Jeremiah “The Bull” Evans: Alpha Conned

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0:05If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash wandery spelled b-a-b-b-e-l dot com slash wandery rules and restrictions may apply on a friday in february 2022 journalist meg walter found herself covering one of the strangest events she'd ever witnessed it was a male-focused business conference in salt Lake City called AlphaCon.

1:01I thought worst case scenario, I'd be a little bit bored and it would be a lot of how to run a business, you know, how to keep books or how to hire the right people. And there would like probably be some tinges of toxic masculinity. And I was so wrong. For one thing, there wasn't much practical business advice to be had. Some of the speakers seemed confused about exactly what was going on or what they were expected to say. Meg tweeted during a few panels, posting direct quotes from some of the speakers. The tweets immediately got traction online. After the first day, she wrestled with the idea of skipping the second, but ultimately decided she wanted to see things through and cover the rest of the conference.

1:52When Meg went back for day two, she expected more of the same. However, when she arrived, something unexpected happened. I sit down, I put my water on the table, pulled out my notebook, and a woman who is part of AlphaCon approaches me and said, Are you Meg? And I said, Yes. And she said, We're going to ask you to leave. Meg was asked to leave. Her only offense was quoting exactly what was being said inside Alpha Con, which organizers apparently decided had crossed a line. It was a sign that Alpha Con wasn't exactly what it advertised to be. And it turned out that the conference's founder, Jeremiah the Bull Evans, wasn't exactly what he said he was either.

2:53This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Jeremiah the Bull Evans, Alpha Cond. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we dive into the story of social media influencer and entrepreneur, Jeremiah the Bull Evans. His company, Alpha Influence, promised to help people, mostly men, make themselves stronger, more dominant, and more wealthy than they could imagine. But in the end, hundreds of people who invested in the bull ended up holding the bag.

3:52To really understand what AlphaCon and Alpha influence were all about, we first need to get to know the man who started it all, Jeremiah the Bull Evans. About that nickname, it might sound like Evans earned it by being dominant or aggressive, but actually it was the opposite. For some more context, we spoke with Utah news reporter Kyle Dunphy, who covered Evans extensively. So the story goes that the bull was sort of a nickname that was given to him as a kid because he was overweight. And so he was bullied and called the bull. But after his dad told him to fight back against his bullies, Evans reclaimed the name on his own terms.

4:41And later in life kind of turned that nickname around and adopted it. That's in line with his whole story of perseverance and determination and not letting people tell you what you can and can't do. In addition to that fateful advice from his father, Evans was also shaped by the community he grew up in and his aspirations to play Division I football. Jeremiah Evans was a Utah County native. He was a former football player at BYU. Evans was a quarterback on Brigham Young University's football team for a couple of years. BYU football was a bit of a tradition in his family. His father was a successful player, and back in the day, his grandfather coached the team.

5:35However, Evans is the first person to admit that, even though playing for BYU was a dream, he wasn't all that talented. In fact, he never actually played in a game, and after a couple seasons, he was cut from the team. After that, Evans dropped out of BYU altogether in 2019. After a major setback like that, a lot of people might stop and take stock of things before figuring out what direction they should go in next. But it doesn't seem like Evans slowed down at all. Instead, he quickly set his sights on scoring something other than touchdowns. He decided he wanted to make cold, hard cash. Lots of it.

6:20And he wanted to help others achieve the same goal. So, in 2019, Evans launched Alpha Influence LLC. see. Like many other money-making endeavors of the last few years, alpha influence was modeled around dropshipping. Dropshipping is essentially a form of e-commerce where the business doesn't actually own inventory, but they act as a middleman. So they purchase goods as needed from like wholesalers, then resale on digital platforms like Amazon at a higher price. And that's how they make their money. The idea was that customers could invest in alpha influence, and then Evans would set up an online store for them and handle the back-end logistics.

7:12Evans had a solid pitch. Here's how this works. When you partner with me, I build a business. I help you every step of the way. you handle the operations and then we split the profits. If you're someone who actually wants to get real results with their online business, here's what you're going to do instead. Partner with me. When you partner with me, my team becomes your team. My experience in generating over$70 million in sales online now goes directly to you and I actually have a vested interest in your success. According to Evans, if customers invested with him, they were basically guaranteed to make money and a lot of it.

7:52Naturally, his services didn't come cheap. For about$40 ,000, you could invest in Alpha Influence and they would create an Amazon dropshipping store. There were some cases where clients invested like$70 ,000 or$80 ,000 in his company. So Alpha would take a cut of that investment, usually they said it'd be around 30%. And in exchange, they'd set up an Amazon store for its clients. And then according to their advertisements, they would see return on that. Once Evans had his business proposition all lined up, it was time to get the word out and bring in customers. Fortunately, he had a built-in network.

8:39Evans was a part of the tight-knit community around the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church. And as he started his venture, he leveraged those close ties to make connections and cultivate leads. There's like a really strong community focus. The ward is like a big part of the church, which is essentially the neighborhood. And those are the people you spend time with, and the people you go to church with, right? People you interact with a lot. the way this business operated was really similar to how a multi-level marketing scheme operates, where you really start with people in your community, people who you know, and then use that to kind of like reach out and grow your network.

9:27Beyond that, Evans also hired a team of salespeople to sell shares in Alpha Influence. At one point, he led a team of 67 sales agents, and he used local media to expand his reach. Even before AlphaCon, he was trying to build this brand for himself as sort of this entrepreneur investor. So he had gone on a local TV station's morning program to promote himself. He had some podcasts. He had a review in Forbes. He had some pretty high-level endorsements. The conservative TV host Tommy Lauren endorsed him on his website. So, you know, before AlphaCon happened, he had already sort of built this brand for himself in Utah.

10:15Whatever else can be said about the bull, Evans was skilled at creating a compelling brand for himself. Here's how Evans describes himself on his TikTok. I'm a multi-millionaire. Before the time I was 25 years old, currently sitting at 26 years old, doing$50 million a year in sales. And people ask me all the time, how did you get rich? What did you do to get here? I got rich doing these two things. Number one, I dropped out of college and I went out to develop a skill set. That skill set was sales. Number two, so many entrepreneurs I find try to do everything on their own. I was that way as well.

10:52But what I quickly realized by expanding my team, I'm able to accomplish so much more. But what really took things to the next level was the way Evans used social media to build and promote his brand of masculinity and massive wealth. Here's Meg Walter. Manosphere content. This was mid-COVID, So it was very, we have to fight for our rights. Men need to be masculine again. The government can't tell us what to do. Everything's terrible. You can make a lot of money quickly if you just have the right amount of masculinity. Here's a sampling of some content from the Bull, this time on masking. Don't you dare start celebrating now that you can take off your mask.

11:47Honestly, the fact that we're also in this celebration, like we've been given PAC permission to live our lives in a normal way by our also loving and friendly government, we need to say, screw that. This was wrong. It was an overstep into our fundamental rights to live as human beings. And here are some of his thoughts on mental health. I do not believe depression is real. I feel depression all the time. That does not mean I'm depressed. It means I'm pushing through some pain and some demons, just like we all are. So when we talk about someone who's really discouraged or gives into depression, guess what?

12:23It's because you're a coward. The opposite of a courageous man is a coward. So yeah, you get the idea. The Bull wasn't alone in putting out these kinds of ideas. he found his niche in a growing marketplace of conservative thinkers. I know that it sounds a little goofy, but there is this real ecosystem, especially in Utah, of these sort of businessmen who kind of merge their business with sort of this idea of what it is to be a man and masculinity. And so he was definitely part of that ecosystem. After a couple of years of building Alpha influence through his local community and online, Evans was ready to try something new, an in-person gathering for like-minded folks.

13:16Let's face it, mostly men. In 2021, he announced his next endeavor, a business conference called, what else, AlphaCon. The idea was to make money on ticket sales, of course, but also to continue to grow the Alpha Influence Network. Evan certainly succeeded in getting more attention for his business. However, not all of it was positive.

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15:25Over 30 ,000 licensed therapists. More than 5 million people helped. You can message, schedule live sessions, even switch therapists if you want. It's flexible on your terms. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Get 10 % off your first month at betterhelp.com slash opportunist. That's betterhelp.com slash opportunist. Now, back to the story. After two years of billing up his e-commerce company, Alpha Influence, 26-year-old entrepreneur Jeremiah The Bull Evans planned his next big undertaking. He decided to put together an in-person gathering for all the people he'd been influencing online. It was called AlphaCon, and it was slated for early 2022.

16:21I think AlphaCon was really like an effort to try to continue getting his name out there. Right out of the gate, there were signs that AlphaCon wasn't going to be a run-of-the-mill business conference. For one thing, the online advertising campaign was, well, unorthodox, to say the least. Here's Meg Walter, a journalist who covered AlphaCon in person. You know, Jeremiah released a few videos ahead of this conference, and it was like him shooting guns at the gun range, and him driving a Lamborghini, and him outside a private jet, and him trying on a Rolex. It was very much like, this is the kind of man you want to be.

17:06This is the kind of success you can have if you associate with me and my colleagues. Another factor was that the event was taking place in 2022. Society was still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. And around the world, there were people pushing back against what they saw as government overreach in response to the epidemic. I think given the time this was held in 2022, everyone was so online all the time because we were so stuck in our houses. This feels to me like a broader toxic masculinity pushback in society in general that has continued. I think this was maybe like the beginning of that wave or near the beginning of the wave and we've like really seen it crescendo from there.

18:01Meg thought the event could have the potential for comedy. He named the conference AlphaCon. So the jokes were right there. It was very easy for people to laugh at this, especially when they released the digital flyer, which was him and a bunch of other men, no women on this poster, standing, arms crossed, frowning, very like masculine marketing. And then to have the name AlphaCon attached to it, it was just too easy to make jokes about it. Jokes aside, what was AlphaCon really? what is AlphaCon was kind of the big question nobody really knew I mean we saw this poster I would say the website was not super informative it was billed as a business conference how to run your business better the subtext was how to be a better man how to be more alpha more masculine but beyond that no one had any idea what these two days of AlphaCon were going to be.

19:08No one knew, including Meg, as she headed into the unknown on Friday, February 18, 2022. One of the first things she noticed was that attendance was a little low. It was held at the Grand America in downtown Salt Lake City in one of the ballrooms. And I think capacity was around 200 people. I don't know if that's the venue where they started originally or if they switched to it. I think it was one of those things where it was like possibly moved to a smaller room to make it look full. Right from the start, the turnout looked smaller than expected. And while most of the crowd was men, there were a few women in the mix.

19:55There were women attendees. Maybe a third of them were women. I'm a nosy person. I looked at a few of their social media profiles. They were easy to identify and they were exactly what you expect, like very buying into that kind of mindset and culture. I was surprised by the number of women who were there. Surprisingly, there were a fair number of women in the audience, but on stage, not a single one. The demographic of speakers was all male. I want to say early 30s to probably 50 was the latest. The guys you see at the gym by the weights, only ever at the weights.

20:46Dressed in a flat brimmed hat, a lot of flat brimmed hats, a lot of tight shirts, a lot of expensive clothes. To help picture the vibe of this event, think Tim Ballard, the disgraced leader of Operation Underground Railroad, who we did a whole series on. He was slated to be one of the speakers. Apparently, he dropped out at the last minute. As Meg got a sense of the attendees who had shown up, she started to get a sense for what the conference would be. But as soon as the actual speaker presentations began, she was thrown for another loop. I thought worst case scenario, I'd be a little bit bored and it would be a lot of how to run a business, you know, how to keep books or how to hire the right people.

21:44And there would like probably be some tinges of toxic masculinity, but it would for the most part be informative and probably pretty boring. And I was so wrong. I don't remember a single piece of business advice from any of the speakers. It was a lot of the bull when he spoke. He said betas are the real pandemic. Just a lot of kind of nonsense grifter language. Here's how to be a better husband and then no actionable advice. There was a distinct lack of substance on all fronts, from the speakers to the catering. There was a can of bucked up energy at every table for every attendee. That was the only food or drink we got the whole time.

22:38And that really just encompasses the whole vibe of what was happening at AlphaCon. Like, be a man or be nothing. Like the tagline was be great or be nothing. And they all very much had that attitude, like nine to five, unacceptable. Making money the normal way, unacceptable. You got to do it quick. You got to do it dirty. That's the only way you can be successful. All in all, Alphacon seemed to have more of an emphasis on appearances rather than real content. There were lots of really funny things, like just really loud, not EDM, but like dark techno music that would play every time a speaker stood up or like off brand hip hop that like you're like, I feel like I've heard this song, but this isn't a real song, you know, like stockmusic.com kind of music.

23:31And they would have red smoke spray every time someone got up. It was just like a lot of aesthetics and not a lot of substance. And they would give these insane presentations and a lot of them did slideshows. And when the bull spoke, he had this slideshow where it was like a dog, a kid crying in the corner, an ear of corn, and it made absolutely no sense. Whatever the bull lacked in coherence, he made up for in pure manosphere bravado. Here's a clip of him speaking at AlphaCon. I live a life of freedom because I don't care what regulations come out in this country. I don't care what they try to do.

24:13You can't fucking tell me what to do. I'm the fucking king! So yeah, a little out there for a business conference. After the first day, Meg posted several tweets about the event, quoting some of the speakers. The tweets were entertaining and they got a lot of traction online. At first, she figured she had pretty much seen all she needed to see, but Saturday, the next day, she decided she'd follow through and see AlphaCon to the bitter end. Instead, she barely made it through the door before security pulled her aside. I sit down, I put my water on the table, pulled out my notebook, and a woman who is part of AlphaCon approaches me.

25:05She was one of the employees of Alpha Investments, I'm assuming, approaches me and said, are you Meg? And I said, yes. And she said, we're going to ask you to leave. And I think maybe she was expecting a little pushback. But I was like, all right. Because I was like a little bit in a state of shock because I've never been in trouble for anything in my whole life. I've never been asked to leave anywhere. Turns out Meg's tweets about the event had gone viral and the AlphaCon organizers did not appreciate the bad press. So their solution was to get rid of her. But while AlphaCon may have been a bit of a flop, Evans' company, Alpha Influence LLC, was still going strong.

25:53And the bull was raking in the cash. He assured potential customers that his company had been operating successfully for years. Evans promised them that they'd recoup their initial investment within a year and a half and after that it was all profit. He boasted that his investors received steady substantial returns of anywhere from 7 to 10 percent per month. Evans also promised his customers that if they ever ran into problems with the dropshipping stores he helped them set up he had high level connections at Amazon to quickly and seamlessly iron things out. And to top it all off, Evans featured glowing testimonials from many satisfied clients.

26:42With all of this apparent upside, people flocked to invest with Alpha Influence. More than 500 people. Business was booming, but as the months turned into years, some investors started having major issues. Their drop shipping stores were shut down, and they weren't able to get in touch with customer service to get them back up and running again. To add insult to injury, while these investors weren't making any money, they saw Evans online buying Rolexes, flying in private jets, and driving sports cars. And more and more of them started to get upset. As complaints rolled in, authorities started looking into alpha influence.

27:30Then, in 2025, the bottom fell out altogether. Up next, Evan's alpha influence turns out to be an alpha con job. You know, life doesn't happen bi-weekly, so why should payday? With Earning, your money can be in your hands today. Earning lets you access your pay as you earn it. Up to$150 a day,$750 between paychecks. With no interest, no credit check, no mandatory fees. Just download the app, add your info, and start accessing your pay. You can even leave an optional tip to keep the app running for everyone. For me, having access means covering gas, groceries, or that last-minute vet bill without having to wait for my payday.

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29:58In 2019, 23-year-old Jeremiah Evans' company, Alpha Influence, started doing major business. For an investment of$30 ,000 to$40 ,000, customers could buy shares in alpha influence. Then the company would set up Amazon dropshipping stores, which Evans promised would turn a steady profit. Because they were buying shares, those investments legally counted as securities. It wasn't just Evans hawking his wares. He had a whole team of sales agents. at one point up to 67 of them. But here's the thing, none of them were actually licensed to sell securities in the first place, including Evans himself. Right from the start, the entire business was built on a foundation of illegal activity.

30:52And that wasn't even the worst part. Evans boasted online that he had connections with high-ranking Amazon staff. he assured potential customers that they would have insider access to make profits through dropshipping but this was just another lie evans and alpha influence didn't have any high level connections whatsoever on top of this the bull also ensured investors that alpha influence had their back he claimed they had a legal team and customer service standing by to handle any problems that might arise. But he neglected to give his customers some very important information. Again, reporter Kyle Dunphy.