh dude last so last year that's a good question that's a great question because if ty man a minute tiger's 18 and he ████ talks back his ass so we i we've never we've never actually gotten to like any type of like argument or fight like he's super chill like i'm a super chill person but like in terms of like like throwing down instead we would get down so like when he turned 18 he wanted to go to his first music festival so he's like dad i want to do edc and i was like all right let's do edc we end up raging hard did you do the first part of the edc the e part the e part of it i was with you i was like what's the full experience what's the one i was like what is it there's a pre-party i was like there's another one well the
3:22 tailgate did you guys have any prescriptions no actually we were like totally sober and it was a good ass time yeah i can't wait to drop with the taika would you drop e with taika ████ yeah that's tight the minute he turns age so probably like 14 15. wow wait did that actually that's what i started i want to pass it down and i feel like the experience would be so ████ sick because you know like you and like parent and kid you always have like there's this there's a gap right because you're like trying to parent you know like as much as tight as you want to be there's still that and to be able to break down some barriers you just connect just don't tell social workers you're going to let your minor drop you with you that's why allegedly wouldn't that be a great experience conceptual situation i used to smoke weed with my friend's mom that was cool and every she worked at mcdonald's so every time i went to mcdonald's she would hook us up with
4:12 yeah extra cheeseburgers and she's talked like this because she smoked a lot of cigarettes she didn't smuggle from here with a gravel voice you're gonna be a man today joe a mcmahon your boys are some good boys i put on extra chicken nuggets for you i got another question for you uh has any of your friend [Music] uh tax professionals been asked to help launder and wash money and what was the craziest like proposal your friend got [Laughter] well my friend yeah yeah yeah yeah this guy gets it this guy is good
5:02 weird heir dude allergy seasonality i mean the the weirdest i don't even think that they're weird because i've seen so many different things yeah um but usually it usually revolves down to using like international shell companies and stuff like that so they are technically legitimate if they're done properly but there's a lot of structure that's happening to it so hypothetically how do you do it properly [Laughter] i think here's a better question so like so so there are a lot of loopholes right and um things that are unobtainable for maybe someone at the like low million range but then you have all these billionaires and everyone who can do offshore and all this stuff um at what point do you think it's actually worth it to to spend money to doing that because basically the way they're looking at it is like do i take the tax hit or do i spend money and create like
5:52 an irish corporation or whatever it is um and then so i'm always looking at the threshold like okay when is it makes sense for someone like i don't know google or like jeff bezos or whatever to ████ go out and do this but what about guys that own a donut shop and then we have like three shops like do they need a cayman's account like no probably not but then yeah so i guess what type of revenue or is it a revenue what's the threshold yeah what is the point income threshold it comes down to a couple things like what type of industry or business that they're in right so like the the caymans and what they call the irish thing is double double dutch sandwich where basically they have some other company in ireland or whatever holding intellectual property and there's like a leasing agreement that happens between each other and that moves that money offshore but to operate that thing properly you need a big four accounting firm you're paying millions
6:42 of dollars to make that run so you're probably in the 50 millions a year yeah just to operate 50 to 100 million and 50 to 100 million per year in terms of so we're not we're not there yet yeah so there i mean there are guys that are in that 10 that 25 million they're using offshore but it's for very specific purposes what about like the 10 to 20 thousand so bank of america is fine then okay cool as a financial person who does taxes and again everybody is ████ relating to this kind of thing especially april right what is like either the biggest like uh thing that a loophole in the system or or just something that most normal people would be able to like utilize you know what i mean in order to either reduce reliability or like just something that would benefit them financially especially for the people that are subscribed at home to this
7:32 channel yeah yeah so i mean you gotta click like and subscribe for the top secret stuff immediate twenty percent off click on that button down there so like the biggest thing that i find is is when folks come to me and they ask me for so we do a lot of tax strategy for clients and they're like hey how do i reduce my tax liability and they're just like a w-2 employee there's not a lot of things that we could do there if they're like a nine-to-fiver because they take your tax before you get your paycheck right they take the taxpayer to take your paycheck but on top of that they simplify the tax code five years ago where you can't deduct a whole lot of cool things so usually my first question to ask folks is number one do you operate a business or have you been considering starting a business whether you maybe let's say for engineering architect let's say instead you still had that job but now you did some consulting now if you did some consulting and brought some revenue or income in from there there's a lot of expenses they could operate against it that might not
8:23 be traditionally tax deductible initially but now are tax-deductible right so the biggest thing really is like if you're in a position where you're like i'm paying way too much in tax what can i do my first thing is hey do you have a business or have you considered starting a business step two let's say we all have personal llc's right which we all we all do we all do nice speak for yourself i'm a soul prop super exposed i have a personal llc you have a personal llc sex have her llc yep no that one was taken sexpert sex giver i don't know if i have a personal llc should i get one yeah you should bert quan all right quan businesses as somebody so so let's say uh you're like have you thought about operating or do you own or operate your
9:13 own somebody's like yes then after that what are like your main go-to things that you're like boom boom boom you're talking to the room right now everyone here is a freelancer or yeah so when it comes like tax strategy right there's there's basically three different things you can do you have time shifting strategies time shifting time shifting you have income shifting strategies which mean you're shifting income from one bracket to another and then you have general deductions so time shifting i've only heard of general deductions my cpa must suck my cpa must suck what are the other two what's time shifted so time shifting is basically shifting the tax liability to a point in the future so normal tools that we would use are things like setting up an ira or 401k okay okay private pension plan even like very specifically designed life insurance policies can shift that tax liability to a different point in the future so it's time shifting today's video is
10:04 brought to you by audible now i've been doing these long road trips as you know yeah i do know vegas to la and sometimes northern california if i feel like it but one thing that i've been really getting into is audiobooks and what i realized too is i'm more of a audio learner than a visual learner and so i'm really into this whole like self-help stuff right because every single time i have free time i feel like aside from just being entertained i want to like develop myself and be a bit of a nerd so what i've been doing is going through the list on audible and trying to hack my brain right how do i deal with my feelings how do i deal with this and that and audible has a lot of dope stuff in different categories from podcasts to audiobooks there's just so
10:54 much content it's mind-blowing but what's awesome if you're a new member you get the first 30-day free a audio entertainment all-in-one app it's like joe's saying they got audio books podcasts comedy music performances they got all kinds of stuff so it's a really cool app it's all-encompassing and like what he was saying is if you're new member you get 30 days for free to try out so i highly recommend it so if you want to check it out go to audible.com off the record or text off the record to 500 500 it's so easy go to audible.com off the record or text off the record to 500 500. income shifting is shifting your income bracket from where you are in a high bracket to a lower bracket and you can either do it by setting up specially designed c corporations if you have that type of revenue um even paying kids what's that type of
11:44 revenue you need to have to squirm again it's like it's kind of like real that's a great question it's really specific based on a person's situation so a good example is i had a client he had a business that was pushing about 15 million dollars a year in revenue his net profit is a million and he was trying to find ways to reduce today his net was a million it was very labor intensive what yeah after 15 that's crazy yeah there's a lot of labor involved it's a very labor-intensive business that he operated and so for him he was like hey i have these expenses that i can't deduct because it's in this s corp structure so it's like well if we created a c corp that houses these things i'm getting super in the weeds now but if we create a specially designed c-corp that houses these things you could legitimately deduct it and you're pulling off of your income and you're reducing your tax by that so that's one another one that might be more common is like for me i have an 18 year old kid
12:35 i bought him a car paid for his car insurance that's not normally not deductible so instead what i did is i hadn't worked for me he can make 12 grand a year from income from me on a tax-free basis so i'm going from a high tax bracket where i'm at to zero where he's at and i'm basically deducting things that are always going to buy for them that's common a lot of people employ their family members and make them officers of companies and then when you go on a trip or whatever it's a business expense or whatever but i think yeah the key though to not be illegal is you have to bring some sort of income you can't just have a business just to write off ████ cash only so that that's a really good point right i love this hobby hobby how do we do this like a hobby to the irs is like it's non-profit mode of generating if it's a hobby the arsenal doesn't allow you to deduct losses so it's got to be for profit motives
13:25 right and then so the last thing the third one is deducting shifting strategy so just being really creative with wakey deduct like so for example like i run a lot of my business out of my home and typically for a home office expense you can only deduct that room or one room for that purpose but as an s-corporation i could actually lease a portion of my residence back to my company so it's paying the lease for that portion because i'm shooting content all around i have clients come over i've got employees come over because i knew that strategy when you lease a home but i was gonna ask like when you own a home how would you do it and that makes sense you lease a portion of your home to the business yeah you become a landlord to your business so good and then so you pick up that income on your individual side but then you offset it by the expenses to operate the property there's so many clever ways to do it you're explaining so well yeah like a dummy like i can understand you know you can't understand i don't
14:20 what got you into like accounting and and tax law and all this stuff like yeah man that's a really good question so like you went from owning a uh what like a like a like a like a chop shop no i'm just kidding like a like a auto mechanic you know like improving rice rockets and stuff and whatever to accounting so i i went from that and then i got into financial planning the insurance and financial planning industry and this is back in 2008. so 2008 the stock market was booming this right before lehman brothers crashed and i ironically needed a tax deduction so my dad was like hey why don't you get into the tax business and i ended up buying um four franchises this company called liberty tax oh that's how i got started in the tax business so i got into the tax business and then lehman brothers collapsed the entire financial market collapsed my entire financial planning business got decimated and i was just in a tax
15:11 business um as a person under did you cry oh dude it was painful times like house got foreclosed on oh my god the whole whole it was a ████ show but did you cry though oh i definitely cried that's cry tears not tears of joy tears of sadness but seriously though like when you hit rock bottom like that do you like what are your thoughts at that point i mean it was tough like i had a young kid and now still married at the time it was like how was he when i got into the tax business 13 years ago so he was ████ five wow wow that's a scary ████ time crazy i still remember that packing up the house because the house is being foreclosed on and then moving out to worcester massachusetts for the first part of the year as we're building at this office we're sleeping in the back of the office to make it work yeah that's crazy that's a really cool ████ story though but to know i know where you are at now and
16:03 it's like it's like that i mean that entrepreneurial like ups and downs it's the you signed up for this kind of work you know it's like this is the life you just you have two businesses and it just disappears and then now you got to do it all over again the number of times i've i've restarted and like like entrepreneurship is interesting right you gotta finish that sentence how many times did you receive it yeah yeah yeah i think a lot of people don't hear that right now the number of times i failed and restarted so many times just number of times hit rock bottom yeah so the first one was my automotive business this is 2001. my business partner and i we end up having a falling out i ended up walking away from a million dollar business yeah because we had a lawsuit all this stuff that was part number one part number two is 2008 i had this great financial planning business got into a liberty tax that where my main source of income collapsed house
16:53 got foreclosed on moved out to worcester massachusetts to run this business just a big struggle and then like seven years ago same thing i helped my ex-wife at the time with her her youtube channel and we got this like huge subscriber number stuff like that ended up getting divorced again started from scratch right so like because that was the channel was like the partnership and so she left with that and then you had to restart so i mean it's that life is just like this beautiful journey and like it's a duality in life you have these ups and downs doesn't sound beautiful at all he makes it sound soft but it still still sounds a little tough but like those lows those low moments help you really appreciate the high moments and maybe i'm just just like this is my like you're speaking from a high moment so when i look at your your board eight be like this is so high
17:43 it's one of you my highest love life you bring up a really good point because i think um i was like when i was hearing your story i'm like man i'm so lucky i don't have any lows like and then i'm like wait a minute i do i just don't maybe recognize it as a low because i can't accept it so i'll have to create some type of oh i want this to happen i want to be in debt for 200 grand with the government because ████ it i'm i'm a dj right so i'll create these things in my head and i'm like oh and then it gives me the courage to just pay it off and i'm done but then the effect that it had it's almost like delusional right where like it's like uh yeah i wasn't in a bad place it's like the michael jordan's thing right the last dance seems like i took that person but i but i think i've hit rock bottom a couple of times and maybe emotionally felt it but my mind
18:34 didn't recognize it you're like there right now aren't you well i play it all right i'm gonna turn it up a real hot you went through a divorce what was that like like what led to it how was that why did it happen and then no that's a that's a really good question so like okay in like in relationships by no means is it's just one person right it's it's a it's a two-way street it's two people working together to make things worse so it's her fault so yeah mostly mostly 60 40. but there's a combination of factors that had happened so i was raised in a cult i met my ex-wife in a cult so our like our mental framework was kind of like wait i wonder if our cult's big crazier than your fault let's see let's duel it out right now battle of the cold there's so many good you got to finish these
19:24 sentences hold on his eighth day adventist eighth day god he's even eighth day adventists wait you're both you're both from the same cult whoa okay so let's let's backtrack a little bit yes can you say it or not yeah i could say it what is it so it's it's a long name it's called the supreme master ching hai international meditation association it's still an active force today i still have family members in it supreme supreme master ching hai international ching meditation international meditation is that that buddhist group that i think i've heard well there's another name you've gone to like the loving hut vegan restaurants they're part of the group oh so they're always just saying supreme master you know it's some culture yes you're not supreme master bart does this call have a profit yes yeah so there is a leader to the cult and it's been around for quite a while it's based
20:14 out of taiwan for quite a while and it you know at its peak i think it had over 100 000 members whoa so your parents and her parents were in it yeah and then you were raised in it so this was normal life for you guys normal life yeah yeah it's part of that so like internally like the mental framework was very different and then when you come back to the outside world you're like oh ████ this is what life is supposed to be so that's how we met and like kind of like our relationship always had some struggle because of that um and then for what caused the struggle if you guys like kind of had common ground in that area i think the biggest thing is just like you know you know that's a that's a great question um there's a combination of things like colts are really unique and there's this framework of what defines to be a cult so one of the main frameworks is does it does that cult or that group influence who you're supposed to hang out with and how you make decisions and judgments in life yeah
21:04 yeah so in part of that group like if we were to hang out with more people from the outside or have our friends like we would get karma and it would be harder for us to become enlightened so it would pull us away from the outside so we didn't have a great friend group and the challenge like relationships and marriages and this is this doesn't have to be an occult too is sometimes we rely on our partners to be our best friend our lover the mother of a kid like all these things that's that's a lot of pressure that we put on that person and so we rely on having great friends that we could maybe shoot the ████ with maybe talk about things that maybe we we want to have a sounding board before we talk to our wife i didn't have that yeah so a lot of cult and heavy religious stuff it's like you can't even say your real things because then they'll judge you or like it's like it's not real friends and stuff at least that's how i felt like there's like the subconscious and it's it's it's not like the group said it but there's
21:54 always a subconscious internal judgment of yourself and us as asian americans we typically become like much more harsh in our inner language than what we say to other people yeah so like that was me like i had a lot of inner judgment damn because i was always concerned of like ████ if i do this i'm not going to get enlightened if i do this i'm not going to get liberty in this one lifetime you know if in like part of it too like if you had if you had sex or like you made love to your your partner you would actually lose the you you'd have to work harder to become enlightened because now you're more in the physical body as opposed to focused on your meditation and i'm working so hard on you that's great yeah so there was there was a really a lot there and then as we got out of the cult the challenge i had is i always lost myself at work my escapism was from work and so in a relationship i would be physically present but not mentally present because my mind would always be
22:45 in work and then you combine that to youtube and social media world where you're always being analyzed non-stop all the time yeah like we're like everything is about shooting content like family vacations would be family vacations you'd be shooting content and so the challenge that i had is i was not good at set creating boundaries yeah that was my fault right and i wasn't great at communicating and all these different things right and you know obviously she had her challenges we are what was she good at yeah talk about that enough about you man i mean i you know i don't want to i'm not the kind of person that that says anything bad about anybody put her on blast that was definitely like for me a big challenge do you for cold culture do you acknowledge it's a cult while you're in it or do you only recognize the cult after out dude so like when you're in a cult like you've been indoctrinated and you have this belief that you're doing everything
23:36 right like we believe we're saving the world and everything but it's like an abusive relationship yeah your homies on the outside like yo that relationship's talks like he's like oh man i know i know i mean i got the black eyes and ████ like that but it's good everything's good and it's it's even worse because you were born into it i think that man is hard fruits are ingrained right i was 12 when i got into the group but that's still very much like but if it's such a formidable time in your life right yeah if it's reinforced by your parents you have relatives your whole community everyone you know your wife like there's a there's a terminology for it where it's like a uh something bias right where um where if your life depends on something people don't want to leave it so like so like pastors a lot of the times you know they want to they won't even consider that maybe christianity or
24:27 something might not be the thing to believe you know and then because they have a salary from the church they have the whole community in the church so for them they can't even question it exactly so a lot of the times if you belong to an institution that also is your livelihood a lot of people make it's extremely difficult because there's nothing you can say to even bend that reality and then you have this this veiled threat and it's not a communicated threat but a veiled thread of like if you leave this group you lose your entire friend group right your entire community that's part of it the the unintent not unintentionally they subconsciously isolate you from the outside world and then they're like this is where all your homies are at so if you realize that it's no longer a right thing to do and you leave you're back in the world with nobody right so like for me like my identity was shattered like when i decided to leave
25:18 the group that's another freaking crazy story how old were you when you decided to leave the group it was pretty recent it was um i think i was like 31. that's pretty ████ crazy yeah i've been waiting to leave jk it's only been like a year it's a free mastermind friends in the car scene were also in that cult no no so like the car scene i was in the cult during the car scene well i mean i was i was in the car scene when i was still in the cult um but you never mixed them never mix them yeah never mix them like that was for me like where i actually was in touch with like real people the car scene like the car scene for me is like it's like not like an escape but not necessarily just an escape but that was my community i love the car race horse yeah this 20 minutes is not enough man it's not enough yeah we have seven minutes we haven't even got to the divorce story what he's learned he just got so stuck with the cult ████
26:10 [Music] you
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