February 24, 2026 – Land Sales Brent Bowers, Storm Chaser Josh Morgerman and IBM Salima Lin

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion.

0:24 Jim Beach : Jim Beach, hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, making some money, getting off the sofa, going out and creating a business, changing the destiny of your family for generations to come, there is nothing more that you can do than being an entrepreneur and starting a business to help your family prepare for the future, and a great one at that, entrepreneurship is the key to all happiness. If you want to be happy, successful and have a little money, entrepreneurship is by far the best way to get there. We got a fantastic show for you today, three great guests. First up, we have Brent Bowers talking about flipping land instead of houses. This is a brilliant interview because of Brent and what he is doing is just so impressive. You know, I interview lots of flippers, lots of real estate people, lots of real estate methods. And this is, I think, my favorite. I think Brent has the best ideas because of the maintenance. He has figured out how to do real estate without having to worry about the toilet being clogged. After that, we’re welcoming back to the show Josh wargerman. He is the storm chaser. I think he’s been to 80 something hurricanes during his life. I first start off by calling him crazy, and we go from there, but it’s a lot of fun, a good interview, and you will enjoy learning some of his stories, and also about the building products that he is talking about. I use them myself, and have had great success with it. And then after that, we’re also welcoming back to the show Salima Lin from IBM, talking about AI and a new study that they have produced at IBM talking about the future of AI. I hope you’re out there using it for your business. I believe that AI is the biggest benefit that an entrepreneur can have. I don’t know if you’ve done it, but I challenge you to sit down at chat GPT and type in I want to start a business, and then just go at the end of almost every prompt, every response that chat GPD gives it then gives you an option of three or four other things, like, Would you like me to do a market viability study for this idea, or would you like to do a financial it comes and gives you the next step. And if you do that next step, it will then give you another step. And after about an hour, you have a 50 page business plan, pretty much planned out, and a business that you have thought of so many pieces of because the chat GPT forces you to consider all of the various things. I can’t tell you how great it is. Also for books, if you’re writing a book, put a chapter in it will tell you where the mistakes are, what you should change, what you should think about. It’s just a great product. So anyway, I’m excited to speak with Salima and find out the trends and what’s going to happen in AI anyway. Great show. Thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to get started in just a second, climate

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4:12 Jim Beach : Welcome back to the show and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. You know we have had all sorts of guests talk about all sorts of real estate, and we’ve really never gotten down to the dirt of it the land. I’m very excited to welcome a real estate expert, investor and coach, Brent Bowers. He specializes in land, buying and selling land. His website is the land sharks.com Also want to thank him for his eight years of service as an Army officer. Brent, welcome to the show. How you doing? I’m so good. Thank you for having me. It is our pleasure. Land is harder than selling something else. It has a higher commission. Why land? Yeah.

5:00 Brent Bowers : Yeah, I tell you what, I grew up in a cattle town, and everyone that owned land was either rich or a dairy farmer or a rancher, and I was none of the three, and never really knew how to make money with it. I had gotten my certain real estate with houses and rental houses, and then eventually Wholesaling Houses and renovating houses and flipping houses, but that was pretty tough to do, as I was an Army officer in the military, and I heard a podcast one day, believe it or not, kind of like this interview, where the guy was, like, doubling his money over, like, a very short amount of like, like a week or so. And I was like, There’s no way it’s that easy. So I kind of put it to the test. In 2015 I started reaching out to landowners that were several, several years behind on their taxes, really about to lose the land. And sure enough, people wanted to sell it to me. And none of this land was that great. It wasn’t buildable, wasn’t accessible, some of it, some of it was landlocked. But there’s this special thing about American land that people just want to own it. So I would buy it for a couple 100 bucks and then turn around and sell it for like 5000 and I will say I was kind of

6:13 Jim Beach : hooked after that. Yeah, that sounds like a damn good process. What is the land worth, when you’re paying 200 is it worth? Yeah, or 5000 or 100,000 an acre. Back in those

6:27 Brent Bowers : days, the 2015 I was really just, I was just kind of figuring out what the heck I was doing. I didn’t know what I was doing, but those parcels were worth anywhere from about five to 10 to $15,000 and I was getting them, like, dirt cheap, pennies on the dollar. And I kind of moved my process and evolved my process over the years, where I was like, Okay, what if I went after land that people actually want, people can actually build on, and it’s more valuable. Like, I started going after land that was really just higher demand, where actual Realtors were selling this land, and when I did that, it made it a lot easier to sell, first of all, and then number two, it made the profits a lot larger. So I’ve kind of changed the strategy over the years, where I see what the land is actually selling for. That’s how I know what it’s worth. I look at it on Redfin and Zillow and see what what other people are selling it for. And then I go into those areas and start making offers to the landowners that own that land. So not just tax delinquent stuff, but anybody that owns a parcel. Sometimes they’ve gotten it via inheritance, or maybe they’ve stopped paying the taxes on it. Some of those people do, or maybe they just bought it like, you know, 20 years ago, planning to build a second home or or a cabin. Life happens for people, and plans change and they never step foot on it. Or maybe they’re out of state and they’re kind of unemotionally attached to it. So those are the kinds of deals I’m looking for.

7:58 Jim Beach : All right, that sounds like it would be hard to find. You know, especially if there’s already an agent selling the land, there’s a real listing. It seems like it would be hard to flip. I mean, if the investor wanted it, he didn’t buy it already, and now you’re going to buy it and try to sell it to him again. Didn’t he already pass on that piece of land? Well, you

8:19 Brent Bowers : would think that a lot of the stuff I’m buying, though, is not listed, so it’s already listed. I need to get it out of, like, a rock bottom price. I have bought stuff that’s listed before, but usually it’s just generally listed way too high. Or sometimes they’ll only list one out of, like, two or three parcels that they have, and we’ll remarket it and reprice it at the right price, because there’s a lot of people think that they can just put a piece of land on the market and sell it and make a million bucks on it. That’s the land you see sitting for years. But 99% of the land I buy is off market. It’s not listed. The owners have not listed with a real estate agent, and that’s what I’m going to do with it. Okay?

9:01 Jim Beach : How do you find all that land, the 99% that you just mentioned, off market?

9:05 Brent Bowers : Yeah, so I got a great website called the land sharks list.com that I go and pull property records where people actually own this land, and I get their mailing address and I send them an offer letter, okay,

9:21 Jim Beach : we’ll start over land sharks, land.com

9:27 Brent Bowers : it’s called the land sharks data.com I’m glad you asked me that again, because I said the wrong one, the land sharks data.com this is a program ran by Zam flow, and what I get on this land starts, the landscapes data.com is I pretty much put the area I want to pull a list of land owners, and I pull that area, I pull all the land parcels that they own, and I price them out and send offer letters. And. Most people won’t accept them. Most people will just throw it in the garbage. But the ones that do accept them, it’s already got my profit built into it. So I’m offering them. I’m offering to buy that land from them at a discount. Now they know it’s a discount. They know sometimes they can get more if they list it with a real estate agent, but most of the time, people are just looking for

10:22 Jim Beach : a buyer. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Is this as competitive as other types of real estate flipping?

10:32 Brent Bowers : You know, for years it’s been kind of just wide open, no competition. I’m starting to see more and more competition these days, because of data, because of technology, it’s making a lot easier to do what we do. But yeah, it’s, I mean, you’ll have some competition, especially in areas that are like hot like Florida, Lee County, where you’re seeing like 47 sales in two days. You know, there’s competition in those areas. But when I see competition, that’s usually where success leaves clues. Yes, that’s

11:01 Jim Beach : very true. Florida is a good market right now. I thought Florida was in collapse at the moment, or billion condos for sale?

11:09 Brent Bowers : Yeah, well, I’m not buying condos. I’m buying land.

11:14 Jim Beach : Florida was a horrible market right now.

11:17 Brent Bowers : Yeah, well, I’m in it, and it’s still moving. I, I wouldn’t say, trust the news. Everything the news says. There’s another strategy I do. I put brand new mobile homes on these land, some of these parcels of land as well, and those are selling on a weekend. So it’s just, you know, where one market can be going down, another one could be going up in the same state. Mark our land is really, I like to say it’s regional. You want to you want to look at the areas where it’s still moving. Some of my land has went down in value. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still sell it. We got to offer, you know, financing offered at the right price. A lot of times I’m not just putting these on the market for top dollar. I’m seeing whatever everything else is listed at, and listing it for less, and a lot of times holding the financing to where I’m actually being the bank. That’s where it’s almost like having a rental property that I never had to make repairs on. Just get monthly payments.

12:10 Jim Beach : That’s a nice idea. I love not having to do repairs. Where in town are these pieces of land close in 100 miles from the city. Where is this land?

12:25 Brent Bowers : Yeah, sometimes it’s right in the city. Sometimes it’s more rural. I don’t really care where it’s at. I mean, for a while there I would just go on the outskirts of town, but again, looking at the like with my strategy. Now, I really want to see where land selling. So it could be in town, out of town, as long as land is selling, we want to see trading happening.

12:49 Jim Beach : Okay, so just if other deals are happening, where are you finding that data?

12:57 Brent Bowers : Redfin Zillow, public, just free, websites, because you can go on there and see where land’s selling, where land’s available for sale. Now, I have done the stuff in the middle of nowhere. That’s, you know, you’re not seeing the sales happening. That stuff is definitely sellable. People want to own that kind of land, but it just takes more marketing. It usually takes offering the seller financing to move that stuff. Nothing wrong with it. That’s kind of how I got my start.

13:22 Jim Beach : And you put rental or double wides,

13:30 Brent Bowers : yep, some of them placing brand new double wise on them. So now it’s like we’re adding a well, we’re adding a septic system. We’re putting the brand new double wide electricity now where I had to finance that land before. Now I can get buyers that can get FHA lending, USDA VA lending, or conventional financing. So it’s opening up my buyer’s pool. So it’s like turned into like to land that we’re developing it, which is a whole nother strategy. There’s, there’s more pieces to it. However, it’s just, it’s just more consistent, because with with these, the collapse you were talking about high interest rates, we’re still two and a half million houses short in this country, especially affordable housing, to where I can place one of these brand new mobile homes and be $100,000 less than a stick built or a concrete block structure, so now someone can get into one of our homes for $600

14:28 Jim Beach : less a month. Wow. By the way, it’s pronounced mobile, not mobile, mobile, mobile.

14:36 Brent Bowers : Mobile, yeah, I think I think you hit it on the head. Mobile, yes.

14:41 Jim Beach : I have an aunt and uncle who are slum lords. Very proudly, slum lords, a matter of fact, I’m named after a slum lord, and they started off in a mobile home, and can’t stand them, but I don’t know, they’re pretty nice these days. I’ve seen some damn. Nice ones.

15:01 Brent Bowers : Oh, yes sir. I like that. My goal is, when you walk into one of ours, our double wide mobile homes is, you’re like, Wow, is this a mobile home? Because a lot of times they have drywall, they have fireplaces, and just because it’s mobile, mobile, you got me wanting to say mobile now mobile. I place brand new ones. They’ve never been moved, except for when I put it on there and we have, like, we basically adjoin it to the land so it will never move. I mean, Florida, we have hurricanes, so these things have to be held down darn good. That’s why we can get all this lending on them. Because it’s brand new. It’s never been moved. If it’s ever been moved, FHA won’t touch it.

15:40 Jim Beach : Okay, you’re gonna spend a lot of money putting in utilities and roads.

15:46 Brent Bowers : Yeah, you could do that. I generally like to buy my stuff that with a road already go into it, though, utilities, yeah, it depends what you call a lot of money. If I can, if I can, do $170,000 worth of, say, improvements to include the land, and now it’s worth 265,000

16:05 Jim Beach : there’s quite a bit of profit to be made in that sounds like it. And then are you financing most of the deals? Where are you getting your money for all of this?

16:16 Brent Bowers : So where I get my money is I started out just flipping land, where I would I would sign my contract, or I would sell it to a cash buyer, basically. Or some people call that wholesaling, and I was kind of limited by the amount of land deals I could do. It was really what did I have available in my bank account. That’s what kind of kept me doing the smaller land deals was as I started sharing with more and more people what I was doing and how lucrative this was, I just started telling people, Hey, I’m looking to do more land deals this year. So I started building what, what I call my private lender database, where I have now have a spreadsheet of like, 80 something lenders that are ready, willing and able to lend me cash. Most of these people are not in real estate, you know, they’re regular people like you and I. They’re they’re plumbers, they’re doctors or attorneys. One guy works for State Farm, another one for Napa, and they just want to make their money grow, but they don’t want to start a real estate company like I have. So that’s where I get most of my money, just regular people. I don’t deal with banks. I don’t deal with institutions. I’m not using hard money anymore. I did start with hard money lending. To where I was borrowing from, from guys that would charge me four points and 12% interest. And honestly, it might sound expensive, but that’s if I’m going to make 30 grand on something and I’m going to pay them six grand and use their money. It’s not a bad deal.

17:38 Jim Beach : No, as long as you can get out of it, right? The hard money is scary. If you if something goes wrong all of a sudden, you are paying an outrageous rate. Yeah, yeah, it’s real estate things go wrong. So how many deals have you done, and how many of them have blown up? Ugly? Yeah, I’ve

17:57 Brent Bowers : done through over 350 land deals at this point, and I’ve lost money on two now,

18:05 Jim Beach : wow, that’s very impressive.

18:08 Brent Bowers : Yeah, yeah. And some of it I’ve taken back. You know, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. A lot of times when we sell this land, you know, easy, come, easy, go, is what I say, if you don’t collect at least $5,000 down. And I mean, a lot of my sold rights, I just collected, like, 1000 bucks down and $200 a month for many, many years. A lot of those people will actually stop paying for that land if they didn’t put a big enough down payment. So I’ll have to take the land back and then resell it. I’ve got several parcels. I’ve resold three or four times. And that’s one, one argument people make me, well, I’d rather buy rental houses because eventually they’re going to pay off the land. Well, some people do, some people don’t.

18:48 Jim Beach : Yes, so Brent, do you have classes? Are you teaching this? Yeah, we teach people over at

18:54 Brent Bowers : the land sharks.com I put a video out on YouTube every single week talking about what we do. But, yep, I teach a couple people,

19:04 Jim Beach : all right, and you’re helping with them financing. Do they get access to your magic List of 80?

19:10 Brent Bowers : No, I don’t share that. Those guys want to lend to me. They might lend to others, but I show them how to build those

19:15 Jim Beach : lists, right? Yeah. I mean, you just go to the real estate club meeting every Wednesday in town, and every town has one of those, and start meeting investors there, right?

19:27 Brent Bowers : Absolutely, that’s a great place to do it, because I actually started a meet up in Colorado Springs. It’s still going the Colorado Springs real estate investor Association. We started it back in 2018 right after I got out of the military, and that’s really where I was sharing with most of the people when I was up to and that’s where I found my initial first lenders. That’s where I found my initial coaching students that were like, how much to teach me how to do this. So I highly encourage people to go to those, those meetups, or maybe even start one I was not ready to start. I started back when I did, but luckily, I teamed up with a really smart real estate broker out in Colorado Springs. So between the two of us, we pretty much had answers to most things, but the guys in the crowd, you know, had the answers as well.

20:15 Jim Beach : What about South versus North? Are we seeing? You know, we’re seeing a migration to the south overall and the macro data. Where do you what region are you not investing in?

20:28 Brent Bowers : Yeah, I’ve seen a huge migration to the southeast of the United States. I actually started this business out in Colorado because I was stationed out there in the military, but and I did quite a number of deals in Arizona, and believe it or not, one of my best land deals yet to this day, it was in California just a couple years ago. It’s just, you know, just because people are migrating doesn’t mean that there’s not more buyers buying out west. But yeah, I’m seeing a huge migration of incoming people moving into the southeast of the United States. Most of the Carol, I mean, Carolinas is probably the top two states. But what they don’t talk about on the news as well is like a lot of people from out of the country are moving to California,

21:14 Jim Beach : and there’s still land to be bought out there. Okay? And are there any kind of zoning problems you have? Or do you deal with zoning? I guess it’s a case specific type thing.

21:31 Brent Bowers : It is very specific, but most of the time I just leave the zoning exactly how it is like if I’m going to place a brand new mobile home on a piece of land, I’m not going to mess with it. I’m not going to put that branding mobile home on mobile home on it, if it’s not zoned for mobile homes. But most of the time, I just strictly stick with residential vacant land.

21:51 Jim Beach : Okay, and how big are these parcels? Is it one acre? 20 acres? Is that part of the formula at all?

21:57 Brent Bowers : Yeah, you pretty much hit it. I’m I’m mostly operating in the 10,000 square foot lot, all the way

22:02 Jim Beach : up to 20 acres. How big is 10,000 square feet? Quarter acre? Yes, sir.

22:09 Brent Bowers : And I always tell people like an acre is very similar to a football field. You know, most people can’t envision what an acre even looks like. It’s about a football field. Very, very close, interesting.

22:22 Jim Beach : I had not heard that comparison. How much are the classes?

22:27 Brent Bowers : Brent, yeah, it depends. I don’t. I don’t really just give classes. I coach people on a one on one basis, and it’s really just kind of what they’re what they’re looking to accomplish. So I charge different prices for that. So I would just recommend, if someone wants to know exactly how much, or I just need to probably have a call with it and see what they’re looking for. But I guess the easiest answer is very expensive.

22:56 Jim Beach : 30,000 50,000

22:58 Brent Bowers : No, no, under, under 7500

23:01 Jim Beach : Okay, that’s very fair. I’m going to call that very fair. I love it. Okay, what am I not asked? I can’t think of anything to ask at this point. I think we’ve kind of, yeah, the story,

23:19 Brent Bowers : I think you hit it on the head with, why land? You know, why not houses? You know, I’ve done a bunch of houses. I think the only thing I could say that you could ask, is, why not buy a house instead of a piece of land? And I just tell people I’ve done houses as well. I’m in my first house in 2007 bought it for 130,000 rented it out for years, evicted multiple people. I sold it in 2019 for 130,000 but my first land deal, I bought for $285 and sold it for 5000 and then the second land deal, I bought for $500 and I sold that one for 500 down and 400 a month. And that’s the one that was my paradigm shift. So it’s a lot cheaper, faster, easier and more affordable to get started in real estate with, with lands over a house, it’s just less moving parts and a lot. I like simplicity.

24:07 Jim Beach : I love that not having to fix stuff, you know, and getting the midnight call that my toilets flooding and you’re about to lose a ceiling below you. Or, you know, one of those types

24:18 Brent Bowers : that has totally happened to me where the second story was leaking on the first totally happened to one house. Is terrible situation.

24:26 Jim Beach : Hey, belted an ice skating rink on top of a computer room. Oh my goodness. Can you imagine someone put a computer center underneath an ice skating rink?

24:40 Brent Bowers : What makes sense you keep the computers cool with the ice.

24:47 Jim Beach : What about these big data centers that are coming in and buying 1000s of acres? Are you seeing any of those deals or hearing about anything like that?

24:57 Brent Bowers : We got a guy in our land sharks community that he. Was the land buyer from meta by one time Facebook. So I’m just, I’m seeing them, I’m hearing the stories, but I’ve yet to be involved in one. That’d be awesome.

25:11 Jim Beach : Yes, Georges has passed a law, I think it passed, that the data centers are not allowed to drive up the cost of energy, and if they do the they have to make up the difference with the power company because, you know, they’re using so much power and or demand. You know, price should go up. But you know, why should I pay for that data center to get cheaper energy that I subsidize. Very interesting. Yeah, it makes sense. Oh, I have been watching a lot of those here in Georgia. We’ve got, I don’t know, five or six of them. I think that are 1000 acre type things.

25:57 Brent Bowers : So, yeah, those guys are sucking a lot of energy. Holy cow, can’t even imagine how much energy they’re burning,

26:03 Jim Beach : and water too. The water is, I think, more scarier to me than the energy because I know we can just put up a power plant, build a nuclear power plant if we need to. You know, Facebook is building their own that is building their own nuclear power plants now, because they need more energy. But where do they get more water? That’s where I you know, that’s the hard part.

26:22 Brent Bowers : Yeah, wow. In the water. What is the water for? Is it to cool the nuclear Yeah, wow.

26:30 Jim Beach : The computers. Okay, it’s part of the air conditioning and stuff like that. So, very interesting. Well, Brent, I love what you’re doing, man, you’re an absolute genius, and I’d love to do this myself. I’m going to be one of your clients. So expect a call from me soon. How do we find out when we get in touch?

26:50 Brent Bowers : Go to the land charge.com or check me out on YouTube if you want to learn more.

26:55 Jim Beach : Fantastic friend. Thank you so much for being with us. Great, great, great story, and we’d love to have you back. God bless you, sir. I appreciate your time. Tell us a little bit about what you did in the veteran in the military. What were your Where are you staying? Yeah.

27:08 Brent Bowers : Duties, yeah. Started out by going to Oklahoma to basic training. Then then Georgia actually for Fort Gordon Augusta, Georgia for signal support specialist. I was in charge of fixing radios and computers and electronics on trucks and you name it, as long as we if it had electrical pulse, we touched it. Those were my enlisted days, a couple of deployments to Afghanistan. Lived in Germany for a while, then Georgia, I’m sorry, then back to Florida, then to Colorado for my final duty station as a lieutenant.

27:41 Jim Beach : Well, fantastic. We appreciate your service there, and appreciate you being with us to tell your land story. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, and we’ll be right back.

28:00 Intro 2 : Too well. That’s a, that’s

28:05 Intro 2 : a wonderful question. Oh, my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim,

28:10 Intro 2 : wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer,

28:17 Intro 2 : that’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for startups radio,

30:50 George Pesansky : Thank you so much. It was such a labor of love, really kind of a story to my younger self, all of the advice, all of the really tips and tricks and things that, in most cases, I learned the hard way over 30 years of helping fortune, 100 size companies drive change and improvement and really helping individuals, teams and organizations reach their full potential, I wanted to take 30 years of experiences and ideas and put them all into about 300 pages for about 30 bucks. I love it.

31:28 Jim Beach : Can you give us some of the strategies? Can we walk through some of them?

31:31 George Pesansky : Yeah, absolutely. You know some of the chapters, you know, some of the eight strategies that we we outline. You know, one of my favorite is a saying I use that focus is your friend. Of all of the advice I’ve given, sometimes people kind of will come back and give me feedback that that didn’t go as well, or it didn’t happen the way they hoped. But the one piece of advice I consistently give, if we can define our problem, if we can focus on a narrow set of expectations, it always produces a better outcome. So we talk a lot about that, as well as this concept I call the improvement factory, really thinking about creating change and helping you reach your potential by not just thinking about, you know, working on a problem or kind of fixing an issue, but thinking about your capacity to improve, and what is the downtime that’s really robbing and preventing your consistent application of driving change and improvement. And it applies, you know, to an individual, but it also often in teams and organizations, when you start to think about what we’re trying to accomplish, like a machine that I want to have running high quality outcomes, 24 hours a day, much like a factory, we all have an improvement factory, and when we become the managers of our own improvement factory, we can really hold ourselves to a whole different level of accountability.

33:01 Jim Beach : Let’s deep dive into those really fast, please. You said focus. Do you mean concentrating on what I’m doing right now and not letting anything distract me? Or do you mean having a niche that we focus in and we don’t do anything outside of that niche?

33:17 George Pesansky : Yeah, there’s, you know, two pieces that we really try to encourage, you know, one is to obviously focus on a specific outcome, a result that you’re you know, you’re thinking about as a vision, but also recognizing that there really is very few things where outcomes just immediately occur. Almost everything that we do in life and business and work is a series of small victories and being able to focus on the barrier, the issue, the problem, really the target that is in your way, that is preventing your progress to the greater outcome, That technique, which is really this idea of focus is really powerful, because if you can name it, if you can describe it, if you know what’s preventing that next step, then you’re one step closer to that outcome. Way too often people just focus on the outcome, and they really get overwhelmed by all the barriers

34:19 Jim Beach : and with the improvement factory. Can you give me an example of that? I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that yet.

28:27 Jim Beach : we are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m excited to welcome back to the show. A climate and weather expert, a storm chaser, Josh morgerman, he’s been on the show a couple times before. He is down in Orlando right now to talk about resilient homes and weatherproofing our homes. Josh, welcome back to the show. How you doing?

28:53 Josh Morgerman : Jim, good. It’s nice to be back. Thank you for having me back. I appreciate

28:57 Jim Beach : it. What’s the latest storm you were chasing?

29:01 Josh Morgerman : Well, actually one of the biggest I ever chased, which was Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica a few months ago, being in, oh my god, like crazy, Category Five, winds gusting over 200 miles an hour, and I was right where it came in. And I’ll tell you, out of the 84 hurricanes I’ve been in, which is a world record. That was maybe the worst. I mean, it was, it was an extreme, extreme impact. It was like the came in with the force of the nuclear bomb. I mean, the wind, just the force of the wind tore down concrete buildings. That’s how intense it

29:35 Jim Beach : was that when you got hit in the head, the sense, no, I wasn’t hitting the head.

29:39 Josh Morgerman : I was, no, no, I was, I was, I was, I’m protecting myself. Thank God.

29:44 Jim Beach : When did you get hit in the head, Josh and had the sense knocked out of you? Why the hell do you go

29:51 Josh Morgerman : I’m so dense. I didn’t realize you were joking. I was like, okay, is he confusing with someone else? Yeah, no, I I’m a little slow sometimes with humor, you’ll have to. Forgive me. No, listen, people ask me this all the time. They’re like, what’s wrong with you? And all I can say is, listen, honestly, I was born this way. Since as far back as I could remember, I was always just like, entranced by violent weather, even when I was a toddler, it’s just the top storm chases, you ask all them, it’s something you’re born with. So yeah, I wasn’t hit in the head. I grew up with this imbalance.

30:23 Jim Beach : You don’t know that your mother didn’t drop you during a storm or something? Maybe that was it,

30:29 Josh Morgerman : you know, maybe that’s what it was. I’ll have a conversation with her, and I’ll see if I can, if I can, blame her for this.

30:34 Jim Beach : How much damage are these storms doing to our houses?

30:39 Josh Morgerman : I mean, like a lot, you know, especially, you know, the US, we’ve had it. We’ve had a tough slog the last decade. You know, if you look at hurricane history, decade to decade, it’s really variable. The US sometimes has a decade where it kind of gets off like, like, more or less easy. You know, 2006 to 2016 was kind of like that. That was kind of a quiet decade since 2017 the US has just gotten smashed again and again by the super destructive hurricanes. You know, a lot of category fours. We even had a Category Five in 2018 hurricane Michael in the Panhandle Florida. Category Five is extremely unusual in the United States, so it’s something that we have to think about. We’re in a really bad slog right now. Last year was actually 2025 was one of the first years in many that we did not have any hurricane landfalls in the US. But it’s absolutely an issue. What about

31:32 Jim Beach : this year? Have we had anything big this year, except for the Jamaican that you mentioned? Seems like this year’s Well, calm or two,

31:39 Josh Morgerman : yeah, like the so the last the 2025, hurricane season was, was, it was bad for Jamaica, but for the United States, it was, it was calm, nothing, nothing hit American shores. Jamaica got hit really badly, but everything stayed kind of east of the United States. So the question is, what is this coming? You’re going to be like? So hurricane season starts in the summer, you know, and there’s mixed signals, but I will say that right now, it does seem like we’re kind of in a busier phase with hurricanes in the Atlantic, which means hurricanes that hit the US. So I think that we have to stay vigilant and prepared.

32:11 Jim Beach : Well, definitely, what do we need to do to our houses, and what are some of the new technologies that make our houses safer?

32:18 Josh Morgerman : Well, I think we need to look at the materials that our houses are made with, especially on the exterior, and this is something I’m very passionate about. I built my home in Bay St Louis, Mississippi, right on the Gulf Coast, where we get not only hurricanes, but we have extreme heat, incessant humidity, which just causes all kinds of like horrible mold and rot. So when I was building my house, I thought a lot about this, what are the materials I could use to keep my house from just like either rotting away or falling apart? And that was the most important thing to me, and I decided to go with the latest and the greatest, which is the James Hardy family of products. First of all, I went with the Hardy siding. It’s made of fiber cement, which means it does not mold. It doesn’t rot. The termites do not find it appetizing. It’s not even combustible, and it’s impact resistant. So if flying debris hits it during a hurricane, it’s going to give some protection there. That’s one of the most important things. But, okay, fiber cement that sounds ugly, doesn’t it? That’s not like a poetic or evocative sounding term. This stuff is beautiful. I built in an historical district, okay? In my Historical Commission in Bay St Louis, they are very they really protect the sanctity of Old Town, Bay St Louis. They want it to look a certain way. But they’re totally cool with the Hardy siding, because the product that I use looks exactly like traditional cedar lap siding. It’s just, it’s absolutely gorgeous. You can’t tell the difference. So I get the benefit of sort of like the capturing the essence of natural wood, but with all the benefits of this new technology to keep the, you know, to keep it from, like I said, rotting away, or molding and all those things.

33:52 Jim Beach : I know the product I have used the product. I used the product on a deck, believe, unbelievably, you know, I had some places that needed siding, and I actually put it on the bottom to as the actual floor, and it’s worked out great. You had more color selections than the what’s the other stuff that I’m drawing a blank on the other brand name that’s No, I’m

34:16 Josh Morgerman : excited you mentioned this. I’m excited you mentioned this about the decking. Okay, so James Hardie, like it recently integrated with a few other brands. James Hardie is now a family of brands. Okay, so there’s the Hardy sighting, but for decking now, the James Hardy company has a solution specifically for that. It’s a brand that they’re now. It’s part of the James Hardy family. It’s called Timber Tech, okay? And this decking, it’s made of an advanced PVC formula. It is okay. I was on the on the convention floor yesterday, and I was given a test. I was looking at different like planks, okay? And I was asked to say which were wood and which were this advanced PBC formula. I could not tell the difference. That is how gorgeous this stuff is. It captures the look and the feel and the character. Traditional wood, but like, like the fiber cement siding, this advanced PVC formula, it does not absorb water, it again, it doesn’t mold, doesn’t rock. Termites don’t like it. It’s not combustible. It doesn’t Ignite. This stuff is amazing. And decking is one of the that is, one of the things that is the biggest headache for so many homeowners. I remember my dad, you know, built a deck on our house when I was younger, and the amount of time you spent replacing planks, restaining everything else you go with this Timber Tech brand of decking, and you don’t have any of those headaches. It’s just built to last. You put it in, and it stays the same for decades.

35:35 Jim Beach : You actually need to send a photo crew. I’d built a 30 foot swinging bridge with the James Hardy plank is the topper. Wow. 30 foot swinging. Did it yourself, my backyard yourself, which was covid project, but it’s awesome. It’s so pretty, and it’s not slippery, either you could walk on it when it’s wet and not slip.

36:01 Josh Morgerman : That is you really did that yourself. Yes, I

36:03 Jim Beach : did 100% by myself. It was actually, when you look at it, you’re like, How in the hell did you do that? But when I like, walk you through the steps, it was unbelievably easier and much safer than the construction of the tree house. The Tree House is when I almost died, not the Swinging Bridge,

36:20 Josh Morgerman : and you made the tree house yourself as well.

36:22 Jim Beach : Yes, the whole thing by myself. It’s like 30 feet up in the air.

36:26 Josh Morgerman : That is, I’m like, seriously blown away. Like you, like you impress me. You inspire me. Because I am not so talented with these, you know, these do it yourself projects. I’m like, wow. I’m in awe. Okay, is it tree house? Is it is it Hardy? Did you use Hardy siding on it? You know,

36:42 Jim Beach : I don’t remember. I used a siding product, and I don’t remember what it was. We’re eight years out now or something, but I have 100% sure that the decking on the bridge was James Hardy because I wanted a different Okay,

36:58 Josh Morgerman : okay, well, I I’m gonna insist that you do a materials audit of all of these items and make sure that they’re Hardy products, because I wanted to last into the future. I want to see. I’m actually very, I’m really curious to see your handiwork.

37:12 Jim Beach : It’s pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. Yeah, I got kicked architecture school, so

37:17 Josh Morgerman : I had that. Ah, I got it. I got it. I know you’re kind

37:21 Jim Beach : of the basic points to build you a deck when you inviting me to your house to build

37:26 Josh Morgerman : you were invited to my hurricane party, which is at the beginning of June. Every year, I have a giant event at my house in Bay St Louis, to celebrate not the beginning of hurricane season, but to celebrate preparedness and awareness. And I will actually you were invited to that. I will get your information from the producer afterward, and I’m going to insist that you come, but, yeah, you have to build the deck in order to come to the party. I’m just kidding.

37:48 Jim Beach : I love it. I mean, I’ll do it free. I just love building decks. You know, it’s I don’t be careful. I might take you up on this. Don’t exercise. I build decks and bridges and tree houses because got to carry all that wood to the backyard. There’s my workout.

38:03 Josh Morgerman : That is awesome. Okay, well, good man, I’m gonna, I’m gonna take you up on this. I’m gonna get that information, and we’re gonna connect, and you’re gonna tell me what I’m gonna, what I’m gonna put on my property.

38:12 Jim Beach : Josh, tell us where we can find out more.

38:15 Josh Morgerman : James Hardy, that’s H, a, r, d, i e.com, where they have all the products you need to make the outside the exterior surfaces of your home and property, climate resistant. Fantastic.

38:27 Jim Beach : Josh, thanks for being with us. Godspeed, that we have a small season this year with nothing bad, and thanks for being with us. Thanks, Jim and we will be right back. You.

38:46 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. You know, AI is making so many things volatile, up for change. So many things are happening right now. Some of them are kind of scary. Some of them are really exciting. I’m excited to welcome someone who is going to help us understand what’s going on now with AI, please welcome Salima Lynn to the show. She is with IBM’s consulting business. She’s had an amazing career. There she is, I think, like 25 years she is the managing partner of IBM consulting, and also works with the Institute for Business Value. They’ve come out with a new study. And Salima has been on the show three times, which this is her third time. So two more she will get the green jacket that we always give away. Salima, welcome to the show. How you doing?

39:40 Salima Lin : Thank you. I’m looking forward to that green jacket. Jim,

39:43 Jim Beach : yes, you are the wit the the woman who’s been with us the most. So you are closer than any other woman to the green jacket. Wonderful. Yes, love it. We steal them from the Masters there at Augusta. So I. Hope that doesn’t bother you.

40:02 Salima Lin : No, I’ll keep it away from my husband.

40:05 Jim Beach : All right, what’s going on with AI? Tell us about the new study. Yes.

40:10 Salima Lin : So we surveyed 2000 C suite executives on what would drive success for them over the next four years. Enterprise 2030, is that study, and think about it as a blueprint, Jim on what it takes to be a smarter enterprise by the end of the decade. And essentially, a smarter enterprise is one that is making bold bets more often and sooner than competition. They are reinvesting the productivity gains from Ai into innovation and new growth. They are designing one of a kind, AI that’s unique to them. They are elevating human judgment. It’s about humans and AI working and collaborating together, and they are preparing for quantum so there’s a lot there, but essentially, our point of view is that, whereas AI is supporting the business model today, in the future, it will become the business model.

41:20 Jim Beach : All right, excellent. Is there some data that we need to know about? Some results?

41:27 Salima Lin : Sure there’s there’s a lot of results, maybe point to a couple that are really interesting. The first is that 80% of executives expect that AI will significantly contribute to their revenue by 2030 but only 24% can clearly say where that revenue will come from. So in other words, Jim, they have this clear picture of the destination, but they don’t know how to get there. And that’s the real challenge, right? This disconnect between expectation and impact, which is why it’s important to act with speed, to make big bets early and often, and to really think about how you can use AI to drive differentiation in your business. That would be one data point. If I were to give you a couple options, do you want me to give you a couple need to hear?

42:23 Salima Lin : Yes. Okay,

42:25 Salima Lin : all right. So the second data point I would give you is around speed. And I think we all well, many of us tend to want to wait for that perfect data before we make a decision. And according to our study, 55% of the executives say that competitive advantage in 2030 will depend more on the speed of execution than the perfect decision, and so speed is critical, as we’re thinking about AI and maybe the third piece of data I would give you is that AI won’t do all your thinking for you, right? And so making sure that as human beings, we are being skilled and trained to work alongside AI is critical. 57% of executives say that today’s skills are expected to be obsolete by 2030 and so that puts a huge pressure on us as human beings to make sure that we’re skilled, and as employers, we need to give room to our people to train and to drive that continuous learning day to day. I should let you know that it’s interesting, nearly half of employees say they’re comfortable being managed by an AI agent, and at least twice as many employees say that they would embrace, rather than resist greater use of AI by their employees. So I think we have almost like the perfect storm, in a good way, in that AI is getting more experienced and getting better employers and people recognize the importance of it and the need to reskill and work alongside AI.

44:16 Jim Beach : All right, what about the jobs? I think everyone’s freaked out about jobs. Is there any data about creating new jobs or losing jobs?

44:27 Salima Lin : Absolutely, I think Jim the debate about AI versus jobs is often framed incorrectly. If we’re using AI in the way that it’s intended to drive differentiation. Think about it this way. Stage one is you use AI to drive productivity. Stage two is you take those productivity savings to create growth. And growth means you’re creating new roles, even as routine tasks evolve and so new roles. Will be created. Many more will be transformed, and some will transition away. And I always tell people humans as humans, those who have AI will replace those who don’t use it. And so the important thing is get comfortable with AI and think about how it makes you do your roles much better, much faster, and think about the new roles that will come about as a result of it.

45:29 Jim Beach : Okay, so right at half you said right. 48% think that this will say that again.

45:41 Salima Lin : 40 No, I No, I don’t think I said that, but I think what I did say is that most of the roles today will be transformed, and new roles will be created.

45:55 Jim Beach : Okay, and then do we know what the number, or the percentage of executives who think that we’re have a net job creation?

46:08 Salima Lin : No, we don’t have that data. What I would what I would say is that most of the two thirds, over two thirds of the executives that we spoke with said that by the end of the decade, you know, they will have achieved as much, you know, efficiency gains from from Ai, as they would have otherwise. 70% are reinvesting that productivity into growth, and so there’s a real focus on growth to drive uniqueness and differentiation.

46:43 Jim Beach : Okay, so overall, would you say that the data is scary, encouraging? Where would you put the data, the whole overall, 30,000 foot takeaway from this,

47:01 Salima Lin : I would say that AI isn’t going away. It’s not a fad. Companies are massively increasing their investments in AI. So I would tell your listeners, AI is here to stay. It’s not a fad. And to make sure that you’re well positioned in the future, make sure that you are reskilling yourselves. You are being open to new roles and to experimenting working alongside AI.

47:31 Jim Beach : All right, you know, I think some of AI is very, very easy, and then some of it’s very, very difficult. The building of agents, seems to be the hard part where we create a program using the AI, is my understanding. Do you think that just a generic use of AI? I’m comfortable with chat, GPT. I can do spreadsheets with it. I can, you know, I have some skills. Is that going to be enough? Or do we need to learn to program in AI to create these agents?

48:08 Salima Lin : Yes. So it won’t be enough to answer your question, I think you can get incremental type improvements when, when you do that, but everyone has access, right? And so the real impact will come from uniqueness, which is taking that AI and making it unique to you, to your data, to your workflows, to your intellectual property, and that’s what’s going to set companies apart. As AI becomes

48:40 Jim Beach : more common, okay, and then what about the by the way, generations compete and grow. Will AI be the, obviously, the competitive advantage, but will it also change, like the structure of the organization pyramid? Do you think

49:02 Salima Lin : I think it will absolutely impact the operating models and the business models that companies have. One of the data points, and I don’t know if I mentioned it or not, but you know, 80% of executives expect AI to significantly contribute to their revenues by 2030 the only way that happens is if we’re embedding AI into our processes and into our ways of working, so it will have a fundamental impact on how companies operate, not to mention AI is as much about technology as It is about people, and so rethinking how you train your people, how you skill them, how you drive continuous learning, is going to impact our workforce management practices that are out there. And by the way, I was just thinking about that 48% point that you mentioned, AI first organizations, meaning. Organizations that are moving with AI at the core of what they do, versus just bolting it on to what they do today, they are 48% more likely to create net new job roles. I think that’s what you meant, and that is absolutely correct.

50:16 Jim Beach : Okay, yeah, that is what I was referring to. It sort of reminds me of when we all got printers, and they said that, you know, it would decrease the use of our paper, because you don’t need to print every five minutes. You can, you know, print at the end of the day or something. And then, what did we all do? We all print every time we make one single change in the document, right? And so the use of paper actually exploded instead of going down. I kind of wonder if AI exactly, I’m sorry, go ahead.

50:49 Salima Lin : No, I would say exactly. I mean, if you look over time, and if you look at technology changes, I think at first people are afraid, but in every instance, it drives growth, right? If you look at the 2000s when the internet connected the world, online commerce flourished, right? And so I think over time you get new technologies. And when we take a step back and we look at it, it often drives growth

51:17 Jim Beach : versus contraction, right? You know, I don’t, I don’t see that people are going to lose jobs. I don’t know that we’re going to get enough integration so that companies will actually fire people very soon. I think that’s further in the future than most people think. I think it’s going to take extra people to integrate that hopefully, you know, especially for a small business, you’ll grow right through using AI, and it will simply be part of your growth engine. But that, you know, as you’re growing, you could need the same number of people. So I don’t know that we’re going to lose jobs overall, I kind of think that we’re going to have a whole new category of 25 year olds making $300,000 a year because they have this skill. What are your thoughts?

52:12 Salima Lin : IBM has said for years that AI is going to transform every job. And so new roles will be created, many more will be transformed, and some will transition away. I think the important thing is that we take steps today to equip the workers in the workforce and students with the skills that they need to work effectively with AI technologies. And to give you an example of this at IBM, we’re actually doing this through a range of programs, including our commitment to train 2 million learners in AI by the end of 2026 and this effort builds on our existing commitment to scale 30 million people by 2030 and so I think that’s where the focus needs to go. It needs to be and it is about

52:59 Jim Beach : growth, all right? Well, that’s what I want to grow our businesses. I know we’re out of time, unfortunately. How do we find out more? Salima, get to see the actual data and some of the analysis.

53:14 Salima Lin : Absolutely So, the data that we talked about and a lot more data you can find in our enterprise in 2030 study, which is at ibm.com/i b V, ibm.com/i b V, fantastic.

53:34 Jim Beach : Great stuff. Selina, thank you so much, and I look forward to having you back in a year or so closer to your beautiful green jacket.

53:43 Salima Lin : Me too. Thank you so much.

53:45 Jim Beach : We are out of time, but back tomorrow. Thank you so much for being with us. Have a great day. Bye. Now you.