MI334: Confessions of an Entrepreneurial Addict w/ Chris Koerner

23:25To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Why do you think they had no interest in doing it themselves? It seems like it's a, I don't know what the revenue would have been, but it's got That'd be a decent chunk of change you're giving up. Yeah, I think that they're trying to optimize for the in-store experience. I don't know this. They haven't told me this. But my hunch is that they think it would cannibalize their in-store sales or incentivize people to not come to the store.

24:08And I think they want the Bucky's experience to stay exclusive and elusive and unique. Whereas if you can just click and order it, then it's... Even if their sales go up, and even if it doesn't hurt their in-store sales, it's just not as much of a novelty. So you're going directly to the stores each week or a couple times a week to buy merchandise to then sell online? Is that how the logistics of it work? Yeah. So we have pretty close relationships with the general managers of two different stores and decent relationships with two other stores as well. And so we will place an order beforehand and they will receive it from their distribution center, palletize our order, let us know when it's ready.

24:51And then we will show up. We'll make sure everything's in there. And then we'll go to the front counter with everyone else. They will kind of portion off our line, our aisle. And we'll swipe that card for tens of thousands of dollars and then load it up in our box truck and drive it to the warehouse. That's incredible. And this all developed because you already were doing, it's called 3PL, right? third-party logistics, you were already doing this for other food companies, right? Like ice cream and candy, but whatever, you know, like you were already doing that, right? Yeah. I mean, we didn't need that.

25:22We could have done it from our house if we wanted. It just made it a lot more convenient. We already had software. We had the skills. I have an e-commerce background, so it made it a lot easier. But funny enough, like after two years of doing both of the Texas Snacks company that we owned and the e-commerce fulfillment for other brands. We just looked at our financials every month and said, man, this 3PL stuff does not make any money. This is such a hard business. It's a high margin for error. Let's just fire our customers and only do the Bucky stuff. And so we did. So the company, the holding company's co-founders, do you have partners?

25:58I know you're partnering with the college kids that we mentioned, but do you also have a partner that is like your Charlie Munger, your right-hand man that is bouncing off these ideas and figuring out what to pursue? Yeah. His name is Nick Huleski. And he was one of my mission companions in Hungary. He was my first. So they call that your trainer. So he helped me learn Hungarian. And we've been best friends for like 18 years now, ever since. You talked about a little bit about like the entrepreneurial gene. Do you think that's something that's like innate in people? Or do you think it can develop?

26:31I think it could be either or. for me, it was developed. It doesn't run in my family at all. I grew up poor. I lived across the street from a golf course. And my first business was selling golf balls that would land in my yard and in the ditch across the street. And I would go gather them up and put them in a red rider wagon and wash them and walk them to the clubhouse and sell them in the parking lot until the owner would yell at me. That was out of necessity because there was no money for a yearbook or for candy or for a bike. You had to earn it if you wanted it, right? How to earn it. Yeah.

27:02Do you do that with your own kids? So if they want something, you put the onus on them to... No. So they do chores. They all have a chore chart and they earn money. They can buy whatever they want with that. But it's not super hardcore. We also buy them things. What I was saying yes to is that all four of our kids are very entrepreneurial. My wife is entrepreneurial as well. It is in our DNA as a family. So for them, it's nature and nurture. right it was just nurture and so are they working in some of the companies that you've got going do you put them to work like doing fulfillment or from time to time they'll do fulfillment for texas snacks not super often but really it's more of they sell stuff at school and we help them with that my daughter will make bracelets my kids will go to uh winco which is like a budget grocery store where you can buy candy by the pound and i'll give them like a five dollar budget and And we'll do competitions so they can see who can turn that$5 into the most amount of money at school by reselling the candy.

28:04I think I heard you said you do something similar with like a Robinhood account, right? Like they trade and you have a competition to see who can trade. We did that once with crypto, actually, just for fun. And it was bad timing. None of them did. It was when things were collapsing. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into that. I wanted to hear about, you've got some great stories about John McAfee of McAfee security fame. Very fascinating guy. I think you had mentioned they're making a movie about his life. Tell me about how you got connected with him and just like that entire story. That's a long story. So I'll give you the highlights.

28:43And that is 2017. Crypto was just booming. Bitcoin was going from 3 ,000 to 20 ,000 over the course of two months. And I was deeply entrenched in all of that. I first bought Bitcoin in 2016, and I'd just been curious. And so I had a thesis in 2017 that crypto altcoins specifically, so everything aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum. I had a thesis that these prices were driven by hype. And I wasn't a genius. A lot of people thought that. But my thesis was that this would be measurable. And so I kind of developed an algorithm that took the hype of an altcoin, which was derived from how many social media mentions and, you know, mentions on Twitter and on Reddit and all those platforms.

29:27I would make a hype score and I would divide it against the market cap. So if a token had a really high market cap and no one was talking about it, then my algorithm would say short. And if, you know, it had a very low market cap, I don't remember what I was talking about. It would say buy. And I put this together and then I started tracking it and it worked. And I thought, wow, this could be huge. This is really big. I found alpha. And to find alpha in the stock market is impossible. Hard to do. In crypto, why not? So I was a nobody on social media. I had no following. And this was 2017, correct?

29:5617. Yep. Late 2017. Good timing. Yep. And so, well, in a sense, bad timing in another sense, because it was all about to crash. But I thought, okay, I need to reach out to John McAfee because he was the biggest influencer on crypto Twitter at the time. You had about 800 ,000 followers. And so he's notoriously unreachable. I tried to guess his email to no success until finally I did. I used an app to see if he would open my emails and he finally opened it and he wouldn't respond. So I just kept emailing saying, John, I've got something big I want to show you. He finally responded and he was very critical, very standoffish.

30:32He said, I don't believe you. And I said, let me show you in person. I thought if I could present in person, then he'll buy into it. So he finally said, yes. He said, come to my house and tend to the sea. And so I flew to Alabama. I stayed at a friend's house in Northern Alabama. And then I drove up to his house and he had said, I'll send you my address the morning up. So I started driving to his city, which is Lexington. And he wouldn't respond to my email. I didn't have his address until like the last minute he gave me his address. So I showed up and he wanted me to show up at 1.23 PM. And this was late February 2018 at this point.

31:04And I presented this to him and it was a wild, it was wild. He had a whole camera crew from Australia there. He had bodyguards, he had assault rifles laying on the ground. It was everything you'd imagine. And I presented this to him and he loved it. He understood it immediately. And he said, what do you need from me? And we launched a company together. That's crazy. And how did it unfold from there? Yeah. So I asked him to tweet about me twice per week, and I would give him a quarter of the profits. And the whole play was to start a free community for people that wanted access to these altcoin picks.

31:38And then once they started relying on it and investing in it and liking it, to start charging for full access to all of the picks. And so we did. We launched a Discord community. We had tens of thousands of members. He would tweet about me twice per week. He did everything he said he would do. We ended up launching a token and it grew to a 30 something million dollar market cap. We were listed on a dozen major exchanges. And then the market just started crashing. I mean, it was crashing the whole time, but you couldn't tell. We thought it was just dipping temporarily. Turned out to be a two-year bear market.

32:12And we just fought that the whole time. And so the market cap dropped, people would leave the community, and it ended up just kind of dying a slow death. it's such a good story actually i remember that time 2017 he could move a market with a single tweet yeah he could we were always very careful about that we didn't have an ico we didn't want to sell any tokens we didn't want him to really move the market and he ended up getting in trouble for a lot of those tweets yeah i mean he ended up going to prison right i mean he's since passed away but i think didn't he get put in prison for tax fraud or tax evasion tax fraud yeah yeah did Do you have any trepidation going into business with him?

32:52Were you like this guy? You seem like the antithesis of him. Like you're this Mormon guy, right? He is the exact opposite. Drinking and party, you know, like just seems like a wild lifestyle that he's led. It just seems like there couldn't be two different partners. I did. We were very different. Yeah. And I wanted to keep it more of it like a business owner slash influencer relationship as opposed to a business partner relationship. And so I call him a partner in the sense that there would not have been a business without him. He wasn't one of many influencers that we used as part of the strategy.

33:24He was the only distribution channel that we had. So in that sense, he was a partner. In a literal sense, he was not. He didn't own any equity. He never invested. I never gave him money. It was just kind of a rev share agreement. But yeah, I did have trepidation, which is why I structured it like that. I had trepidation walking into his house. I bet with the bodyguards and the assault rifles. It had to have been quite an experience to just be part of that whole scene. Yes, it was. So you've since started a Bitcoin mining company. How did that come about? Did you toss aside all the altcoin stuff and you're focused strictly on Bitcoin now?

34:00Because I know you're a big Bitcoin guy. Yeah. So the crypto company died in 2019. And then in 2021, Bitcoin was booming again. It was the next cycle. Right. And China had banned mining in the summer of 2021 overnight. And so the difficulty rate plummeted, which meant mining became extremely profitable, like very profitable. And so all of us enterprising Americans, such as myself, latched onto that. And we started looking for ways to mine Bitcoin. And so I started looking for facilities for places to lease that had heavy power on site. And I was striking out until I finally found a place 30 minutes from home for sale.

34:37And I reached out to the seller directly and I bought the facility from him. When I say I bought the facility, it wasn't a business. There was no LLC. There were no employees. It was just a lease in a rented building that I'm sitting in right now that already had all of the infrastructure and transformers on site to enable hundreds of Bitcoin miners immediately, which was very hard to find, especially at the time. Did you have any miners at all at that point? The facility did come with miners. So what I bought came with miners that were mining Bitcoin directly. But we took that asset and we turned it into a company, which is today Mining Syndicate.

35:18So we basically spent a lot of money for access to a lease and infrastructure and a handful of miners that were netting like 15 grand a month at the time. We knew that was very short lived because they were late model miners. We sold the miners because we didn't want to be in the mining business. We wanted to be in the hardware and in the hosting business. So say more about that. So how you're not selling, tell me more about that. You don't mind Bitcoin. You are selling, you're like a server basically. We sell. So if you, let's say you wanted to mine Bitcoin, we would sell you a$5 ,000 machine, which would mine you like call it$12 a day in profit of Bitcoin.

35:54And then we would sell you the electricity and the services, which would be about 200 bucks a month. So we make most of our money selling that machine. And then we kind of break even on the hosting. That's our business. So had you done any of your mining on your own prior to this? Did you have any experience at all doing your own mining of Bitcoin? I had almost no experience, which never detracts me for better or worse. I had bought two miners from eBay throughout this whole process to learn. I plugged them in. I was like, okay, I'm an expert. But no, I didn't have much experience at all. And Texas is kind of a hotbed for mining, isn't it right now?

36:35So what's on the horizon for the... I mean, let's talk a little bit more about Bitcoin. I mean, it's something you have strong conviction in. Do you make any price predictions for this coming? Yeah, I can make predictions, but I've never been good at them. To me, Bitcoin is just math, which is why I like it. It's provable scarcity, which not even gold has. We think gold is scarce, but we don't know how scarce it is, right? So I think Bitcoin is a gold replacement. Not a gold killer, but just a superior alternative to gold that will eventually overtake gold's market cap, which would mean one Bitcoin would be like$300 ,000 or$400 ,000 each.

37:06I think it's a statistical inevitability that Bitcoin will hit$100 ,000 and then$1 million each. Is it going to be in months or years or decades? I don't know. I do think we'll hit$100 ,000 this cycle over the next 18 months and maybe even$150 ,000 or two. And so you do not trade in and out of positions with Bitcoin like you buy, you hold, and you hodl, as they say, right? Yes. I'm so bad at investing in stocks. But what I am good at, though, is I'm good at never selling. It did take years to learn that. So if I buy a stock, I will never sell that stock. If I buy Bitcoin or Ethereum, I will never sell it because the pain that I feel from selling too early is much greater than the pain I feel from losing money.

37:49Right. Wasn't one of your first investments, Circuit City? Yep. That was my first investment. It was your first. And that was a pretty big loss, wasn't it? At the time, it was a third of my net worth, which was a whopping$500. Right. So I was 21. But I have foregone a lot more money selling things too early. Like when the last time I did that and the last time I will ever do that was in March of 2020, when I freaked out and I sold all my stocks. Nope, I don't like where this is going. And you name it. Like Nvidia, Tesla, Shopify, like need I say more? I'm like, my Tesla has already tripled. I'm going to sell it now.

38:26Yeah. I had 8X more to go after that. Right. Yeah. It's painful. My brother did the same thing. He panicked and yeah, it's huge upside that you end up missing out on. Yeah. I just, I don't do that anymore. Like I've held Bitcoin at 85 % drops. Like I don't sell. How do you deal with the volatility? Like, you know, the drop from let's say 60, whatever it is 67 ,000 down to 15 or 16 ,000. How do you think about that psychologically? How does it affect you? I use friction wherever I can. So there's a lot of friction between me and being able to sell Bitcoin. Passwords, two-factor authentication. Multi-setup or something.

39:03All of it. Yeah, and I just don't. Honestly, when I sold Bitcoin too early, when I sold those stocks, that was when I was more of a speculator and not a believer. And I think Bitcoin is going to be here forever, right? And so I would sell it to pay the mortgage or to feed my family. I'm not stupid, but I don't sell it even if it's dropping 80%. I just can't. I'm not good at timing it and I don't want to get good at timing it. So I don't think about it. So I don't sell it.

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42:53All right, back to the show. I think that's smart. I want to get into real estate a little bit. Talk to me about your first real estate deal? How did you first get turned on to real estate? Because I know that's one of your passions too. I first got into real estate in 2008. Great timing. At the time, Obama instituted the first time homebuyer tax credit. You remember that? I do. And it was$8 ,000. And he changed it eventually to be like, what was it? Like a tax deduction. But in the beginning, it was a check to your bank. And as a 21-year-old with$500 to my name, that was very attractive. And so I got home from my mission at 21.

43:31And I just felt like I could take on the world. I had all the confidence in the world. And so I started reading all the business books and all the real estate books. And I started college and I wanted to be a homeowner. And I didn't have any money. So my wife and I started waiting tables. We were in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And we, seven months into marriage, we bought a three bedroom, one bath house in Tuscaloosa for$90 ,000. And it had been sitting on the market forever. And we didn't know what we were doing. We used the same broker that was listing it to buy it. She said, oh, the sellers won't budge on price.

44:04So don't even ask. She went, oh, okay, whatever you say. And it had been sitting for a year at the same price. And they definitely would have come down on price. I didn't know what I was doing. Anyway, we bought the house, we moved into it. We got$8 ,000 from Obama. We took that and we bought a rental house five minutes away. And those are our first two homes. And that has since led to mobile home parks, right? So that led to a third rental house. And then I moved to Dallas, Texas, and I partnered with a couple of guys. We bought a small RV park in Oklahoma. And then we bought 24 more mobile home and or RV parks over the next two years.

44:40We sold the portfolio in 2021. And then I started buying them with Nick, my partner at Co-Founders last year. And then I'm also a GP on some deals occasionally with other partners as well. So what is it about mobile home parks that you like? You've done... Are you doing value adds when you buy them? I love it because it is... You're really buying land and you're maintaining the infrastructure under the land and not the houses itself, which most people don't realize that. They think, oh, mobile home park, it's going to have all these maintenance issues. Yes, if you own the mobile homes, but that's not what we do.

45:16So we will buy a park and sometimes the tenants own the homes. Sometimes the park owns the homes. Regardless, after closing on the park, we will give or sell the homes back to the tenants if they want them. If they don't want them, then we will give them plenty of time to move. And then we take a hit on the top line revenue, but we don't really have to manage anything after that. We just own the land and rent it out. So is this something you're looking to add more mobile homes to your portfolio or are you kind of tapped out right now? it's kind of a passive thing. So people DM me deals. And if they're attractive, then sometimes I'll just assign them to someone else or occasionally we'll buy one ourselves.

45:56But it's not something I'm really looking to scale, but I'm also not avoiding it right now. So I want to hear about an average day for you. You're creating a bunch of content. You're writing 30 or 40 ,000 words a week, I believe. You've got all the holding company co-founders, all these businesses underneath it. How are you running an average day for you while still maintaining a family, a wife, all of that? Yeah. So an average day for me is I wake up at like six or so and I just shower and go straight to the office, one of two offices. And I just start working. I drink caffeine and I just put on my AirPods, put on something in the background and I will just, I'll get to inbox zero right away.

46:37I will just knock out a to-do list. I will write a long form tweet and I will just kind of, I'll kind of hop from helping my operators, hop on calls with them impromptu. And I will write content. I'll write my newsletter and I leave my calendar pretty much empty most of the time. I just don't like structured meetings and I'll just kind of, I'll tackle fires one at a time. And I'll do that until about 6pm and then I'll come home and I'll eat dinner with my family every night. Like there's never really a reason to miss dinner. I don't travel that much. And then I'll take the boys to basketball practice.

47:11I'll usually work in the car while they're practicing. And then I come home, hang out with the kids, put them in bed, and then I'll watch something with my wife. And sometimes I'll have the computer open. I watch Love is Blind. Tell me about Parkinson's Law. What is Parkinson's Law and how does it affect your life? Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it. Back to high school, if you had a big, huge project due three months from now, you're probably going to get it done the night before. And it's probably going to be great. At least that's how I work. Whereas if you only have an hour to do something, then you'll get it done in that hour.

47:46And so the same principle is true with Elon buying Twitter and firing 80 % of people, and it just keeps going. And then the same principle is true with just taking on way too many projects and too many people or too many companies. So I just let the most important things bubble their way to the surface. If I let something slip, if I forget to do something, then that's just a message to me that it wasn't that important. I'm not going to forget my family, right? That's not in my work bucket. So that's the most important. And then if there's a big fire, like an investor, we're raising money, that just lives in the top of my head and it will get done.

48:21And everything else, like whatever my time kind of gravitate towards is what's most important because it's what I'm placing importance in. And everything else just falls to the wayside. And maybe I pick it back up in a month when it's more important then, or maybe I never pick it back up. But I used to fight that and just really try to hone in on one thing. This works really well for me. And it's what I love doing. And honestly, it doesn't feel like work. 12-hour days every day. It's no different than a 9-to-5 guy working 6 hours at the office and then fishing 6 hours if that's what he loves. It all feels like play to me.

48:58Stephen Covey is a Mormon and he's got the Franklin planner that I used to really be into. My wife actually is still into the Franklin planner. She carries it around. It's like a big, massive, bigger than a telephone, old telephone book. And she lives her entire life by that. Do you, is that something you utilize to like kind of structure things and keep track of things and prioritize? No. So I have a very low tech system. I have Chrome tabs open. And And if it's an open tab, then it's a to-do list. A few Google Sheets that I leave pinned in Chrome at all times that I'm always referring to. I've got my Reminders app on my iPhone.

49:33And then I have unread emails and unread texts. And that's everything that I need to do. I have a calendar for stuff like this podcast. But most days, there's one or two things in my calendar. It's something that I've taught for years. But now I've just stuck with it because it works. I want to get into idea generation. You've got a ton of ideas that you come up with, whether it's businesses or tweets that you're, you know, threads that you're writing. Talk to me about that creative process. Where do you come up with ideas or where do you, where's like the fertilizer, the source of some of these ideas come from?

50:06I don't know. It's like, I consider it like the 10 ,000 hour rule, right? Like when my work is my hobby and it's all that I do outside of my family, then I just see things everywhere. And I thought of this analogy a little while ago. Like I'm not a musician at all. I would like to be. I love music. I played the guitar a little bit, but it is my bucket list item to have a hit song. I think that would be awesome. But the thought of writing a song is just so foreign to me. Whereas some people are like, I don't have ideas. How do you think of these ideas? And so I think of Taylor Swift and she has hundreds of songs, maybe thousands that we don't even know about.

50:44And they just flow. She'll just see something outside and write a song. And it's just because that's all she is. That's all she knows. That's all she sees and thinks about her brain is wired in that way. And it's trained to be wired in that way. And that's just how I am. I don't know. I don't try to think of ideas. I don't have a process. I just see things out there. And I think I just attach commerce to it or business to it. Like, oh, this could be improved by... Oh, you could monetize it like that. That's just how my brain works. I find it fascinating. Is that why you've partnered with some of these college and MBA students?

51:19Because you've got so many ideas that you want to pursue and you give them free reign and let them run with it? Yeah, exactly. The Fast Tree Care, I bought fasttreecare.com, the domain, six years ago. And I just kept renewing it. I was like, that is a good domain. How is that not taken? And I had helped a friend as a favor start his tree business, And it went amazingly. And so I thought, all right, that's just idea number 72. And one day, the stars will align or not. And if they do, then I'll launch this business. And it did. And it's a great business. And it's a great domain name. And it's awesome.

51:53And so co-founders is a vehicle for me to plant those ideas with other people. And because people tell me a lot, what if you just did one thing? It's like, well, I do one thing. And it's start businesses. I don't do one business because I wouldn't enjoy that. Do you find Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny, I think he made the comment that it's like the Pareto's law, 80-20 rule that 80 % or what, 20 % of your companies are generating 80 % of the revenue. Do you find that to be the case? Absolutely. Yeah. So is that Bitcoin mining? Is that Texas snacks? Right now it's Bitcoin mining just because it's the most established and we're selling a high ticket item.

52:34So to have a$100 ,000 day means we just have to sell 20 items. That makes it easier to be a bigger business. But co-founders is very new. Our AI startup is four months old. Our RV park is eight months old. Texas Snacks is old. But that's just a$3 or$4 million business. And then Mining Syndicate. And then... Yeah. So I don't know what that 80-20 will look like in the future. But yeah. I want to shift gears a little bit. you used to be a pretty heavy dude. 260, you said. You're not that anymore. So talk to me about that process of getting into ultra marathons and losing a bunch of weight and just the training that was involved in that.

53:15You had a comment with Chris Powers. It was something about the importance of seeking out and finding hard things to do, which I'm totally in agreement with. Make yourself suffer. It goes against our grain. Tell me about the ultra marathon stuff. Yeah. So I celebrated my 10 year anniversary in 2008 with my wife and I was this size when I got married. I was this exact size all throughout high school, throughout my mission. And then I got home and I got married and I just let myself go. And I gained 50, 60 pounds. And my wife, bless her heart, never once said a word. She's not the type. Hey, watch what you're eating.

53:52Like, what are you doing? Like, man, maybe you should work out. Never, ever once. She just loved me. Never. Never. And she never gained a pound. She had four kids and she always just lost it and then had another kid. And so she's the same size today that she was in high school. And so despite her never saying anything, we were on our 10-year anniversary and I just looked in the mirror and I was like, what are you doing? Who are you? Like what? Nothing. There wasn't a person that made a comment. I don't know what the trigger was. It was just, I hit a point and I was like, this is unsustainable.

54:23And I had tried over the years, half-heartedly, lost 20 pounds, gained it, lost 30, lost 10. And I was like, no, I'm done. And I had heard about keto, but I didn't know anything about it. And I was like, let's try that. All right. When I come home from Hawaii, our anniversary, it's like, I'm going to start keto. So I did. And I just didn't look back. I just went strict keto. I lost all the weight and I didn't really do much exercise. It was just diet. I played racquetball kind of just a little bit on the weekends. But after I lost the weight, I hit my goal weight and I was like, okay, now you got to keep this off.

54:53I didn't want to be on keto forever. So I thought, I'll just start running. So I just went outside and I don't have a background in running. I wrestled in high school and that's it. So I just started running around the neighborhood. And I'd always told myself I never ran a race. I'm the all or nothing type. And so I thought, man, it'd be a cool story if my first race was a marathon. It'd just be cool to not work up to it. That's the extent of my thinking. And so I just Googled a marathon training plan. I followed it to a T. I ran a marathon two and a half months later. And then I learned what ultra marathons were.

55:20I didn't even know they existed. And I ran an ultra marathon a month after that. And then I ran 13 more over the next two years. So an ultra marathon is what's the shortest mileage? 50K, which is 31 miles. And what's the longest you, what was the longest one you did? 139. 139. So something like that takes how long? 35 hours. Holy smokes. That's crazy. Yeah, it is. It's pretty crazy. I mean, that's wild. I biked across America. That was like my big journey. So I appreciate... Oh, yeah, that's pretty wild. No, I appreciate these kinds of stories. And I think they're great to seek out. But I can't imagine running, whatever, 36 hours, however long.

56:03You know, like that blows my mind, honestly. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it comes down to dialing in your nutrition. And I mean that while you're running, right? Like you got to learn like how many calories you need per hour to keep going. Just like how much gas your car needs every 100 miles, right? And then you got to dial in your, you got to take electrolytes. That's the big secret. You just got to have your salt, potassium, magnesium. And then the third is you just can't quit. Like you just walk. That's not an option, right? No, it's just not. And you walk a lot. So you say running, but there's in a lot of ultras, there's more walking than running.

56:41Are you sleeping? Like taking a little cat nap along the way or? No, I never have. People do, it's common, especially multi, 100 to 200 or 300 mile races, but I've never had. Is it something you would do that level of distance again, or is it a one and done? I did it. I proved I could do it. I don't need to do it again. I would. I definitely would. I never quit one, which I've since learned is rare. They have a 30 % to 40 % dropout rate, which makes sense. I just, on the 140 mile one, I remember being out there and like, it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life by far. And I wanted to quit.

57:18I just thought I have four kids and they're going to ask me why I quit. And I can't tell them, well, daddy broke his leg. You know, daddy got bit by a snake. I just have to tell them it was too hard. And that was the only reason I just couldn't do it. I couldn't quit. And they would have been like, yeah, of course it's hard. I couldn't stomach them remembering that, even if they never did. I just couldn't do it. No, it's a great example to set for them. I want to get more into your kids. You've got a daughter that had a lung transplant. And this story is really amazing. So tell me a little bit about her, the conditions she had, and then what led to the lung transplant.

57:56And then we'll kind of go from there. Yeah, she had a disease called pulmonary hypertension, which means high blood pressure in the lungs. It's extremely rare, especially if it's idiopathic, which means doctors don't know the cause for it. Sometimes older smokers will get it, but it's very rare to be born with it. One in a million. And so we didn't even know she had it until she was three. She just kept having breathing issues. She was misdiagnosed with asthma. Then finally, our pediatrician was just like, maybe it's pulmonary hypertension. And like that just set off this chain of events. And so she was diagnosed with it.

58:29We'd never heard of it. And we learned it was terminal. There's medication you can take. So basically what it means is the arteries in her lungs are too narrow. She was born that way. And so the heart works on overdrive 24-7 to push it through. So her resting heart rate was in the 120s to 150s. Oh, wow. 24-7. Right. So couldn't climb upstairs. Her lips, everyone thought she wore purple lipstick because her lips are always blue. And so from three to nine, it just got worse. And she'd be on oxygen sometimes. Sometimes she had, we were in a trial in Denver, like we tried everything. But we, you know, there's no cure.

59:02And so at age nine, the doctor's like, listen, she needs a double lung transplant. That's the only way out of this. And it's not really out of it because lungs don't last forever. But it was just the best option. And so we had to move to Houston to be close to the Texas Children's, which is the best lung hospital in the country. And she was on the waiting list for six weeks. And we got a call late at night and we took her in and she got a lung transplant. And it's been two years almost to the day. And she's been healthy ever since. that's incredible super incredible and so what is the like the issue will she have to have you said there's a time limit on lung transplants will she have to have another one in her 20s or something like that so the first year is the riskiest and we got out of that and so average lifespan of lungs is like seven to ten years yeah and so doctors will do a second transplant if all of the stars align, if they say it's okay.

1:00:00It happens in a minority of cases. So that's kind of the hope is a double, like a second lung transplant at some point in the future. My wife's father had a idiopathic is the term, right? Idiopathic lung issue, and also had a lung transplant. And same thing, gave him five to 10 years. And I think he was older when he had the transplant. He was in his late 60s, I think when the transplant happened, but was able to get a lot more years than he probably otherwise would have. So you since have become a donor. So talk to me about you and your wife and what you guys have done, you know, trying to give back to, I guess, thanks to the little boy that saved your daughter's life.

1:00:39Yeah. So a month or two after she got her transplant, I learned about living organ donation, which basically means donating your portion of your liver because livers actually regenerate. You only have one, but it will regenerate. So donating a portion of your liver or donating one of your two kidneys or donating blood marrow. And so I learned about, I didn't even know it was a thing. I just thought you'd be an organ donor on your traffic license. And I had learned about doing it altruistically, which are also known as non-directed, where you just give it to a stranger. And it only happens a couple hundred times a year.

1:01:12Nationwide, just that people choose to do this, you're saying? Yeah, there's about 4 ,000 kidney donations a year, and about 95 % of them are to a loved one. Okay. Or non-directed ones. Right. So, I just felt immense gratitude to Sam, the boy who tragically died and gave my daughter his lungs, and I wanted to pay it forward. It seemed like a very logical way to do it once I learned about how low risk of a procedure that it is. Yeah, you told me it's like a colonoscopy or a giving birth or something, like about the same odds of... about 3 in 10 ,000 mortality rate. And what was the stat? I read that if just 1 in 10 ,000 people did this kind of kidney donation, there would be...

1:01:57Tell me about that. I don't know the exact numbers. Yeah. So I kind of had to back end into this math myself. Once I learned it, I just like, wow, the McAfee story, I just wanted to shout it from the rooftops. If 1 in every 10 ,000 healthy American adults, So not just Americans, not just adults, but like healthy American adults were to donate their kidney, then no one would die waiting for a kidney. Whereas today, about 5 ,000 people a year die on the transplant list. Wow. And your wife also did the same procedure. You and your wife both gave a kidney and went through this process. Yep. Just two weeks ago.

1:02:36Two weeks ago, she did hers. Wow. That's incredible. So to find out more about it, I think you mentioned a organization or a website. What was that? Yeah, the National Kidney Registry. I think it's like NKR. KidneyRegistry.org. I'll put links in the show notes to this. I'm interested in it. I don't know that I would... I really admire people that do something like this. So pretty cool stuff. Before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you wanted to talk about? No, I don't think so. We had talked about this earlier where I'm doing this a live call-in show. I call it the Dave Ramsey for entrepreneurs where...

1:03:10I love it. But yeah, people can call in and just ask me business questions live on Twitter through Twitter spaces. And you've done one so far. You're planning to do 10. Is that what you said? I'm going to do 10 as an experiment to see how it goes. And yeah, it's on Twitter at noon every Friday. And you can call in through Twitter and just ask me any business question and I'll answer it live on the spot. That's awesome. I think it's a great idea. How do people find you on Twitter? How can they find you elsewhere online? What's the best way for people to sign up for the spaces thing and just learn more about you?

1:03:45Probably on my website. It's chrisjkerner.com, K-O-E-R-N-E-R. On Twitter, I'm MHP underscore guy, as in mobile home park guy. Pretty active there. Awesome. Chris, thanks so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate your time today. Absolutely. Thanks, Patrick. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.

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