He Turned $300/mo Into $3,750,000/mo From GARDENING

24:27That I completely agree with. I always think like it mitigates all your downsides, but it doesn't, at least I haven't found that it makes you some massively happier person yeah yeah yeah yeah but you remember that that study where it was like 70 000 a year right that's bullshit that is absolutely that i agree is bullshit that why why do you agree that that's bullshit okay so first of all i think inflation adjusted isn't it like 160k now or something like that yeah even i think that numbers might be bullshit too to 160 grand in uh in one of the top five cities uh shockingly doesn't go very far doesn't go far Yeah, I think I think that's bullshit because the things let's say you're making like 200 a year.

25:11You can get like you can have someone come and clean the house or you can have like meal support or these sorts of things that that help you free your time up from things you like genuinely don't like to do. There's things like I love to do that. Of course, I could pay for like I obviously I grow my own food and I like cook meals and bake my own bread and stuff like that. I don't have to do that. But like I don't clean my house anymore. Right. And so things like that, I think, give me... I don't know if positive joy would be the way I would phrase it, though. It's just like, I don't have to do an annoying thing, is the way I think about it.

25:43Yeah, it's like... You remember that book, The Five Languages of Love? And it's like, oh, your girlfriend's an active service woman. So if I do something nice for her, she'll feel loved. There's the five languages of love, but for money. For me, it's not nice things. But for some people, it could be they love cars. For me, it's the same thing, where I've got a cleaner who comes often. And I just like genuinely feel happier not having to do my laundry and clean. Yeah. And so in those like small things, which frankly aren't expensive, it definitely makes you happier. Yeah. Those little small things.

26:16I learned that all from Ramit. Same. I learned that all from Ramit is just he has like a surgical team on every single part of his life that he hates to do. And I was like, you know what? That's actually pretty smart. And so. And he spends big on stuff. I was with Remy on Saturday. He like always asks these like crazy questions where sometimes I'm just wanting to chill and have fun. And he's like, Sam, let me ask you a question. What's your rich life? And I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, let's just drink our coffee. He's like, no, no, no. Tell me your rich life. And I'm like, okay. It's not stuff.

26:51It's services. He goes, what would happen if you 10x your spending on your services? And I was like... I was having coffee with him. We had the same conversation. He goes, he goes, he goes, how, how, how big would your staff be if it could be as big as you wanted it to be for your house? And I was like, I don't know. Like, I think I have like a cleaner and maybe like a cook every so often or something. He's like, oh man, like what kind of cook? You know, he gets into the details. He gets into the details. He loves it. He loves it. And when he asked those questions, frankly, it does make me start thinking a, like maybe I should do this and be like, am I thinking too small?

27:25Like if I love something, why don't I like get 10 X more of, of that thing. And so it is like cool to think about. He does do a good job with that, uh, of like make of like pressuring me to think beyond like how I'm thinking. And, and Ramit stuff has actually been life-changing for me. Same. How big is the business now? Can you say? Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're about 90 ish people. Uh, and we're hoping to hit somewhere in like 40, 45 million this year in revenue. That's insane. Right. Did you ever think that, And are you doing it profit profitably still now that even though you've raised money? Yeah, we're profitable.

28:01We're profitable. The first year after, I think we were not because, you know, we hired quite a bit ahead of of growth because we were like way under hired with me and four contractors. And then this year, this year we are. You think how big how big do you think it's going to get in like five years? I mean, I think it's like a foregone conclusion to get above 100 million because we have we've made a couple acquisitions. We made two small ones and one large one. And even just sort of growing those, I think, has a shot at getting us past 100. I don't know how much bigger than that. Why acquire something instead of building it on your own?

28:38It's really just speed. And if you have the competency internally to do it. Did you, I mean, you studied accounting, but did you know anything about acquiring a company or did Churn kind of hold your hand? So the big acquisition where we bought the seed company, that was, Churn led a lot of the diligence on that because it's like way too complex a 30 year old business like i there's no way i could do the diligence on that but the two small acquisitions i led those and they sort of just helped with the legalities of getting it all done so the very first one was a seed tray so like when you when you're gardening you usually start seeds in like a little tray and a lot of these trays are made out of pretty flimsy plastic and they're just like throw away things and so a friend of mine who was in the space on the media side of gardening he's like an educator he he was developing these trays and he hit me up and he's like hey can I come down to the house and just show you this new tray that I made to start seeds in and this was uh early 2021 I was like yeah sure come on down he comes down he shows me this tray and it's like this very super sturdy durable tray to start seeds in which solves like some of the problems of them being flimsy then he had like cut all these little slits in it there's like a big hole in the bottom which if you're a gardener you know, it's like, it makes it easier to like pop the seed out and put it out in the garden.

29:53So I hold the tray. And the second I hold it, because I've been gardening for like eight years now, I'm like, holy shit, this is like the best seed starting tray I've ever seen in my life, like for sure. And he's like, you can stand on it if you want to. So I like, I'm like 220 pounds. So I stand on it with one foot, it doesn't budge. And I'm like, okay, like that thing's durable. And so I go, well, what do you want to do? Like, I think this is a cool product. Do you want to like I can put it on my Shopify store and like see if the audience wants it. And he's like, yeah, sure. What do you think?

30:20Like, we'll just split the profits 50-50. You have the audience, I have the product and let's go. So I started teasing it in like Instagram or YouTube videos and it's an injection molded product. So we can only make so many in a day. You have to like press the mold and like accumulate inventory. So we built up like maybe a week or two of inventory or what we thought was. And then I just put an Instagram reel out and I was like, hey, this is the coolest tray I've ever seen. And there's a link in my bio to go grab it. And we sold it out. Shopify has this live analytics you can look at. It's awesome.

30:51It's like just the biggest dopamine rush when you start seeing that. So I remember I was screen recording just to see, just to kind of flex and record the live screen. And we sold out like a couple of weeks inventory, like 25 seconds. How much revenue was that? It was like 25 or 30 grand, I think. So now that's an entire line of products we own. it's on our shop it's called our our epic tray line uh so if you go to our shop and you go to seed starting supplies you'll you'll see all the trays there so over the next like over the next like three four weeks we just like built up inventory dropped it sold it out built up inventory dropped it sold it out and we were just splitting the profits and then i go to him and i was like hey look not only is this working like really well like better than i thought but there's definitely more trays that we could make there's like different form factors and different ideas and like little domes you could put on top to keep humidity in or whatever.

31:43And I was like, but I can't make them because that's what you do. And I'm like 95 % of your sales. So what if you just joined Epic? You know, we'd raise some money. I was like, well, you could be our product lead. Well, I can't really like buy the business based on revenue because that is, we are your revenue, right? And so how do we structure a deal? And so the deal we came up with without getting into like crazy specifics is we basically paid him for all of the assets like the the molds themselves and and the research and development time and a premium on that um gave him some equity and hired him as our product lead and then we've built that line out to like i think like 12 or 15 skews going d to c and wholesale now um and it's like i think i think we're like up 7x probably on the acquisition price as far as like revenue after the fact so and and that wasn't like a big acquisition it was sub 500 000 so to me i'm like that's why you would that's why you would buy because i yeah and that's a great that's a great deal for everyone involved yeah exactly it was a total win-win what are the other two so the second biggest one we did was actually a media acquisition so that was a blog so a friend of mine from from like the old seo days had built a gardening blog and we were hiring for a director of editorial, like just someone to run our blog.

33:06And our blog was doing well, like maybe like eight, 10 million sessions a year. And that was monetizing off of display ads. But then hopefully like people will go through and like buy some stuff on our store too. All from search or mostly from search? Yeah, it's like mostly search. I would say like 80 % search. And so this guy emails me and he's like, hey, look, I saw that head of editorial position. I'm working in SEO right now, but I've also been building a gardening blog on the side. It was called allaboutgardening.com, which is now redirecting to Epic Gardening. And he's like, I'd like the job.

33:39I'd like to put my hat in the ring for the job, but I kind of have a competing blog. So to me, I go, look, you've built that blog really fast, way faster than we're currently building ours, but you kind of can't work for us and run that blog. So what if we bought your blog and hired you to run our blog? And he goes, okay. And so what we did is we bought the blog and we migrated his blog into our blog which was like call them both like 10 million sessions a year something like that so you'd think like 10 plus 10 is 20 but our blog from an seo perspective was like super strong so by migrating his into ours our blog went to like we probably got like a 20 30 premium on the traffic so like 10 plus 10 equals 25, right?

34:26So then you're monetizing better off of the display ads there. But then we also just made more from the ads themselves. And so effectively, the acquisition financed itself by the increased revenue of like month one. So that was another like sort of weird acquisition. Can you say, was that more or less than 500? It was, yeah, it was in between 500 and a million. And the way we structured that one is we paid some upfront and some over a period of time, job plus equity. So this was post churning. This is post churning. Yeah. So the way that one has ended up working out is we have a awesome leader running our blog at a higher level than ours was before.

35:06Our traffic has over doubled and we're monetizing at over double the rate on the traffic. So, you know, like, like YouTube RPMs, right? It's the same with blogs, like our blog RPM doubled after doing the acquisition. and so basically we just created like a cash flow that that finances the thing that we bought that created the cash flow did you read a book about this i mean how did you learn about acquisitions like this i mean that's a pretty good one i just thought i don't know i just thought about it i was like if i do that i feel like all these things will happen and then they did i don't know like my like uh you're like look i don't make up the rules i just think them up and write them down yeah i don't know i just i i well you know how people say like there needs to be one read one like core reason to do something uh like a acquisition or a business move or whatever i i agree with that but to me i the way i mentally underwrote both of those things is i was like well the core reason is pretty obvious like i don't have a product now i do or like i don't have the traffic and a leader and now i do but then i just go how many other ways could this benefit us and how many other ways could it hurt us?

36:12And if the ways that could benefit us outweigh the ways that could hurt us, I go like, I feel like it'll just work then. And this probably holds true for acquisitions that are smaller where it's maybe a less efficient market or something like that. I don't know how it would work if you have some sort of big deal. What was the third one? Because you're two for two now. That sounds pretty good. Those ones have worked out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the third one was almost like kind of a condition of doing the churn and deal in the first place because they're like, look, like this is this is not a big amount of money for us, but we want to do some follow on and see if we can like purchase a really awesome company in the space and help power up Epic Gardening.

36:53I was like, OK, cool. That sounds good. Which is I think what they did with like Meat Eater and a few others where they buy like they buy the or they invest in the media company and then immediately they're like, let's go acquire a company to sell to the audience. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so we were looking, man, we looked at so many different companies, like maybe 150, 160 different companies in the space. I was like out at a fruit tree farm in Missouri at one point in time. When you say look at 150, does that mean just like put like ideas on paper or does that mean actually contacting 150 people?

37:30Oh, it means contacting more than 150. It means like talking or like looking at a deck or inspecting in some way, somewhere around 150, something like that. I mean, that's a shit ton of work. Yeah. This is why having them has been helpful or having an investor on your side has been helpful because like I'm out here running the business and I might mention a company and they'll diligence and say like, yeah, this makes sense. This doesn't make And then they'll cold email them or cold call them and be like, hey, this is who we are. I know this is out of the blue, but would this ever entertain you?

38:01And then if they say yes, then like, look, why don't you put together some high level numbers and then send something over and we can talk about it with our team. And then you get some type of like DocSend or PowerPoint or you get something and you're like, yay or nay, it could go to the next step. Let's actually have a real discussion about this. Is that how the diligence looks like? Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I remember we were looking at the top 600 gardening apps at one point in time. And so I got a sheet from one of the people on the investment team. And they were like, yeah, here are the seven we think make any sense whatsoever.

38:37And here's the 593 that don't make any sense at all. So these guys are doing a lot of the work then. They're helping you. Oh, yeah. They're pulling their weight. I think so. Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, so the seed company. This is like the big acquisition. this was a company that without me knowing it, it was the first pack of seeds I had ever grown when I first started gardening. So I went into some random nursery with my brother and just picked up like a beautiful packet of seeds, just cucumber seeds. And lo and behold, turns out to be the seed company we end up buying in the story I'm about to share.

39:10So we go out to Colorado. It's this company called Botanical Interests, and they're really well known for having high germination rates. So the seeds sprout really well when you buy them, but also the packet is just beautifully designed. What are they growing? You know, I'm a noob. I'm a total noob when it comes to this stuff. What are they? What's the output? There's six. I think we stock about 650 varieties of vegetables, flowers and herbs. So pretty much anything under the sun, anything that you would like reasonably want to grow. We have it. And it's a it's a husband and wife. They've been running it for like 28 years.

39:40They were married. I think they had divorced like a few years prior to that. And they were sort of ready to hand the business off to whoever wants to run it next. But it, you know, it's like one of those like, quote, boring businesses that people talk about all the time. Who's actually going to be able to buy it? And the seed business is actually fairly complex. There's a lot that goes into it that you have to understand. And so we go out there. I meet the guy, the husband, and he's like, hey, can I grab a selfie? Like, actually, I have a friend who's like a big fan of your YouTube. It'd be amazing if I could show her that we met.

40:11And immediately, I'm like, okay, maybe I've got a little edge in this process. Like, maybe I'm going to be able to get this company. Or it could go either way. It could be like, you have an edge or shit, they know that we have money behind us or something like that. Could be that too. Yeah, it could be that too. But we go through the whole... The diligence happens. We go on a tour of the place where we're talking through pricing and all this sort of stuff. And so I told my investors, I was like, they gave me all this swag. They gave me a hat. So I go, I'm just going to wear this hat in every piece of content we make until we either win or don't win this deal because I know the guy watches it.

40:46Right. And I know like probably his team watches it too. So for the next, like this was maybe May for the next six months, which is a great time, like May, that's spring through summer. I'm cranking YouTube videos out. I'm cranking Instagram reels out, short form, whatever hat hats on 24, seven, every single piece of content. And we go through the bidding process. We win the deal. We were not the highest bid by like quite a bit i would say a material amount for the sellers to like not have in their pocket if they went with us and we go out to celebrate and i go hey you know i really appreciate you guys like it's it's truly an honor to be able to carry on the legacy of this company like this is the first seed packet i ever grew and i'm just being very gracious because i did feel that way and he goes you don't know how much wearing that hat helped and i go i knew it uh yeah i got him not in like a malicious way just like sure sure sure i'm using the angle that i have which is my everyone won everyone won everyone won did you uh what were some of the red flags and and i guess green flags or whatever it is for that deal along with a few other deals when you're looking through the financials and the business so that the seed companies red flags are that it basically that it is a seed company like that's just a hard it's a difficult business like there's a ton Why?

42:04Because there's so many different SKUs. Tons of different SKUs. You have to do like a non-GMO certification. You have to do germination testing. You have to do pesticide and herbicide testing. You're physically purchasing or contracting a grower to grow seeds that you then receive, test, repack, etc. And so there's just like a lot of... It's not like you're selling like a rug or something like that and you can just buy rugs from China and then sell the rugs to other people in America. So that was complex. But the part that I think was really green about it is it was far and away one of the best brands in the space.

42:38Like I loved it for 10 years. And on top of that, they were mostly a wholesale business and the online business they sort of hadn't done a whole lot with. And I was like, OK, well, we're definitely an online first company, media and product. So why don't we just plug those two together? And I think the first year after we did the deal, the online part of the business for the seed company was up like 60 % or 70 % year over year without really doing much. All we did was move it to Shopify and tell people we own the company now. And that's pretty much it. What payback cycle were you looking for? And what type of multiple do businesses like this sell for?

43:15Man, I don't remember offhand the multiple, but I want to say it was probably 6 to 8x, somewhere like that. Income. Yeah, I think so. and how long till you could pay back the acquisition that's a good question i don't know maybe hopefully like hopefully like so i mean i i think that's pretty fast yeah it's like i would say like five hopefully yeah i mean more i mean if you only if they only sell for five to seven times i would think that you you'd actually grow it or get that money back significantly faster i would think because of kind of like the audience that you have the audience and then like Like just the opportunity because we're, we're, we're carried in, I would say 4 ,500 stores around the country.

43:59And so to me, I'm like, well, it's just seeds that are carried, like just our seed brands there because they were a seed company, but we're making these trays that I told you about. We're making these other new products. We, now we have a distribution network. So why don't we tell all those retailers, Hey, look, we're like making better product that your customers will want. Just stock our product in your store. And so that was, that was another like big lever. I think we're still testing it out and trying to prove if that's right or not. But we're like, yeah, why wouldn't we just offer a ton of our products now to wholesale in a network that we couldn't have built?

44:30Have you ever been to Chip and Joanne's like Waco? I did a show for them in 2020. Like you were on their show? I filmed a show for Magnolia back then. It's basically like Disneyland for like 40-year-old white chicks. uh it's like you could like buy anything in the world uh that you're like for your home or living room i went to it once and like my uh mother-in-law and her sisters like wanted to go and like take pictures of like they just wanted to like anything with chip and joanne's name on it they just wanted to see it and i was like doing math around like how i mean it's like a it's like a it's like a campus and so they've got like food and uh many many different stores and i was doing math and I'm like, these guys are going to be billionaires.

45:18Like this is going to be, this is going to be the greatest thing ever. And that's going to happen to you because you've got the same shtick where you're, you're in a good, uh, niche of, of, I imagine it's mostly women. Uh, and they probably have, they probably spend a lot or just for the hobby, they spend a lot, but B you got the charisma, you got the look like, like it's going to happen. Do, uh, do you get crazy like stalker messages or like fans who are obsessed with you um it's definitely happened yeah it's definitely people make fun of me on this podcast all the time particularly everyone thinks i'm gay because they like i comment on like a man all the time yeah but you know i'm not embarrassed to say you're a charismatic good-looking dude i imagine you've got you've got a lot of fans back at you dude wait so everyone thinks i'm gay too actually just because i'm like just because i'm a guy i think it's because i'm a younger guy in gardening and gardening is seen as a more feminine hobby uh people just think i'm a gay guy which is just it's just an interesting phenomenon to experience on the internet all the time but um yeah no i mean i would say it happens for sure it i've done the whole like delete all your info from the internet process but it's kind of hard it's never good enough it's never good enough especially when you film at your home right like my set is my outdoors and so i can't like not show the street etc because it's it's just in the shot there's nothing i can really do about it dude i've had times where like i took a picture of my house and i didn't think you could see it and then like the next couple days i'll get gifts sent to my home and like people will find it on like street view and i'm like oh shit and like i'm not a famous person i'm a mildly popular person in a small subset of the internet and so i can't imagine if you're like real famous or if i'm like you and my videos get millions and millions and millions of views yeah yeah i mean look it's it hasn't been as bad as i think like legitimate celebrity type people but i've definitely had like i had an experience earlier this year where this woman we're all in the backyard because that's where we film most of the time but there's a garden in the front yard too and i have security cameras on now that record like locally to my house so i can pull up footage of whatever i want and this woman like comes up the front door knocks on it says you who and then like looks in the house and then goes out into the front gate, walks, opens it, like kind of messes around with some plants, tries to walk around the backyard.

47:40And my assistant was in the backyard. She's like coming around the back to the front. So they kind of like butted heads. And my assistant just freaked out. She's like, who is this woman? And this woman saw nothing wrong with what she was doing. She's like, oh yeah, I just wanted to see if you guys were filming, like wanted to come say hi. And we're like, we don't know who you are. And she like, there's nothing we could have said to her that would have made her understand her behavior was like completely out of the norm. And so every so often, it's like the law of large numbers, man. Like if you have an audience of many millions, all you need is 0.01%.

48:09And that's still like 14 people, you know, that'll come mess with you. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now. And let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean, branded invoice.

48:42Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to Mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. You were telling Ari before about something that I wanted to ask you about. And this is something that I've been crazy interested in. It's a business I don't really know much about other than listening to like two or three podcasts and reading a couple articles.

49:14But the licensing of fruits or vegetables or different type of seeds. So I was reading about the history of Honeycrisp apples. And I believe it was started in either, I think it was Minnesota, like University of Minnesota. what they did was I think they like took two plants and they bred them. However, that people even do that. I don't even know how you do that, but it took like many decades because I guess it takes a year to get a new plant, or I guess it takes like 10 years to get an apple tree in the first place or five years, something like that. And then you screw up a bunch. And then it, so it ultimately will take many years, sometimes decades to get like a good apple.

49:53And then they come up with a really cute name, like honey crisp, or like, I think I had one the other day that was called like a cotton, a cotton candy apple. like you like brand it with some like cute name and then you license it out to other other farmers and you build this massive business that has this moat that will take 30 years to disrupt is that how it works am i do i have that right with that's pretty much right that's pretty much right so we're gonna go into like garden nerd territory for a sec just so i could explain how it works so when you're making a new tree it's it's really difficult like you mentioned like actually when you're making new varieties of most plants, it's super painful to get the variety that you actually want.

50:36Like I met a guy at a farm once, he'd been working on a potato for like 20 years. And what was his goal outcome for that potato? So the goal outcome, potatoes are grown from what are called seed potatoes, which is basically just a potato that you throw in the ground. So you don't plant like a little seed, you just throw a potato in the ground. So this guy was trying to make a potato that you could grow from an actual potato seed. Because when a potato is in the ground, it throws like leaves up and it actually makes a potato flower, which produces a potato berry. And that berry has seeds in it.

51:06And if you plant those seeds, the problem is that you don't get the potato that you planted. You get something different. So his outcome was like a more efficient way for a farmer. It wasn't necessarily a certain taste. Yeah, it was. It wasn't. I mean, it definitely was a taste, but you're right. Like the idea was instead of buying a ton of potatoes and planting them by hand, you could just plant a bunch of seeds that took him 20 years right did he get his out did he do it he got it yeah it's called the clancy potato we actually sell it on our our store it's an awesome potato did he get wealthy from it i hope so i didn't ask but i hope so i think he did it under a seed company so probably they got wealthy i'm not sure but either way he's interesting guy so with fruit trees though it's kind of the same thing where like you have to you have to keep developing tons and tons of trees and then figure out, let's say, okay, this is the apple out of the hundreds that I grew out that I actually like.

51:59That's my next Honeycrisp, right? And what you then do is you have to graft, you have to take a piece of that tree and put it on what's called the rootstock of an apple. So like the roots and below. Because you can't use the seed of that because it'll be a different apple and it will take a long time. So let's say you get this magical new honey crisp uh what you do is you take a bunch of those those little branches off and you put them on other apple rootstock and then grow those out and then those are genetic clones of that new honey crisp and then you do that again and then you do that again and so that's how and is each time one year or how long does it take to grow a tree it's probably like it would really depend on the type of fruit but it it's probably it i'll say this it'll shorten from growing from seed by like 70 80 it's like way faster than growing it from seed not only that it you you have to do it that way because you won't get the same genetic apple and so what what guys like the honeycrisp guy you mentioned or this there's a guy named floyd zager who's who's sort of known as like the godfather of stone fruit which is like peaches nectarines all those types of trees what they do is they have tens of thousands i think of trees that they're cross pollinating growing out, grafting, tasting, testing.

53:14And then when maybe 0.1 % of those actually become a variety, they now have a patent on that because they've developed that what's called a cultivar. They have that cultivar and then they can license that out for other people that put into production. They take like a licensing fee on all those. So you're right. Like once they actually create the next Honeycrisp or the next like killer peach, they can make a cashflow off of that thing for like who knows how long until the next one comes around i'm looking at this guy floyd so he's 94 years old it looks like he's he's still doing it i think i think he passed away like a couple years ago but he's like a total legend in the space oh yeah you're right he passed away but it looked like based off the photos up until like when he passed away it looks like he was still yeah planting or involved did he build a big his name of his company was uh zager's genetics is that right yeah zager genetics and then what what there's a nursery called dave wilson nursery which i think they sell the most fruit trees in the u.s they use a lot of zagers stuff uh and so they'll they'll be the people who grow out a lot of floyd zagers actual trees so it's a crazy model because you're right like good luck competing you have to spend like 20 years to even get started does it make does it make is it like a good business or is it something that looks awesome But day to day, it's quite challenging.

54:33I mean, I don't think it's the easiest business. You have to know a lot about plant botany and genetics and all that. But like the people who like this type of stuff, like there's nothing you could pay them to make them stop doing it. So they might as well have a business based on it, you know? Yeah, my parents are in the agriculture industry. So my father, his first business was a fruit stand. He started as a stock boy in like the produce section of a grocery store. Then he opened up a fruit stand and then he created a produce brokerage, which is like, uh, basically you have relationships with farmers in Idaho or Bakersfield, California, and you buy, let's say$500 ,000 of onions.

55:10And then you go and find a trucker to pick it up. And then you sell that$500 ,000 of onions to Walmart for five, five,$500 ,000,$50 ,000. And you make like 10 grand of profit or something like that off organizing that, that deal. And you have to sell... At this point, he's sold over$100 million of onions over the course of 20 years. But the margins are like 3%. It'll be basically him by himself selling $20 million a year worth of produce. And you make... I don't know what you make, but like$300 ,000 a year. So good living. But you've got to sell a shit ton of product in order because the margins are so small.

55:53And so I've grown up talking to some of these farmers. And it's more of a vocation than anything because it's just what they know. They've been born and raised doing that. And it's like, I am a farmer no matter what. And it's not like maybe traditional businesses where it's like, I see an opportunity, I'm going to do this. It's like, no, this is just what I was bred to be. That's what I've noticed in our space because there's a lot of like smaller product companies or small seed companies, et cetera. No one's trying to get super rich doing it. Even me, back in the earlier days, I was like, I'm very happy making that$250 that I made gross revenue and pulling out whatever I made.

56:37It just so happened that I also like business. And so they combined really well. We'll wrap up here in a second, but I want to ask you a quick question about diet. it i'm i'm a little i recently moved to a new place just mostly because it was across the street from a farmer's market and i've been obsessed with the idea of buying produce and uh meat that only comes within like a 20 or 50 mile radius of where i am um because like even if you buy food at whole foods i still think like whole foods is supposed to be like some type of standard which i don't think it is the standard anymore but for a long time it was like that was the standard of healthy eating.

57:18But I still feel crappy after I eat that because I don't, you know, like I don't even know what organic actually means. And I don't actually bind to the height necessarily that that makes that is the right way to do things. Are you eating all of your own food? And do you think that makes you feel different than grocery store food? I think, I think for sure it does, because I don't know that I believe, you know, that book, blue zones remember that one that came out it's like dude i think that that that book is awesome but i think it's bullshit like i think i think a good part of it is bullshit yeah you know why it's bullshit so here well i'll tell the audience i did a little research on it it's like what they all have in common is that uh like in osaka japan or uh like they lie about their age and so like they notice that like wow this in this town there's a shit ton of people born on january 1st like what's going on and turns out a lot of them lie about their age i guess so they get social security at a certain time or something like that oh wow uh and so there was a lot uh like the the although maybe he there was some bit of truth in there the commonality between the five blue zones is that they have a huge amount of like age fraud i also saw something about can you imagine like lying to be older uh i saw something about like it also maps to when we started accurately tracking birth certificates, like a lot of these people are old enough that they're from before when we did that.

58:44And so how can you really know how old they are? The thing I do think is - And that's the nicer way to put it, what I maybe said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think the thing that is somewhat true there is like, it does seem to just make logical sense that the fresher food you eat, the better off you'll be. And so to me, I go, well, it doesn't get fresher than out of my own backyard, right? Like we just had an amazing carrot salad we made yesterday. I've even grown my own wheat to make my own sourdough bread, which is definitely extreme. I don't think that's practical. But yeah, I mean, I think you do feel better.

59:15And I think the next best thing to growing your own food would be going to a farmer's market. As long as you know the farmer is actually growing things the way that they say they are. Because now there's farmer's market fraud. Because down here in San Diego, people will drive up from Mexico with monocropped food and just pretend it's a farmer's market. what questions do i have to ask them you would have to ask like well where is your farm which they could definitely show me pictures yeah yeah they should have pictures of it and you could ask like you know do you spray pesticide herbicide fungicide if so like which ones you don't even have to know what their answers mean but if they can't fire the answers off quickly that's your signal that they kind of don't know what they're talking about what do you do for me meat i tend to just buy at um i'll go to like a whole foods or there's like a local fish market called point loba seafoods down here in san diego i'll try to go to and sometimes so i'm trying to get like some friends to do that like quarter cow thing with me yeah so far so far no one's down so if you're out there all around me i've been trying to do that as well uh you need like a huge garage fridge which is how you know you made it by having a garage fridge to like store all this meat uh but I've been doing it too.

1:00:29Have you seen, um, uh, it's called, uh, it's called coop, but if you Google like, Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We just had him on our podcast. AJ smart farm. Yeah. Yeah. AJ is a good buddy of mine. AJ is awesome. Um, I, what's his URL? I want to give him a shout out. Uh, coop.farm coop.farm. So coop is like, it's like they, like the tagline that I saw in the article was like, it's like the Tesla for a chicken coop. coop and it's uh so coop.farm it's like a smart chicken coop um and it looks pretty cool i think i might get one um i think it'd be awesome to have your own chickens uh because that's like a pretty low maintenance uh way to kind of get into the habit or get a hobby the other thing that i've done for years is uh beekeeping um so i've raised my own bees um in order to get honey uh which is It's like an awesome hobby.

1:01:19And beekeeping is a cool thing because it requires not much maintenance at all. And from a business perspective, you remember that Flow Hive or whatever that went viral at Kickstarter and it raised like$20 million? I do think that beekeeping, like the supplies, could actually be a legitimately good business. And you can create a lifestyle brand around it because the content around that is inherently quite viral like i used to create these like just videos of me like uh scraping off the honey or the uh what's it called the um honeycomb the honey from the comb yeah like scraping the comb off of my uh uh my trays or whatever that's in the hive i don't actually know anything about it even though i've had bees for years but like that's how little you have to know about this in order to like successfully do it like i would like scrape off the comb and like make these awesome videos and then just like give it to my friends and they loved it and it's like such a fun hobby uh and so i'm really big on that named i think her name is like texas bee works i don't know if you've seen her stuff on the internet but she has this like very soft pleasing voice and she'll be like there'll be music and there'll be some crazy scenario where there's a hive and she's like called out and she goes i've been called out to take this hive out of a manhole dude she has a 1.6 million subs on youtube oh yeah yeah she's huge and so i always look because i know what I did with Epic.

1:02:46And I look at all these other people and I go like, don't you realize like you could have a thriving beekeeping like goods company. But then, you know, the sort of paradox of the whole creator world is that most creators just don't want to do that. And that's why they don't do it. Dude, she was on Joe Rogan. I'm looking at it now. Erica Thompson. She was on Joe Rogan. She goes, I did my first podcast and it's Joe Rogan. It's Joe Rogan. She goes, I did my first podcast. Link is in the bio. Thank you so much, Joe Rogan and team. This was such a wonderful experience for me and my bees. Damn, that's a flex right there.

1:03:19That's a flex. Awesome. This is a gem. This woman, she's got it. Yeah, man, beekeeping is an interesting hobby. You should try it out. It requires no work, and I'm pretty sure it makes your plants way better. I noticed that whenever I get bees, you start seeing all different types of flowers in the backyard. That's the last thing I haven't done. I've got the chickens. I've got all the pond. And I don't have bees yet, so I might have to get some bees. Dude, it costs like$200 to start. My hives are from Amazon for$200. And then you go on Craigslist and you find a bee delivery person. The lady that I used was this beautiful Eastern European woman.

1:03:59She shows up in her Lexus. She pops out with an hive. She's not wearing any mask. She's got a fancy watch on and beautiful blonde hair and nice clothes. And she just goes like, I've got your bees. And I was like, yes, ma 'am, please come put them over here. And I paid her$200 for the bees and the$200 for the hive that I got on Amazon. And that's all I needed. Do you still have them right now? I recently moved. But up until recently, yeah, I had them in San Francisco. And I had them in Texas. But in San Francisco, I had them at my small little house. I had a backyard. And then I also had them on the roof of my office in downtown San Francisco.

1:04:36And I had about 10 ,000 bees. and you wouldn't even you could your hive could be like 30 feet away and you wouldn't even know that it's there yeah uh it's like a pretty self-contained thing it's like an awesome hobby i've got a spot for my hive that i have the perfect spot in my backyard for my yeah and like i think i like i don't even know what i'm talking about and i have them and like i got i got stung i've been stung like twice like it's like not like that big of a deal like it's like people think it's a very intimidating unapproachable hobby but i got into it because i like made a list of like i was like i need a hobby that doesn't require a ton of work uh i it can't cost a ton of money because if it costs a ton of money i'm going to break rule number three which is i can't turn it into a business to make money and so like i like and i was like what's a good hobby and then i saw a bird speed documentary and i was like that's a good hobby let's do it go so it's and um aj's a buddy of mine and uh he got me into beekeeping as well yeah yeah i'm excited to see how that smart coupe business does.

1:05:32It's a really cool design. Well, thanks for doing this, dude. You're the man.

1:05:39You're going to be fun to watch over the next five years. This is going to be a very exciting journey. We take pride on having people on before they write the beginning of their takeoff. And even though you're already incredibly successful, I have a feeling that this is still going to be early in your journey. And we're going to brag about having you on early in your career. That's awesome, dude. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right. That's the pod.

1:06:17Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter, they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s? You're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:06:47If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N-A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.