Meet The Farmer Who's Making $50M/Year With a Newsletter

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en so the background is this this guy named kevin van trump he is probably in his 50s late mid to late 50s um and he basically i think he worked in chicago on like the commodities like trading floor so he like traded commodities but he’s got a relatively thick southern accent right so he goes to chicago he probably makes eight figures trading commodities so he like sounds like this country bumpkin farmer but like you know he’s trading like corn futures and [  ] like that makes a lot of money then maybe 10 years ago he starts this daily newsletter where he writes the whole thing by himself every single day at this point like 17 years he’s done that is it 17 years something like that it’s like some almost 20 years he’s been doing this every day and it makes like something like in the world of 20 million dollars a year in subscription revenue just to read it’s more i think it’s like 30 40 million a year now so i’ve done calls with him and i’m just and this guy who’s like oh hey check this song [  ] out like that’s what he’ll say [Music] okay so uh i haven’t talked to you in like two weeks you had covid yeah dude i had i i can’t even explain what i had i would apologize because i missed so many recordings but in a way you gave me covent because i got coveted because i went to this conference which is you know a decision i made i didn’t really honestly i wasn’t really thinking about it code has just been so present that i wasn’t really like i didn’t do the math of like you know if i go on a plane and i go to a conference with 2000 people what’s gonna happen and so sure enough i go to this conference that sam hooks me up with he’s like sam’s like hey this conference is amazing it’s called farm con these guys who run it there’s super cool story you know it’s awesome and i was like oh i’m in and i was gonna go and i land and i’m like yo i’m here baby let’s do this and sam’s like oh i didn’t go dude i don’t want to get covered well i can’t i cancelled like last minute i i dude like i thought that you knew that i cancelled but like how would i know that because we we had talked about you going and we hadn’t said i don’t know we had not really mentioned that yeah yeah and uh i thought you knew i canceled so i felt horrible but like a week or two prior to that’s like when omnichrome and all this stuff happened and it’s a it’s a farmer’s conference in kansas city my you know i’m from missouri and i was like ooh i think that uh like that coveted will be there yeah i don’t know if i would like it was for sure there it was the you know the the main attendee the main keynote speaker um dude we walked in so i walked in ben went with me and so um we go in and me and ben are literally the only two people in the room with a mask and there’s like 2 000 people in there and i was like oh [  ] i didn’t even really think about it and i was like oh [  ] it’s here um and i was like well the odds of me getting are pretty high but i’m now here so i gotta just make the most of it so anyways basically i go to this conference uh and everything that could happen to get covid happened meaning like it’s like uh conferences in this ballroom great it’s two thousand people in one room all right that’s not so good they don’t have masks on okay next thing that happened i go to the gym in between uh like the sessions we mean ben want to get a workout in we go we meet this guy we’re making small talk and we’re like oh you’re here for the conference he’s like no i’m just quarantining here my girlfriend has coveted so i’m here oh my god i was like bro i just shook your hand and what am i doing and so then this guy my gym buddies got covered i was like oh great and then i get on the plane finally to come back i’m like all right i think i might have made it out unscathed i don’t know i’m feeling okay plane gets stuck on the runway for three hours someone on a plane in a closed tube with a bunch of other people for three hours i was like all right it’s over i got covered and sure enough i get home and uh two days later i get covered now the dumb thing i didn’t do was i didn’t quarantine right away which i should have just done i should have just said hey even if i’m not feeling anything i’ve been around a bunch of people i should just like leave but i was like look i just left my wife at home with the two babies for like you know four days i should come back and help and in trying to help i ended up giving my wife covid then we gave both our babies kovid and so for the last 10 days it’s just been someone in my house has coveted at any given time um and i’ve just been literally i haven’t gone to a computer i haven’t done anything i’ve just been get it taking care of it ben did not get it i think ben had it like a month ago so he somehow came out unscathed did silly get it uh he didn’t go he didn’t i’m going he flaked the night of um and was like actually like it’s super inconvenient to get there i have to like change my flight has like a stopover [  ] this i’m not going uh we’ll do something else so was it and you but you were even though you’re vaccinated you got sick i got pretty i got really sick yeah i got some really sick for three days so let me tell you about my coverage experience i uh i got really sick for three days but it’s just the flu with a side dose of paranoia because it’s like oh this ain’t the flu this is this is coven and so uh definitely you know fever all that good stuff whatever then the babies everybody has kind of the same thing but the bad thing is like i don’t know how you are but i’m like a huge baby when i get sick me too and my wife is like uh you know never gets sick she’s like one of those people just like never gets a cold never has a runny nose nothing and so even with kovid she was like she fought it off pretty good it was like pretty mild you know she was still doing that i think women are generally tougher particularly moms are tougher when it comes to that stuff totally but the hard part is when we both get the same thing and i go down like a you know bag of bricks and she’s still complaining yeah she’s just like what is this why are you why do you need so much sleep right now i’m like i just can’t explain in fact i saw this meme that was so perfect it goes there’s this guy and he goes he goes you know it’s so good that women have to give birth and go through labor because now they understand what happens when a man gets a cold and that’s how it is i’m a huge baby about it and she like toughed it out no problem uh so that was kind of embarrassing did um so how many people how many full-time employees work at your um your company the uh the the the d2c company maybe seven eight full-time and and these in amer americans full-time and you and you like are running not all americans but but you know people who this is their main job they work full-time and when you’re not counting the warehouse staff and do you like do weekly meetings with them and run it like a company or is it really if it’s run like sean like very autonomous everything done via slack very autonomous everything done via slack we have one meeting a week that’s in slack and i just say hey get in this channel right now but we just did it it’s at 10 30 it’s like all right get in this channel right now and i just say all right you everybody here and then they just like emoji react and then i’m like cool this is like a real meeting meaning like don’t go open 10 other tabs like when i say something i want a response within like a second because it’s like a live chat i was like but calls are annoying we all agree calls are annoying so let’s just like do like just humor me let’s try this meeting style so we do it i kind of like it and basically i just say all right what’s everybody’s main priority this week like what matters everyone’s like oh we got to do this this this i said then i’ll be like ah that doesn’t really sound that like that matters that much can we punt that they’re like yeah i guess so and like we just agree on here’s the three or four things that matter this week you’re doing this you’re doing this you’re doing this and then it’s like cool all uh i tell one guy i say hey check in on wednesday and everybody just say how they’re going on their things for the week and then check in on friday and say how did we do for the week that’s it that’s how much time does your wife spend on the company she spends a good amount of time like she’s uh she you know she’s a stay-at-home mom i guess like first job because like so during the day she doesn’t really work on it too much just kind of like on her phone in between you know just like watching the baby but then at night she basically works from 10 p.m when the babies are finally knocked out to 2 or 3 a.m pretty much every night she does that and she works on the business and does the designs and all that stuff so when you guys are both sick how bad like who’s we did no work you just we just like you just have a a a person who you trust and you say just handle it yeah we’re like you know just you do what you can do and then whatever doesn’t get done doesn’t get done we’re not going to worry about it we’re not going to add a stress to our life that like says this week we also have to you know work it’s just impossible so let’s talk about this conference for a second because i have been telling you about this guy for a long time and i think that you sh you humored me and the audience has humored me and they’re like oh that sounds neat but when you got to meet him did you understand what i was saying dude this guy is amazing this guy is amazing and what he’s built is amazing so i want to go through i have a bunch of thoughts but let’s start with with them okay so the conference called farmcon and the families call the van trump family that’s their that’s their name so it’s kevin van trump and jordan van trump uh that’s like the two kind of like core principles that’s the father and son and uh i’m just going to describe what happened when i got there because it wasn’t like a normal conference so a couple unusual things i go in and there’s a normal stage like a conference you know like they got that freaking wallpaper behind it that’s like every sponsor’s logo on step and repeat banner okay cool that everything’s normal but this main speaker kevin van trump is sitting not uh not in a chair he’s got this like mahogany desk that was put on to the stage and he’s sitting in it he looks like a judge of a courtroom so he’s got this humongous like oak wood table that he’s sitting behind in his thing and he’s got a gavel literally and he’s talking into the mic and he it’s just like a free-form agenda so he’ll be like he would just say something he’d be like i walked in and he’s like yeah that’s why i don’t hire any ivy leaguers you know ivy leaguers here’s a problem with ivy leaguers and he’ll just go on a rant there’s like five panelists that are sitting there and then he’ll just like do tell this story and the crowd loves him i loved him he is an amazing charismatic speaker who is smart and very real and he’s very he’s just a very good speaker like his style was so likable i couldn’t i can’t explain the background is this this guy named kevin van trump this is all from memory i met him four or five years ago at a conference and since then we i’ve kind of brought him into our circle of friends he is probably in his 50s mid to late 50s trading floors so he like traded thick southern accent kansas city missouri isn’t really considered the south but it can be pretty country so i don’t know where he’s from so he goes to chicago he probably makes makes a lot of money then maybe 10 years ago he starts this daily newsletter where he writes the whole thing by himself every single day just and this guy he’s like oh hey check this selling [  ] out like that’s what he’ll say he’s like pointing at his new picasso so i’ve done video calls with him and he’s got like this like beautiful like chopper in the background like a fancy customized motorcycle he goes oh we just picked up this song [  ] though we just got this home [  ] here today we really love the picassos and you like that’s how he talks and he’s he now his family uh kevin or jordan his younger son runs like this other business but in this the commodities world this like farming world they are gods and i’ve met a bunch of people who like them and they’re like new york-ish type folks who have like 50 100 million dollars and are like traitors and they like revere him and they love him dude so so have you read any of his newsletters they’re so good yeah i must paint subscribers first they’re like you know it’s like it’s like a 20-page pdf so it’s like not even like a short thing it’s like a long thing and it’s like he basically is writing about what he thinks is going on so uh in the market so he’ll be like you know bean futures or you know rice or corn these different commodities he’s talking about what’s going on is really important for people in agriculture because if you’re a farmer and you’re making you’re growing corn you got to decide do i hold this corn and try to sell it myself do i need to take on some insurance in case the price of corn drops and um should i sell you know all of my corn you know in these futures in this futures market or should i you know should i hedge but should i take a hedged position against what i’m producing and so you have to decide what you’re going to do with your crop that is your like for most people investing is this like side thing it’s like you do your job that earns you your money your business energy your money and then you invest in the stock market whatever they’re two separated things for a farmer these are not separated this is part of the like core thing of what you do is basically managing your risk and these aren’t guys that have like a farm that like they just like get by these are like folks that like supply the corn to like mcdonald’s and we’re talking like they have turnover of 20 30 50 million like they’re here’s that yeah he’s like you know you’ll meet the guy who makes all the rice for chipotle it’s like whoa that’s crazy that’s crazy volume and then i would meet people who were like what you call gentleman farmers they’re basically people who don’t need to farm they just grew up that way and they’re like yeah my family i like living on a farm i want my family to have a farm i farm on my weekends and nights like there’s one guy he’s a ceo of a large company and he was just farming for fun you know nights and weekends and that’s why he was you know like there and it was like such a bad use of like time but it’s not it’s a it’s not a bad use of time because it’s a hobby it’s a pleasurable thing for him what this manual work is like how he relaxes how many people were there so it’s about 1500 people and um so let me explain this guy to their business okay so they have what i’ll call three separate components maybe four okay so there’s the newsletter the paid newsletter that basically you subscribe to you pay a thousand dollars a year and i think i believe i my guess based on some triangulation is that that’s making about 30 to 40 million dollars a year now in annual subscription revenue and he’s writing that you know like we’d be hanging out it was like maybe midnight he’s at the hotel bar or whatever we’re hanging out and he’s and i was like so like you know who on your team writes the letter he’s like he’s like i wish you know i write the letter he’s like i’m going to go right up to my room right after this go write that some [  ] and he’s like you know that’s how he talks yeah he’s like i don’t know why the [  ] i did this he’s like i created a job for myself he’s like i told my kid my son i said you you need to the best job in the world is investing you should invest don’t do what i did i created a job for myself and i have to write this thing every day but you know you know i love it whatever and it’s really ugly have you seen it it’s like it’s not mobile friendly it’s just a pdf and it’s like 3 000 words with like powerpoint uh it’s all substance over style uh there’s a few memes in there which i like uh it’s like you know just some here’s some jokes uh and i think that’s very on broadcasting it’s good the writing is great the writing is really great uh and the insights obviously matter otherwise people wouldn’t be paying for this thing right they’re genuinely getting value and at the conference he’s a god dude people people love this guy they they respect his kind of like knowledge and his content and then they just really like him because again he would say i literally wrote down verbatim things that he was saying because i was like this is just like this is so entertaining like for example um i’m just gonna read you a couple of quotes on uh that he was saying so he’s like i hate hiring ivy leaguers because uh they’re too afraid of failure he’s like they don’t well they’ve done so well their whole life they’re not they’re not used to looking wrong or looking silly you know go try nfts go go go put your hands on the wheel go get go go fall go scrape your knee he’s like that’s how i grew up he’s like my dad would take us in the car he said no no seatbelts baby that’s how we roll he’s like he’s like we’re gonna take some risks we’re gonna get skinned up we’re gonna break some bones we’re gonna fall off the bike he’s like that’s how you gotta treat your kids even if they’re smart kids you gotta he’s like because one of the big concerns is how do you get your kid you’re you’re 60 maybe now and you got your farm your kids 30 they don’t want to take over the farm or they don’t maybe they want to but they don’t know how to do anything well he’s like he’s like you got to segment off a portion of the farm let him fail but let him have the skin in the game um he’s like you know i want to have kids i don’t melt down when the rug gets pulled i want to be able to go to them and say hey things things have changed we’re changing tonight and he’s just like going on this rant and dude i’m sitting there in the crowd and i’m like world star i’m like this is this is such a hype monologue and had nothing to do with whatever they were talking about like bean futures five seconds before that but he would frequently go on these and every time i’m just nodding my head i’m like preach um like we i was at this dinner with them and people were like it was kind of like these guys organized this dinner they were paying for it but then they as you know like sort of what’s what’s that what’s the catch it was we’re going to pitch our idea to kevin and a couple other guys who we want to invest in it and they pitch their idea and he’s like cool so who’s the uh who’s the who’s the audience who’s the customer for this and uh they’re like well you know we’ve done extensive psychographic research here’s a they slid over this thing he’s like psychographic i don’t know what that means man what the [  ] you saying who is the customer and they’re like it’s it’s not democrat he’s like it’s a psychographic profile he’s like no like name them do you know five people who want this product like would this guy want this product hey you over there at the table would you want this product and the guy’s like no i wouldn’t want it and the guys are like kevin you’re not like being open-minded and he’s like i’m trying to help y’all he’s like i’ve heard this idea ten times and it failed i invested in this one it failed investors and why did it fail because there was no customer for this product and he’s like trying to give him real talk and it was so good and the whole time i’m just like wow this guy’s core business instincts are very strong and his delivery method is fearless i just i’m trying to do the impression because i want people to feel like what it felt like to hear this guy off the top of his head it’s so different than corporate america it’s so different than new york sf where everybody’s hedging every word and packaging everything and trying to deliver it and trying to make these [  ] you know like criticism sandwiches where you say a positive thing than a negative thing that a positive thing to like you know deliver the blow whereas he would just say the thing and he did it in a way that came off great i loved it what uh all right so you have a list of a bunch of [  ] that you’ve learned here let’s just rattle them off i found them to be all wildly interesting let’s do a couple things so the rest of his business so he tells me so he goes i’m doing i got i know for sure his build business was doing in the 25 million dollar range years ago right so that so there’s the newsletter component yeah then he’s like well two please by the way i think right and he’s like you know i don’t uh there’s never been a sponsor 15 years john deere comes to me they say we would love to sponsor no trust for the odd he he had these principles he was like these people are going to trust me because i’m not going to be selling them to somebody and so um he was like you know i’m gonna do it this way and i’m gonna stick to my guns and so and he’s never done a never like run ads to advertise this thing it’s all organic word of mouth one person sharing it with another saying you gotta check this thing out forwarding it to somebody else saying hey you see what he’s saying about where the market’s going and then that person’s like [  ] i need these insights and so that’s an amazing you know there’s probably 90 profit 95 profit like on that on that 30 million right i think i like what’s talking about which emails like it’s so raw i think he uses salesforce to send it out right like that’s his email service provider like it’s pretty raw so then the second piece of the business is i think that there’s now a secondary thing that’s happened many many years in which is like a big company will come to them and say hey you know let’s just i’m just gonna for argument’s like chipotle’s like hey we need um we need somebody’s gonna grow soy in this region so he’s just like hey i know like they’re like you know everybody and so he’s like cool yeah i can find you people who can produce what you need and they were like cool if we pay them let’s call it five dollar five dollars a bushel you know we’ll make it 550 and you keep your 50 cents as the as a broker fee so i think that now produces as much as the newsletter so so let’s double it basically let’s tack that on um now the third thing is investing so they basically had this you know they’re like well everybody keeps coming to pitch us ag tech they know they don’t know what the [  ] they’re talking about we know everybody in this space so they then started investing and i think they just had their biggest hit to something called benson hill or benson’s hill or something like that that went public um so you know like the first kind of like you public unicorn that they seated and the last one is the most interesting one of all this is what the sun is doing so yeah ag swag so here’s the back story that he tells about this and i’m not saying anything private like he told us on stage he goes i met a guy who he like moved into my neighborhood type of thing and he used to be you know big shot exec at some company and he’s like cool like what are you doing now he’s like oh i’m uh i’m doing this kind of like either this buyout like leveraged buyout or i’m going to become a ceo of this company called american identity we make t-shirts and hats and he’s like all kind of lame like selling t-shirts now like you’ve done some big [  ] why are you doing that a few years later fast forward that company american identity identity sells to staples for eight billion dollars and he looks at they say what the hell is a that t-shirt company what what the hats custom hats like what what the [  ] and he’s basically like yeah um he’s like who are your biggest customers he was like oh yeah my three biggest customers are cargill adm and john deere and he’s like uniforms what’s that is that are they making uniforms or they’re just making licensed merchandise so like i think by john deere they’re just are printing it for form they’re printed they’re making it for john deere john deere might have employees they have you know two thousand employees they want to say john deere or a vest with a giant green john deere vest or whatever and so he’s like those are your top those are your biggest accounts like those are my buddies um like i know all those guys and so after they sell or whatever is him and his son they create ag swag agricultural swag it’s the same idea but now they go to all those accounts and they say hey you want like vests and and fleece and hats and whatever and you got you know 100 employees in your office in brazil you need to send some stuff too cool we got you and i think this is going to be a really big business also and so they are doing very well he was saying they outgrew their their warehouse they’re trying to you know expand and all this he was telling me so i want to say any of the numbers for that particular you tell me some of just the square footage they need in the warehouse and i know from the ddc space i know if you need that much square footage you are putting out pretty crazy volume so i thought that was amazing as well but what an example of just being a big fish and not even a really small pond right it seems like a niche but it’s like agriculture yeah pretty huge niche you know aggregate like my parents are working this industry and that’s why i like this guys because i got to know them is like the thing that people like guys like you and me and people listening to us were these tech folks and we dismissed this but like literally everyone in america has an onion in their home or a product made of an onion right and you you’re gonna buy it multiple times a week um that’s what my dad does my dad sells onions and i remember people i would make fun of him and he’s like go look in your cabinet you have stuff that i have owned at one point i bet and uh and so it’s not as small as we think oh i mean obviously it’s not like for example the uh the founder of square this guy jim mckevin i want to talk about him too he’s this he was the keynote speaker she comes on the stage he was also a very good speaker i’m and i kind of have a high bar for that kind of thing but he’s he was very impressive and he gets on stage very first thing he says is um just want to say thank you to everybody in this room for feeding my family you know it’s like but it’s just it’s like such an obvious thing but i say yeah of course where all the [  ] we eat comes from somewhere and in my mind this is gonna sound super dumb and ignorant but it’s true which is like before this conference i really spent zero percent of my time thinking about where the heck the food comes where heck food comes from and if you thought of a farmer you probably had stupid stereotypes of like dumb idiots for sure i was like oh and going into this i was like oh i’m going to go meet a bunch of hillbilly like rednecks basically they do talk like that i’m from there they definitely will talk like that but they like are wearing like a 50 000 rolex and when i get there they’re like you know yeah you know put options on bean futures and you know with brazil coming on board with you know i’m gonna i’m gonna take this hedge position against corn and i was like oh wait y’all are like [  ] wall street traders wait what and i was like okay maybe it’s just a couple of these guys and i was like oh and then i would meet guys in the hallway and i’d be like what do you do oh we have my family i was on a farm in south dakota for 40 years okay cool so i was like do you do this like kind of like [  ] soybean soybean oil futures and they’re like yeah you got to and i was like what i was like how do you know he said well we got a broker but like you know it’s key to the business you got you got to be doing it and i was like holy [  ] like you guys are more sophisticated financially than anybody i know like i could go to in silicon valley i go talk to engineers or or angel investors vcs and i could be like hey explain to me how a derivatives contract works or explain to me how a how the corn futures market looks nobody would know what the [  ] they’re talking about nobody would know what to say dude now now okay so you’ve you’ve not made fun of me but you teased me a little bit about like loving trucks and farmers now do you understand why i think it’s so cool like these guys are sophisticated and everything but like the people you and i hang out with in our in our coastal coastal cities they don’t give a [  ] about these folks and i’m like man if you got to make those collide and be awesome right and so a couple couple things like on that note so when i was at one of the dinners they were talking about uh it was the who’s the customer dinner they were they’re talking about something they and something came up they go uh you know how long he’s like how long we’ve been here about whole foods and uh you know plant-based this and oat milk that he’s like this still tiny fringe [  ] he goes america eats cornbread and milk at scale this is what america wants they need how much how much volume is the whole food and then i’m thinking dude in my bubble everybody eats like that everybody eats the fringe [  ] so it was just awareness of like two things one is like in the future maybe what we’re doing ends up becoming more mainstream i do believe that but how not it is is crazy the scale the difference in scale of just like you know corn versus you know the non-whole foods versus whole foods is like to them whole foods was this rounding error and i thought that was hilarious because to me it’s like you know it’s like i don’t know where i shop every day it’s it’s the main thing and again all this is going to sound really dumb but uh i’m dumb that’s i guess the answer when i was there i was learning how dumb i was about everything um there was so many different things like that that i was learning can i just rattle off a couple other things okay so jonathan write us in the chat is this is this i could talk about this all day i think this is the coolest [  ] ever so i’m going to give you a couple of pain points and or business ideas that i saw or heard when i was there or just making up because like oh maybe this so one thing is even though i’m like oh these guys are really sophisticated there’s no way that they want to be that sophisticated about this all these like kind of financial uh products that they have to use for hedging the props they produce and the insurance and all that good stuff so i think that some kind of wealthfront type of robo-advisor that basically just does all the work for them to manage their risk is is going to be like important because every single one of them is like yeah we have a broker we call and we talk to him and he tells us xyz and uh he tells us what he thinks we should be doing and we come up with a position we want to take and then we take it so that to me felt very old and i feel like if somebody has a real advisor thing that’s kevin trump had an idea he goes i want to make a rally road and i think we’ve talked about rally road on here which is basically rally road is like this app you open up and you can buy a fraction of cool memorabilia so it’d be like a sweet old car or first edition harry potter signed book set it’s awesome in my opinion rally road has one of the best apps i’ve seen in like the last two or three years super nice app company i wish i invested in honestly uh i’ve been i feel like i’ve been saying that for a year probably should have just done it at this point but really cool product really cool app so he was saying he’s like i feel like he’s like i think we could do rally road just for our stuff and i was like what do you mean he’s like you know just like the the original you know motorcycle from dukes and hazards or you know and again i’m all the references flew over my head he said them really fast but like it was basically just just cool hicks [  ] yeah and um and i was like oh that’s probably actually a really good idea because these guys got money and they care about this stuff and there’s like a network effect of just speaking to that audience dude didn’t i tell you um so you know how i used to work for the show american pickers right do you do i don’t you were not in the market for that because you were in uh were you in australia at the time whatever but you if if the show was around now you wouldn’t watch that you don’t fit that that bill but do you know that that show america so for those listening i used to work for the show american pickers it’s basically like pawn stars would go up what did you do for them so the main guy in the show his name is mike wolf he’s the main character he owned this store and it was called picking and so you go and you just knock on doors and you go to barnes and you find old memorabilia and you either sell it in your own stores or you sell it to antique shops or you sell it on ebay and like the antique shops they have to get it from somewhere they get it from pickers this guy like would buy old bike bicycles that’s a big market or he would buy like a old 1936 harley for 10 grand and sell it for 30 grand that type of stuff and he owned the store and he started filming himself pre-youtube for like five years to make the show popular pitching it to the history channel year after year after year getting declined finally they said all right this is cool he’s a good-looking guy charismatic guy they pick up the show he gets he was not rich off the pick and stuff but he was like making a living gets rich because he licenses the show he owns he’s the producer he owned all the rights i work at the store where we would sell the stuff that he bought the his picks but so many people would come to the store that basically we sold 30 grand a day of t-shirts and shot glasses and because he was like eventually he wouldn’t even sell the picks anymore because he was like i need i need stuff for people to look at when they’re in the store and he probably made um i mean his business was probably doing 30 40 million dollars a year off all of his whole office stuff and when the show was on when the show was live it’s still live now but it’s past its heyday when it was live we were the second or third most popular show on tv on all of tv and we would have people flying from all over the world just to come and look at the stuff that i mean i would have i helped run the store but like half the time i was just holding the door and making sure that we weren’t at capacity and um the reason i’m bringing this up is this whole rally road for middle america [  ] this is the real stuff and like buying like these rare baseball cars or whatever it is that’s the fringe and rally road has built a great business on top of that exactly and by the way if you were going to start this i would i i’d email sam and cc me just so i didn’t get to know but b i would go to these guys like mike wolf i would go find these kind of like all-american influencers and i would use them to help promote the app and help get them all get them on board to to grow this thing and i think this is kind of like you go where nobody else is fishing i think there’s just not much competition to build technology products in that space um let me tell you a couple other ideas that were that were in there so um any kind of fintech for farmers so part of it’s like this wealth front idea but also just like i’ve invested in six companies that are all just variations of like you know brex or mercury bank so basically like there’s two startups that got big that were in the that were serving entrepreneurs serving tech startups one is mercury which is just saying hey instead of going and using bank of america or wells fargo just use mercury as your bank right we have a slick interface it’s a mobile app you never got to talk to a banker you know free wire transfer but it’s not really a bank it’s um they’re partnering with another bank and they just layer their branding on top of that they’re on top exactly um but they’ve done really well they’re now valued over a billion dollars you know this guy who built it mod he’s kind of in our in our friends group he’s awesome and um yeah he’s great he came on the pod so uh you know so so mercury was bank for tech startups and then brex was visa for tech startups same thing not you know they’re built on top of the visa rails or the mastercard rails or whatever but it’s just a credit card for startups and it was taking advantage of like hey we understand startups so like for example you might be a startup that’s raised 10 million dollars of venture capital but your credit card limit is 5 000 because the bank’s like dude you have no income no history no nothing no credit like you know we can’t give you money and there’s like dude i just raised 10 million dollars i have the money in the bank spend because they know that startups spend most their money on ad spend exactly like that or things like um you know just the fact like hey you can fill out the application online you don’t have to talk to human and it’ll be like sent to you in two days or like you know you want this to like easily autofill online like there’s do little stuff that makes it like work well for that oh mercury for farmers brex became a multi-billion dollar thing mercury did and i’ve been i’ve now invested in versions of either mercury or bricks for teenagers for teens in india four businesses in india for canadians creators is the one that everyone for creators i did that one creators make this for food creators this it would be it’d be so much better to do this yeah it’d be yeah it’s gonna be crazy so we call farmers that’s what we call farmers we’re gonna rebrand farming as the creator economy they’re just creating food yeah yeah seed creators um dude it’s so much that would be such a better company and they’re spending a lot of money right because like all of it the equipment the like you know this the fertilizers these are like huge bulk purchases my cousins i have an aunt and cousin who it’s a mom and son they have 1500 acres with like a thousand cattle or so and i’ve gone out and hung out with them and so they basically raised bowls to it’s called bucking bowls so like at a rodeo the bowl that is like it’s called that that bowl is bucking and at a rodeo the guy the cowboy who stays on wins money and the bull that bucks the hardest wins money and you can also make money by if you have a really good buck and bowl you get money by getting its semen out there and all the females they kill and turn into beef and they make a living doing this they’re i don’t they’re probably millionaires but uh they are [  ] hard workers and when they walk around places like during a work day because like when you’re a farmer you’re constantly driving to get feed whatever they’ll have 20 g’s on them in cash wow like they just have just like fat loads like you just need or like when they go to the road rappers and farmers dude when dude when they go to the rodeo i’ve seen them they have like a they’ve had like 10 grand on them because they got to like buy this while they’re there they do this they got to make their bet anyway these farmers have [  ] loads of cash because they are they’re still doing stuff with cash so like this is interesting it’s a great market yeah uh the other one if uh automation so i think the number one thing that was on everybody’s mind is automation how do we how do we get more automation so i think from the beginning technology has helped farms which is like you know before there was tractors everything was like you know horse pulled you know or whatever and then tractors come out it becomes a big deal and john deere is trying to do self-driving tractors and everybody’s trying to do automation and so i think if you’re sitting at mit or you’re at carnegie mellon and you’re in some robotics lab and you’re like okay i can keep making like you know things that i understand that from you know this gadget that like turns off my light switch in my room because i don’t like to get up once i lay down yeah so that’s what i’m gonna do it’s like dude instead go to a farm for like three weeks and just watch what’s going on and then from there come up with the automations and stuff you want to pull i’ve invested in a few companies in that space um so it’s automations and precision agriculture they call it so um which i i think automation falls under precision agriculture that’s like the the term i believe and uh it’s incredibly interesting so like you talk about like automated car autonomous cars autonomous tractors is incredibly intriguing right there’s also like sensors so just like soil qualities like the soil health is like one of the most important things if your soil health is bad your crop is [  ] and so just being able to come up with models where you can go put sensors in the ground and get real-time soil health data um and alert people hey this plot in this area is not going to grow very well because of this that also seemed like a big deal so those are some ideas last one is family succession planning so one of the biggest things was like how do you pass down your farm because if your kids don’t want to do it and increasingly you know kids don’t want to do it what the heck are you going to do with this farm uh and so there’s like places that you can sell farms so i think that was one opportunity there’s creating your estate your will and all that stuff there’s renting it out to other people there was just a whole bunch of stuff around okay if billions of dollars of farms is going to trade hands in the next like 10 10 years who’s going to be in the middle of that um and i think working with remember one we had one episode where we talked about picking your customer and we were talking about this company user voice or user testing which one did your mom work for user testing and i was like i think that’s so cool because it gives people like your mom like moms who raise kids and don’t can’t have full-time jobs it gives them work that’s admirable that’s exciting that’s incredibly motivating i think you could i would easily put farmers in that same situation um or in that same category where it would be really exciting and fun to work with those guys right right totally uh there was a couple of startups that i liked one was called acre trader it said these guys now they’ve raised like 60 million bucks i think peter thiel invested in them and basically it’s just fractional land ownership of farms so the idea is you can buy i could go on there today and i could put down a thousand dollars and buy a piece of a farm in north dakota and i can make eight to eleven percent a year uh on that thing and i could diversify i could own pieces of five farms in five different states i do five different things and then there’s a farmer on the farm that does the work that’s leasing the farm from you you’re just owning the land and these guys i think the average farm that they were doing was like two million dollars in size uh and they did like 80 farms last year or something like that so i was like okay that’s actually pretty good like they buy they basically buy the land and then fractionally sell it off and they take a broker fee plus they take a like management fee of 0.75 a year on top of that just to manage the the just to be the property manager of the land so it sounds like this conference is badass you you it changed your perspective on some stuff for sure in fact i actually just want to say uh conferences in general i think that the general rap is conferences ways to time you’ll see that a lot on twitter especially from smart people people say either the exact opposite for you i think conferences are pure [  ] alpha meaning i think there’s so much gains to be had at conferences number one you leave your routine and that’s just frees the mind to just like get out of the like get yourself out of the weeds and get somewhere else then when you meet somebody at a conference there’s like just meeting people in person like it’s so crazy you don’t have to do anything you know that i met kevin i spoke at a conference and i was just hanging out in the lobby and kevin van trump came up to me and he was wearing cowboy boots and a ramones t-shirt and i thought that he was like a weirdo like i did think that he was legit but he was like talking like a big game not like bragging but kinda like he told me his business and he had i could he had like a hundred thousand dollar watch on and i was like wait you’re telling me he’s like yeah i got 20 000 subscribers i was like oh sick you guys make money through ads he goes oh no i paid subscription i was like wait who are you so i uh by the way he remembered you he gave a great intro when he was introducing me he’s like i met this guy sam he used to work for american pickers and bo and he just gave he told the whole conference about you and how great you were it’s awesome and so anyway i met kevin at a conference which now you’ve been brought into the fold this is going to influence you in some capacity you’re going to bring other people into the fold that’s why conferences are cool conference is cool secondly go to weird conference so if you just keep going to the same insular if you like i actually think that going to conferences that are not your industry something that nobody really does and i’ve always done like i went to i remember like a restaurant trade show conference and i’ve been to a gym equipment gym owners conference and i’ve been to and when you go you just meet a whole bunch of people from a different totally different walk of life you see what are they thinking about what are they what are their uh what are the problems these guys are worried about uh who are and you you know i’m sure out of this i’ll get some investors for my fund i’ll get some new ideas i’ll get i’ll get some new perspective and it just makes you a more interesting person and so i would highly recommend going to trade shows specifically but like just different industry niches that are not yours and just go go to a sneaker conference and just be like oh what the hell are these sneaker heads doing like who are these people and what do they do yeah i know it’s like a luxury if you if you have the time but um if you work remotely anyways go to one of these things spend four hours on the floor and then spend the other five hours or whatever at night you know working and just work from there for the week um or if you’re young and you don’t know what to what to do don’t just take a job like go dabble go travel around to three of these and you’ll just have like a totally different lens of things so so i think that’s like a hack that you know i wanted to bring up uh yeah it’s crazy by the way these guys the farmers the best thing i got from them was their little one-liners like they were one guy was telling the story about this investment he lost a bunny bunch of money on people were like damn you like that like holy [  ] you must have lost a lot he it was a sad day but you know that’s why johnny walker makes a blue and yeah you know you just like move on i was just like i’m writing these down like these are bars dude these guys are these guys are amazing can we um are we allowed to talk about i think so why not all right let’s talk about so do you want to give the bat we might want to bleep out his name so let’s let’s bleep out his name well let’s talk about my friend well let’s let we’ll ask him after this but all right we um he there’s this guy named i didn’t really know much about him somehow i got brought into this group chat that you’re in and in a weird way i feel like i’m good friends with them now even though we’ve only texted yeah he uh how does he talk about what happened over the weekend about this app okay so um so basically says here’s his short story he’s built a couple of like products honestly never really had a big hit um him and his friends have been working on they were working on a startup or they’re working as a startup for a number of years and they’re just grinding running test after test they’re really building a lot of stuff in the social space so he learned a lot of like kind of the he like cut his teeth in trying to build the next twitter next tick tock next whatever right and the they were about to fail the last thing they built the hail mary was they were like oh let’s just create this like kind of like quiz app this like superlatives app where it’s like oh who at your high school is most likely to you know become a professional dancer or like you know go to jail or whatever and it goes viral and it’s called tbh and it goes viral it hits like number one in the app store because this the flow is basically you you open the app you start answering these questions about your friends they would text your friends being like hey sean said you’re most likely to x click here to see what else he said i was like oh dude i’m going to click that and then you click that and then it would go on something something along those lines so tbh goes viral facebook ends up buying it smart move by i kind of knew this thing doesn’t have like you know legs to actually be the next hit social app but it made them like you know a good not like i i don’t think it sold for what it was reported as yeah it’s like a hundred million dollars i think but it made you know a lifetime of money yeah exactly so these guys they pull it off in the end right so they went from like literally they were about to shut it down he’s like [  ] it let’s just launch this last thing and um and that thing hits so then he goes to facebook he stays there for like [  ] four full four years so he hits the full vest and he’s he the whole time i don’t know he’s probably bored and he’s just on twitter and he’s like he’s what people call [  ] posting which is basically like you know just posting jokes on twitter and oftentimes making fun of the tech industry so making fun of the stuff that people in the tech industry are doing and um so anyways he you know people like to follow him because he’s funny so over the weekend so he he basically said he tweeted something out last week that was hey i’m working on i’m going to work on a new project i finally like left facebook whatever um i’m working on a new project i want to work with a designer uh if like i’m looking for a founding designer if you want to like you know build something amazing work with a team that’s built you know built apps blah blah blah uh you know dm me something along those lines and when he quit and announced that he was quitting at facebook it said i’ve been at facebook they bought my app i’ve been there for four years um it really was just um there was a lot happen and i want to give a thread on everything that i learned any and and it pointed down down like the down emoji and there was no other threat that was nothing there yeah and it was hilarious here’s what i learned my four years of facebook nothing um and so yeah that was hilarious and so people are like oh people generally are excited about next your thing especially all the kind of like venture investors and angel investors this is kind of the entrepreneur you like to back which is somebody who you think is smart who um is a serial entrepreneur so not their first rodeo but also hasn’t had the big win so they still have a huge chip on their shoulder and want to want to make it big so that’s like a great entrepreneur to invest in and he’s pretty well networked and pretty well respected so people want to invest in it so he tweets that thing out looking for a designer and then somebody else said uh somebody two days later just tweets like i saw uh you know a mock-up of a new app like holy [  ] it’s gonna like change everything and this guy also is like a [  ] poster this this guy uh i think in his hands like another cohen or something like that and um and by the way you’ve seen the the image that he’s talking about he’s posted in our in our text thread before but like you know here’s an idea like i might make this thing and and if i put it correctly it wasn’t even like it’s not a business it’s like it’s like a it’s just like a silly idea and it’s a high-level idea still he’s still ideating he doesn’t exactly yeah so anyways people then start memeing that guy they’re like i just saw a new app um new app for the first time and you know this work that i’ve had on my toe for years just went away and like you know the next person would be like you know uh i showed it to eight children who were starving and now they’re you know they’re not hungry anymore and so this goes viral as a uh as like a meme on twitter i’m gonna read you some of them that were there the good ones they were great they were great let’s see um there was guys saying like we’re happy to announce that it was andrew chen we’re happy to announce that we just led an uh a hundred million dollar round new app right i can’t believe they’re extending um i just got to a session with my therapist she ended up asking me for tips on how to get allocation into a new company and so just became this like meme in the tech industry and then a lot of people were seeing it like what’s this app and so and by the way this this idea this like kind of like growth hack it was accidental a but b really effective and it drummed up a bunch of interest and a bunch of hype around what this new app could be and so what he did was he created an nft with like uh i think he’s still 16 he’s got oh my god he’s got this really stupid like image for his twitter picture but it’s kind of like funny uh and he made different twitter images based off of his and 69 of them and in if you bought one you get early access as a beta user to his app right i don’t know was that the promise i didn’t know yeah that’s the promise look at the floor price of what those are so he goes ladies and gentlemen i’d like to introduce leadership hosting club a collection of 69 owners will get access to quote app parentheses there is no app it is now available on amazing and so he links it and it sells out um as nfts do and i think he made what did he make off this thing the floor has dropped so anybody who bought this i think is probably not doing so hot um the floor is now only 0.36 e so that’s not great but anyway it’s still a thousand dollars so 69 pictures per thousand dollars okay not bad so here’s what i want to ask you okay i want to ask you a question because you have done something similar i didn’t know before you and i you introduced me to him um i knew him as a guy who built an app it seems like people revere him like they consider him an expert on consumer apps which not saying that he isn’t he certainly is pretty successful but also what the [  ] but but also like his reputation like is so big where he’s like yeah is anyone that good that’s kind of what i’m gonna get yeah and you’ve done a good job of that as well of creating this like mystique uh almost out of nothing right not that like you weren’t successful ahead of time but like you’ve done a really good job of building what i sold my startup for less than what my investors had put in now you know the way it worked you know the team still did well and i made good money off of it but like that’s not that’s the that’s not the definition of a successful business because there’s a lot of people that have sold their companies for a lot of money we have a we have a handful of buddies that are like uber rich no one [  ] knows who they are and like even if they told you that what they did you’d have to like they’d have to beg to speak at a conference whereas guys like you you’ve got like the daily show reaching out to you you’ve got celebrities reaching out to you who want to like get on board with you and then the same thing because you can make it sound good i could say i sold my sold my last startup to amazon yeah technically i did technically i made money but like oh that’s not it that doesn’t make it a like a huge success you know it doesn’t make me like a thought leader i don’t think that’s the right way to say it because that you you’re you’re acting like you’re tricking people because you’ve never tricked anyone ever and i don’t think as either but what you’ve done is you you’ve both done this really good job of creating a little bit of mystique about and what i want to know is you can use the example and then you how does someone i guess i’m asking for myself because how do you create so much of this like brand equity uh like you guys have well i think in both cases it’s basically you put out you put your thoughts on blast so you know they’re the real answer and by the way i say that not to make fun of the app i think did sell for a profit so good good for them i’m saying i know that i’ve gotten disproportionate credit for my track record of success when in reality like the best thing i’ve built is this d2c company that i don’t tell anybody the name of that’s the profitable business that’s doing eight figures a year but like that’s not actually why people my reputation came before that so you know that’s kind of weird right so where does the reputation actually come from it comes from two things one is you meet people in real life so like you go meet you know the investors at these different big funds or uh ceos of different companies and when they’re talking to you they’re making an independent assessment of your love your caliber your based on your thoughts so right so so first it’s like a hand-to-hand combat thing you meet a bunch of people you earn their respect one-on-one by by you know when they’re talking about some deal they’re doing or a company they’re building you you actually contribute by adding value by pointing out things or or giving them criticism or or giving them feedback on what’s really great um or identifying to them other things that are really cool and they say wow this guy really you know i i got a lot out of this conversation so you do that with like 300 people and those people matter right because they have themselves influence and trust so for example you know uh like josh element is a good example this guy was he was early on at linkedin at facebook at twitter at robin hood uh like earlier sean meaning he was he was like head of growth at a bunch of these companies yeah yeah yeah he’s a big deal he’s been on our podcast and so he’s got you know tremendous people have a tremendous amount of respect for him because he’s had a tremendous career well both and i have you know on separate occasions met you know met with josh and we when we’re talking about our startup and whether our startup succeeded or failed josh knows look you’re playing in the sort of like the startup lottery startup olympics a startup can fail and an entrepreneur can still be really great and if out of that conversation josh josh walks away thinking oh this person’s really smart and then they connect you to some other people that they they know and those people say wow josh thanks for the intro sean was really great you develop a reputation amongst people who have a reputation so that’s the first step through real-life interactions you develop a reputation with people who already have a reputation so that they will retweet your stuff so that they will vouch for you when you have a project or you’re doing something and that that goes a long way in the marketplace uh so like for example i’ve had josh or biology or different people who have their own big following and their own respect if they share me or they they they say this person’s great then a whole bunch of other people just inherit that reputation they they say oh okay if josh says he’s great he’s great biology says he’s great such a unique way of it’s almost like credibility hacking or something like but that’s the thing i think is important is like i’m telling you how the mechanic works but there’s the thing you can’t just the reason it’s not a hack is because your your thoughts actually have to be interesting you have to actually hack like you’re you’re a hack i just mean like you’re you’re you’re the uh getting the desired the the process of getting to the desired outcome right the second thing is we both created content so now tweets are mostly making fun of people who create content and threads and teach courses but before that he was doing it himself right he was he himself was saying you know when you’re building a social app blah blah or here’s how we grew inside high schools for tbh and i why did i respect him because he released this this memo actually got leaked from inside facebook oh yeah yeah yeah and the memo basically said he was like hey guys at facebook here’s some of the stuff we did to grow amongst teenagers and i know facebook wants to grow amongst teens here’s some stuff we do tbh for example for every high school we would create an instagram account for branded to the high school so it’d be like you know mckinley high you know secrets and that’s the instagram account and it would be locked and we would follow anybody who had mckinley high in their profile then they would follow it you know 40 of people would follow us back they would request to follow but we were private we wouldn’t approve anybody’s request then at 4 pm when everybody got out of school one day we would accept all the requests so everybody simultaneously would get a notification about our account so they would all go check it out and then they would all see the link to download the app and then they would download the app and then with and then as they were downloading that they’d get notifications that their friends are all downloading the app today and it felt like a big deal and that’s how we hacked distribution into high schools i similarly have told actually a very similar story about how we would go get our goal was always to get half of a high school to download our app in one day we did it a completely different way but i’ve shared that on podcasts different places or on twitter threads and people read that and they’re like oh [  ] this guy’s smart that’s a really smart growth tactic this guy really understands growth this guy really understands teens this guy really understands social and if so if you just if i like it’s that uh quote my buddy jason hitchcock told me once he goes you say one interesting thing i say huh that’s interesting you say two interesting things like ah those are interesting you say three interesting things i say [  ] this guy’s interesting and uh that’s really what you gotta do with content is you have to if you say three original interesting things around one topic whether it’s bitcoin or media or robotics or whatever if i get three interesting things from you i’ll in my brain i will assign that tag to you this guy’s interesting worth watching and then if other people endorse it and say this is interesting it goes even faster so this is this is exciting to me i think this is a fire episode i’m not gonna i don’t want to talk about it entirely right now because i think we should rap here i so last weekend when you were sick so you probably didn’t see this i tweeted out about sdrs so short-term rental stuff did you happen to see that i saw it and i followed what you were talking about look super interesting your facebook group i want to hear more about that uh so i’ll save it for another app if you want we’ll save it but did you join the group i didn’t join the group at no i didn’t know the names it’s called sam’s sdr’s or something yeah i just made it in the car like my sarah was driving and i just made it in the car such a smart way to do things by the way like it’s gonna sound super simple like i just made this thing because you were curious and wanted to learn about it right like you hadn’t decided to do it yeah but it’s well i have now but i’m still looking for property though but i um sam’s str crew yeah i’ll let you in and there’s like a thousand or 1500 people it’s mostly all tech guys dude i’ve met some guys did you get these people you tweeted it out just the tweet that’s it only that it’s all tech guys like it’s that guy aj uh who owns uh the the pet business and then it’s nathan barry it’s marshall haas i there’s there’s guys in there that i’ve met guys that are like billionaires like who have sold or rather they’ve sold company for a billion dollars i met one guy who’s making half a million a month in profit he’s paying himself six million dollars a year off of his uh a handful of uh yeah there’s another guy in there who owns 50 million dollars worth of them it’s crazy i’m learning all this in this [  ] group it’s amazing so you’re gonna have to browse through that and i’ll tell you some more we’ll start with that one next time does that interest you dude of course it interests me yeah that’s great it’s crazy who would have thought about about short-term rentals and how they’re crushing it it’s the highest level of interest in me which is where you say what am i doing with my life why don’t i do that all right you raise your question your own life is the highest form of interest the thing is the thing is is that like you you don’t need to quote be doing it you just need to have done it and there is a world where you not quite set it and forget it but like you just like it’s not like you need to do [  ] all the time to it right and so i would say like one of the criticisms not a criticism but the one uh my feedback for sean and how sean should like evolve maybe is to sometimes invest in some of these a little bit more boring stable things at least just a tiny portion of your of your money and like this is like a really interesting asset class have i told you about steady no this is sweet i think you’ll like it so i i actually i think the website is cool steady i want to say it’s deadly.capital or steadycapital.com one second let me pull it up if i just type in study okay do steady dot capital s-t-e-a-d-y how do most tell me what you see it says it’s a black screen and it says how do most millionaires build their wealth 90 of millionaires invest in real estate study lets you earn passive income from real estate for 100 okay and you invest in okay so seti is a web dashboard for retail investors to buy shares of income generating commercial real estate commercial real estate make investments and senior financial reports in our dashboard and get monthly deposits from your investments directly to your bank account we do not offer high addressing this is the part i wanted you to read yes we do not offer hi this is this is really good copy we do not offer high adrenal investments we don’t have an app designed to keep your eyes glued to your phone we pursue steady returns over hype we are the tortoise in a race full of hairs so beautiful so good so so i read this so this guy i used to play pick up basketball with her he was on my like intramural basketball team he that’s got dylan he created this company i just kind of saw his twitter and i was like oh what’s the guy dylan up to like and i didn’t even know he’s a startup guy like he’s just a dude we used to play ball with and um has like steady capital what’s that and i read this landing page i was like dude what is this i gotta invest literally so i invested in both his company as well as i started putting my money into steady this is why you invested in steady yeah cause i was like dude this this is what i want i was like i want to own i want to have real estate income coming in but i don’t want to do the work of like going and finding a property diligencing it underwriting it taking out a loan for myself buying the property managing the property all that good stuff so what these guys do is they basically hand pick um sponsors so they’ll have like um guys who have a good track record in commercial real estate commercials they’ll be like oh this guy buys warehouses in the middle of texas and they basically diligence the properties for you and then all you do so what i do i just said auto invest so i just say five thousand dollars a month just as a starting point i was like i’m gonna give it five grand a month into commercial real estate cool over the this year i’ll have 60 grand put into this and then it just shows me it’s like cool you’re gonna be you’re gonna break even in 18 months but you’re going to get your first check next month the you know basically what they do is they go to that sponsor they say hey you know you’re going to raise money for this deal anyways give us half a million bucks we have this cadre of investors we come in as one line item on your thing and we become an investor and then you just like we our investors want passive income through real estate investing and he’s like he’s trying to do like the robin hood model where it’s like robin hood made it where there was no fee you could invest for a very small amount of money so it’s like normally real estate has pretty high barriers to entry for knowledge as well as the amount of money you have to put in so his mission is like i want to make real estate as you know investable for even a hundred dollars and even a hundred dollars if you’re earning eight percent you’re great you’ll earn eight dollars of passive income and it’s gonna be big you think it looks cool i think it’s a really hard business to do because you know you have to it’s like a two-sided market you have to have really you know quality deals but honestly like these aren’t like like for example with startup investing i don’t just give my money to anybody for startup investing because i’m like dude are your deals any good or they all dog [  ] with real estate it’s like these are like the property there’s so much data about the property it’s collateralized by the property the the guy’s got a track record you’re not looking for the next uber the thousand x return you’re looking for something that’s gonna generate eight to ten percent a year or eight to fifteen percent a year cool like that’s doable that’s not that doesn’t take a miracle so i really like steady uh i think there’s currently a waitlist or whatever people have to like dude i just signed up for it it looks sick oh yeah i’ll email the guy to get you in if people want to do it they should do it i think it’s real i think it’s really good for people uh like i’ve had i’ve had multiple people asked invest in my startup fund and i just say no i’m like if you’re not already wealthy don’t do this because this don’t use this as the way to get wealthy you have much smarter paths to get there if you already have if you’re already you know a multi-millionaire cool i you should do this then to get some exposure to startups but i think for most people getting exposure to passive income real estate is a much better place to to build wealth if you’re not already wealthy through your business or yeah that’s the this is a good episode i’m interested in city i have a whole bunch of other topics still so i’ll save those for wednesday i appreciate you holding down the fort while i was uh it was hard it was hard i think like i had to do it with ben and ben’s great and but i had then i did it with noah and noah’s great but you and i are i mean you’re talented which i talk about all the time you and i together are talented and it was very hard with it was way harder without it it was work i love to hear it i love to be needed it was work dude it was work and like i thought there’s been times where i’m like oh [  ] i could just i could handle this it was work it was like i felt like i was working by the way if people haven’t listened to the episode you did with ben on the silk road it’s on our feed it’s a special i think it’s called special episode silk road i don’t know what it’s called go listen to that i listened to that while i was sick i [  ] loved it uh because i’ve been meaning to read american kingpin for so long you told me was so good and i’m just like [  ] up not reading it and uh so listening to that gave me my fix and it it’s like you know the best kind of netflix shows where after it’s done you then go down the rabbit hole and research more for like an hour on your phone in the middle of the night under the covers like that’s what i was doing about so dude after that one i think we were prepared for 45 minutes it wasn’t a lot but we were both so fascinated by that topic and i think you something happened where you weren’t able to come and we found last minute and we’re like let’s just do this ben and so we’re gonna do another one on uh a guy called i forget the there’s another version there’s another like juicy one but uh i just bought the book i’m gonna go read it and like do it that’s those episodes were fun and ben’s really good at that stuff yeah exactly and you guys play off each other really well the one thing i really wanted to know because while you’re here i’ll get how did they catch him so you had said like basically they traced his uh you said okay he had he he had originally posted on this forum saying ah yes hey has anybody seen this thing and then also that um that they you know caught him in the library right down the street from you so i got those bits but i wanted to yeah i know it was him yeah and um yeah like i think there was a bunch of details about like the investigation like that the cop chase basically uh yeah so basically was there more there it was you know it’s so funny there’s this episode of south park where they’re trying to like track this terrorist and the boys are like dude just like do a reverse google search and like like just use google and that’s what they did and so the very first post ever about the silk road was written from a username and that same username posted a few weeks prior to stack overflow saying i’m building a website that is trying to do this yeah can you please email me ross albright gmail.com and then they like did they like used a web archive because once they once he once ross caught his air he changed his username from like altoid to like frosty or something like that but it was on the web where like he was asking he used a username to post about i’ve created a website or no sorry he created username it says has anyone heard about this new thing called silk road and that was the first time anyone ever mentioned it but just weeks prior that same username asked about like how to build an exchange or something like that and then they found out who this ross guy was and then they realized that um oh we just like went to this guy’s house recently as homeland security because he ordered like 18 ids with his picture but for like different states with different names let’s keep an eye on him and they found out basically was like all right whenever and so they had a fake fb they had an fbi guy become an employee of the silk road right and ross or dread pirate roberts the owner would say all right i gotta log off to go blank they noticed that ross would walk out of his house and go for a walk right like they they just tracked him or they’re like all right i gotta go to dominican republic to do blank and they’re like oh ross is in dominican republic on vacation according to his facebook right and so they knew the the fbi the day he was arrested he got arrested in the library right down the street from my house in glen park and they said basically the fbi was do not arrest them we got to get a swat team and they’re like dog he’s on his computer right now we’re chatting with him and they like tackle them right like logged in this second we know we’re having a conversation with them and so they had two fbi agents he was sitting at a chair uh in the science of this library that i used to go to he was sitting at a desk in a chair they go they had two fbi agents dressed as kind of homeless people go right behind him and get into a fight where the guy was like [  ] what are you doing here and the lady was like [  ] you man you don’t know like you know like they got like a domestic disturbance and so he turns his back and when he turns his back the other fbi agents one tackles him and the other one swipes his computer from his desk and runs it straight to the van and they plug it they already had they knew that he was using a pc they had the outlet right there they turned the video camera on and they start filming them they go look here’s the [  ] he’s on the dashboard right now as we speak here’s us we’re literally just talking to him and they plug a usb in and they like they get a lot of the stuff out before the computer goes to sleep and is locked and so that how is there no movie like i know there’s like a kind of a shitty movie why isn’t there an amazing movie about this there needs to be it’s such a good story the the book american kingpin is the best book i’ve read in years and years is such a fascinating story and it’s also as we said in the podcast it’s incredibly challenging story for someone like me because this guy ross looks like me right like when you hear about gangsters and [  ] they’re usually like poor often times minorities and like well that’s like the other that person’s not you know i i don’t i don’t relate to that person ross was uh from a good family a white guy a good looking dude who lived in san francisco played on computers had these ideals of like i want to help the world you’re like oh he’s just like me right but he’s a [ __ ] criminal who tried to like supposedly wanted to kill people and sold more drugs than al capone and so it makes you question like what’s right and what’s wrong yeah dude it’s so good go listen to the episode if you if you like that little bit but it was really good so that that definitely got me through one of the one of the coveted fever nights i mean i’m in i got my fever going i’m listening to the silk road i got all kinds of crazy ideas in my head it was awesome all right that’s the episode oh um we have to do one thing before we before we go so we um two or three weeks four weeks ago at this point we did a contest on tick tock where we were gonna give five thousand dollars to at least one person who created videos about using our youtube videos and chopped them up and posted them on whatever platform and used our clips so the end result on tick tock alone are hashtags in like the first two weeks got something like 30 million views do you know that damn um and we’re giving jonathan confirm in the chat are we giving it two to the people that i think it’s the cartoon let me know but the first guy that we’re yeah okay and it’s the the first guy we’re giving it to his name on tick tock i believe was mfm minis i think his name is michael and he posted a bunch of videos a few of them got more than a million views his msm cuts right i’m sorry is it oh yeah i can’t get that wrong because there’s an mfn minis as well jonathan tell me exactly who the winner is in the chat i can’t get that wrong mfm cuts is the winner and this person got something like so mfm cuts that’s the winner mfn cuts that’s the winner this person got like 30 000 followers on their tick tock channel in like 10 or 15 days millions of views they won and then the second place person who also gets five thousand dollars i think they’re called um toon pods is that what they’re called say it again pod tune mr pod tune so they turned podcasts into cartoons like south park style we’ve retweeted a couple of them because they’re awesome and they are hilarious they are really good so the best one was where i was making fun of you for not wearing a shirt hilarious really good i have a feeling both of these guys are gonna end up making a lot of money by uh turning this into a business and i bet they already have yeah exactly um good job good job by by the way mfm cuts the guy he is in university still when i emailed them he’s 19. i love it uh good job by them and so can are is this still going can people still end like win next month a different like a different person could win or no yeah we’re gonna keep doing it we gotta wait i gotta wait till jonathan tells me we’re allowed to announce it but we are going to continue doing it because we saw uh in december our podcast basically in november we were like just shy of a million in december we basically skipped over a million and went straight to two million and i think that that tick tock thing was one of the reasons why it happened one of a couple reasons yeah and did we do this other winner two the 60 minute thing we’ll announce that next time okay sounds good uh all right i gotta go good stuff good seeing you again all right i’ll touch that episode