The Simple Newsletter Making $20M+ A Year With 1 Employee

did you save like thirty thousand subscribers at six hundred dollars a year yeah brian the thirty to forty thousand range on paid subscribers yeah you've gotta tell me everything here i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on go kevin back what's going on man we're here so i have i i've gotta do a quick story on how we met so about four years ago i think we're in scott stale arizona at the design pickle conference i just get done doing this talk about how the hustle is like doing pretty good we're at a million subscribers whatever at the end of the talk i just walk backstage or i walk in the back of the crowd you're wearing a ramon t shirt and like shorts that you walk up to me and you're like hey nice little talk you to there and i was like oh thank you and you've got this comp you got this confidence about you and you're like so how many subscribers do you have and i was like i think a million or something like that and and you go well you know that's pretty nice i got a little newsletter myself we're doing okay we got about thirty thousand subscribers and i was like oh that's that's a good start and you said well how much do you charge people to read the hustle and i'm like it's free i make money via advertising and you're like oh you don't charge and i was you do and you go yeah we charge about six hundred dollars and i it takes about ten seconds and i'm like doing the math and i'm like wait did you say it's thirty thousand subscribers at six hundred dollars a year and you're like yeah what do you expect and turns out you've got this massive newsletter business and i was like what's the newsletter about and you're like oh we talked to farmers it's all about farming an agriculture and i'm like wait hold on man you've gotta tell me everything here and that's when my mind was blown and i was like we gotta get you on and it took about four years but finally we made it happen i appreciate it sean what did you think would you met the van trump's and got got around his people man i would just call it a series of amazement and confusion i showed up and first of all it's called farm con so i think the conference is gonna be a bunch of farmers by the way at this point in my life i don't think i'd ever met a farmer i i had grown up you know overseas i lived i live on the coast i had never really met a farmer so i thought it's gonna be about farming and and and whatnot and instead it's actually about investing and so that was the first front i was amazing confused about was i walk in and it's a talk going on about options trading corn futures and and it was so far over my head and i was like wow wait these guys are actually talking about crazy wall street stuff what's going on here and then over time i met a bunch of people the conference was amazing and they were like what are you doing here and i was like i don't know i got i don't farm and i don't trade commodities so i'm not really sure but i'm here to talk i have a talk schedule tomorrow and i'm here to just be out of my comfort zone be out of my bubble because i had only been going to tech conferences when i was doing my research for this pod i learned that you actually kinda did a similar thing which was that there was a period of your life where you wanted to shake things up and you started just go into different conferences or trade shows that were totally unrelated to what you were doing and what you were familiar with you kind of intentionally put yourself in that to just shake up your worldview view is that right can you talk a little bit about that yeah for sure that's i meant sam i mean we were at this i don't even know what they hell was my son called and said let's just make it where we make ourselves go to different things make ourselves uncomfortable get out of our conference he called me and said hey there's just conference in phoenix mom wanted to go to phoenix and out there and i said what is it and he said design pickle i said what the hell are we they had people speaking out we're doing like hair you know they at hair drying business and they had all kinds of crazy so i said okay i'll go shit next thing i find myself walking around the courtyard of this place holding another guy's and like you're your shit i never do here in the midwest right hell is going on you know they had us doing some weird stuff and and yeah that's where i'm mess sam so yeah each year we try to go to different things just get different perspective different views you know we just believe in in trading and investing it's all about perspective and you know you can get blindsided a million different ways and so i like to be around the younger people to help broaden my perspective because you know we always say in our business it's the old bear and the young ball as we get older we tend to get more bearish just because we don't we don't understand as much as we did when we were younger you know when we were younger we were aggressive and we knew the latest greatest things and now that if we get older most of my older hedge fund friends and traders one more cynical bearish just by nature it's like because we just don't understand a lot of the newer stuff so well i'll give you two things i came out of it number one after farm me and ben at in the lobby of the hotel while one of the talks going on it was another corn futures talk that was going over and i said hey let's just hang on the lobby real i gotta guy i don't i don't understand what the hell these you guys are talking about anyways so we go to the lobby and we had talked to you about your newsletter business and we go you know what we should create a newsletter business around what we're what we're interested in and we were in very crypto at the time we have been kicking around this idea but we hadn't really had the momentum the energy to just like create it from scratch to birth that baby and so only in the lobby of the hotel where we like let's do this and we named it milk road which was kind of like a farming sort a name anyways it it all came together in the lobby and then a year later we sold that business for millions of dollars and so i i gotta credit you in a way because we had had a conversation with you the night before and you told us you're like i guess i gotta go back to my room i gotta write the newsletter and we were like you still write the newsletter like surely you've hired a team of people you're like no i i write the news that myself i've written it i think you had written it for like some absurd number like eighteen straight years or twenty straight years you hadn't missed it and it was you riding it every single day is that right i have a a girl east where we can't say border trade stacy grape she's out in la and she helps me with a lot of content and a lot of the they i write corn beans weed i write the top comment that cheat she helps with those and then i write the stories down below so it's her and i usually tag team in the whole thing to to give her credit and she's been she's been awesome though let's explain though a little bit so your main thing is the van trump report so van trump report dot com it's a daily newsletter that is it's a great read i actually i have read it for a while and it's talks about i call it for farmers but it's way beyond that so it's agricultural based information but four farmers but also for people who are trading commodities and you have said that politicians read it to understand a little bit about what's going on in that world and you've told me i don't remember exactly what you said you told me that it was doing something like thirty thousand people paying something like six hundred dollars a year and it's basically just you writing it which if you did that math that's true that's like eighteen million dollars a year and revenue from a newsletter is that right yeah it's just myself there's about four of us on our staff here a friend of mine that used to be a golf pro buddy that i went school with stacy out in california and my son jordan on this side of the fence my wife does a bookkeeping with accounting team but that's really it and like you said yeah i did the newsletter and just you know wanted to write about what i was interested in and and everything that kinda interests me and so you know that's that's really what we do what we put out yeah we've got several ky million senators lot of big trading groups hedge fund people and yeah brad thirty five we're brian in the thirty to forty thousand range on on paid subscribers it's also got like five pages of memes in it which i love because i was like i would read it and the part was cool is commentary on where you think the market's headed and it's written the way you talk it's very informal it's it's a straight shooter type of vibe which makes it fun to read even if it's not your stick and then it's got a bunch of memes which made me laugh and i was like this is hilarious that that you chose to you do that was the product we see today is that basically how you started it is that what it was at the beginning and how did you get it off the ground what was the how'd you get the initial momentum with that yeah pretty much so i my wearing my high school suite sweetheart we were both from a small roll down here in missouri i go to work for a group that was contract with nfl do camps combines clinics so i'm traveling all around the country got a really cool job making no money my wife kinda lands her dream job in chicago and you know we could come me by neither one of our parents or anything we didn't have any money really so to speak when we were younger so my wife gets his job she was gonna run the eddie bauer out of michigan avenue they was gonna be their premier store and all this so we thought man is gonna be great you know we go up there and i didn't know anything and as some of my friends in the nfl are like you gotta get in the trading business when shit i didn't know anything about trading and i said i had a small real town farm kid played lost horton on my life and they said well we'll get you this interview i go get an interview of this guy and the guy just kinda looks at me he's like damn you're a big tall guy and i i was probably about six four three fifty at time and they're like you you like to fight and i'm what the hell kind interview question is it you know i'm like what what and i said yeah sure shit i go out every weekend you know need to rumble or do at the bars and they're like yeah you're great we're you're hiring and i said well what am i doing i don't even know what the hell i'm doing they're like oh everybody will see you on the floor it'll give us a little edge in advantage so you know i started at the bread bottom they wanted me a phone clerk you know and then moved where in or getting orders off so i meet a few people they start out by go over and i'm trading swiss franks marks some foreign currencies over the mer and then i flip back over to the board i trading treasuries wait kevin this was back when you used to have to kinda push and shove your way with the papers getting your train on and they were like yeah your size was actually an asset yeah the date time the the you know they'd hire a basketball guys x football guy that'd beats fights break at all i'm on the floor so then we got off the floor where we were ar minis e mini first came out we were ar minis against bigger s and p's and then really my strong suit became really more people got interested in grains corn because they started using corn as ethanol and things like that so a lot of our big energy traders and friends they didn't know anything about the midwest you know and so it was all just foreign language to them so they would keep asking me questions and then i would go back home to my small rural where the farmers were playing domino's in the morning you know getting breakfast or caught and you know they'd be like hey city slick you know tell us what's happening here in the corn bean or weak market or cattle market and i would do like you said shut up i would just dump it down to my you know my back home speaking in more of a blue collar and just tell them hey here's what they're really meaning or saying and so in o seven i just does before that a little bit when the the government came out with the r that's where they turned corny in ethanol i started writing a newsletter kinda just for myself a journal i i'd said hey i'm gonna be a better trader and better investor i've listened a lot of people i've been broke twice on a couple of deals and it's like let's do it the right way so i started journal and i said hey i'm gonna send my notes out to friends and then it started circulating back to me it was coming from guys at goldman and different trading firms they was circling back to me and i told my wife i said shit we were investing trying to do some oh storage units at the time so i thought i'll send it out for forty bucks a month it'll be like a storage unit deal let's just see if people buy or pay and it just kinda took off and lit nuts from there and we've never advertising we're about forty five countries now and all the growth was organic then oh yeah would never advertise one to i love it and then you have the conference the thing that i went to and i think it was originally called the van trump conference you renamed to farm con and for those of who don't no you are like a god at this thing it was really inspiring to see us because you weren't trying to be you know the the front center of it but you could just tell you had so much respect from the community people really appreciated this gathering because they were getting a lot of value out of it and you ran it like a family affair and you got your son there and he's got his swag business and so the how did the farm con thing come about and is that like a big part of the business why do you do it yeah you know it's sounded well and started off just myself and probably thirty or forty friends traders investors we'd get the together other once a year drinks some bears and tell each other what our favorite trays or favorite investments were and they loved coming to kansas city because it was kind of an anomaly though where used to be in on the coast in new york or california so they'd come here and it would be kind of fun and so they would start to invite their friends and we all had investments in land bigger land investments different than next thing they had a lot of hunting and fishing guys were coming and just people at own big farms they were flying to private planes in and so yeah then we just got blew up and they start telling more and more of their friends and el next say we start selling out almost everywhere we'll have that you know it's it's really cool you know fun time can we talk a little bit about kinda like your empire and what it is now so you've got the publishing business the newsletter and then you have this thing called ag ag swag which is a merch company is that right yeah let back too to be clear you know some of the people grandfather in and we started charging forty dollars about four hundred a year or forty bucks a month then we went about eight years ago to six hundred and sixty and we have some people that white label the report send it to their their businesses and their staff and things like that so that's all in the mix but yeah so i had a friend dave cr holds he recently passed away he was a ceo of pay less cash and dave came back here to kansas city it started a business consulting company and then he got hired in a place called american identity and i said dave what the hell are you doing a coming american identity i said don't they just sell like hats and cha stuff and he's like yeah private equity company bought him and they're gonna dress it up they wanna have a you know big executive team so they're bringing me in as a ceo and he's like i think we'll have a good exit what about three i think it was three or four years they sold the staples i believe it was undisclosed but the i think it was close to eight billion dollars they sold the staples and i said holy shit i said who what do what you guys do go over there and regular did and he said yeah made hats shirts and chad he said and i said well who the hell are your biggest clients and he's like john deere ad car i'm like shit i said i know all those people i know all the you know all the farming can ag people and he says i tell you know if you ever get where you guys are gonna starts somewhere want something and just under the radar non intrusive business you know this this would be a great way to get them wrong so i told my son jordan when out of college or he is about out i said hey if you ever if you wanna try some on your own i got an idea i said i've come up with a name ag swag and i said you know we could probably spin this off and take care of a lot of our clients and just provide a lot better service and and be a lot you know more fun and friendly and and give people some great fresh ideas and so we launched ag swag and it's you know just a swag company that provides hats things of that nature too people were really specifically in the ag world we do other things but that's really our jordan schwartz nah he's running that he's hired an art team he's got about four or five artists my daughter came back to help him he's got you know team of logistics people and i think they're gonna do he said somewhere between twenty five and thirty million dollars this year so you know they're they're growing like crazy and you know every day if we wanna pull up on slack i can walk you guys through a little bit of the business while understand yeah let's do it you know this is just a simple example you draw you know you have your your scale uniqueness on the left and your scale of total value on the right and so if you go to your far right you have high value and low uniqueness right and you're asking what the hell that be and that that's like a tire business i always use an example like you know people have to have it so it's not unique but there's high value because everyone done the way was killed their family and any damn tires on their car so they wanted it to be good that if you see your business in that aspect you know you're in a low gross business model and and you're gonna have to be a a low cost provider you're gonna have to do volume and you know that's gonna be your play if you get up into the upper right quadrant in this keeps me out of a lot of bad business deals here you have low value but high uniqueness you know you start to ask yourself what you know what is that remember with snap or google come out with the glasses those glasses or i went back in my day like a laser dis you know you you know you're you're gonna be cost a lot of money to educate the masses it's gonna cost a lot to get it to market and there might not be any longevity in it so you gotta be careful in you know not a lot of value but high you need that's a tough spot to play now you get over to where apple likes to play or some of the others you go high value high uniqueness that's something like an ipod ten thousand songs in your pocket you know that was their main stick and its light that's where you can create high gross that's where you can create high margin and that's where you can make a lot of great things hap obviously lower left corner you're you're an idiot if you're somewhere no value know no back you're you know and i always stand there people buy value not price and this was a hard one to understand for a lamp because if i went into walmart and i put a whole bin of laser disc in there and i put them for sale for five cents i mean back yeah nobody's reason can buy them just because there's no value to you know what i'm saying now maybe there is a little now because people are looking to sell some of those types of biden but i'm just saying you you have to be aware of people by try keep it by value not price and so you make the price as low as you wanna go and it was just not good it's not good and i see people get trapped in that a lot of real estate and some other things so you know this is where we try to we try to categorize the business deals when they come down the pipe where this is at and how this is gonna play out because it's never the soldiers i send in at first right it's never the first money we send in on the deal it's how many more soldiers are gonna get called to duty in the and maybe never come back home into my bank account or come back you know miss limbs and arms and so it's like you have to be careful i think in that aspect you know it's it's that because i'm my wife all the time times like my gosh we're writing more capital call check but we try to know when if we can categorize in this way we know what we're getting into where we went with ag swag what's critically important we believe is knowing your funnel so your light users there's obviously you're gonna be able get more market share on your light users as you move down the customer continuing that would be your heavy user so as sean pointed out that would be john deere or that would be a car now we what do you have to understand in all businesses you're always gonna be pulled to the right so you're always gonna be pulled to the high user and low gross they're gonna try to get you over there if if people like what you have they like what you're doing they're gonna take you over there more to the right and you know try to beat you up on your price strat beat up on gross because they say they're are heavy use that's why it's really imperative for most people you don't wanna get an order from law you know you don't want to go that way because it's next to impossible to get your business back to the left and to the left is where you're gonna see a lot more profitability a lot more high gross and and so we tried to position ag swag in the middle away from the john deere in so we've had calls from them wanting their play is for us to you know store all of their merch for the year we ship it out it becomes a logistics business the growth shrinks up to nothing and we've got a you know a real you know you know we're running a real people business that where we've got a lot of hands and a lot of touches so we tried to stay out of that space as much as possible early on so we can create and build more smaller accounts smaller business owners and people like that where there's more for fragmentation for us so you have these other slides that i really like so you have this this poker versus chess one that i loved to you can you talk about this one yeah you know i just saying you know they talk a lot about life's being like chess or a lot of times you'll hear people talk about those things you know you know i say life's more like poker than chest just because the cards are face down and a lot of ups involved a lot of time so you know you can be the greatest have the greatest skill in the world i've met some the most brilliant brilliant people but if they don't catch any breaks or don't catch any luck and you know it it becomes stuff so i think you have to remind yourself and that's what we were kinda talking about earlier if you take you're a genius and you're you're just smarter than everyone else i think you're run into a ton of problems so a ton of roadblock that's where i think you know you have to look at it more like poker like you get catch you're gonna get luck lucky every now and get on a run and get a low heater and and sometimes you know that's when you really have to to push and go all in as just when when you're when your lux going your way when when you feel like you some of the things are going your way you gotta pull way back you know that's not when you doubled triple down that's when you kinda hun her out it let the storm clouds fast and and hopefully our luck shift and turn around a little bit well it seems like there's three three parts to the poker right there's the cards are are face down so there's a lot of unknowns unlike chess then you're talking about luck and variance that's the second part and the third part was you said that the the amateur players just play too many hands a pro only plays you know fifteen to twenty percent of their hands but an amateur is playing half the hands and so the trick is actually just to pass on the average opportunity to save room for the huge opportunity that's that's the other one doug and i think warren buffett calls us waiting for the fat pitch he's like there's no cold strikes you can let fifty opportunities go by and just pass on them even if there were some good ones in there it's okay as long as you just when you do swing you swing at the right ones hundred percent i i heard upset agree i mean you know we use that analogy we use the ted williams saying all the time there's dead williams as a batting chart and ted williams was one the first person to go and document all this where he would hit balls where he could you know what his percentage was if it was high outside low and inside and he figured out where his sweet spot was and and williams was just sitting wafers bitch and you got it hit hey don't knock shit out of it so it's similar to what yourself you you talk about lock and you say passing on the average opportunity to stay room for the huge opportunity and with your trading would have been opportunities that you thought were huge that you pounce on as well as maybe some that you didn't because you thought they were average yeah tons i could go through those like crazy and you know but i i agree with that and we've we've talked about this myself and a lot of my trading friends it's that as we've gotten older we've we've learned we can look back through all of our document tag area i mean the more trades we made the worst year we had it seemed like the fewer trades by far the better of the year and you know now we're trading even less and less and less and i know i think some of our readers kinda probably getting scar these i want the action and everything but you know it's like wrestling you know it is a great wrestler a high school college wrestler they're super patient they wait for the the market in this case to make a mistake late for the market to get out of out of a aligned or over leveraged or over tilted and then you come in and you try to make a play you know most all your money made the greatest traders will tell all your money's made sitting you know sitting and waiting and it and it's incredibly hard to do the decision to do nothing is a decision and in our world a lot of times it can be the best decision you could possibly make so you know and as far as like sam you know we like i said we were early with the quote early with tesla i was trading when amazon first came out and we had thirty thousand shares of amazon like right out of the hole and i went negative on it and i literally forget story and my wife and i shit we didn't have enough money to pay attention at the time and we were sitting there they i had this position on it went against me and i said man if this thing just gets back to even in amazon train like three or four bucks a time it got back to even and i'm blew out and i mean it would have been like you know the craziest trade of all times if i have stuck with it but i'm wouldn't have stuck with it probably you know i'm a trader so it's like he can't he can't beat yourself up saying man if i would just stayed in that or not stuck i think a lot of people do that to themselves you know it's a psychological game and you you just wanna try not to beat yourself up and not get down on yourself because that then it then it gets hard to fail and and recover so what's the case for being a trader versus a investor because if you read about all the investing greats they all kind of poo poo traders a little bit they're like oh you don't wanna be a trader you wanna be you know a a buy and hold guy you wanna buy find a great asset and sit on it for a long time am i just only reading the advice from the investors and that's why or is there something to what they're saying now you're absolutely right i mean there's plenty of trades i've been in that i've become an investor because they went against me and we just kept holding and holding building right the was meant to be a short term trade but turned into a long term you know just ass kicking so it's like no i agree my job though i was a trader so you know i was at the floor i at the exchange i was a can't city board trade guy you know and so my whole job revolved around trading and fairly quick movements in the market i was never i did own a day trading firm one time and you should've see you know the success rate on people day trading it was just a miserable business so we don't day trades so to speak will be more swing trading will we multi days in a trade you know the commodity markets are a little different every buyer there's a loser and they're little different than stocks and and there's expiration on the contract so you know we're we're more short term oriented it but we're also longer term investors like you would say sean i do think i advise my kids my own kids just exactly what you're saying you know no unless you're gonna be full time and you really want the belly aches i wouldn't advise probably you know trading or trying to tie market movements like said i i'm more with buffet you know i i think you know everybody's trying to beat the indexes i mean everybody's trying to beat the be here to last second and you're in and you're out that stuff to do and you know so i think you know as passive investor long term hold is probably a good plot for for the majority of most be in that's way to build wealth how many years have you beat the index how or how been doing this twenty or thirty years how do you think that you've beat the index tina know i mean the years that we beat it we'd be to buy a mile because we get lucky in some certain position or some surge stock and like this year i'm i'm trailing i have decent them amount put over into you know we're still in a lot of cds at five point a quarter or five percent and you know a lot of our wealth building has come from real estate that's just buying land farmland or what are you buying by and real did you know we have everything from commercial properties to single families that we've turned into various airbnb really out land farmland regular land those have been our biggest winters has the majority of your net worth come from the income that the newsletter has produced or has it been from trading and so i think there's two ways you can do with your business you know when you're breaking money you can either take the money and reinvest it back in your business which we didn't do that was kind of my play i'm like i'm not gonna do that i'm gonna take my money and then i'm gonna put it out and see and try and invest in other people's businesses and you know and we've we're we're partners with a for private called isa select so we're early investors and ag tech startups and some biotech and so we've had a total losers but they've all led to meeting new people learning new things and then that and in turn comes to something else today so you know we try to grow our revenue and then take that revenue and invest it in various other vehicles and other sources what's the like sentiment like amongst the people that or reading the newsletter or would come to the conference you know are people bullish right now are they optimistic are there big headwind or tailwind what's going on in the food producer world yeah you know it's it's pretty dark right now over in our world to so to speak the the big jump in rates was obviously a kind of a real bench for a lot of our ag tech startups and a lot of the people just in agriculture in general so you've had a big jump in rates and then we also have you know a little bit of a glut right now we have a pretty burdensome supply core over two billion bush supply core you know we had a about five hundred million bush supply of beans coming down the pipe and wait sorry that that means that last season over produced yeah you we had a good year last year south america is coming off a a pretty good year like for example production doubled from what they had to had a big drought last year and had some production problems brazil's got a little bit of they're down from a little bit but china like so china right now hasn't been a buyer of us new crop beans haven't booked any any cargo which is unusual so we're worried we got this election coming up if anything can happen we're not sure how china is gonna play it with trump coming back into the mix are we gonna have a bigger hit on tariffs so when trump was in office we had bean prices go derek break pretty considerably because the we got into a pissing match with china and you know they're the number one buyer of beans in the world so it's we're kinda trying to weigh this thing out here and see how things are gonna shake up but we do have some new things on the front we got sustainable aviation fuel so soybeans are not gonna be used to make sustainable aviation fuel which is gonna be a big one we're trying to push to get corn where the corn production is gonna also be used to make sustainable aviation fuel there's a few pipeline issues that need to be addressed and some things like that but we're moving for more food for fuel is becoming more little more prevalent so we're seeing more countries move to that for cleaner energy sources so we're seeing more utilities and more usage or traditional crops or we're seeing more utility and more usage were land we were just seeing a ton more buyers and bitter come in for land people wanting to put in solar you know solar fields to create energy wind fields there's just a lot more utilities being used now for data centers we're seeing a big push through the midwest on companies wanting to build these massive data centers really through the clutter of the midwest and we think it's kinda like cushing oklahoma where we store our oil now we think data is gonna be kind of the new oil and so we're gonna try and store our data here in the us centrally into the midwest so we're seeing a big bush in some farmer i mean gobble for a big data my father is a a produce broker so he owns a small brokerage where like let's say that over the course of twenty years he's sold a hundred million dollars worth of onions you know over the course of twenty years the the the the margin is like five percent like so he'll he'll he'll make five million dollars over twenty or whatever if you sell a hundred million dollars worth of onions so it's a huge quantity but in that space he's a small dog you know really tiny but i remember during wait like i remember i was only seventeen or eighteen i watching the news and i was like you know dad why do you seem like you're making more money now than than before where everyone else seems to be going broke and he was like well look at the corner of our kitchen there's onions and potatoes there like people are still gonna buy this stuff no matter what and then when the economy is going well like you're gonna go out to eat and i'll crush it then too so i was like i'm i'm in a good business and i remember thinking like as i got older i kinda forgot about farming and i forgot about food and agriculture and i just i didn't really think about it but what i've learned is that over the years that america is really good at two or three things one of them being culture so we export culture like amazingly well so hollywood is like our biggest export i would say or or agriculture the second thing that we do really well we are so fucking good at growing corn america is so good at growing corn and i forget how important agriculture is to our to our our way of life in in america so when you're talking about some of these things about what china is doing what brazil's is doing if china's buying stuff from us how big is like this entire industry that you're associate i mean what percentage of the gt gdp or economic value is it creating in america compared to other things call massive i mean it's you know one of the and we're seeing more and more of the wealthy get into agriculture and that's why i'm saying it's a really hot area and you're seeing yeah the gates foundation buffett group well warren son howard he used to be a big farmer and he had just recently gotten out and still on the ground but they're having some other people farmer and addition things like that yeah seen a big big push and more and more people being interested in a ag and interested in food and where it's coming from we're seeing charlotte also say is more people going direct to the farmers just recently in the last few weeks we've seen more ranches come online kinda form a little coalition there's a group about seven good ranches out in texas that are now selling direct to the public you know they were getting maybe they were getting minimal for their beef you know and now that they're selling direct they're they're really doing well and people like buying direct and so you just buy off their website or or there there's some startup that's doing this yeah they have a auction oxygen i think it's called bid for beef i thought that was a dating site yeah yeah you know today i yeah no could be whatever you're too yeah yeah but you know they're starting to make more traction and we're seeing that across the board with other plays what's going on with like farms that are kids don't wanna take it over what does the succession plan look like and is somebody solving that problem that's a huge issue and that's being discussed heavily and in the ag world that you know so you have a this this big succession rollover i think i don't know what the number i can't remember off the top my head it's okay eighty percent of the farms are owned by people over sixty you know it's it's a really aging demographic and a lot of the the kids you know our have other jobs are went off to great colleges and great schools and they don't necessarily wanna come back so yes there is there is a a a big issue and and a lot of the people in the farming world keep their cards really close to their chest and they don't really talk a lot openly with their kids or they don't have a lot of great succession planning in place and and we're seeing that a lot i think you know we've tried to be super open with our kids and and discuss everything and show them everything and say hey here's where everything's at here's where you need to know here's where you need to be and you know hopefully you only tell our other friends a similar type things so yes session planning is is very important and i think it's you know something that we all have to address as we own businesses so well what what do think is gonna happen like if if eighty percent of these are owned by people over sixty and a lot of the kids are going like is this just gonna be private equity owns all the farms like what what what happens here we are gonna see a lot of roll a lot of turnover so in the farming space or when you're buying acreage there's there's two bidder that are gonna come against you the person who farm butts up against you they're gonna be more to pay a big premium because the land may only come available once their life are and so they're gonna be bid and heavily so whoever's can close proximity because as you know driving the are driving the heart it it makes a lot of sense to get a continuing piece of ground and now you're also having like california teachers pension fun bidding against you you have other high profile fun people bidding against you so yes who runs it they just play somebody to go live on the farm and one sean have you ever been on a farm no so don't i don't know where i would go to find a farm where do you got without somewhere my my aunts and uncles and cousins are farmers in oklahoma and they have like two or three thousand acres and they are i guess they're ranchers and so they own like fifteen hundred cattle i believe and a bunch of their cattle are sean you probably never heard this term they're bucking bulls have you ever heard you know what a bucking bowl is i do not so what they do is they the pb which is the professional rodeo association they if you get a good bowl a good bowl can be worth i don't know kevin what like fifty grand all the way up to a million dollars and i yeah more day some and these good balls you get you make money in two ways you make money because at the rodeo the rider gets paid so if you stay on a a bowl for a certain amount of time you win and you get paid but the bowl that bucks the hardest also gets paid and that's like like a rate rating system and so there's like famous bowls that are known as like really hard fucking bowl who's the michael jordan of bulls it's bush wack i think bush bush bush has been the best for a long time no bush is a famous bowl the guy who like david bush lag which is named jr r or something he like just retired i believe right what was i say yeah we've my son played so of all a couple kids that were pb bull riders are already they're insane so yeah my cousin and the family this is what they do and so i went and stay with them every once in while and we get up at like eight and starting at like ten you go to the feed store and you buy a huge amount of feed you bring the feedback you call the bowls and you throw it all over like the like you scattered it out throughout the the the area and they come up and they eat it and then on the weekends they drive these bowls from oklahoma to texas which is like twelve hours and these bowls when you put them into the truck you would think a bowl that you burst and raise like they will literally be there when they burst this bowl but once the bowl hits puberty i guess or it has balls it wants to fucking kill you no matter what it doesn't matter if you raised or birth this bowl this bowl what's the murder you every chance it's gets and so just to get the bowl onto the truck it's like a life or death situations once a while like this it's a fifteen hundred pound thing that that you gotta get into this trucks and they would drive these balls all around the country and they get paid i think for grand just to as an appearance fee or something like that to show up in pb and then the other the cows the the females and so they make their money by raising the cows that they sell for beef and then the bulls they either sell them to get bread or they make money directly from the rodeo and it's like a huge cash business so my cousins and aunts and uncles they'll always have a a lot of cash because they'll go to the auction and it's just like a really heavy cash business they get let's say ten grand or selling ten ten pounds they take that ten grand and they spend eight of it like that day on more cow feed and so it's like a really heavy i i'm probably getting some hundred numbers wrong but they're it's a really heavy cash business and it's fucking hard my cousin sam would drive around and he'd be drinking like natural light while he's driving his truck checking on all the like on all the cows dude it pay it's a hard living and it's really fun i've like spent time on there it's been it it's fun for me as a visitor but it is a hard job to do this shit you are working and walking constantly yeah you're right and you know i lost i lost a good joke not a big joke but i did when you said somebody's buddy's mind getting said hey let's start raising these bowls to be pb bowls you know rodeo bowls shit i know battle don't think have her cashed one check i think it just it was a lot of fun a why of like you said a lot of drinking that light and drive her out of the pickup check on them and you yeah and like it's it's like fun but it it's fucking hard and it it's a very capital intensive business hey i'll one i'll give you one that i that that was a big miss now a guy came to me sam we're get a kick guy came here hell was probably twenty years ago and fifty you know the i was just getting going he said man i got this great idea and the guy came in and he was all suited and i said well and he's is an english major and all he says what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna build his websites and i'm gonna hire a couple other english majors and we're gonna write really eli descriptions of these cattle and these bulls and their stems the stand that they call the sperm you know and he's like then i'm gonna sell this sperm all over in japan all over the world i said dude you're that's this shit ain't ago or you know this was early up to dude blew it up it blew what how do you eloquently describe the sperm of a ball what's it what's his website you know the background the lineage i don't know i have not solved him for another year but i remember he came back through and some people are like man this guy just hey i'll tell you one we were at the louisville farms they had me come out there to speak because us world largest indoor fire show on sai down be the keynote speaker and there's this little boost set up nexus they got these polaroid on this little pin by ten booth tip and i go talk you guys so what the hell is this thing he's like it's called farmers only dot com and you guys just seen all of that at man i'm not shitting you sean we're like all making in front of him and then the next year he comes and he has like a twenty by twenty booth and then the next year he's there and shit his booth damn biggest john deere i mean his booth is last and everywhere like the hell then he's got super bowl ads it is just holy dot com you're looking to mirror farmer you know that thing just blew up and he shitty turned out it's a great deals when you let so let's say i wanna become a gentleman farm farmer and i wanted to go buy a farm walk me through that so first where would i find a farm do is this like sold like on zillow or is this brokers only how do people find farms to buy you know some people are now investing f through i'm in i'm invested company acre trader acre trader dot com so we buy farms we even have farms out in near neck of the woods sean we had nut farms out california we have regular other row crop production parts through bakersfield in that area through there you know and all over the united states you have very far as grow very similar products so farmer is selling a fraction of their of their farm what ends at acreage trader we go in and actually buy the entire farm from a family say they're what out or the sec succession planning and they so we'll buy the entire farm and most of the time we'll have a farmer area that has called us about the farm instead said hey we don't have the money but if you guys would wanna put up the money and we'd be happy to farm it for you and do revenue sharing crop sharing or some type of you know split into the revenue we're looking to just hold the ground for appreciation over ten twelve year period the years you have good years you have some really good years some years though you you're gonna have some some losing years but over the course of time ten fifteen twenty years your appreciation on the land is gonna be that's really gonna carry you for that's what the that's what a lot of hedge funds and are looking for with a lot of funds are looking for that longer term well what what are these trade for like if i go buy a farm what is the multiple you pay on a farm typically or would it be just price per acre rice per acre and it's gone nuts lately i mean my buddy just sold his mom left him of junk ground that they had in the family and he said hey what do you think and i said i don't man it's a great time this was about seven eight months ago i said you know farmers are flushed with some cash maybe it's about a year ago and hand up getting twenty thousand an acre down here outside of missouri now that's pretty rare off the books you know acreage around here typically go for you know five to twelve to fifteen but if someone needs the ground or wants the ground and it's a continuing piece of track to their farm you can see guys get the bidding more and so you get bidding orders yeah you can go out anywhere look up farm grounds you want them you know there's a lot of things you wanna look for liking in cans as you can't drill any wells any you can't drill new wells and so kansas in nebraska there's a liable and all with the underground aquifer and there's a lot of problems with with water and so you know we we believe though we like c and b great we like ground that's maybe in a flood plane or we like ground this water efficient because we believe that all the technology and the money from gates is foundation or buffet they're they're really putting their money into new technology to help grow crops in third world countries that have really porcelain you know iowa has the best soil iowa and illinois though they'll argue with each other who's got the richest soil and they've got great soil and great farms that you really don't have to do a lot too you get to some of these peripheral areas that like these guys you you get a biker jacket but you got no bike right that's that's more of my my my land so i just need to i'm asking questions just so i have the lingo in case i ever get pressed so that i i can sound like i know what i'm talking about without actually knowing anything yeah you're you have to get some land to match that car heart coat that you wanna get i get i yeah i get that well what about the other tech like i've seen people do these like fitbit for cows where they're like you know like cow valuable you know asset and you don't know if it's sick you know keep driving around keep checking it what if you could know before it's too late what tech is working yeah we we it is and we're investing a few companies to do that and they'll tag them they'll tag the cattle you know because there is a push to have less antibiotics less you know less you know shots and things into into our our food supply so if you're able to identify when they have a fever earlier you can get them segregated from the herd get them away from the herd give them the give them the medicine that they need in a more timely fashion so yeah all those are great you know zoe publicly traded company they're a leader really probably in the animal health space if you're looking for some a longer term play we're invested in zoe i have a business sean that my friend's working on that my interests you to kevin so basically he's putting he's put r r r r rfid sorry tags on chickens and cows and you know how like a chicken will like when you buy eggs it says free range and you just kinda trust like i guess that means that chicken was just like out walking around which is better for me because it's somehow healthier and all it's also like if you're if you care about animals you're like alright at least i know it had like a better life and whatever but free range i think that's it's a technical term actually where they has to have a certain amount of space but i don't think of that it's actually necessarily always followed and so what he did was he's putting these these tags onto the cows and chickens until you know the beef that you bought the tag number and you could actually go and see how much did it walk around and where did it go which sounds a little more bit and weird but it's actually supposed to be like reassuring where it like look my farm is now you could hold my farm accountable to know that this meat was actually raised in the way that i promised it was going to be and that's like an interesting idea because i think sean you said this i think you said in like some period of time twenty or fifty or years we're gonna look back at the way that we treated cows and we're gonna be like that was pretty unfortunate like this it shouldn't have been done that way where an animal was born in a pen and never leaves and then we eat them and i i actually agree with that i agree with that sentiment where like the way that we treat certain animals i'm cool at eating them but it's it's better to better to and them have a certain life and so this idea is kind of interesting to me yeah we think that that's gonna be prevalent throughout we think you're gonna blockchain far is what we're call it in our world you know here a blockchain far meaning the fertilizer companies and the input companies are gonna have to report all that and you're gonna know what was put on whatever it is you're eating or you know and the reason i wanna a blockchain it is just like remember when bolton was having those issues several years back you know with some things they wouldn't be able to go right to the field right to the spot and know exactly what happened and what was put on and what time and where it was at so yeah i agree with you sam i think that's definitely where the world's edited and know i think christine seeing farmers make that transition more and more they're a lot more tech savvy than people give them credit apps in the world they they're very tech savvy as a matter of fact and nobody treats their animals i mean my opinion i have never been on a farm in my entire life that i seen any abuse to animals i mean nobody treats their animals better just because it's generally it would typically the way they make their own living the way they make their their money and they teach their kids to take care of the reality know they love and show them at four ages and go all around it it's sad that they do get it such a bad rap in the media when i've personally never come across it and what's your take on the alternative meat movement thing where and silicon valley there's a bunch of startups that are trying to grow beef from cells so that you won't have to farm the animal you won't have to harm the animal to to be able to have the same genetic it should be virtually identical genetically identical what's your take on that movement and is that where you think things are going i think there will be a segment of the space that continues to grow and i think you're gonna see it continue to gain market share i think is is population shifts and moves out you know as the baby boomers continue to age and move all we get more people i think you're going to see alternative types of pro protein be developed and i think as they get more money in the labs they're getting better at reducing the cost and creating better flavor and i think as those two things continue to move forward just like with tesla elon musk you know it's it's only a matter of time how's everything happen gradually than all at once and you know it's like the electric vehicle i think you have you know a lot fewer moving parts it's a lot better than the combustion engine i think you're gonna see things you know gradually gain more and more market share well we'll have farmers taken to like i always read the comments of like in texas message boards and things like that they it it doesn't it seems like it's fifty fifty if like the rural community thinks that electric vehicles are are worth it yeah right now it's a tough know because just the distance has travel you know a lot of folks who travel massive distances out in rural very and so it doesn't make a lot of sense to them at the moment i think eventually yes i think they'll see it have better torque you know better low end get up and go out of the hole and i think you'll see it a lot more transition i like anything no nobody wants to i guess let go of their heritage and their roots and the you know it's same with the fake meat you know a lot of farmers just bash it and wanna go nuts about it i i i think there's definitely gonna be a place more and i think there's it's gonna be able to gain and grow some market share you probably you know as they get cost lower and lower i think it'll be you know a way that we see things up if you were twenty four years old again and you had the entrepreneurial energy to go do something what would you be what would you advise that twenty four year old to go go to go do in this space where do you think the opportunity is i think there's gonna be a big push with air quality air you know just the quality of error from this whole whole virus just the testing for the viruses and you we're seeing a lot more testing take in general just over the entire space so i think you're gonna be a big push thanks to do with air and creating good air quality we're seeing a lot more kids that have asthma or asthma related problems and i think you know not just here in the united states but i'm talking globally and taking what's an example solution what's an example of that from an agricultural perspective well s you know we're big right now into the carbon market so you know we're trying to reduce carbon footprints and no one really reduces it much more than the you know giant corn the corn film plants you know things of that nature and so you know yeah i think there's a big play and a big push into the carbon try to reduce like i said trying to reduce the footprint anything that'll help save energy improve our water usage improve water purity you know i think anything to do with the natural resources that just to become more heavily relied upon if we transition all this to electric i mean the rare minerals are gonna be art they're gonna be scared i mean there's gonna be a lot of plays in you know what we see on the on that whole side in that whole front so i think you know natural resources things to do with natural resources things to do with air water like i said food quality you know we really love the blue collar space i mean i think we love you know like what cody sanchez has going on some of the other things we like the thought of buying blue collar businesses rolling them up and you know kind of patching up and selling them why do you like that because they're they're retiring i think they're retiring i think we didn't see near as many kids go into the trades as we had in the past you know my dad my wife's said i mean everybody was in trade back that that was everyone's goal to go to college so you know just had a big lull are big i guess you know where they're just a short supply of good skilled people and now we think you can go into that space and we've tried it a couple times and you know where we can build out some things and i think you provide people with good quality service in an onboarding process that you know you can cut your customer retention rate down to a feasible level i i think there's just the sky's is a little growth you know that do you use kevin to use tiktok i'm on yeah i see have you guys seen the like popularity amongst young people and the trades like it's it like people like glam it in in a in a in a cool way and i think an accurate way which is like i'm making a hundred and fifty or hundred and twenty thousand dollars that i just want to trade two years it goes so well on tiktok because it's a it's like a novelty it's like going into the zoo it's like wow you made that you know how to do things with your hands and that's what a carrot looks like when you when it comes out like that's incredible swipe alright onto the next one then that was easy but but i actually think that some of these young people are actually being influenced by this because they're like shit i graduated with a hundred and fifty or two hundred grand in debt and i don't make anything remotely like that i'm amount of money and i'm sitting on my computer all day like this might be a little bit more intriguing and i don't have the any data but it does seem like young people are more open minded to the trades than at least sean and eyes like graduating classes yeah i'm seeing that as well i'm wondering that from some of the younger kids that are opted not to go to college and are going be pipes that are going into pipe union or the plumbing union or electrical union so yeah we're we're definitely ai ain't gonna replace plumbers or or electrician or h hvac people it may be one day but but no time soon and like i do think that's subs getting more popular and i think that's really cool fascinating there's like it's also like ripped buff dude so it's always like chicks like commenting you're like about like have you seen that guy sean who just cuts wood yeah the lumber yeah the lumber jacket guy he's incredible i love that chicks i'll sit there and i'll watch that video twice it's just an incredible video it's his guy that uses an axe and he's a sometimes shirtless sometimes not and he's just like oh you know obviously a ten out of ten he's just chopping wood and like everyone's like i need to in my life therapeutic have you been a part of any roll ups i always find roll ups to be a really interesting business strategy it seems like there's a lot of money you've made in in a successful roll up i'm curious if you've been a part of anything i am not personally no i usually they're exit ahead of time or you know get a little nervous over it flames out but i have a couple friends that yeah that's their whole their whole way they've created all their wealth you get got one of the joe lumps i'm speaking of right now he's doing it with cranes he's buying small crane companies that'll have two or three cranes and he's buying them and he's putting them all together and you know and he's gonna sell that out and he's done it with several other things with its restaurants or different things in the past so yeah i thought it was interesting on the crane plate you know he kidding me about it and investment night we just didn't do it but yeah i'm sure he'll hit of you told un with him did sean i think the shit that kevin's doing is way more exciting than the shit that our friends are doing which you're gonna quit and go do it know i don't know about that it sounds it's like a lot of work sounds like a lot lot of words then if you're not gonna go do it no and what it means is i like hanging out with these types to people sometimes that's what it means yeah it gives you guys you know i think it gives both of i like hanging out with your group of people because i think it gives me different perspective and learn different things that you guys have on that i can make applicable to my world as well so you know yeah there's a good synergy there between all and how do you do that practically because i think you do a good job of getting yourself into positions like we talked about going to random conferences that are totally outside your industry that you didn't need to go to but you wanted to go to to shift your lens a little bit or hanging out with younger people who may be demographic just doing different things culturally doing different things than the guy who made it and is at a country club now might might be disconnected from whatever the culture shifts are how do you tactically go about doing that do you put yourself in those positions what questions do you ask honestly just make myself i always eat yell yelled at the kids and we were growing up so i played sports at a high level and had several friends in one world series and you know super bowl as we always talk you know we he'd get a bad coach you know everybody get a bad coach or things like that and it's like look when you gotta be able to steal someone from the guy the guy was great player that you know you gotta go in there with an open mind and you gotta be able to take away some things that they've done well and that they've done oz even then use those and put those arrows in your quiver so i just always had the kids looking for new crazy weird conferences or things to go to and and from there i'd make myself go the last couple of years i didn't wanna go and i'm like but each time i went i'm i i took away several little gold nuggets that we'd implemented into our business models and hell we've made big returns on them each one of them and you y i didn't think i didn't get anything out gotta of go into the car i just like this is gonna be a waste but i just sucked it up and did it you it's like going to work out or you got run or since like shit i guess i just gotta go do it yeah we had a friend when we were going to farm who supposed to come with us it was me ben and our buddy and the morning of we're like hey we'll meet you in the lobby you know your flight was yeah you you landed like an hour ago right and he basically woke up looked at and he said kansas city he looked at the flight time and then he's like you know what just bailed and i was like man but but of course i i felt that everybody feels that in the moment like no do i really wanna go do this thing that i don't have to do that is unknown right it's it's back to your thing about are you willing to sprint for an unknown distance and we didn't know what value we would get out of it that was the hard part that was the challenge and doing it when we didn't know what would come out of it was really really valuable and it's ironic because that same friend he he gave he gave me a great analogy one time we were talking to a younger friend this guy was the youngest vc and silicon we can valley so nineteen twenty years old he was investing i don't know ten million dollars into to things he was like he got written up as the youngest vc in silicon valley so we were we're reading with this guy but now five years have gone by and it was like you hadn't seen him really progressing at that same rate that you would expect somebody who definitely had that sort of ph type of upbringing where it seem like you had all the potential in the world and i was like man what do you think he's doing wrong whether what would you do differently he goes oh it's it's like windows and doors because he's only willing to do something if it's a window if he could immediately see through and see the what's on the other side it then he'll do it but anytime there's a door and it's opaque and you don't know what's on the other side it he's not willing to knock on a door and open it up and see what might be inside he's only looking at doors and he windows he's never willing to go through a door and if once he starts going through doors he's this guy's career is gonna take off and i remember hearing that and really taking that you know to heart because i thought that was very very wise that's a great analogy yeah i've never heard that for so i've heard a lot that's yeah that's a great one there for sure so sean the reason why you like a lot of these folks in the midwest and some folks in the in the south is because you love phrases you love phrases like windows the doors you love cool sakes and you know what i love them too and that's why i'm happy yeah i did both that you guys we were at a dinner so at farm you invited us to like a private dinner at the end is like ten people this guy stands up and he delivers two of the coldest lines i've ever heard so he stands up and for we're doing our intros like a and so i stand up and i give some super vanilla intro hi i'm sean i live in san francisco and i'm i'm interested i'm tech founder and i investor alright said sit down forget this guy stands up he's got a big presence and he goes i i don't remember what his his name was exactly what he he said he goes you know i don't know a lot of things i don't know i don't know the score of the game right now there's a big game going on he's goes i don't know the score of the game right now i don't know anything about this and he goes he goes hell i don't know where the remote is in my house at the time but i know deals and i've made a lot of deals he's like i'm a private equity guy and he starts talking about his deal making i was like wow here he goes i've been around for a long time you cut me open you can see a lot of rings in the middle i was like wow it's one way of saying it just on fire he goes somebody go somebody asked them they go what if well what if they don't what if they don't go for it on this deal it sounds like you really need them to to say yes what if what if you they say if you get rejected he goes i'm not afraid of rejection hey he's a big big old dude and he goes i've stood in front of women in my life naked before i've heard no no no no no i'm okay with it but looks like wow this guy is like half comedian half businessman and i loved it but it was just it was just another day at the office for him but for me coming from from our world that was like the charisma levels and the the the the the gift of the ga was so was so incredible to see i loved it yeah it's definitely wild tub yeah and and you got towards shoot a little bit that i like just here and what you have to say kevin and for the people listening maybe maybe we'll get you some new subscribers it's the van trump dot com i i like your you always you do something cool but you'll just like have a selfie with you and your wife and you're like say today we're on vacation here's what we're doing and you'll say something kind of funny cute and i love it we should just get like a group of twenty of our of our listeners to select small group to go to farm cotton and we'll all go together as a field trip next next time you guys do it when is it first week in january january eighth the night this year cover ago how much is the ticket i think this year we're like twelve hundred bucks or so and you've sell a lot of them too right yeah was sell out whatever they give us you know high capacity we saw up the hotel every year and yeah we appreciate you doing this you the man thank you and thank you for years of being a a cool dude you've always been a great guy to me so thank you i appreciate it good luck both you guys and your family yeah that's the pod thank you very much i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back