Tech Startup Ideas for the Farmer Economy

so the background is this this guy named kevin van trump he is probably in his fifties late mid to late fifties and he basically i think he worked in chicago on like commodities like trading floor so he like traded commodities but he's got a relatively fixed southern accent right so he goes to chicago he probably makes eight figures trading commodities so he like sounds like this country bump farmer but like you know he's trading like corn features and shit like that it makes a lot of money then maybe ten years ago he starts this daily newsletter where he writes the whole thing by himself every single day at this point like seventeen years he's done that is it seventeen years something like that it's like some almost twenty years he's been doing this every day and it makes like something like in the world of twenty million dollars a year in subscription revenue just to read more more zoom i i think it's like thirty forty million here now so i've done calls with him and i'm just and and this guy he's like oh hey check this song bitch out like that's a whole yeah okay so i haven't talked you like two weeks you had covid you i had i i can't even explain what i i apologize because i missed so many recordings but in a way you gave me covid because i got covid because i went to this conference which is you know a decision i made i didn't really honest i wasn't really thinking about it covid 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 two thousand people what's gonna happen and so sure enough i go to this conference as sam hooks me up with he's like sam 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 y i'm here baby let's do this and sam like oh i didn't go dude i don't wanna get covid well i can't i canceled like last minute i i dude like i thought that you knew that i canceled 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 very much yeah yeah and i thought you knew i canceled so i felt horrible but like a week or two prior to to to that's like when omni cr and all this stuff happened and it's a it's a farmers conference in kansas city my you know i'm from missouri and i was like oh i think that like that covid will be there yeah i don't know if i was was for sure there it was the you know the the the main attendee the main keynote speaker do the we walked in so i walk in and me ben went with me and so we go in and me and ben literally the only two people in the room with a mask and there's like two thousand people in there and i was like oh shit i didn't even really think about it and i was like oh fuck it's here and i was like well the odds me getting are pretty high but i'm now here so i gotta i just make the most of it so anyways basically i go to this conference and everything that could happen to get covid happen meaning like it's like conferences in this ballroom great it's two thousand people born in one room that's no so good they don't have mask on okay it's next thing that happen i go to the gym in between like the sessions we were meaning ben wanna get a workout in we go we meet this guy we're making small talk and we're like oh here for the conference he's like no i'm just q here my girlfriend has covid so i'm here oh my i like girl i just shook your hand and we were what am i doing and so then this guy my gym buddies got covid i'm like oh great and then i get on the plane finally to come back i'm like alright 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 on a plane and a closed tube with a bunch of other people for three hours i like it's it's over where i got covid and sure enough i get home and two days later i get covid that the dumb thing i didn't do was i didn't quarantine right away which i should've have just done i have just said hey even if i'm not feeling anything i've been around a bunch of people i should just like lee but i was like look i just left my wife a 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 gave both our babies covid and so for the last ten days it's just been someone in my house has covid at any given time and i've just been literally i haven't gone a computer i haven't done anything i've just get it taken care of it ben did not get it i think ben had it like a a month ago so he somehow came out unscathed did really get it he didn't go he didn't go he fl the night of and was like actually like it's super inconvenient to get there i have like change my my flight has like a stop over fuck this i'm not going we'll do something else so was it and you but you were even though you're vaccinated vaccine you got sick i got pretty i got really sick yeah i got sit really sick for three days so let me tell you about my covid experience i i got really sick for three days but it's just the flu with a side dose of paranoia because it's like oh i say the flu this is is covid and so definitely you know fever all that good stuff whatever then the baby's everybody had kinda 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 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 covid she was like she fought it off pretty good was pretty mild you know she was still doing like i think women are generally tougher particularly mom 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 you know bag of bricks and she's complaint yeah she's just like what is this why are you why do you need so much sleep right now and i'm like i just can't explain in fact i saw this a meme that was so perfect he goes this is guy 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 it happens when a man gets a cold and that's how it is i have a huge baby about it and she like tucked it out no problem so that was kind of embarrassing did so how many people how many full time employees work at your your company the the the d company maybe like seven eight full time and and these in in a americans full time and you and you like are running the not not all americans but but you know people who this is their main job they work full time and when not counting the warehouse staff and do you like do weekly meetings with them and run it like a a company or is it really sean if it's run like sean like very autonomous all everything done via a slack bear autonomous everything done to just slack we have one meeting a week that's in slack and i just say hey get in this channel right now or we just did is that ten thirty was like alright get in the channel right now and i just say alright 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 ten other tabs like when i say something i wanna response within like a second because it's like a live chat i was like the calls are annoying we all agree calls are annoying so let's just like dude like just humor me let's try this meeting style so we do it i kinda like it and basically i just say alright what's everybody's main priority this week like what matters everyone's like we gotta do this this this i said then i'll be like that doesn't really sound that like that matters that much can we punt that 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 there's like cool i'll i tell one guy say hey check on wednesday and everybody just say how they're going on their things for the week and then check on friday say hey how do we do for the week that's it her man time does your wife's been on the company it's been a good amount of time like she's 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 kinda like on her phone in between you know just like while watching the baby but then at night she basically works from ten pm when the babies are finally knocked out to two or three am pretty much every night she does that and she works on the business she does the designs and all that stuff so when you guys were both sick how bad like who's we didn't no work you just we just like you just have a a 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 gonna worry about it we're not gonna add a stress to our life that like says this week we also have to get work is 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 you humor me and the audience has humor me and they've 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 wanna go through i have a bunch of thoughts let's start with with them okay so the conference called farm con and the family's the the van trump family is that their that's their name so it's kevin van trump and jordan van trump that's like the the two kinda like core principals that's the father and son and i'm just gonna describe what happened when i got there because wasn't like a normal conference so 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 sponsors logo on step and repeat banner okay cool that everything's normal but the main speaker kevin van trump is sitting not not in a chair he's got this like mahogany desk that was put onto to the town to the stage and he's sitting in 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 ga literally and he's talking into the mic and he the it's like a free form agenda so he'll be like like he he would just say something that he be like i walked in and he's like yeah that's why i don't hire any ivy league you know ivy league here's a problem with ivy league and he'll just go on rant there's like five panel that are sitting there and then he was just like do tell this story and the crowd loves them 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 for memory i met him four or five years ago at a conference and since then we i kinda brought him into our circle of friends he is probably in his fifties late mid to late fifties 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 fixed southern accent kansas city missouri isn't really considered the south but it can be pretty country so but i know where he's from so he goes to chicago he probably makes eight figures trading commodities so he like sounds like this country bump farmer but like you know he's trading like corn features and shit like that it makes a lot of money then maybe ten years ago he starts this daily newsletter where he writes the whole thing by himself every single day at this point for like seventeen years he's done that is it seventeen years something like that it's like some almost twenty years he's been doing this every day and it makes like something like in the world of twenty million dollars a year in subscription revenue just to read it's more more is it i i think it's like thirty forty million a a year now so i've done calls with him and i'm just and and this guy who's like oh hey check this song bitch out like that's what whole and it was like he he's like pointing at his new picasso so i've done video calls with and he's got like this like beautiful like chopper in the background like a fancy customized motorcycle it goes oh we just picked up this film bitch we just got this bitch year day we really love the picasso and do like that how he talks and he's he now his family 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 fifty a hundred million dollars and are like traders and they like revere him and they love him dude so so have you read any of his newsletters they're so good yeah must it pay subscribers first they're like you know it's like it's like a twenty page pdf so it's like not even like a a short thing it's like a long thing and it's like he basically writing about what he thinks is going on so 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 your growing corn you gotta 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 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 a hedge position against what i'm producing and so you have to decide what you're gonna do with your crop that is your like for most people investing is this like side 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 off 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 twenty thirty fifty million year 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 are like what you call gentlemen farmers they're basically people who don't need to farm they just grew up way and they're like yeah my family i like living on a farm i want my family to have a farm my farm on my weekends and nights like there was 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 it's such a bad use of like time but it's not it's a it's not a bad use time because it's a hobby it's a pleasurable thing for him what this manual work is like how he relaxes how would over there so there's about fifteen hundred people and so let me explain this guy to their business okay so they have what what i 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'm my guess based on some tri is that that's making about thirty to forty 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 gonna go right up to my own room right after this go write that some bitch and he's like you know probably yeah he's like he's like i don't know what the fuck did this he's like i created a job for myself he's like i told my kid my son and i say you you need 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 bowl friendly it's just a pdf and it's like three thousand words with like powerpoint image all substance over style there's a few memes in there which i'd like it's like you know just hear some jokes and i think that's very on brand the writing great the writing is really great and the 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 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 i'm just gonna read you a couple of quotes on that he was saying so he's like i hate have hiring ivy league because they're too afraid of failure he's like they don't they're done so well their whole life they're not of they're not used to looking wrong or look at silly you know go try n t's 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 my he's like my my dad who take us to the car he's said no no seatbelt baby that's how we roll he's like he's like we're gonna take some risk when gonna get skinned gonna break some bones we're gonna fall off the bike he's like that's how you gotta treat your kids even if the smart kids you gotta he's like because one of the big concerns is how do you get your kid your your sixty maybe now you got your farm your kids thirty they don't wanna take over the farm or they maybe they want you but they don't know how to do anything whether they're he's like he's like you got a segment off a portion of the farm let him fail but let him have the skin in the game he's like you know i wanna have kids that i don't melt down when the rug gets pulled i wanna be able to go them and say hey things things have changed and we're changing tonight and he's just like going on this rant and dude i'm sit there 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're talking about like be beam futures five seconds before that but you would frequently go on these and every time i'm just nodding my head i'm like preach like we i was at this dinner with them and people were they like it was kinda like these guys organized this dinner they're paying for but then they as you know like sort of what what's what's the what's the catch it was we're gonna 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 who's the who's the audience who's who's the customer for this and they're like well you know we've done extensive psycho research here's a they slid over this thing he's like psycho i don't know what that means man what the fuck you saying who is the customer and they're like it's it's not demographic he's like it's a psycho profile he's like no like name them do you know five people who want this product like with this guy i want this product hey you over there at the table would you want this product and the guy guys like nah i want it and then just like and the and the guys are like kim you're not like being open minded he's like i'm trying to help you y'all he's like i've heard this idea ten times and it fail i invested in this one it failed invested in this and why did it fail because there was no customer for this product and he 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 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 s f where everybody's hedging every word and packaging everything and trying to deliver it and trying to make these fucking 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 alright so you have a list of a bunch of shit that you've learned here let's just rattle them off well if love to be while all wildly interesting let let's do a couple things so the rest of his business so he tells me so he goes i'm doing i i got i i know for sure his build business was doing in the twenty five million dollar range years ago right so so there's the newsletter component yeah then he's like well please by the way i think he's right hey he's like you know i don't there's never been a sponsor fifteen years john deere comes to me they say we would love to sponsor no trust for the all he he had these principles who was like these people are gonna trust me because i'm not gonna be selling them to somebody and so 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 mouth one person sharing 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 like shit i need these insights and so that's an amazing you know that's probably ninety percent profit ninety five percent profit like on that there on that thirty million right like think it uses i like what what's so what's was talking about which email like it's so raw i think it uses salesforce to send it out right like that's a email service provider like it's pretty raw so then the second piece of the business is i 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've just get a for fur for argument like chipotle is like hey we need we need somebody's who'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 five dollars a bush oil you know we'll make it five fifty do you keep your fifty cents as the as a broker so i think that now produces as much as the newsletter so so let's dump it basically tack that on 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 don't they don't know what the fuck they're talking about we know everybody in this space so they then started investing and i think they just had their biggest to something called benson hill or benson hill or something like that that went public so you know like the first kind of like you'd public unicorn that they seated and the last one is the most interesting one of all this is what the sun is doing so you yeah ag swag so here's the backstory that he tells about this and i i'm not sure anything private like he told this on stage he goes medi 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 i'm doing this kinda like either this buyout like leverage buyout or i'm gonna become a ceo of this company called american identity we make t shirts and hats and he's like alright kinda lame like so t shirts now like you've done some big shit why are you doing that few years later fast forward that company american identity identity sells to staples for eight billion dollars and he looks at he's like what the hell he's like that t shirt company well what the hats custom hats like what would you what the fuck and he's basically like yeah he's like who are your biggest customers he was like yeah my three biggest customers are car ad and john deere and uniforms what's that is that are they making uniforms or they're just making licensed merchandise so like i think it's like john john deere they're just are printing it for for they're printed they're making it for john deere or john deere might have employee the way they have you know two thousand employees they wanna like john deere or a vest with a agreeing john deere vest or whatever and so he's like those are your top those your biggest accounts like those are my buddies like i know all those guys and so after they sell 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 a hundred employees in your office in brazil you need to send some stuff too cool we got you and i think this is gonna be a really big business also and so they are doing very well he was saying they're the out grew there's their warehouse there but they're trying to you know expand and all this he telling me i wanna say any of the numbers for that perk you telling me something that just a square footage they need in the warehouse and i know from the d space i know if you need that much square footage you are putting out pretty crazy volume so i that was amazing as well but what an example of just being a big fish and a and and not even a really small pod right seems like a a niche but it's like ag yeah pretty huge fish at you know ag like the my parents are working in this industry and that's why i like this guys because i got the know is but like the thing that that people like you guys like you and me and people listening this where these tech folks and we dismiss 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 you're gonna buy it multiple times a week but that's what my dad does my dad sells onions and i remember peep i would make fun of them and he's like go look in your cabinet you have stuff that i have owned at one point i bet and and so it's not as small as we think i mean obviously it's not like for example the the founder of square this guy jim i wanna talk about him too he's just he was the keynote speaker so he comes on the stage he was also a very good speaker i'm and i i kinda have a high bar for that kind of thing but he's he was very impressive and it gives on say it's very first thing he says is just wanna 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 said yeah of course where all the shit 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 and if you thought of a farmer you probably had stupid stereotypes of like dumb for sure i was like oh and and going into i was like oh i'm gonna go meet a bunch of hill billy like redneck basically was dude talk like that i'm from there they they definitely will talk like that but they like are wearing like a fifty thousand dollar rolex and when i get there they're like you know yeah i'm you know put options on bean futures and you know with brazil coming on board where you know i'm gonna i'm gonna take this hedge position against corn and i was like oh wait y'all are like if i can wall street traders wait what and i was like okay maybe it's just a couple of these guys and i was like and then i would meet guys in the hallway and i'd be like what do you oh we haven't my family was owned a farmers south dakota for for forty years okay cool so i was like do you do this like kind of like fucking soy soybean oil futures and they're like yeah you got to i was like what i was like do you know what is well we got a broker but like you know it's key to the business gotta you gotta be doing it and i was like holy shit like you guys are more sophisticated financially than anybody i know like i could go to in silicon valley go to talk to engineers or in 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 fuck 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 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 air coastal cities they don't give a fuck about these folks and i'm like man if if you c gotta make those collide and be awesome right and so a couple couple of things like found that note so when i was at one of the dinners they're talking about was the who who's the customer dinner they were they're talking about something and they and something came up they go you know how long he's like how long we've been here about whole foods and you know plant based this and oat milk fat he's like this still tiny fringe shit he goes america eats corn bread and milk at scale this is what america wants they need the how much how much volume is the whole food and them i'm thinking dude to my bubble everybody eats like that everybody eats the fringe shit so it 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 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 the non whole foods versus whole foods is like to them whole foods was this rounding error i thought that was hilarious because to me it's like you know that's like i don't know where i shop every day it's it's it's the main thing and again all this is gonna sound really like dumb but i'm dumb that's i guess the answer when i was there i was learning how dumb i was about everything there was so many different things like that that i was learning can i just rattle off a couple of other things okay so jonathan write us in the chat is this is this i i could talk about this all day i think this is the coolest shit ever so i'm gonna give you a couple of pain points and or business ideas that i saw herb 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 the this all these like kind of financial products that they have to use for hedging their the crops they produce and the insurance and all that good stuff so i think that some kind of wealth front type of robo advisor that basically just does all the work for them to manage their risk that's is is gonna be like important i was because every single one was like yeah we have a broker we call and we talk to him and he tells us x y z and he tells us what what do he thinks we should be doing and we come up with a position we wanna take and then we take it so that to me set felt very old and i feel like if somebody does a robo tripadvisor thing that's in kevin and trump had idea goes is i wanna 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 by a fraction of cool memorabilia so it'd be like a a sweet old car or first edition harry potter sign book set it's awesome it's in 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 feel like been saying that for a probably should've 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 i was like do you mean he's like you know just like the the original well you know motorcycle from dukes and hazards or you know and 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 shit and 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 do there's a like a network effect of just speaking to that audience dude did didn't i tell you so you know how i used to work for the show american picker right do you do you do i don't you were not in the market for that because you were in were you in australia at the time whatever but you if if if if if the show was around now you wouldn't watch it you don't fit that that bill but do you know that that show american so for those listening i used to work for the show american picker and it's basically like pawn stars would go 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 pick 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 picker this guy like would buy old bike bicycles that's a big market or he would buy like a old nineteen thirty six harley for ten grand salt for thirty 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 decline finally they said alright 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 owned he's the producer he owned all the rights i work at the store where we would sell the stuff that he bought the the his picks but so many people would come to the store that basically we sold thirty grand a day of t shirts and shot glasses wow 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 right and he probably made i mean his business was probably doing thirty forty million dollars a year off all his all his stuff and when the show was on when the show was live it's still live now but it's passes 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 the stuff that i mean i would for 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 the reason i'm bringing this up is this whole rally road for middle america shit this is the real stuff and like buying like these rare baseball cars or whatever it is that's the fringe and raleigh road has built a great business on top of that exactly and and by the way if were gonna start this i would hey email sam and cc me just so i need to get to know but b i would go to these guys like mike wolf if 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 let me tell you a couple other ideas that were that we're in there so 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 b or mercury bank so basically like so there's two startups i got big that were in the that we're serving entrepreneur or serving tech startups one is mercury which is just saying hey instead of going and using bank of america wells fargo just use mercury as your bank right we have a slick interface it's a mobile app you never got talk to a banker you know free wire transfers it's not really a bank it's they're partnering with another bank and they just layer their branding on top of that they're they're on top exactly 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 is awesome and you know he's great he came on the pod so know so so mercury is bank for tech startups and then b was visa for tech startups is and same thing not you know they're built on top of the visa rails or the mastercard rails or whatever it's just a credit card for startups and it was taking advantage of the like hey we understand startups so like for example you might be a startup that's raised ten million dollars of venture capital but your credit card limit is five thousand dollars because the banks like did you have no income no history you no nothing no credit like you know we can't give you money and there's like dude just raised ten million dollars to have the money in the bank like the they won't cap points on ad ad spend because they know that starbucks spend most of their money on ad spend exactly that or things like you know just the 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 fill online like there's do little stuff that that makes it like work well for that so mercury for farmers b became a multi billionaire i think mercury did and i've been i've now invested in versions of either mercury or b for teenagers for teens in india well business is in india for canadians creator is the one that ever creators i 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 gonna that's what we call farmers we're gonna re brand farming is the creator economy either they're just created food yeah yeah seed creators dude it's so much that would be such a better company and they're spending a lot of money right because like the all of it the equipment the like you know this the the fertilizer these are like huge bulk purchases my cousins i an aunt cousin who it's a mom and son they have fifteen hundred 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 like at a rodeo the bowl that like it's called that that bowl is bucking and at a rodeo the guy the cowboy who stays on wins money and the bowl that bucks the hardest wins money and you can also make money by if you have a really good bucking bowl you get money by getting it 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 they are fucking hard workers and when they walk around places like during a workday because like when you're a farmer you're constantly driving to get feed whatever they'll have twenty 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 rodeo and farmers dude you went dude when they go to the rodeo i've seen them they have like they've had like ten grand on them because they gotta like buy this while they're there they gotta do this they gotta make their bet anyway these farmers have fuck loads of cash because they are they're still doing stuff with cash so like this is an interesting great market yeah with the other one if automation so i think then 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 tractors everything was like you know horse pulled you know and or whatever and then tractors come out it becomes a big deal and john deere trying to do self driving tractors and everybody's trying to do automation and so i think if you're sitting at mit or your carnegie emailing 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 wanna pull i've invested in a few companies in that space so it's automations and precision agriculture they call it so right how which i i think automation falls under precision agriculture that's like the the term i believe and it's incredibly interesting so like you talk about like automated car or autonomous cars autonomous tractors is incredibly intriguing right there's also like sensors so just like soil quality like the soil health is like one of the most important things if your soil health is bad your crop is fucked 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 and alert people at hey this plot in this area is not gonna 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 wanna do it and increasingly you know kids don't wanna do it what the heck are you gonna do with this farm and so there was like places that you can sell farm 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 gonna trade hands in the next like ten ten years who's gonna be in the middle of that 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 does 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 raised kids and don't can have full time job 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 or in that same category where it would be really exciting and fun to work with those guys right right totally there was a couple startups today that i like one who's called trader so these guys now they're raised like sixty million bucks i think peter t 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 on that thing and i could diversify you know on 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 and they did like eighty 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 fractional sell it off and they they take a broker fee plus they take a like management fee of point seven five percent 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 ass you you it changed your perspective on some stuff for sure in fact i actually just wanna say conferences in general i think the the general app is conferences ways to you'll see that a lot on twitter especially from smart people people say that either the exact opposite for you i think conferences are pure bucking alpha meaning i think there's so much gains to be had at conferences number one you leave your routine and that's just freeze 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 many people in person like it's so it's so crazy you don't have to do anything know that i met kevin i spoke at a conference and i was just hanging out the lobby and kevin van trump came up to me and he was wearing cowboy boots and a ramon 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 was like i got twenty thousand subscribers i like he guys make money through ads he was oh no paid subscription i was like wait who are you so i by he remembered you he gave a great intro when he was introducing me he's like met this guy sam he sort from american picker sample oh and he just gave he told the whole conference about you and how great you were it is awesome and so anyway i met kevin at a conference which now you've been brought into the fold this is gonna influence you in some capacity you're gonna bring other people into the fold that's why conferences are cool conference is cool secondly go to weird conferences 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 is 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 to 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 life you see what are they thinking about what are they what are their what are the problems these guys are worried about 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 you just makes you a more interesting person so i i would highly recommend going to trade shows specifically but like it just different industry niches that are not yours and just go go to a sneaker conference and just be like oh what the hell these sneaker heads doing like who are these people what do they do yeah i know it's like a luxury if you if you have the time but 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 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's you know i wanted to bring up yeah it's crazy but 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 money bunch of money on and people were like damn like that like holy shit you must have lost a lot he goes it was a sad day but you know that's why johnny walker makes a blue and you know and then you're 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 are we allowed to talk about i think so why not alright let's talk about so do you wanna give the bet we might wanna believe out his name so let's let's believe out his name just well let's talk about friend well let's let we'll ask him after this but alright we he does this guy named i didn't really know much about them 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 how does he talk about what happened over the weekend about this app okay so so basically here's this his short story he's built a couple of like products honestly never really had a big hit him and his friends have been working on and they were working on a startup up or they're working as a start up for a number of years they're were 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 you like cut his teeth in trying to build the next twitter next tiktok 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 kinda like quiz app this like super 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 get go to jail or whatever and it goes viral and it's called tb h and it goes viral it hits like number one in the app store because this the flow is basically you suck 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 like dude i'm gonna click that and then you click that and then it would go on something something along those lines so tb h goes viral facebook ends up buying it smart move by kinda 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's sold for what it was reported yes reporting this like a hundred million dollars i think but i that made you know a lifetime of money yeah exactly so these guys they pull it off a in right so they went from like literally they were about to shut it down they got fuck let's just launch this last thing and and that thing hits so then he goes to facebook he stays there for like fucking 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 he's just on twitter and he's like he's what people call ship hosting which 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 so anyways he you know people like to follow him because he's funny so over the weekend so he he basically he tweeted something out last week that was like hey i'm working on i'm gonna work on a new project he i finally like left for facebook whatever i'm working on a new project i wanna work with a designer if like i'm looking for a founding designer if you wanna like you know build something amazing work with a team that's built you know built apps blah blah you know dm me some something along list 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 it really was just there was a lot happened and i wanna 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 i there yeah and it was hilarious here's here's what i learned by four years of facebook nothing and so yeah that was hilarious and so people were like oh peep people generally are excited about next to your thing especially all the kinda like venture investors and angel investors this is kind of the entrepreneur you you like to back which is somebody who you think is smart who is a serial entrepreneur i'm not their first rodeo but also hasn't had the big win so they still have a huge chip on their shoulder and wanna wanna make a so that's like a great entrepreneur to invest in and he's pretty well network and pretty well respected so people wanna invest in so he tweets that thing out looking for a designer and then somebody else said somebody two days later just tweets like i saw you know a mock up of new app like holy shit it's gonna like change everything and this guy also is like a shit poster this this guy i think it's it just sounds like another c or something like and and by the way you've seen the the the image that he's talking about he's supposed to it in our in our text thread before but like you know here's an idea like i might make this thing and it it's and if i correctly it wasn't even like it's not a business it's like oh it's it's like a it's just like a silly idea it's a client idea still i think he's still idea you know the executive yeah so anyways people then start meme that guy they're like i just saw your app knew app for the first time and you know this work that i've had in my toe for years so just went away and like you know the next person would be like you know i showed it just eight children who were starving and now they're you know they're not hungry anymore and so this goes viral as a as like a meme on whatever ever to read some of them that were there are the good ones they were great they were great let's see there was guy saying like we're happy to announce that it it was andrew chen we're happy to announce that we just led in a a hundred million dollar round a new app right i can't believe they're extending i just got to assessment with my therapist she wanted to asking me for tips on how to get allocation into this new company and so just became this like me meme in the tech industry and then a lot of people who were seeing like what's this app and so and by the way this this idea this like kinda like what quote unquote growth hack it was accidental a but b really effective and they drum up a bunch of interest in a bunch of hype around what this new app could be and so what he did was he created an n t with like i think he's sold sixteen he's got my he's got this really stupid like image for his twitter picture but it's kinda like funny and he made different twitter images based off of his and sixty nine of them and in if you bought one you get early access as a beta user to his app right i don't know what's that the promise i didn't there that's the promise look at the floor price of the what those are so here goes ladies gentleman i'd like to introduce shit club a collection of sixty nine owners will get access to quote app parenthesis there is no app it is now available on and so he likes it and it sells out as as n entities due and i i think he made literally make off this thing or oh the floor has dropped so anybody who bought i think is probably not doing so hot the floor is now only point three six east so that's not great anyway still a thousand dollars so sixty nine pictures four thousand dollars okay not bad so here's why i wanna ask you i mean i wanna ask you a question because you have done something similar i didn't know before you and i you introduced me to him i knew him as like a guy who built an app but it seems like people revere him like they consider him an expert on consumer apps which not saying that he isn't he he currently is is pretty successful it's but also what the fuck but but also like his reputation like is so big where he's like yeah is anyone that good that's kinda what i'm gonna get yeah and you've done a good job of that as well of creating this like my mistake almost out of nothing right not that like you weren't told us all ahead of time but like you've got a really good job of building call call what i sold my startup up for less than what my investors have 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 on the definition of a successful business like because there's a lot of people that have sold the companies for a lot of money we have a we have a handful of buddies that are like uber rich no one fucking knows who they are and like even if they told you that what they did do you'd have like they'd have to bag 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 wanna like get on board with you and then them the same thing because you can make it sound good i could say i so my sold my last start of 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 a thought leader 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 have 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 my mistake about and and what i wanna know is you can use 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 like you guys have i think in both cases it's basically you put out you put your thoughts on blast so you know there's a re the real answer and by way i i say that not to make fun of any i think look it did sell for a profit so good good for them i 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 d 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 kinda 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 ceos of different companies and when they're talking to you they're making an independent assessment of your your caliber you're based on your thoughts alright 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 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 three hundred people and those people matter right because they have themselves influence and trust so for example you know like josh el is a is a good example this guy was he was early on at linkedin at facebook at twitter at robinhood like earlier sean meaning he was he and he was like head of growth at a bunch of these companies yeah yeah he's a big deal he's been on our podcast and so he's got you know people have a tremendous amount of respect form because he's had a tremendous career well both and i have you know in separate occasions met you know met met with josh and we when we're talking about our startup and whether our startups succeeded or failed josh knows look you're playing in the sort of like the startup up lottery start of olympics a start who could fail and an entrepreneur can still be really great and if out of that conversation josh josh walks away you're thinking oh this person's is really smart and then they connect to some other people that they they know and 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 re retreat your stuff so that they will vouch for you when you have a project or you're doing something and that maybe that goes a long way in the marketplace so like for example i've had josh or ba or different people who have their own big following in 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 say okay if josh says he's great he's great if apology says he's great great such a unique way of it's almost like credibility hacking or something like that but but that's the thing i think is important is like i'm telling you how the mechanic works but there's the the thing you can't just the the reason it's not a hack is because your your thoughts actually have to be interesting you have to hack like your your a hack i just mean like you're you're you're the or 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 tb and i why did i respect him because he released this this memo actually got leaked from inside facebook oh 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 grow amongst teens here's some stuff we did tb 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 mc mackenzie high you know secrets and that's the instagram account and it would be locked and we would follow anybody who had mc high in their profile then they would follow you know forty percent of people would follow us back they would request to follow but we were private we wouldn't approve anybody's request then at four pm whenever 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 download the app and then they would download the app and then would and then as they're were downloading the app they'd be getting notifications that their friends are all downloading the app today and it felt like a big deal and that's how we hacked distribution high school 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 podcast different places or on twitter threads and people read that and they're like oh fuck this guy smart that's a really smart growth tactic this guy really understands growth this guy really understands teens this guy really understands social and so if you just if i like is that quote my my buddy jason hitchcock told me once he goes you say one interesting thing i say that's interesting you say two interesting things say that are interesting you say three interesting things i say fuck this guy's interesting and that's really what you gotta do with content is you have 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 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 wanna talk about it entirely right now because i think we should wrap here but i so last weekend you when you were sick so you probably didn't see this i tweeted out about sdr str so short term rental stuff did you happen to see that i saw it and i followed what you were talking about looks super interesting your facebook group i wanna hear more about that so you save it for another app if you want save it but did you join the group i didn't join the group no i know the it's called sam's or something yeah i just made it in the car like my sarah was driving i just made in the car such 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 you hadn't decided to do it but it's well i have now but i'm still looking for a property though but i so i have s str crew yeah i'll let you in and there's like a thousand or fifteen hundred people it's mostly all tech guys dude i've met some guys you get these people you you tweeted it out just the tweet that's said only that it's all tech guys like it's like guy a aj who owns the the the peck yep business and then it's nathan barry it's marshall h 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 handful of yeah there's another guy in there who owns fifty million dollars worth of them it's crazy i'm learning all this in this fucking group it's amazing so you're gonna have to browse through that and i'll tell you some more of stuff we'll start with that one next time does that interest you dude of an interesting yeah that's great it's crazy who would've have thought about about about short term rentals and how they're crushing it hits the highest level of interesting me which is where you say some am i doing in my life why don't i do that alright you basically your quote question your own life is the highest form of interest the thing is for the thing is is that like you 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 shit all the time to it right and so i would say like one of the criticism not a criticism but the one of 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 wanna say it's steady dot capital or steady capital dot com one second let me pull up if i just type in steady okay do steady dot capital s t e a d y dot how do most okay yeah tell me what just tell me what you see it a it's a black screen and it says how do most millionaires build their wealth ninety percent of millionaires invest in real estate study lets you earn passive income from real estate for one hundred dollars okay and then you invest in okay so study is a web dashboard for retail investors to buy shares of income generating commercial real estate commercial real estate make investments in senior financial reports in our dashboard and get monthly deposits from your investments directly to your bank account we do not offer high address the part i wanted to read yeah we do not offer high this is this is really good copy we do not offer high adrenaline 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 well wonderful so i heard this so i read this so this guy i used to play pick a basketball with it he was on my like in real basketball team he this guy dylan he created this company i just kinda saw this twitter and i like guy dylan up to like and i even know he's a startup guy like he's some dude we used to play ball with and it i like city capital was at 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 i invested in steady yeah because i was i do 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 wanna do the work of like going and finding a property diligence 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 handpicked sponsors so they'll have like guys who have a good track record in commercial real estate commercial still they'll like oh this guy buys warehouses in the middle of texas and they basically diligence the properties for you and then all you do is so while i do it i just had auto invest it's a i just say five thousand dollars a month just as a starting time like i'm gonna put five grand a month into commercial real estate cool over the this year i'll have sixty grand put into this and then it just shows me it's like cool you're gonna be you're gonna break even in eighteen months but you're gonna get your first check next month and the you know basically what they do is they go to that sponsor they say hey you know you're gonna raise money for this deal anyways give us half a million bucks we have this cad 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 robinhood hood model where it's like robinhood made it where there's 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 have to put in so that his mission is like i wanna make real estate as you know invest for even a hundred dollar and even a hundred dollars if you're earning eight percent great you'll earn eight dollars of passive income and if the 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 the you know quality deals but honestly like these aren't like like for example with start up investing don't just give my money to anybody for start investing because i'm like dude you deal any good or are they all dog shit with real estate it's like these are like the property like there's so much data about the property it's collateral by the property the the guys 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 and cool like that's doable that's not that doesn't take a miracle so i really like steady i think there's currently a waitlist list or whatever people up to like did just like it looks sick yeah i'll email they gotta get you in if people wanna do it she they she could do i think is i think it's really good for people like i've had i've had multiple people asked to invest in my startup up 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're already if you're already you know multi millionaire cool i you should do this then to get some exposure to start i don't 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 what yeah this the this is a good episode i'm i'm interested steady i have a whole bunch of other topics still so i'll save those for wednesday i appreciate you holding down the fourth while i was it was hard it was hard i think like because i had to do it with ben and ben's gray and but i and then did it with noah and know is great but you and i are i mean you're talented at which i talk about all the time you and i together are talented and it was very hard with it was way harder with without it was work i love to hear it i love to be needed it it was work dude it was work and like i thought there's been times and like oh fuck i just i can 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 do 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 called go listen to i listen to that while i was sick i fucking loved it because i've been meaning to read american king penn for so long you told me was so good and i'm just like backed just not reading it and 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've were prepared for forty five 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 a guy called i forget the there's another version there's another like juicy want but 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 you how did they catch up so you you had said like basically they traced his you had said okay he had he he had originally post on this forum saying yeah hey has anybody seen this thing and then also that that they you know caught him in the library right down the street from you so i got those bits but i wanted to know i know it was him yeah and yeah like i think there was a bunch of details about like the investigation like that the like cop chase basically yeah so basically once they're more there it you know it's so funny there's this episode of sal park where they're trying to like track this terrace and the boys they're like dude just like do have 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 so yeah but can you please email me ross at gmail mail dot com and then they like did a they like use a web archive because once they once he once ross caught his air he changed his username from like alt to like frosty or something like that but it was on the web where like he was asking he he used a username to post about i've created a website no sorry credited 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 k and then they found out who this raw sky was and then they realized that oh we just like went to this guy's house recently as home security because he ordered like eighteen 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 alright whenever and and so they had a fake f they had an fbi guy become an employee of the silk road right and ross or dr pirate roberts the owner would say like alright 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 they distract them or they're like alright 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 the fbi the day he was arrested he got arrested in the library right down the street from my house and glen park and they said basically the fbi was do not arrest him we gotta get a swat team and they're like dog he's on his computer right now we're chatting with him and he like walk tackle them right he 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 in the science of this library that he used go to he was sitting at a desk in a chair and they go they had two fbi agents dresses kinda homeless people go right behind him and get into a fight where the guy was like bitch what are you doing here and the lady was like fuck 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 tackle him and the other one swipe his computer from his desk and runs it straight to the van and they plug they already had the they knew that he was using on 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 fucking he's on the dashboard right now as we speak here's us we were were literally just talking to him and then they plug a usb 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 doing movie like i know there's like a kinda an amazing movie about it there needs to be it's such a good story the the the book american king pin is the best book i've read in years and years it is such a fascinating known story and it's also as we said in the podcast it's incredibly challenging story or someone like me because this guy ross looks like me right like when you hear about gangster and shit they're usually like poor oftentimes 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 from a good family a white guy a good looking dude who live in san francisco play on computers had these ideals of like i wanna help the world and you're like oh he's just like me right but he's a fucking criminal who tried to like supposedly wanted to kill people and sold more drugs and a capo 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 liked that little bit but it it was really good so that that definitely got me through one of the one of the covid fever nights i mean i'm 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 alright that's the episode oh we have to do one thing before we before we go so we two or three weeks four weeks ago at this point we did a contest on tiktok 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 use our clips so the end result on tiktok alone are hashtags and like the first two weeks got something like thirty million views do you know that damn and we're giving jonathan confirming 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 were yeah okay and it's the the first guy were giving it to his name on tiktok i believe was m m minis i think his name michael and he posted a bunch of videos a few of them got more than a million views no his cuts right sorry and oh yeah i can't get that wrong because there was an m m minis as well jonathan tell me exactly who the winner is in the chat i can't get that wrong m m cuts is the winner and this person got something like so m cuts that's the winner m mfa cuts that's the winner this person got like thirty thousand followers on their tiktok channel and like ten or fifteen days millions of use they won and then the second place person who also gets five thousand dollars i think they're called tune pods is that they're called pod say it again pod tune mister pod tune so they turn podcast podcasts into cartoons like south park style we've retweeted a couple them because they're awesome and they are hilarious they are really good so the best one was where i was making one of you for not wearing a shirt whole hilarious really good i have a feeling both of these guys are gonna end up making a lot of money by turning this into a business and i bet they already have yeah exactly good job good job by them by the way m cuts the guy he is in university still i wanna i email them he he's nineteen i love it good job by then and i so can are is this still going can people still end like win next month a different like a different person 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 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 tiktok thing was one of the reasons why it happened one of a couple reasons yeah and did be doing this other winner two the sixty minute thing we'll announce that next time okay sounds good alright i gotta go good stuff see again alright i'll take a finger it up episode