Barn Talk - I Lost Everything at 26. Here's How I Built It Back

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Welcome back to Barn Talk! In this episode, Tork and Sawyer sit down for an open and honest conversation comparing their lives and mindsets at the age of 26. Tork reflects on his experiences coming up in the late 1990s from the financial pressures and risks of running a farm to weathering the collapse of the hog market. Sawyer, now 26 himself, shares what it's like navigating business, investing, and rural life in today's world, where information is everywhere and opportunity looks different than it did for his father. Together, they explore generational shifts in work ethic, financial lessons, risk-taking, relationships, and the role of faith. Through personal stories and real-world examples, Tork and Sawyer highlight what’s stayed the same and what’s changed for young people trying to build a meaningful life in rural America. This episode is full of hard truths, honest reflections, and valuable advice for anyone thinking about their own journey no matter their age. JOIN THE BARN TALK NEWSLETTER & GET LIVE EVENT ACCESS: We're on a mission to get 10,000 subscribers, and once we do, we're hosting a live event at the barn! Sign up to get exclusive access to tickets and details.👇🏻 Help us get there: https://www.joinbarntalk.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  APPLE ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● Barn Talk Instagram ➱ https://www.instagram.com/barntalkshow  ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS    ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4    ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS ● Sawyer’s X ➱ https://x.com/SawyerWhisler  ● Tork’s X ➱ https://x.com/TorkWhisler  00:00 Discussing Midwest corn crop outlook 18:24 Financing the First Property 30:49 Buying a Camaro as a teen 36:28 Discovering Business and Investing 49:08 Following in kids' footsteps 01:02:17 Family dynamic and generational gap 01:05:02 Childhood memories and adventures 01:18:15 Importance of delegating tasks 01:27:58 Transitioning to construction work 01:42:33 Surviving the hog market collapse 01:54:51 Father's tough love lesson 02:03:56 Importance of Communication in Relationships 02:08:30 Family and church discussions 02:23:14 Valuing old friends and partners 02:30:46 Audience poll and listener feedback ------------------------------- ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional, professional broker or financial advisory. Understand that you are using any and all Information available on or through this website at your own risk. RISK STATEMENT– The trading of Bitcoins, alternative cryptocurrencies, NFTs, individual stocks, etc. has potential rewards, and it also has potential risks involved. Trading may not be suitable for all people. Anyone wishing to invest should seek his or her own independent financial or professional advice. #EP213 #iowacorn #perc #gateway Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. Today is going to be a deep episode. We got something in the works for you guys that I think is going to hit home for everybody. We're going to do a little bit of, we're going to do a little bit of comparison between the both of us. So we're going to talk about, I'm 26 years old. Dad was once 26 years old.

Long, long ago. Long, long ago. Because what are you? Far, far away. What are you? 70? Right there. You look damn good for 70.

Thanks. How about like 50? Do I look good for 50? You look really good for 50. Nice. All right. But 55. You're 55.

I met 52. Not 52, the number. Right. Right. Age is only a number. That's right. We're going to do some comparison. like I said, he was once 26, I'm 26 now. So we're going to talk about what dad was feeling like

at 26 years old. We're going to talk about where he was financially, you know, what his mindset was, where his relationships were and what he thought about them, where is his relationship with his faith? Where was that at? And we're going to compare it to where I'm at now at 262 to just kind of, there's generational differences here. I think a lot of you enjoy the back and forth that dad and I have, and the generational difference that we do have and him being my dad and I'm being him and I'm his son. So we're going to get into all that.

But before we do, you guys know the drill. If you get any value from the show, all that we ask is you share it out with the people that you know. That is probably the most beneficial thing you could do to help out Barn Talk because this show has all grown because of you and your word of mouth,

sharing it with your friends, family, co-workers, whoever, we really do appreciate it tremendously. We really do appreciate it a lot and we would not be here today without you guys. Another thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is leave a review on Spotify or Apple. It gives our show a lot of credibility.

Spotify is beating the hell out of the Apple guys. I don't know if it's just easier to leave reviews on Spotify or if we just have more people over at Spotify. But regardless, those reviews really do help. us land more amazing guests to come to the, come to the barn and have great conversations with us. So thank you to all that do that. Last thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk, if you can't get enough of us and you like what we'd say sometimes, and you want to get a written form of our thoughts on in Rural America, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can go to join barntoc.com.

We have a goal with that right now. If we get to 10,000 newsletter subscribers, we want to throw a damn party. We want to throw an event right here on the farm, right here in the barn, have you guys out, drink some bush lattes, have some great speakers that have been on the show before, come, and get a meet them, and they get a talk, they get a deliver value, and really just have a good old time. That's what we're trying to do.

I think that is going to become a reality. We are taking some pretty large steps towards that. Anybody that knows through the farm videos or has seen any of the videos of what all the old hog sheds look like around where our barn is, we have three old hog buildings built in the 70s, and that all that's left of them is basically the concrete. And we got a game plan, and I think somewhere here in about a month, we're going to get them all busted up and relocated. and so the beautification is going to begin. And so once we get, you know, it never hurts to have company. So we're going to get some stuff cleaned up. And then I don't know when it's going to happen,

but we are getting closer to having that live event here. And, you know, the other thing about the newsletter is, if you just can't stand this and you don't want to have to listen to us, the newsletter is a great way that you can get all the information without having to listen to me. So just get the newsletter. And then you don't even have to listen to it. I wish I could do that.

I wish I could just get text from you sometimes. You do and you don't read those. Well, because I get so overstimulated by your voice. I hear it all the time. I don't feel like that's true. No. It sounds kind of like angel singing. Maybe to you.

It's like the sound. It's like the sound in like a video game when like a big, like you win a quest or a... It's like an achievement getting unlocked. Or you go up a level. That's what my voice to you should sound like. I don't know. People say it sounds like Tony Stewart. So I guess I'd ever put two and two together on that,

but you do kind of sound like him a little bit. You do. All right. Other announcements, we are going to be at the Gateway Farm Expo, November 17th, 18th, and 19th. Uh, so it's in, it's in, it's in Carney, Nebraska. So we're going to be there in November. If you guys are looking to go to a farm show, a farm expo, uh, we'd love to meet you. We're going to be there. We're going to be, uh, meeting and greeting with you guys.

We're going to be talking. We're going to do a, we're going to do a talk on stage there while we're, while we're over there. And it should be a pretty good old time. I'm looking forward to it. Uh, I don't think my ass will be puckered too much. We're, we're getting her down. We're getting her down talking in front of people with a crowd. But I wanted to throw that out there because that'll be here before you know at times flying when you're having fun. So yeah, so how are you today?

I'm good. How are you feeling? I've got a whole list of stuff that I need to get done. It's funny how, you know, one day you wake up and you walk out and you look at the corn crop and you realize, yeah, this corn's

just about done. It's probably going to start drying down. And then you think, hmm, what all do I got that I said to myself last year when we put everything away, yeah, we need to fix that before next year. And now next year is almost here. So the list is vast and long and it's raining. And it looks like there's a chance of rain of every day this week. So not a lot of that outside stuff is going to get done. so I guess I'll have to putter in the shop. But I'd say we probably have got, I don't know, inch of half rain today. This crop is basically made.

And Stonex came out with their best guest versus the USDA number, and they think it's about the corn crop they think is about two bushel better than what USDA is saying. And I hate to say it, but I think they're probably right. because in all the driving around that we've done, the crop looks really, really good. With the exception of some places up around Des Moines-Ames area where they just got absolutely hammered by those rains.

I mean, they got like five inches of rain a couple different times, and it just kept raining. So they've got some fields that really got flooded out. But with the exception of that, I think around the Midwest and the big ice states, corn crop's going to be pretty. It's been good. A lot of good heat when we needed it. A lot of good rain when we needed it. Yeah, very little stress. I'd say the only real stress time on this crop as far as corn goes was it's a little, it was pretty dry right during emergence. And some of the corn emerged pretty uneven. But other than that, I mean, it's been.

I was a little worried in the beginning because when we first got everything planted, it rained for a while. Yeah. There was not a lot of heat. And it finally came around. So that was good. But you know what I realized this morning? What? There's a decision you can make first thing in the morning as a man or a woman. Right in the morning you can make this decision. And there's really no going back once you make this decision.

Okay. So I got up this morning. I went to my underwear drawer. I pulled out a pair underwear. I put them on. And then I didn't realize it until I sat on. I sat on the toilet today and pulled my pants back up

that my underwear were inside out. So did you just go with it? So it's kind of one of those things where they're like, oh, that's not right. But then you go, but the damage is kind of already been done.

It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. Only I know that, but now you all know that. But I sat there and I thought, you know, this is kind of one of those things that you do this and you do it the wrong way

to start your day. there's really no going back and you might as well roll with it. Nope, that's right. I've gotten dressed many times in the dark. Like, I remember when I was doing service and I would leave in the morning when we were living a little rental house while we were redoing the house, we live that you live in now. And, you know, you're trying to be quiet and you're putting on your clothes. And I remember getting dressed and I had my T-shirt, my PSI T-shirt,

laying in the clothes basket. and I grabbed it and I got dressed and I left, drove up to the shop, got some parts, and I was headed north and I pulled into like a Casey's or a quick trip or something. And I got out and that was when I realized that I was wearing one of my Bud Light softball t-shirts, which it wasn't too big of a deal. It's not like I was going to, it's not like I was trying to sell anything that day. Or go to a corporate office.

Exactly right. It's probably good I wasn't going to the office that day. But yeah, you know. Shit happens. It does for sure. Or, yeah, in your case, you're covered either way, just as long as you got underwear on. Right.

I mean, if it was my choice, I would freeball it a lot more. But, yeah, that's dangerous. That gets more dangerous the older you get. It does. The sagger, the sack, the harder that gets to pull off. Oh, I was just more, I'm just more thinking about, you know, sometimes, sometimes, never trust a wet fart that's what they said as you get older you're talking about the other end yeah the other end oh i'm okay well you're okay well you're okay on that yeah no we're good

why don't you why don't you give them a hot and fast market update courtesy of our good friends before we get into the nitty gritty yes uh today's market update hot off the press i did remember remember to put in the cash prices locally today last week i don't know what i was thinking but december corn 461 uh july of 27 corn 4 440s 491 and best price locally 414 and Cedar Rapids Cargill and Cedar Rapids 433. Beans for November 1174, July of 27, 12, 1181, 1181 in Cedar Rapids and 1191 in Quincy. Bean meal 308, wheat for December 665, hogs for October, 83, and 8. May of 27, 86, 80.

And just so you know, since we're going to talk about me and are you at 26 and me at 26, in 1997 hogs were $94 in August. And that was the beginning of the end because by summer of 98, they were below 15. So turn quick. 97, we were feeling pretty good. I remember and then the bottom fell out. So cattle for October, $229, $100. Feeder cattle for August, $253.

Or sorry, $353. Crude oil, $74. This crude oil market, I don't know. I just don't know. Every day, you don't know what it's going to do. If you like trading oil, somebody's making a shitload of money, trading oil, because I'll tell you what, it takes volatility, and they've got it in spades in the oil market.

30-year treasury 5.17, 10-year treasury 4.6. And 1997, 30-year treasury, 6.58, and 10-year, 6.3. Bitcoin, 65,000. Been 65,000 for quite a while. Wish I had something snappy to say about it, but there isn't much going on in Bitcoin. Gold, 4,200. I don't think it ever got down to my $4,000

buy mark and if it did i missed it so silver 62 bucks and the stock market despite everything going on in the world is very close to record highs and uh Tesla came out and had their first earnings report for sorry not Tesla Elon Musk came out and kind of gave first earnings report for the SpaceX and uh he threw a bone to navidia because he said they're only going to buy chips from Navidia, and so then the poor CEO of AMD, she didn't know what to say. So that is your market update, courtesy of our good friends at Contera Ag. If you're looking for financing in your ag operation, whatever it be, raisin almonds, milk and cows, corn and soy, they got somebody that probably speaks your language. If you're looking for leasing information or you want to buy some

hunting ground, they can help you with that too. So give them a call and go to contaraag.com. And thanks to those guys for your market update. What do you know, big fella? They're good folks. I was going to add to the market update that I saw this and I just wanted to confirm it. I saw that 57,000 jobs were added to the job market. So that was what I was going to add to it.

And I think the jobs market is kind of irrelevant. Don't you? Thank you. oh no i'm not saying that i'm not saying that i know but uh i saw somebody kind of explain this that the whole jobs the unemployment rate and the jobs uh deal that all came as a byproduct of the depression back in the 30s because they started to do it every month as like a way to try to try to gauge whether or not the economy was getting better or not but uh i think i saw tony reed talking about this

when you think about your circle of friends and everybody you know, do you know anybody that's unemployed? No. I don't know anybody that's unemployed. Like anybody that wants a job's got a job. And anybody that I see wandering around in the middle of day that doesn't have a job, this might be a snarky answer, but a lot of those people don't look like they're employable or they want to be employed.

So I think the whole unemployment rate is bogus because, You just think it's a culture thing? It's like I just... Yeah, I think that no matter how perfect your economy is, there's just a certain amount of people out there that they ain't going to work. They don't want to work. The safety net, public safety net's too good.

Or, you know, they got somebody... Part of it is cultural too, because there is some families that they will all live together or very, you know, kind of live in the same building or, you know, maybe in the same house, where they all work

and a couple of the people stay home, take care of all the kids, but then there's other cultures where one person works and all the rest of them stay home or all the rest of them don't work. Hey, thanks for sticking with us. All right, so I want to talk about something

that I think is genuinely underappreciated. The Iowa Corn Checkoff. It's one cent per bushel. That's it. One cent. And that money goes to work for you in research, market development, and education. It's not going into something black hole. It's funding the work that builds demand for your corn all around the world.

The checkoff was established by farmers by a grower referendum back in 1977, specifically to benefit farmers. And it's still doing exactly that. It funds the research to develop new value-added products from corn. It builds markets and countries that want our ethanol and our feed products. And it educates consumers on decision makers about what we actually do out there. When you think about it like an investment, which it is, the return of our economy. on that one cent is pretty darn good. To see where your checkoff dollars are going

and what they're doing on your farm, head to IowaCorn.org. Now, let's get back to it. I think it's going to be a deep, meaningful episode. So let's get into it. So like I laid out in the beginning, we're going to talk about dad's journey, where he was at 26,

and we're going to do where I'm at 26. So the first topic that we're going to talk about, round one, is money. You're 26 years old. What year is it? Yep. Late 97. Main subject's money.

Yep. 1997, Trish and I had been married for four years, and your brother was two years old. You hadn't been born yet. We were living not very far from here. I had purchased a 120-South Farrow-to-finish operation with a house on like five acres or seven acres or something like that. So I was fully indebted. I think I had a, I think I had a, I think we might have spun the house out. I think it was on a 15, everything was on a 15 year mortgage, I think, and I borrowed,

I think I had like $30,000 that I put into it, that I had, my grandpa on my mom's side, gave me, like loaned me $20,000 and never wanted me to pay him, so basically gifted it to me. uh so i think i borrowed a hundred and maybe 180 000 on a two hundred and ten thousand dollar price of that setup and then i had a 50 or 60 thousand dollar operating note which was probably three quarters the way max oh it was probably maxed out in 97 because we we'd gone through 95 because I bought that in 92. We moved in January 1st and 93. So I had a wife. I had a kid. Trisha was working semi full, I mean basically full time cutting hair. She'd been in cosmetology school and she was working in town. I was working with my dad. So my dad was still farrowing here.

I was farrowing there. I think that we were in the process of merging our sal unit, our sows together to where we were going to ferro everything down here and nursery everything at my place and then finish on both sides. Not a, you know, not by today's standard, it's not the most brilliant idea, but the time it seemed okay. No 401k, no IRA, no investments. I was going to ask you about that, but what was like your mindset with money? Like what had been taught to you? what, yeah, like what was your mindset of money? Zero. So my parents were, you don't talk about, you don't talk about religion, you don't talk about money.

I grew up in a house, youngest of three boys, and I was spoiled. I would say I was spoiled, but I worked, you know, I worked hard for everything that I was given, but I was given pretty much everything. Like, we didn't pay for gas. We didn't pay for my dad bought my first car. All of the things I did to that car I paid for off of what the pigs that I raised because I had a deal with him that all the junk pigs, you know, I would get them along.

And then if they turned into pigs that I could sell, I got the money out of him and all that. What was the rule for him for you when you were in high school, middle school? Like my role. Well, rule, but what? what uh like what was his rule when you wanted to go out at night or like you know how much you like how much time did you have to work as a kid um so i had no curfew when i was in high school uh but my dad woke me up every morning at 5 a m you could stay out as late as you want in fact you could stay out all the way till 5 a.m as long as you were there to chore and you learned pretty

quick. So the one thing I had going for me when I started this deal was I had no problem working. That was, it was beat in to me. And, but as far as money goes, Trish and I didn't have a budget. We, we, our phone, the only phone we had in that time. And I, I want to say 97, I don't know if we, I imagine we had gotten rid of our bag phone by that point. I, I think we probably both had phones. but you were still on the deal where you paid for so many minutes. It wasn't like an unlimited plan. We had dial-up internet. We had AOL, and it was slow as shit.

So, I mean, you could, if you wanted to sit there long enough, you could bring up the AOL homepage and read the news. I did invest some. I had like $5,000 that I played with. And what I did was I day-traded, and I got investors' business daily. and it came in the mail every day and it had this stock rating deal in there

and I listened to some like I think they were cassettes maybe they were CDs because if you were a subscriber to investors business daily like they had this whole series of of educational

CDs or tapes that they would send you and you'd get them for, I don't know, like $10 or whatever. And I remember I would listen to those cassettes or whatever. But that was the, there was no, my parents didn't give me any. School didn't teach you. No, school didn't teach me anything. Parents didn't teach you.

And we were horrible with our money. I was very, what I would say is I was very good about raising pigs. I, I knew everything I needed to know about, uh, Farrowing sows, breeding sows, raisin pigs. As far as running a budget, I was terrible. And we had a Von Mar card, and we had a Best Buy card, and we had, I don't know, we had three credit cards. And the way my parents operated was, basically my mother was in charge of making sure there was money in the checking account. and if there wasn't money, you didn't write a check.

And that's how they operated. And you always said that they would take pigs to the buy. They'd just go sell more pigs if they needed money. Yeah, if they knew that there was an expense coming, maybe the pigs got marketed a little lighter or, you know, whatever. Or we sold a load of corn out of the bin instead of just hoarding it all to grind for feet. Anyway, all that to say, in 97, we had been through 1995. In 1995 was a bad year and things were tight.

I wouldn't say we lost a lot of money in 95 because I don't think it, I think hogs got down into the 30s. And I mean, we might have gone backwards a little bit, but it wasn't bad. 97 hogs were high. And we were feeling pretty good. And we were, we did not know in 97 that we were literally standing at the abyss of what 98 was going to be. So Trish and I,

we had a very unhealthy relationship as far as money goes. In other words, she didn't grow up on a farm, she didn't know, she would just be like kind of bamboozled by the size of checks

that we would write for feed or for whatever. And she really, she didn't really want to know. And I, didn't like it when she got stressed out. So I just didn't tell her any more than she needed to know. I was the one that paid the bills,

and I made sure that she had cash in her purse for lunch from the salon and gas in the car, and, you know, the rest of it I took care of and probably not very well. But 97, we were fine. We were getting along fine, but all our eggs were in one basket. and there was no, yeah, there was no information like there is today. Yeah. I wasn't listened to a podcast.

I wasn't reading. There was no Dave Ramsey. No, none of that. There was, you could send away, like, there was infomercials, and Tony Robbins was still going, even in the 90s, you know, he was getting his start, and, you know, you could buy a book on positivity, and, you know, we'd go to the mall, and you, like, the internet was, was the mall. That was the internet.

You went there to learn, like you'd go to the bookstore. The trends, the news came through the mall of what was going on. So when you were growing up to like, because I feel like this is kind of broad, but you've kind of,

I feel like you've always had this sense of trying to earn a dollar. Yeah. Or like be, and I don't know if that just comes from farming and watching Grandpa or whatever, but you've always kind of, I feel like you've always been enterprising. Yeah.

Why do you think that is? I don't know, that's weird. Because sports wasn't your thing. Yeah. Like you flat out say sports was not your thing. You always wanted to farm. You always liked numbers and business and economics and farming. Yeah.

All of that kind of goes into farming, basically. But like what, do you think that was just instilled? Yeah. So what's interesting about that, that. I thought, like today, I thought about this a lot. And we'll get into this when we talk about like faith, because some of my earliest memories are of my parents having dinner parties. And the people that would be at them was the pastor of our church, who was a very, he was a very, I wouldn't say he was intimidating, because I was probably too young to be intimidated.

intimidated, but he was very impressive. He had this just white hair, you know, and he'd been in the Navy, he was a chaplain in the Navy. He and my dad were pretty, pretty tight. My dad being, having gone to law school and been a lawyer, he was very close with our family lawyer, Bob Day. Bob and Corny Day would be at our house, Bill Kettlitz and his wife. And then our insurance man, he would be there. There was a guy that owned the jewelry store, him and his wife would be there, and there was a guy named Fred Anderson, and Fred Anderson worked for Seiford's clothing stores.

His wife ran the store in Washington, but he worked for corporate, and he was like a marketing guy. And great big guy, chain smoked, and I just remember he had this deep voice, kind of like a hairy carry. He kind of looked like Harry Carey a little bit and sounded like him a little bit. But all these people would be at our house and they would be talking. And I can just remember how interesting it was, like listen to Fred Anderson talk about all the things that they were doing at corporate and building out stores and, you know, how the sending people to buy and all that.

Then at the same time, the guy that sold my dad, his hog buildings, his name was Harold Warder. and Harold Warder worked for Husky built and he gave me my first pair of cowboy boots. He showed up when we bought the buildings that my dad built, he brought my brothers and I each got a pair of cowboy boots. He showed up. And that guy was so full of shit. I mean, he was your typical.

He was your typical salesman, but I didn't know that. I just thought he was most interesting, funny, you know, had an answer for anything. and that just impressed me. And so I can remember sitting in school, like in grade school, and my best friend that lives to this day, I just got back from going on a trip with two of my childhood friends. He and I would scheme about,

we would scheme on trading baseball cards. We had dreams of building like a baseball. card store that sold fish and bait, you know, fish and lures. And I remember at one point, my mom had somewhere she had gotten this cinnamon flavored like oil. And I would dip toothpicks in it. And then I would take the toothpicks and I would sell them on the playground, flavored toothpicks for like 10 cents a piece or five cents a piece. I was always scheming. And that just went through. And I remember when when I bought, when we all got to drive in, I wanted a, I wanted a Camaro. I wanted a flashy car.

And I bought a Camaro, red did it all. It was painted Porsche India Red, you know. And to do that, it took money. So I was always scheming of ways to make money, like bailing hay in the summer, or working for some farmer above what my dad. So I don't know where that came from other than, part of it, I think, was the impression of the people that came through our door at our house and just watching them, and part of it maybe was just in me. Hey, thanks for sticking with us. Are you headed to the fall shows? At Farm Progress, propane generators will be running the AC in the tents,

which you'll appreciate, especially with that September heat. At Husker Harvest Days, you can talk directly to the guys building propane irrigation engines. Diesel prices are too volatile. You need fuel costs you can actually pencil in. Swapping old diesel equipment for propane engines and heaters saves you real money on fuel, maintenance all year long. The Propane Farm Research Program will pay you up to $10,000 towards new equipment just for sharing performance data. That's $10,000 for gear you're probably going to buy anyway. Apply today at propane.com backslash farm funding. Now, let's get back to it.

Yeah, because it's like that nurture nature thing. But I also think on the nurture side, too, you watch Grandpa and you also went to the buying station and you went to the feed store. Not only you're getting these people that were coming in there are enterprising on like the town side, but you have all the farmers that you're around too that are talking about economics and money and talking about all the shit you're not supposed to talk about, but you're talking about it at the feed store. Yeah, and my dad was a different kind of cat too, because my dad wasn't that way.

As far as, you know, I think he had been through, he got started late in life because he'd gone to college, thought he was going to be a lawyer, then decided he didn't want to do that. The war came along. He'd been to war. He lived through that. He lost a lot of friends that he made.

and I think that it made him appreciate just that slower lifestyle and also just not having to be dependent on somebody to where he was not flashy. And I can remember like farmers like going to the Farm Progress show that was in Washington, Iowa in like 77, 78 maybe.

I got to know, we got it right there. Is it, I don't know, it doesn't matter. but I would see these farmers that, you know, would buy a new tractor or whatever. And that really interested me, but my dad, I can remember asking him about something like that or saying, we should get, you know, one of those. And he was always very like, he was always like, you know, just spending money to spend money doesn't, you know, it doesn't do anything for you. So it was kind of a weird, it was kind of a weird deal because,

I knew that I wanted You know, I was like a raccoon I liked shiny stuff And my dad was always like He only bought what made sense And if it didn't make sense He didn't buy it So weird balance

Yeah So that's my experience with money Yeah That was where you're at 97 we were basically Like I said 97 Trish and I were just standing on the abyss

And we didn't realize it We didn't know But you thought yeah The world by the time the tail. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We thought, you know, we thought anything was possible. We were going to, we were going to make a bunch of money and we were going to raise a family just like my parents did. Yeah. Well, so I guess for me, I'm 26 now, but I'll talk about kind of the steps of my, where I'm at with money today, but also my mindset on it. And I would start back either when I was

16 or 17, you took me to my first financial advisor, and I'm not going to name the branch, but you took me there because you, as you got older, you were invested in the market through a financial advisor, and you took me there,

and we opened up, I believe it was my Roth IRA, and we started invested in mutual funds through that financial advisor and got me started early. And that kind of led me down the path of just the idea of building wealth, and making your money work for you and all of that,

that kind of started the plan of the seed in my mind to kind of go down this road. And I always like the idea of building and progress. And when I grew up, I was always focused on, my number one thing was sports. I love progressing in sports. I love going to the weight room. I love throwing the ball around.

I loved running routes. I loved going to the track. I loved improving in athletics. Like that became the game while you were growing up as athletics and improving in there. But when I got closer to graduating in high school, you realized that that's probably not going to be the future for me. I'm not going to go into athletics for the next level.

So like, I had this just realization of like, well, what's my game now? Yeah. Like I asked myself that question of like, what do I play now? What do I do? What is the game that I'm going to, play and progressing from here.

And that's really what started me down the road of like getting interested in business and investing and real estate and entrepreneurship. And luckily and fortunately for me, the internet was this new age of information that you could go find and research and go learn about all of these things. And so when I kind of made that realization that I need to start thinking about this stuff, like I'm going to be in the real world soon, I want to learn about this stuff. I kind of went down a path of just wanting to learn and soak that stuff up. And so when I was making the decision on whether I was going to go into the farming operation

or out of high school or go to college, I was learning all of this stuff. and I was also just started investing in the stock market, probably a year before or two years before, because dad had taken me there. So all of this stuff was kind of starting. All this was kind of started in my head and all this research I started to kind of like dive into it deeper and deeper.

And another thing that made me make the decision that I ultimately made, which was to go right in the farming operation at 18 years old, was my brother is five years older than me. And he came back to our hometown and became a realtor. Well, he also wanted to start investing real estate. So he gave me the opportunity to become a partner with him on a real estate building that was in our town, a commercial building that there was a commercial unit on the bottom

and there was a apartment above it. And we had the opportunity to buy it. And he gave me the opportunity to invest our real estate with him. And so that was also kind of like, all right, well, there's a new, this is a new thing. I know that I got to make my money work for me because I'm learning all this stuff. This is another way for me to diversify.

build wealth, so let's do it. And that was really another way to just kind of say, you know what? I don't think college is for me. I'm going to go in and I'm going to start chorn these buildings because dad had built three hog buildings and there was a place for me here to do something and make a little bit of money. And so bought real estate with my brother, invested in the stock market at either 16 or 17, started chorn pigs. And I went down the rabbit hole even more when I was 19, started the YouTube channel. This will be do farm YouTube channel. And so started documenting what we did on our family farming operation every week. And it was because I just needed to do more. I felt like chorn pigs wasn't enough.

Like I just wasn't contributing enough. And I wanted to find a way to somehow bring value to the operation. And so had this crazy idea of social media. You guys have all heard it a million times, started in 2019. And we haven't stopped since, right? We are on this train and doing social media. The podcast didn't come along until 2021, but the farm channel was first. This will do farm. So then the next big thing was I was able to build my first hog building in 2020. And that was a really good decision. You know, that was a good decision in hindsight.

It's, I still, I paid $750,000 for that building. I got a 15-year note on it, which if you're a hog guy, that's, that's a long note. Yeah, it is. Because these barns take a lot of maintenance, especially when they get to be that age, but hopefully I can start paying that thing off faster than 15 years. That's my goal anyways. But I'm glad I built it.

Yeah, and we've talked about this, but, you know, that building, I'm glad that you feel like that was a good thing because that was as much a selfish move on dad's part as it was a good move on your. your part because I really lobbied for that because in my mind I

thought well one of these days Sawyer's going to wake up and go what the heck am I stuck in this? What am I stuck doing this for and he's going to want to quit? And I'm like well if he gets a mortgage on a hog building he ain't leaving

he's going to stick and then I thought well if it really goes bad and he just absolutely wants out I'll just buy him out and I'll have have one more hog billy. But I honestly thought, well, this will be a good way to where he feels like he has skin in the game. And so it was a win-win for both of us. Yeah. But how much do you think, when you look back, how much of a catalyst do you think it was when Clay came? Did you see that coming when Clay came to you and asked you if you wanted to invest? Like, had you thought about

real estate until he... I can't remember. I mean, I think real estate at that time, that was when Grant Cardone was really big and all, you know, real estate was the whole real estate's a passive investment. That kind of language and shit was being talked about on the internet and social media at that time. So I knew real estate. I knew of it. But I think when he said he was going to make the decision to become a real estate agent and then he was looking to invest, then I started to kind of dive deeper into it. And then I was like, okay, yeah, let's, yeah, I'd love to, let's go. Because I just hadn't heard enough people talk about how great real estate can be. So, yeah, I think it was huge.

I think that was a huge, huge for me to kind of get into that with Clay and him kind of, I'm fortunate that he allowed me the opportunity to get into it with him. You know, that was amazing for my development and also just, I think something that's really important as a young person, if you're getting started, is what I think was beneficial to, for me, was one, the internet seeing what was possible. but two, having an idea, like going out and swinging your bat and getting some hits and shit happening

and going the right way and like, you start to gain this confidence of like, it's the whole Steve Jobs video that I talk about. When you realize in life that you can poke your finger into life

and something can pop out on the other side of it, once you open Pandora's box and you have that realization that your world around you, the things that are in it were made by people that are no smarter than you and that you can poke your whole finger into life and you can build your own things that help people and create value in the world. I got that pretty

early. Yeah, you did. I saw that with you and I saw you working your ass off to get back to the farm, build those barns, and then to get into real estate and have a real estate property and a cash flows and to then listen to all these people on the internet that were doing these things and had this belief and they were showing that things were possible and they came from circumstances that they should have never made it but they made it anyway you started to see like man if these people can do it why can't i do it and then you do that little first hit with the real estate and you're like okay like you can do this shit and then when i did the social media and at first you know we didn't get any traction but then we started i started building that barn and then we started to get some real

traction on the channel and it was like, holy shit, like had an idea, executed it, stayed consistent with it. It's working now. Your confidence of like, man, I'm just going to keep poking my finger into life. Like, this is the way I want to keep going. And so when you get that and you get that confidence, it just steam rolls. And you start thinking bigger and you start thinking, man, I can do more. and I think that this is something that I want to like really pursue and be in the game of. And so there's a quote

that Mark Cuban said that really stuck with me and I still live by it to this day and I believe it. He said business is the ultimate sport to play because it's 365 days a year. You don't know who your competition is and you can play the game as long as you want.

And that really stuck with me, especially coming from, from, you know, grew up, wanted to play sports, all that stuff, made the jump from 18 into, made the jump from kind of sports. That's not a reality for me to kind of business. And when I heard that, it really resonated with me because I, for me, I love the game of business. I love the game of building wealth.

I don't really care about the cars. I don't give a shit about the house. I don't care. not like something that I want materially that if I have it, my life's complete. Right. I don't have that. Is there some things that I say that I would love to have that be nice to haves? Yeah. But do I think that they're going to make my life? No. Yeah. What I love is just the pursuit of progress. Like I don't know what it is, but I'm addicted to that. Like I just love that. And business and,

and farming and entrepreneurship and being a creative and being able to poke your finger into life, you get to make things and create things and make things better and progress things. And that, that's what I love to do. Like I've realized that that is just what I love to do is create value and make progress. You know, what's crazy about our two journeys,

is we are, uh, we are 24 years apart. Would that be right? Because you're 26. Where is it? Yeah. So I'm 55. So 24 years between us. And when I think back to me at 26, there was not any of that. Yeah. Because no one had come along. So I saw my brothers. So my oldest brother, he went to the University of Colorado,

got a business degree, and then he went to work for a company, a big computer reseller, and then he and four of his friends, they started their own company. and I was really proud of that of him, you know, and he was like my idea of, oh, you know, this guy, he's successful and he's, you know, he's a businessman.

And then my brother Trent, he went an entirely different direction, and he spent a lot of time doing a lot of different things and I almost felt like he was a little bit, like he was just, searching. He was just trying to figure out, you know, where he fit in. And I knew from the time that I was little that in my mind, all I ever wanted to do was farm like my dad. And so I never had another thought of like what else is out there. I literally just knew that I just wanted to raise picks because that the people that I looked up to, that's what they did. And I think that that time of being your own boss, which is kind of ridiculous now that I look back because literally all we did

was we worked all the time. So it isn't like I was thinking, boy, it sure sucks working for somebody else. I want to be able to do what I want to do. Well, that only works if all you want to do is work because that's all we did was work. But all of that to say, what's interesting, and I think this might be why people think that our relationship is unusual

is because I feel like I kind of had the awakening that you had at the same time that you had. Yeah. I feel like, so part of the reason that I feel like I feel like I'm a little savvy for my age

and the reason isn't anything about me it's because of my kids because when Clay got into real estate and then you got into real estate I got into real estate and when you decided you were going to do social media I got into social media

and when you decided to be awesome to do a podcast I decided to be awesome to do a podcast. And so you and your brother basically have drugged me along to where if, like, I feel like that you and I would not have near as much common interest if I would have like, at some point looked around, say in 98, looked around and said, the hell with this, I'm going to go get my real estate license, or I'm going to go do something completely outside of ag and like gone down the road of entrepreneurship, because then I would be that much further down there. And I don't think that the connection between you and your brother and me would be as strong on the business side as it is now. But it's kind of weird that what

happened really was because of you and what you did, and you partially because of what Clay did, we all kind of just started at the same time. Now then you are very quickly leaving me in the dust and I'm just kind of riding your coattails now because I look at the, I look at some of it, I'm like, all right, you figure that out, let me know. But in 1997, me at 26, I did not have,

it isn't even that I didn't have the options that you have, which I didn't because we didn't have the access to knowledge, I mean, you did, but you really had to seek it out. Like, you would have had to say, you know, I want to know. Back then, you, you living in a city wasn't an advantage because it was about who you knew. Exactly right. You're not going to find Tony Robbins in Iowa. No.

You're not going to find the conferences to go learn the shit or find the mentorship of really, really successful businessmen outside of agriculture. And honestly, not even the city, the country. Like, you might have gotten, like, you had to go to one of those to hear that kind of stuff. And the only place you would have possibly got it was maybe Des Moines, but you might have had to go to Chicago or Kansas City or St. Louis. So, I mean, honestly, back then, you were at a disadvantage. Like, living in the country was a disadvantage, but living in the Midwest was a disadvantage. That's part of the reason why I feel like we lost a lot of population,

because people that realized that wanted opportunity, they felt like they had to go where the opportunities were. Like you and I have talked about, I think there's going to be resurgence in small town living, country living, because now then. The playing fields level. Yeah, there is no advantage. In fact, quality of life is so much better out of that.

And you still can, you can access everything. That wasn't the case. you know, in 1997, that was not the case at all. You were very limited as to what, you better just stay in your lane because that was your options. 100%. Well, I won't go, we won't go much longer on this, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

Real estate with my brother, sock market 1617, started the media business when I was in 2019. Still doing that to this day. Some of you guys know this, some of you don't. But I launched a meat business in 2023 called Farmers. grade. This was the thing that I was like, man, I'm going to launch a business off the back end of our audience. I'm going to own this meat business and I'm going to grow it slowly but surely for the

long run. And this is going to be my, this is going to be a legacy business that we're going to build and it's everybody needs me. This is a need, not a want. Like this is going to be a good long-term play. And it was doing well. But I hit my limit. I had health problems that I had to address. I had relationship problems that I had to address. I was trying to do the media business, farm in the fall with dad, take care of pigs every day, shoot content on the farm and do this podcast.

And my relationships were failing me, my health was failing me. And I had to make a decision. And to start that business, I liquidated my Roth IRA. I liquidated my investments to start that business because I knew that if I didn't risk,

to get the biscuit, I would regret it. I had to start this business and that money that I had in that account, and those, that Roth IRA and then that other, um, account, I wanted to use that to start the business. So I did that. And then shut it down in 2025, shut it down two years later, end of 2025. Or was that right? Yeah.

End of 2025. Yeah. I shut it down. And now I'm all in on the media business. I'm all in on farming. We got this manure separation project we're working on. And I recouped what I put into it. So that was good.

I recouped what I put into it. And I'm investing again. I'm investing in the S&P 500. I'm investing. I'm not using a financial advisor anymore. I actually stopped doing that years ago because you can... You're like the guy at Home Depot. You just said, I know more than you do.

Well, it's not even that. It's just if you do some research, you realize the index funds outperform mutual funds. and you can open your own portfolio on Vanguard or Fidelity or whatever, put your money in index funds. You don't have to pay a financial advisor fees, and most of the time those funds outperform the mutual funds. They recommend to you anyway. And you don't have to manage these index funds. You're not picking stocks.

You put money into it. It grows. Look it up. But you can't put a price on being able to drive in town and go drink somebody else's coffee and sit in there and just bullshit with them for a while. 100% right. So to this day, and when I liquidated that Roth IRA, I think at that time, it was like $50,000 to $60,000 I took out. I liquidated the Roth. I liquidated the other brokerage account, put that into Farmer Grade. And so I went all in on that. And it didn't work.

It didn't work. So here we are today. Got the media business, taking care of pigs, got the barn, still invest in the stock market. And we're hoping that we can keep things along. So that's where I stand on Money Side right now. My mindset is, like I said, love business, love building wealth, love progress. It's not about the shiny shit for me. It's just about the game and loving it. And it's just fun. I love doing it. So that's kind of my mindset. And I will say this, I will say this. I'm not going to sit here and act like that I didn't have some advantages because I absolutely did. Seeing my dad bust his ass,

work his fucking ass off, seeing my grandpa and working his ass off, had huge influences on me. Fortunate enough to have a brother bring me into a real estate investment opportunity. My dad had built 3,2,400 hog buildings that allowed me to have a place here on this farm. If you wouldn't have done that,

there would have never been a place for me on this farm to do something. I would have never been able to build my barn without him. I would have never been had a place on this farm without him. The truck that I drive, my grandpa bought that truck in 2013 because he needed a tax right off because the IRS was going to take a shitload of his money because he just didn't spend any money ever. So he bought a new truck. He never drove it.

And dad always had a company truck. So when I became 16 years old, it was like, who's going to drive this truck? Well, I guess Sawyer's going to drive this truck. So I've had a truck that's been paid for since high school that I've drove. I get to live in the house that I grew up in. I pay rent to my parents because they live and where my grandparents live now. So I live in one of the farmhouses.

I'm very fortunate and I'm blessed to have the upbringing that I had. And I would be, it would be dumb for me to say that that has not played into where I am today at all. So I will say that. But that's not, that's not the whole story.

That's not the whole story. And I think that regardless of that stuff was here or not, I still think I just have, I have the fire to get to get it going. Anyway. Last thing on money, a good resource that I learned for the mindset on money and business that I think every single person should listen to or watch. It's a podcast called How to Get Rich by Naval Raffekant. Oh, yeah.

He did, he does, he's not a show. Right. He did one episode called How to Get Rich by Naval Rafficant. It is probably the most, it's probably the best podcast you could possibly listen to on just like principles on money, principles on wealth, principles on brand,

principles on where the world's moving, how you should conduct yourself, the mindset and the foundational truths of money and building wealth and living a fulfilling life, that podcast episode has it all. And it's about a two, it's about a three hour podcast. Yeah, because it's broke up into little sections.

Sections. How old is that? It's a, I, that's, when, when I, I, so, we listen to that. That's probably the first podcast that I ever listened to. Yeah. And you told me to listen to it. I think you did. Yeah. Yeah.

I told you to. But, uh, the, I'll just say that the quality of that podcast is so good because you could listen to it today and it's as relevant today. as it did when we listened to it. And I'd say that had to have been 17 or 18, probably. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, yeah, it's foundational. It's really foundational. I encourage any of you to listen to him. He's a really, he's an investor. He's been there, done that guy. He's not some bullshit or he's made serious money in his life. But he's a very, a very good speaker, can talk very intelligently, but distill it down to something that you can understand. And it's a foundational

episode, I encourage anybody to listen to it. Everybody should listen to it. Last thing I forgot to mention, money's a big, big subject. The rest of these will go a little quicker on. You know where I'm standing on my financials as a 26 year old, but reality is, the world's changing fast. If you're 26 right now or in your 20s, it's kind of a hard place in America. We find ourselves. It's hard to buy a house. It's hard to buy a car. Groceries are expensive, gas is expensive, the labor market, the job markets change in all the time. AI, new technology is advancing that we've never seen in our lifetime or a human race,

arguably, unless a civilization fell that we didn't know what their technology was. These are, these are, these are scary, there's a lot of opportunity out there, but it's also a lot of scary things happening, you know, and so there's some uncertain things happening, and it's hard to kind of predict what the future might, look like, but I'm just trying to live as cheap as I can, invest as much money as I can. And like I said in the last episode, I think there's a window and it's shrinking on becoming an owner. I don't want to be one of these people that just accepts universal basic income. If that's the world we follow, if that's the way the world evolves where universal basic

income is going to be the thing because everything gets automated, I don't want to be one of these people that that's all I rely on is the government to take care of me or these tech billionaires to take care of me. Piss on that. Right now, you can be, you can risk it and become an owner. And I think that windows is shrinking. So right now is the best time to go own something while you still can because I don't know if you'll be able to in 20 years. Right. You know, I don't know, but I don't want to take that chance. Right. I don't want to take that risk. So now is the time. Now's the time. The power of now.

The power of now. So that is money. That is money. Round two, we're going to get into work. And now you've kind of laid out work a little bit, but I'm not technically talking about, I mean, talk about what you did, but also talk about how work was different on the mindset piece and just like, you know what I'm trying to say. Yeah. So I've said this many times, you know, my relationship or my family, dynamic is almost like there's almost like a generation missing between my father and I because

my father was 52 years old when I was born and he was born in 1919, you know, grew up during the depression, although was very, was very insulated from the depression and the fact that he was a farm kid in Iowa and anytime anybody asked him about it, it's like, yeah, we didn't have any money, but nobody had any money. You know, they grew their own food. They didn't go to the big city and shop. So, I mean, it wasn't as, it wasn't as, it didn't make as great of impression on my dad as what it probably did a lot of people. But anyway, that said, you know, he, he was the, he was the generation that success was directly tied to the amount of work that you were willing to do, the amount of physical labor. you were willing to do, the amount of time that you were willing to spend on whatever made you money.

And that is, and I will say this, my dad came home and started farming in 49, and he always acted like he was running behind. He always was in a hurry. He always was, and I think he felt that. I think he felt that pressure because when he started farming, a lot of people had already bought farms, already had kids, married, all that. He hadn't done any of that. And got married late and had kids late. And so from a very young age, we all were expected to work. And I had a very strong, it was instilled in me. from a very young age that if you wanted whatever,

like whatever you wanted, that was directly related to how hard you wanted to work. And I was a kid, so, you know, part of this is I was the youngest of three boys, and there's a five-year gap between me and my middle brother, and my parents were old, so they retired. So I got away with murder. And not only that, Not literally.

Yeah, not, we, nobody was harmed in, well, I don't think anybody was harmed. That's just an old man metaphor that gets thrown around now. It is. Well, so sometimes you got to lay that out because you don't know who's listening. But the other thing that it's just like a perfect storm was, you know, all my friends, which were kids that were rode my bus with me or were in my class in, you know, elementary school very quickly, I migrated to a group of. of boys that were all the youngest, or second to youngest,

but for only one that was that way, we were all the youngest of family with three or four siblings with parents that were now older, that were tired, that we got away with a lot. And so we had the dirt bikes, and we had the three-wheeler's, and we wanted the muscle cars. and my dad was very, he was a practical guy.

And like me and my brothers, his friend that was the lawyer had a pool in town. And obviously in the summertime, all we ever wanted to do was get our work done as fast as we could and then nag her mom until she would take us to Bob Day's pool so we could go swimming. And my dad was finally like, he'd had enough of that. So like in 70, I want to say like 78. I never forget this. We come over from the hog building and there's a guy with a dump truck,

a trailer, and a backhoe, and he pulls around behind the garage and is unloading this backhoe. And I asked my brother, I'm like, what's going on? They didn't know. Next thing you know, he's digging a hole in our backyard.

My dad put in a pool, which on the one hand, I told you, you know, my dad was pretty, he was pretty frugal. I think he literally looked at it like, well, I'm tired of these boys whining all the time, and I'm not going to have them running off. I'm just going to build a pool so they stay here, and they ain't getting that pool until the work's done. And that's how it was.

You know, it was like, oh, you got every. And, you know, people like, wow, you got a pool. I'm like, yeah, I got a pool. But everything had to be done before you got to be in the pool. And so it reinforced, I think, you know what? It just reinforced that, that if you want, the stuff, you got to put in the time, you got to get the work. And then I got to be, you know, I was probably like 12 years old, maybe 10,

maybe a little younger than that. My first three-wheeler was a Honda 110. And I got it. And then I very quickly got traded that for a 185, and I paid the difference. And then I traded that for a 1986, 1985, Honda 250R, the epitome. That was the machine. God, I wish I had that back.

But anyway, that was all paid for with labor because we got paid. When we got old enough that we started to want things other than what, you know, mom was going to supply us, we worked for it. And my deal with dad was that I got all the runt pigs and I had a pen in the barn,

and I chored them, I feed them, I vaccinated them, I cleaned the pens, and any of them that made it, we put them on the truck, and I got the check for them. Now, I had to do everything else that I was supposed to do too, but so there was like this connection

between work and, I'd say, the better things in life, I guess you'd say. So I was never afraid of work. I wasn't any good at sports, and my dad wasn't much of a, you know, like he didn't encourage that. And I just, I went to school. I wasn't a good

student. There's a guy in Washington that passed away a couple weeks ago and they had the funeral or a week ago and they had the funeral. And he liked to tell the story. He grew up in a little town east of Washington. I think Cotter and he always said that he graduated fourth in his class in grade school, there was only five kids in his class. But I can tell all of you this. I graduated high school and I, I want to say there was a hundred and there was either 132 or 128 kids in that class. And I'll bet you, I don't know what my class rank was, but I would guess that it probably was somewhere around 123, 125. I graduated my senior high school, my grade point average was 1.65. And I honestly shouldn't have graduated because I'm pretty sure

that my chemistry teacher passed me just so that there was no chance that he was going to have to see me again. Because I didn't care. I didn't care about school. I love the social aspect. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary.

Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. I love people and talking and run in my mouth and I love farming. And I love farming. And I I loved raising pigs. And I knew from the time I was in sixth grade that I was going to be a farmer, just like my dad.

And my parents didn't encourage that. My mother encouraged all of us to do something else, go to college, whatever. My oldest brother, I think that he got the brunt of my dad. Because my dad was a hard ass. I mean, he was a military guy. And he expected you to do it the way he wanted done. And, you know, you weren't going to lip off to him. And you weren't going to, you weren't going to pout around,

and you weren't going to get out of doing something just because you didn't want to do it. I mean, he was a hard ass. And my oldest brother, he took it. My middle brother, he didn't take it very well. And my dad and him had a very rough relationship. And he, in high school, he worked off farm because he couldn't work with my dad. And me, I watched that. And I was like, well, neither one of them worked very well.

So when my dad was a hard ass, I was just a dick back to him. And he and I, we were like, we were like oil and water. But it worked. I mean, I think we respected each other. I know I respected him. I hope. I know later in life he respected me. But anyway, I was at a time where physical labor equated business success.

and by the time I was 26, I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't know anything about building a brand. To me, there was no value in that. We were producing a commodity. I had much better production records on my hog business than I had financial records for my. for my business and my personal life. We just didn't spend time doing anything other than working.

There was work and there was play and there was nothing else. Like just a whole different world. And I feel today when I look back like you at 26, you at 26, I wasn't even aware of opportunity outside of, I mean, I just had tunnel vision. I had tunnel vision. I believe that my future was going to be doing the same thing that my dad had done. That's what I believed.

And I didn't know what that looked like, but I figured that, you know, it would all work out. So, yeah. Well, I would say for me, where I am now is it's not about that anymore, as we all know. Working hard, you need to work hard to succeed. There's no doubt about it. But we're in a time now where you also got to work fucking smart. And if you don't have both, working hard is not enough anymore. The game is way too competitive.

It doesn't matter what industry you're in. There are people that are willing to work hard that are also fucking smart. And they will work hard and work smart. So if you can't do both, you need to start, you need to learn to do both. because people are doing both and those are the people that are winning. And maybe it's always been that way, but it wasn't always that way across every industry.

But now with this digital age and information and all of this stuff, anybody can start a business in any industry. Anybody can learn what they need to learn to get into an industry and win in that industry if they work hard and they work smart. And the reality of where we stand today

is like, I don't care if you're a farmer, I don't care if you're a rancher, I don't care if you're a truck driver, I don't care. Well, maybe truck driver's a bad example. If you're going to own a business, there is just, at this point,

I just feel like you have got to come to the grips with the fact that you got to sit your fucking ass down at that computer chair at your desk and work on that computer. You got to know your numbers. You got to know your numbers, but you have got to be on the cutting edge of what's coming and you've got to know what's coming.

like you have got to build systems you have to conduct meetings you got to build processes you got to have soPs you got to you got to know what's coming down the pipe you got to go know what's going on in your industry you you can't just do the trade anymore you have to be in the loop in the know about what's going on and you have to build a team you have to delegate you have to you have to leverage the tools that are available to you and a lot of that is through technology. A lot of that is through the internet, is through social media, is through whatever. And so I, what my work life looks today is I chore my pigs every day. I don't chore all the pigs anymore. I just chore my barn. I am full time into the media business. So I spent a lot of time

at my computer desk, working in the media business, spend time up here, spend time on the farm with dad doing projects, making content on the farm with dad. we got this DVI, that manure separation project we're doing. There's stuff involved with that that I'm working on. And then help farming in the fall. That's what my work life looks like. And I like it. There's a variety there.

But again, I can't stress it enough. I think the simple matter, the simple truth of the matter is, we're just in an age, whether you're a farmer, ranch, or blue collar business owner or whatever, you have to sit down at that computer and work. The work you do inside, the work you do in your office is just as important as the work you do out in the field. And two things, then we'll move on, or at least I just want to put two things in there. One, margin, you don't have margin.

In any business you do, you do not have margin that we had when I was growing up because your costs, one of that this sticks with me so much so i worked for claude griner for 15 years he owned a company called precision structures in wellman i was a and they're still going today and they build hog billings they're a general contractor but their specialty is hog buildings and claude griner started that business and i'll never forget talking to him about when he started selling hog billings and somebody asked something about the numbers or cash for flow, and this would have been in like the early, early 90s when they started building contract finishing barns. He said, he said there was, he didn't have to worry about cash flow.

He's like, the guys that were Farrowin were making so much money that literally all you had to do as a salesman was talk them, sell them on the idea that they should put these pigs in a building to make their labor simpler. Like, you didn't have to talk about, does this cash flow? Because it didn't matter. Because if they built the building, they probably would pay cash for it,

or they'd put it on their operating loan and not even, like, put it on a five-year note because they were making so much money. Most of them didn't even have good records to know how much money they were making. They just had that much money in the bank. He said the margin was so good in the hog business, the few guys that actually kept records,

they were just growing like crazy, and everybody was doing fine. So that tells you, like, those days are never coming back. So one, you don't have the margins, so you have to spend the time in your business. It's too competitive now. Yeah, it's way too competitive.

And then the other thing I'll just tell you is I'm reading a book right now that's called Who, Not How, and it is all about the concept of instead like that successful people in the past it's all like how am I going to get this done how am I going to achieve this task and Sawyer and I can totally attest to this when you when you realize that you can accomplish way way more by putting the right in a position to do something for you that they're really good at that, whether that be the guy

that helps with our newsletter or whether that be Taylor that helps us with just our brand and our financials and all that. Who instead of how? That, like, that's a powerful, powerful thing. Because traditionally, people think they've got to do everything themselves to save as much money as they can. But the truth is, you can grow your business so much more when you realize that there's power in the who that you bring in to help you versus how am I going to do this myself. So anyway, who instead of how, I have written down here, if you want changes to happen, change has to happen inside so change happens outside. And I relate that, equate that to, like, if I want this farm to change, the work that I do in my office,

office, what happens in that office and the things that I do, the people that I bring on, the delegation that happens, the meetings that happen, the SOPs that are created, the systems that are created, the things that are thought out at the boardroom, the things that are thought out at the meetings, all of that, all of that change that's discussed and implemented in the inside, inside that office, is directly going to affect the outside, which is the ground, which is the hog buildings, which is the cattle, which is the growth of the farm. All of that, all of that goes together. All of that goes together.

So work looks different today, but I like it. I enjoy it. I enjoy, and it's just the reality of where we are. Like that's just, you have to play in the game that everybody's playing in. You got to know what field you're playing. You got to know what game you're playing. we know what game that that's just how it is like that's just how if you're going to play in the game of business you got to work hard and work smart and that's where it is today and for me

retirement retirement i don't think i'll ever do but if there's if there is a retirement in my future it's just going to be becoming just being a full-time farmer like that's that's what it's going to be if i can eventually get rid of all the office shit and offload that to somebody else or pass it on to my kid, and then I can actually just go do the shit. I think that's what all farmers really want at the end of the day is to go, like, actually do the work. Well, I guess I'm screwed then.

Why? Because I'll never get you. You want to get to do what I want to do. So I'm not going to do what you want to do. You're getting there. Oh, okay. All right. You're getting there.

Slowly, but surely. I mean, I don't know. I'll probably stay in the office more. Who knows? That's just something I say. That's what I'll say. Yeah. But,

Next round is risk. And not like the game you played when you're a kid. Not the game that we go. We're not the game you play when you're a kid. Okay, well, once again, ignorance is bliss because 26-year-old me had just learned a little bit about risk going through the early 90s,

but there was a rude awakening coming. So I was, was like all my eggs were in one basket. And my whole livelihood was based on the idea that I was just going to keep doing what my dad did. And Tricia, she would tell you that when she was thinking about a mate, she didn't want, she wasn't looking for somebody with blonde hair. She didn't want somebody shorter than her. And she definitely didn't want to marry a farmer. And so I did a great upsell on her, and she got all those things.

But she had no idea what she was getting herself into. So the amount of risk that she took on with her faith in the man she married was pretty impressive. And we were going to just go. I mean, we were just going to go. and the goal was, I really thought that we were headed to 600 sows. I always thought that if we could get to the point that we could afford to build one big gestation,

that we would consolidate everything and we would end up with 600 sows because to me that just looked like the most efficient way to go. And like I said, in the end, risk, we risked at all and we lost it all because ultimately we got out of farrowing. Ultimately, I sold the farm that I bought at a loss. I ended up going from being my own boss and farming with my dad to farming when the sun wasn't shining and on the weekends and worked for a construction company and nearly lost my

marriage and that was, I mean, 26, that's basically from 1998 to 2001, probably the hardest time in my whole life. So 1997 things were looking pretty good, and we had no idea what was coming. But a lot of risk. A lot of risk. Yeah, and then you had me in 2000. So he had Clay, so 1998 to 2001, Clay was how old he was, I was born 2000. Yeah, 98.

So he had another kid, too. 1980, he was three. And I say that somewhere else in here, I think we're talking about relationships. Yeah, I'll just leave that until we're talking about relationships. But yeah, you want to talk about risk. I mean, it was all, there was no walking away. You know, I had personal guarantee signed. My dad had personal guarantees.

signed on what we were doing and, yeah, a lot of risk. But there was some good that came out of that. I mean, there was good that came out of that experience. And like, well, I became a man. Yeah. So, you know, somebody learned. You learned a lot. Oh, yeah. So somebody said that, you know, what makes you a man? What makes you a man is it's not getting married. It's not having kids. It's not. And it's not. of these things. It's when you get to the point where you have the realization that if anything happens, nobody's coming to save you. It's all on you. That's when you realize what it is to be a man. And up until then, I don't think that I had that. I think that I always felt like

subconsciously, I just, I probably just thought that, you know, I was farming with my dad and nothing bad was going to happen because, you know, they were the backstop. I mean, I didn't look at it that way, but I think I subconsciously, I think I just, I just thought, well, this is what, this is what my mom and dad did. This is what I'm going to do, and it's all going to work out. It worked out for them. It's going to work out for me. I just, rationalized it. And then when you literally don't know

when you literally don't know whether you're going to be whether you're going to have a house to live in or how the hell you're going to get enough money to buy groceries or you drop your health insurance because you can't pay the premium on it,

you yeah, I mean that that's a tough that's a tough spot. And what it taught me, I mean, it made me super risk adverse. Probably one of the questions I get asked a lot is,

you know, why is there such a big gap between, between when I quit farrowing until I built those hog billings? I didn't build my first hog billing until 2010. So from 1998 till 2010, it's like, well, what were you doing? well, I was working for somebody else and I was making damn good money and I didn't have any risk.

I mean, really, I had the amount of risk of, you know, the hog business could go to hell and we didn't sell any buildings and I could end up not having a job. But there was so much service work to do before I became a salesman, I didn't even worry about that. When I got that job after everything I'd been through, I remember telling my wife, I said, I can do this job as long as I can, as long as I can, as, long as I can walk and drive and chew gum because there's so much work out there that's going to need to be done that I got it dicked. But, you know, that bridge between 1998 and 2001, and I was working that whole time. I ended up going to work for a local contractor after we lost our ass and sold all the hogs and, you know, converted everything to finish in. We were custom finishing some pigs. And and then, you know, through the 2000s,

the hog buildings here were empty pretty much most of the time. I mean, we had, there were some times in there where we custom finish some pigs, but the buildings were getting outdated and they were too small and all that. So all my income was coming from doing construction. And, yeah, I never wanted to be, I never wanted to be in a position

that I just didn't have a, options. And that's how I felt 98. I remember feeling 98 because hogs were 15 cents. So what are you going to do? Yeah. Your cost of production is about 38. I mean, you're

screwed. And there isn't anything you can do about it. And I mean, you weren't the only one. I mean, it was it hit ever, it hit hit the whole. Yeah. And I'm not going to get on a soapbox about that, but I get so freaking tired about these people. It's funny how the further you get down history,

there's these people out there that they want to play this narrative that the integrators, the people you have today that own all the sows that have custom finishing, that those guys ruined the hog business. Those guys did not ruin the hog business. Every single one of us that were raising pigs in the 90s ruined the hog business. And you can say, I didn't. No, you did. we all, every one of us were doubling up.

Every one of us were adding more sows because we were making money. And we were adding more sows, building, building, building, buying into sally units, forming sally units. We were doing that. And if it wasn't for the,

if it wasn't for the guys that kept going and did contract finishing, you take like Washington County, Iowa, if that wasn't a thing, there wouldn't be anything. anything here. It'd be destitute. It'd be like some of these towns in western Iowa and other places that are just, there's nothing there. And their contract finish and saved so, I mean, it saved us. It saved so many people. And that all gets, you know, that all gets said, those guys get painted in a

really shitty light. They just were, they were just able to navigate through it and find the financing to keep going. And when the dust settled, there was enough business left that they were able to get, they were able to go. Yeah. And anyway. So yeah. Yeah. So

for me, risk. I mean, I hope that paints the picture of like, I wasn't born when dad went through the hardest point of his life, but I heard about it. He would talk about it openly.

I saw those, I saw my grandpa, World War II veteran, had to go fight as a fighter pilot in World War II. Put his, talk about risk. Yeah. He literally got in firefights up in the air against enemy combatants. Talk about risk. You're literally, he's literally risking his life. Okay, so that, and he survives that, makes it through, works as a farmer the rest of his life,

and that's how I know my grandpa. farming is being a business owner is risky in itself. Farming's risky in itself. Having that as an example, having you as an example of you did take a risk, it didn't go the way you wanted it, but you got back off, dusted yourself off, then came back, built 3, 2,400 hog barns, made it possible for the next generation to get started, and I say next generation, I mean me, to have a place here. So you fought and crawled and found your way back.

So seeing that, it was like firsthand, shit might not go the way you want it, but at the end of the day, you can find, if there's a well, there's a way. If there's a will, there's a way. And so those are my two, like, examples in my own family that I had grew up and observed and watched and listen to stories and all that.

But then, like I said, I was moving through this as I started getting my teenage years and getting into young adult, being a young adult, like I started really watching and listening to these successful people and these successful stories and these people that were real operators. And I would listen to how I built this podcast.

I've eight founder stories up. I love that shit. And so, I mean, every single one of those guys put their nuts on the line. Or women. Put it all on the line to start something that they have an idea on and they're passionate about

and they think is going to work. They go all in. on it. Sometimes they've had failed business ventures before the one that hit. But every single person will tell you that it's successful. You have to risk it. Like you have, there has to be some sort of risk that you take if you want to have some level of success. Like there is no success without risk. There is no success without risk. And we talked about this on one of our later episodes, but what did we say? You can choose the risk of being. You can choose the risk of being. a consumer your whole life and being average in America, which is what is average,

divorced, fat, not financially stable, unhealthy, unhealthy, you're going to die, you're going to have a short life. Like, you can either choose that risk or you can take the risk of betting on yourself and saying, I'm going to make something to myself. I'm going to start that side hustle. I'm going to get myself in shape. I'm going to invest in the stock market. I'm going to buy a piece of real estate. I'm going to work on my business on the side while I have my 9 to 5, but eventually I'm going to go all in on this thing. Like, choose your risk because that to me, like, I think there has to be some level of risk that you take to get to where you want to go. Oh, absolutely. And for me, I mean, here's my receipts.

Took out a loan to get that, took out a loan to buy real estate with my brother, right? put money down, took out a loan to get that rental property. Cashed in my entire, put money in the stock market. That's a risk. You can look at it or not look at it, but it is somewhat a risk. Took out that loan to buy that real estate. Cashed out my Roth IRA and all my investments to go all in into the business that I knew that if I didn't start, I would regret it. It didn't work out. I'm in debt on the hog barn.

Like I said, $750,000, $15-year note. that's that's that's that's risk and taking a risk by starting a media business taking a risk by just starting a business taking a risk by just farming i mean those are risks within their self but it's like at the end of the day if you want anything meaningful if you want to control your own destiny if you want to have a business if you want to work for yourself if you want to do that you have to take risk and it is a risk to do nothing. Yeah. I mean, that's what you got to understand.

It's like people say, you know, they don't want to take a risk. Well, you taking the safe, what you think is the safe path of I spend the money, I go borrow the money to go to college to learn this, get this degree and whatever, you are running the risk that you're not going to find a job or you're not going to find a job that pays enough. money that you can live on and actually pay that student loan back. But even, let's just not even say that you did that. Let's just say that you were able to find a job. You are, you are putting your future in the hands of whoever owns the company you work for that they're not going to, they're not going to go down in flames and you're going to be unemployed. So depending,

like, betting on yourself is a risk. However, betting on somebody else, that's a risk. Everything in life is a risk. Yeah. And so you just have to weigh out. And that's something at me at 26, 97, I, you know, I, I was so naive and I saw people that were, that had jobs doing this or that. And I thought, man, you know, it'd be nice to just not have to worry about any of that. Yeah.

And I didn't realize there's a lot of risk there no matter what you're doing. I think for me where I'm at is choose your rest. There's risks on both sides. I'd rather have a meaningful life, one that I am proud of, one that I don't regret because I took a swing. I swung the bat versus never swinging the bat.

I would rather swing the bat, in my opinion. That's just me. But by swinging that back, you got to be strategic and not lose your nut if you can manage to do that. But regardless of what risk you take, you're going to learn a fuckload. You're going to learn,

no matter what. So I say take the risk because it'll make you more of a man. It'll teach you things you never would have learned otherwise. Being in the arena is a lot better than sitting in the stands and never taking a risk your whole entire life. And I would just say this. Where I'm at is 26-year-old on risk, like I said, I want to be strategic and not lose my nut,

but I still feel young in this game of life and in this game of business. I'm going to swing and swing. I'm going to keep swinging because, like I said, I feel like the runways long. And if you're in your 20s, you got a long ways to go. You got a long ways to go. Shit, the life expectancy, if society's still around, we can live to be 100 years old.

Yeah, I was going to wait to say this in relationships, but I think it fits better here on risk. Everything that I've gone through. So as we, and when we get to relationships, I'll tell you how bad it can be, because it can be really bad, because my wife and I, that was tough. But when I look back, and I've said this before, the greatest thing that happened to me was the worst thing that happened to me, because going through 98 and up to 2000, me meeting the people that I met, because of what I went through changed my whole life. And I'd love to get Claude Griner on this podcast. So I don't think he'll do it, but he should do it because I went to work for a general contractor

building hog buildings. And what I got out of it, what I got out of it was a business degree. Like I learned, I should have paid him. Thank goodness he paid me, but I should have paid him for what I learned. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, it's Jean-Jacqueshaw on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about.

Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ. Out of that relationship. And when I left there, I went to work for Dave Eichelberger. I went to work for Eichelberger Farms. And what I got out of that is greater than what they paid me. Now, apparently they thought they were paying me a little too much because they said I could keep coming around, but they were only going to pay me to Friday.

So I had to retire. But, you know, Claude, one thing he said a lot was, you can do a lot of things wrong in life. But if you find one thing that's right, that one thing can make up for everything that didn't work. And that's true, and that's risk. And all of that struggling, all of the pain, and everything I went through,

I wouldn't be here now. My kids would not be the people that they are because I would have never been able to show them, teach them, give them the experience that shaped who they are, and all that came from a lot of pain and a lot of mistakes that I made, you know, starting in my 20s. And so risk is just so, it's, it's, it just depends on where you are in time. Like, if you're on the front end, you're looking at it, that's like a big risk. When you're in it, it feels overwhelming. If it goes wrong. It feels like a weight tied your ankle that somebody threw you into the ocean, but you get on

the other side of it and you look back and you're like, man, that was worth it. So, yeah, I mean, you just got to do it. And that you're so, I don't care if you're my age. I would say, I don't know this for sure, but I was trying to do the math the other day. I mean, I would say two of the guys that I worked for, they were their most successful in their life. late 50s into their 60s. Like, that's when they really, that's when it all, when everything they did came together and it was just running like a freight train. I mean, they made, they made freaking bank from their late 50s into their 60s.

I mean, they just, that's when it all just hit. So I don't care what age you are. The world's your oyster if you can just find the thing that works. Yeah. All right. All right. Let's move on to relationships. Okay. So what I put down here was that in 1997 was the edge of the abyss, and we didn't know it.

And a year later, the hog market collapsed, and we went through 98. And the only reason that I didn't go, the only reason that I didn't get sold out was because I banked at Hills Bank and Hills. Iowa and the problems that Tim Smith had, Tim Smith was my banker, the problems that he had with some of his other growers were so much bigger than the ones he had with me that I think he just kind of let me operate, you know, because it was like, oh, can you pay the interest on this? And we ran. And it wasn't really until like 2000. 99 or 2000 is when we actually like sold everything out. And that was when Trish and I, we rented a little tiny house in Washington, and we bought the house that Sawyer lives in now off my dad for a dollar and overpaid for it and started

redoing that and ended up moving back here. And 29 is when I went to work doing construction. And then 2001 is when summer 2001, I got a phone call. We were putting a roof on a hog building down by Whalen, and that was the first time that I'd ever heard of a guy. Well, that's not true. I knew who Claude Griner was, but I'd never talked to him. And that's when I went to work for PSI. And that's when things changed.

That's when my life changed a lot, financially. That was the step that changed everything. But from 98 to 2001, summer 2001, It was bad. And I'll tell you how it was bad. So as the market started to collapse, the end of 97, the money started getting tight, the bill started piling up. And my wife, who I thought needed to be, needed to be, you know, I had always been the, a breadmaker and I'd always been the man and I had always taken care of her and I liked taking care of her and I liked giving her, you know, making her life better and giving her what she needed and all that. And it got to be pretty apparent that our life was going to change and I was not,

well, basically I didn't tell her what was going on. I kept as much of the financial problems away from her for as long as I could and thought that you know pull up my bootstraps and we were going to figure this out and it was going to get better and we would extend this and pay the interest

on this and you know and it didn't it went on and when it finally came to a head I very distinctly remember I want to say that Sawyer was born. I want to say that it was the summer of 2000,

and I can remember sitting on the carpet in the dining room of our house up where we used to live, where the sow were, and there was a big picture window that faced out to the north, and I can remember sitting on the floor, or holding, sitting next to Clay, holding Sawyer, looking at my wife and thinking, if she leaves and,

or thinking she is going to leave and take my boys with her, and I'm not going to see them. I remember that very clearly. Because she was mad. She was mad and she was hurt, and she had every right to be because she didn't know what was going on. I mean, she had an inkling, but until you get served with papers, things change. And that was the year of, you know, I think our power got shut off a couple of times.

I think that, I think we got a judgment served on us for something that, you know, we couldn't pay. It was just one thing after another. There was just, there was no money. And what you don't realize is that when you start down that road with your spouse, that when you aren't truthful with them about one thing, then they don't have any reason to believe you about anything that you tell them. And that is very hard on a relationship. And we were married in 93.

And so we're like seven years into this marriage. and it was, you know, there was not, there wasn't money for anything. And so, and we didn't know what we were going to do. Like, I didn't know what I was going to do. That's the other thing is your whole life, your identity is in that, you know, you're a hog farmer, you're a farmer, and everything was always going to be okay. And not only, not only was there no money, but then you wake up. up and you realize that in 1999, my dad was born in 19, so in 1999, he is 80 years old.

Now, he is very spry for 80 years old, but it hits you that not only are, you know, is your livelihood gone, but if your parents, like if this thing gets out of hand and you piss away anything to do with the farm that your parents had, they'll never recover. There isn't enough time for them to recover. And now then, you are just like, the weight of that was crushing. Yeah, I was going to ask you. Like, just absolutely crushing. and nobody knows what that feels like. I mean, until you're in it, nobody knows what that feels like.

And the only thing I knew to do, once again, the only thing I knew to do was work. And so I had started doing construction, and I worked every hour that Craig Jones would give me something to do. And that was actually a, blessing in disguise because I worked on a five-man crew that built, we built hog billings, and Craig probably built four or five billions a year because we did everything. The only thing we didn't do is the concrete, but we, you know, hell, we poured the feeder pads

and all this. But on top of working on that crew, he did his own service work, and somehow I, you know, basically convinced him that I would do that too. And so he would take me with him to do service and then eventually he started letting me do service work and so that was money on the side and ultimately that's what led me to get the job that I got at PSI. All I can say about relationships in that is that the only reason that we are a whole family today is not anything to do with me. It is everything to do with Trisha because she was the the one that had to be way stronger than I was because I had, I had, I was the frog in the pot of water that, you know, the whole time it kept getting worse and worse and worse, and I knew it.

She just got hit with it. Like, she had an inkling that it was bad, but she had no idea, and she had no idea that we were ultimately going to lose our house, and we were going to have to find some place to live and we were going to rent a little house. You know, we went from a big four square house to a house, uh, in town that we were renting that was literally, uh, I don't know if it was a thousand, I, oh, I bet you it was 600 square feet probably. I don't even know if it was that big. It was, uh, just a tiny little place. And, um, you know, we're so lucky. I mean, so, and my parents, it was so hard on, I, I know it was so hard on. I, I know it was so hard. hard on my dad because, you know, he, he had to look at things and be wondering, like, you know,

am I going to be able to hold this together? Am I going to be able to hold the farm together? Yeah. And, you know, ultimately we did. But I would say that it took years. I would say it took years to heal the relationship. um Trish and I we recovered from that and you know we were fine we really were

but I think that I think the scars of that going through that haunted her for a long longer than it did me um

and yeah I don't know I don't know what else no I mean that's that's fucking real I mean, that's some real shit that you like you can't

like you can't make that stuff is priceless because that is part of your story that is part of the journey and like that that's wisdom. That's how you gain wisdom. That's how you gain knowledge and that's strength. I was going to ask you

because grandpa was a like you said a military man so when this shit's happening and you know it's happening and you're just optimistic and you're going to work through it and you aren't telling mom that's got to feel you can't probably go to grandpa and talk about it can you or did you well did you have could you go talk to him about it yeah or was that just like that feeling of sinking not knowing what you're going to do and you're sinking but you're trying to keep it all together and you just feel like there's nowhere to go there's nobody to go to talk

it. Right. No, there wasn't. And the thing about, the thing you got to understand about my, my, me and my dad's relationship was that it's not like your relationship.

It's not like our relationship. Um, because the, the age gap between us was so great that he just, and his, um, I don't know, best way I can explain it is just,

His level of emotional trauma from being through the war was that he didn't worry about shit like that. Like, he literally just didn't have a compartment for real empathy, I don't think. And it's not that he didn't care. And it's not that he didn't love me and he didn't love, you know, Tricia and you boys and all that. He just couldn't really process that. And his answer, you know, his deal was that, you know, just keep going. Like, you know, if you're going through hell, just keep going. Well, my dad, that was his thing, was, you know, well, what are you going to, like, I can remember as a kid coming home from school or whatever.

whatever adversity happened and if I started bawled about it, my mother was the comforter, but my dad, I remember, I remember, I remember, well, I remember this, but I don't know exactly what happened. But anyway, you know, I just, I broke down and I was, I was just, I wouldn't say I was weeping, but I was definitely, crying and he came into the workroom

and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said he's like, well what are you going to do about it? I looked up at him and I said there ain't a fucking thing I can do about it. He goes, nope, probably not. Better just get back to work. He turned around and walked out.

That was it. So no, I felt completely alone. I felt completely alone. The other thing was, this was at a time in my life where, um, so my group of friends, you know, when you grow up in a little,

a small town, you have these friends, and you go through, like we all graduated high school. Uh, some of us went to college. Some of us didn't. Came back.

Most everybody came back to Washington, which is unusual. Um, we all got married about the same time. We all started having kids about the same time. But though your friends start, you know, they all have.

their jobs and what they end up doing and it's totally different. And those relationships suffer because when everything started going to hell in a hand basket, one, you don't go out. Like, you don't go out. And the last thing you want to do is go hang around people and go drinking at the bars because we did plenty of that. I mean, we had building babysitters with our our parents. And so Trish and I, we had a group of friends that we used to go out every weekend. And, you know, that all stops. You're feeling isolated. And then all the rumors start because people start hearing about, you know, what's going on and that you're flat fucking broke. And you just, yeah, you feel incredibly isolated. But I felt isolated from my parents too because, one, I felt

like I failed him. Because I was the one. You know, I was the one. If it wasn't for me staying home, my brother's both left. If it wasn't for me staying home, the farm would have gotten rented out a long time ago. And my parents would have lived there

however long they could have, and then they would have gone to a home. But, you know, I was the one that was carrying it on, and then this all happens. And it goes from you're carrying this on to, you don't even know whether it's going to be able to, like, you may be the, demise the whole damn thing.

You may be the generation that fucks it up. And so it was just, it was terrible. It was the hard, by far, the hardest thing ever had to go through. The only, the only upside of that was what you didn't have any choice,

but to keep going. I mean, it's not like you can quit. Yeah. So you just had to keep going. And finally, you know, it worked the stuff out. But, you know, all that to say,

that was grace. I mean, pure grace. what I put what I put Trisha through you boys were young enough you didn't understand what was going on

which was good but what I put her through if she would have left me there's no way I could have been pissed about it because to have to deal with that I yeah

it was bad but well I will say we didn't have any idea and I will say that to anybody like your kids don't know because you talk about that house. I mean, at least for me, I didn't know.

Yeah. I didn't know. I thought we were just in this house and we were watching cartoons on Saturdays and you'd bring us Krispy Cream Donuts and life was fucking good. Yeah, and like your brother, he loved it. Yeah.

Because when he was at the age where he started riding a bike and we lived on a gravel road and then we moved to town and we were half a block from the elementary school. Yeah. And he could go right around the block

and there were kids, there were kids that lived around there, they were about his age. He thought it was great. Yeah, your kids really don't know. Because, like, I thought it was great. You don't know. So I had no idea, and I didn't know until I got older that that was all going on. But, yeah.

Oh, I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. That takes some balls to share. I think anybody listening can respect the fuck out of that. It is what it is. I mean, I respect the fuck out of it. So, and we are where we are now. So, yeah.

It's amazing. It's a lot easier when you can look back. I mean, that's the thing. is if I would have ended up in prison or ended up, you know, just if I could have started drinking and become a degenerate fuck, obviously we wouldn't be here and I wouldn't reminisce about it. Yeah, 100%.

It would have been easy to fucking... It was really the defining moment of my life as far as whether or not I was going to quit or whether I was going to keep going. Keep going. Yep. I'm glad you kept going. Well, for me, relationships where I'm at where I stand.

I think all of this shit of legacy and the farm and passing it on and money and building wealth is all great, but if you lose the people that matter most to you, it wasn't worth it. There's so many stories of successful men and women that they get everything they wanted out of life, but they have no one to share it with,

and they lose it all. Or they don't lose it all. They have all the money. They have all the shit. They have all the stuff. But they don't have the family. They don't have the people that matter most to them around. And that is not what I want.

I love my circle small. The friends that I have, I would consider family. My family is my family. I love them. I care about them. I don't want to lose them. I don't want to sacrifice my love for them for something else. And I want those people to be at my wedding.

I want to be at their funeral and I want my friends to be at my funeral. And that's kind of where I stay. but publicly I had a relationship that was on social media. I was with somebody for five years, was going to get married to this person. It didn't work out. I live with this person. And so I've been through, on the relationship side,

I've been through heartbreak. I've been through a relationship, a long-term relationship that didn't work out. And there's a lot that I learned from that. There's a lot that I learned from that. A lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of, but it ultimately grew me and built me into a man and ultimately taught me a lot about myself, a lot about other people, taught me a lot

about relationships. And I've done a lot of reflecting since that point. I think there's three layers to a relationship that I'm going to kind of use this as my razor when I'm trying to, you know, looking for a wife, right? The first layer is all the shit that matters in the beginning. and that is the chemistry, the love that you have, you can sit on the couch with this person to do nothing and have a good time, you can go on dates, you know, the attraction, all of that, all the stuff that matters in the beginning. You can have fun with this person.

You enjoy being around this person. It all matters in the beginning. But then shit gets real. And you've got to have that first layer, but it's the least important of all three. The second layer is a two-parter. This is kind of like an Oreo cookie, a double-stop. stuff Oreo cookie. The second layer where the good stuff is, that's the layer that matters the

most. It's communication and it's alignment. If you cannot sit down with your partner and communicate and talk amongst yourselves like adults and solve the problem that you're facing together rather than fight each other, easier said than done, and neither one of you gets explosive or shuts down, if you can communicate effectively most of the time, you're going to be in a good spot. If you can't, you're not in a good, you're not in a good spot. Second part of that layer is alignment.

If you cannot be a team, if you cannot get aligned on where are we going? What is the vision? Where are we heading to? What are our goals? What are the roles that we play in this relationship? Are you doing your part? Am I doing my part?

And then if you're not aligned, you got to find a way to get back aligned. The only way to do that is sit down at the table and get aligned by communication. And if you can't communicate, you're not going to be aligned. So basically you've got to have a teammate that can play the game together and be a teammate and get aligned

and go towards the same thing and want the same thing. And you also have to be to communicate. If you can't do those things, relationship ain't going to work. Last layer is, can you honestly look at this person and say, this person makes my life better in the big buckets of life? most of the time. They can't make your life better all the time because there's going to be seasons

in your life where one of your parents dies. Obviously, that's a season where the person whose parent died isn't going to show up for you and be their best self and they're not going to probably make your life better. Obviously, that's understanding. If your wife gets pregnant and has a baby, she's going to need some time. She's probably not going to make your life better for a little bit because she's got a, she just got done with childbirth, right? But can you honestly look at this person most of the time and say, my life is drastically better because this person is in it. Does this person make my life better than the big buckets of life? And if that answer is no, that relationship probably ain't going to work.

So, or you're going to be in a miserable relationship that you shouldn't have been in in the first place. So those are my learnings from just being in a relationship for that long and it not going the right way. And so basically, I'm in a point now where finding my wife and how, how, a new perspective on relationships and I am unwilling to get married to somebody that I am not 100% confident has my back that can get a line and be a teammate that can communicate with me effectively that can make my life better and we're trying to go to the same place and we also still have everything in layer one. So been through some shit on that side but ultimately it grew me and made me better. It seems like all the shit that you go through that's hard ends up making

you the person that you end up being. It's for the best at the end of the day. The shit that goes wrong teaches you the most and it's the truth. Whether that's relationships, whether that's your health, whether that's the business, whether that's whatever it is. The shit that goes wrong, that's the shit that teaches you the most. And it's true. All right. Last one. This has been a long podcast. Yeah, we're doing all right. This one will, I mean, this is the most important part of the whole deal. We probably should have started with it, but, uh, faith. Faith. Round five. Faith. Faith. So I think everybody's life, you know, obviously life is a journey and your faith is a journey and people have seasons where, you know, they feel close. Unless you're in a situation where you've never grown up around it, I always, it's always hard for me when I'm talking to people and they want to know like, what is the moment that brought you to a relationship with,

Jesus. And that's hard for me because I grew up in a church. And not only that, you know, there's plain people that grew up going to church. But I've thought about this a lot. And something that's, that's, I think, unusual for me is that I grew up going the United Presbyterian Church in Washington, Iowa. In fact, I still go there. And the church is much different today than it was when I grew up there, which, you know, I can have some pretty, very pointed opinions about whether that's a good thing or not. But anyway, it was such a unique, it was such a unique childhood, I guess, because here's, here's the thing. My, on Saturday nights, Friday night, Saturday night, sometimes Sunday after church,

we would have dinner parties at our house. And one of the people that was there most times was the pastor of the UP church. And his name was Bob Ketlitz. And he had this, you know, just completely white head of hair. And he was sharp. And he commanded a crowd. Like he

He was one of those guys that I think if he was at a session meeting he told you how it was going to be in all 12 members of session just nod of their head because you weren't going to argue with a guy unlike today where everybody's got an opinion.

But he and his wife would be there and these other guys that were elders in our church or they weren't all members of the church but they would be there. And I can just remember sitting in the living room after dinner, and they would have these conversations about what's going on in the world, different places. But then they would also have these conversations about, you know,

really their faith and where they were with the problems they had in their life. and whether that was a lesson that God was trying to teach them. And I don't remember, you know, I don't remember it all because I was young enough that I probably honestly wasn't paying attention, but it was just woven into my, like, into my upbringing. And then on the other side of it, what was interesting is, so my dad was, he was kind of a staple in the fact that whenever there was something going on at the church that needed to be talked about, or it isn't like he didn't just get up and read scripture, though sometimes he did,

but he would speak on behalf of whatever committee or whatever was going on. and my dad was very thorough about his being prepared to speak in public. And when he would step up to the pulpit and speak, he would never look at his notes and he would never pause and he would never say ah or um or any of that. He was so prepared because people didn't know this, but I would see him walking through the hog building just running through whatever he was going to say over and over and over

until he was so prepared that when he got up there on Sunday morning, he never had to look at his notes. And that made an impression on me. But the other thing that made an impression on me was that, while we never really talked about religion as a family, like I've said before, like you didn't talk about money, you didn't talk about religion. And my dad, being a military man, you know, he didn't.

been through some shit and he had had, uh, he had had experiences of losing people and I think his perspective on life was, uh, that changed him forever. But he had this faith, which, and I talk about this all the time, that if you're a farmer, I don't know how you don't have faith because you, every year is you're putting yourself out there, you're putting your livelihood out there that you're going to get a crop or whatever. But he always just had this,

even when I was going through all the things we went through, you know, my dad just always had this persona that you would get through it and it would be okay. And later in life,

much later in life, in his 90s, you know, he died when he was 99. our relationship got a lot better, the older we got, the older we both got. But we had conversations, and he's like, you know, there's no, you know, he said to me once, basically, that there's no way you can go through life and see everything that happens to you and not realize that someone has a hand in it. And so that made an impression on me.

I grew up in the church, fell away from the church. When Trish and I were dating and early married and busy, you know, we didn't attend church. We didn't go anywhere. And then as our kids got older, we went back to church. But we weren't really inspired by the politics of the UP church, of religion in general. And in the United States, I feel like many of your denominations have co-opted. the scripture and put their own spin on it. They bend the Bible to culture, not culture to the Bible.

I believe that's the single biggest problem with religion in the United States. And it's too bad that it is that way. And I get pretty fired up about it. And believe me, people that are on session at the UP church could probably get tired of me when I go off on a tirade about it. But personally, I mean, I wouldn't be. My life would, I don't know what my life would look like if I didn't have faith. I mean, I might not even be here.

I don't know what it would. When I was going through everything I went through, there were a lot of times the only person I could talk to was God through prayer. And I just don't know how you do life without. faith, to be honest. I'm sure there's people out there that do. But I'll just say this, you know, lack of religion or the idea that there is no God or that you don't know, you know, it is whatever or it's, you know, whatever, that's your religion. You know, not believing in, not believing in anything is a religion of itself. And there's just,

I don't know, for me, there's just no way. I don't know. I feel like my faith, all that I've gone through is strengthen my faith, and I believe today more than I ever have, that, you know, the good Lord has a hand in each of us as to the people that come into our lives, the situations that we go through, and it is a journey. And it's sharpening us. You know, the person I am today is a much better person than I was in 1997 when I was 26. 55-year-old torque is a heck of a lot better person than 26-year-old torque. But the truth is 60-year-old torque will be a much better person than 55.

And, you know, hopefully by the time that by the time I'm called home that I will have learned, what I was put here to learn. So I guess that's my bit on faith. Yeah, for me, I would say I have some, I mean, I grew up in Presbyterian Church, went with my parents, went to Bible school, went to Sunday school,

learned about the Bible, knew Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, knew that, believed that, always had that belief, and that was kind of my foundation. As you grow up and you get to middle school, school, that's where you start to become a lukewarm Christian. That's where you bend the rules, you go out, you have fun, you do stupid shit, you're not really, you're sinning, and you're not really thinking about it, and you're, you're kind of getting away from your faith. And that doesn't

happen to everybody, but it happened to me. And I know it probably happened to a lot of my friends and, you know, culture and the way that society moved in my generation with social media and all that stuff. There's so many distractions. There's so many things that are trying to pull you away from the word and pull you away from God. And I, you know, hookline and sinker fell straight into that. It's not that I didn't believe that Jesus. I never got to the point where I was an atheist or anything like that. I just became lukewarm. I was not doing things to feed my relationship with God and I was doing stuff to take me further away from God. And if you do enough of that, you start to feel, you start to feel it. You feel that. And so, um,

that's kind of been my story up until recently in my in my late 20s, mid-20s, I start to really understand and realize how important inputs and outputs truly matter when it comes to your faith. If you're doing stuff to feed your relationship with God and you're avoiding the stuff that takes you away from God, you're going to feel a hell of a lot better. You're going to feel closer. You're going to feel different. and I've done that. Yet sometimes I still let my flesh and my sin take over and pull me away from God,

even though I know that that's not right, right? But that's why, you know, Jesus ours are, he forgives us for our sins despite us sinning as much as we do. And I'm grateful for that, and I'm thankful for his grace on that. but to me, I am trying my best to read scripture. I'm trying my best to actively work on a relationship with God and feed that because it isn't, it's something you have to work on. You can have the belief that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins and,

you know, you can believe that. And yes, that's the ticket to go to heaven. but to actively feel that belief, you have to feed that relationship. And if you're not, and you're doing all this sinful stuff, no wonder you feel numb all the time. I mean,

I think that's the problem with a lot of people is they're trying to fill this hole with all this shit that's inside, this massive hole that's inside of us all, with all this shit, and none of it's going to fill it. None of it's going to fill it besides, you know, your faith. And so,

I'm still navigating that. I am not perfect by any means. I sin every single day. I've sent on this podcast. I have a terrible potty mouth. You all know. Terrible. Terrible potty mouth.

I do not claim to be perfect in any regard, but I am trying to work on it. I am trying to work on that. And I'm trying to feed that relationship. And I'm trying to grow closer to God. But I would say my biggest struggle trying to do that is I have a really hard time. I wouldn't say I'm a control freak,

but I like to will things into action. I like to will stuff to happen and to make shit happen, right? I want to think of something, do it, and get the outcome that I want. And... Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, it's Janjean Kabusha on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving,

markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ. What last year taught me and the shit that I've gone through is you can try and will yourself to whatever outcome that you want and you can work as hard and work as smart as you possibly can. But sometimes what is not for you, what God, if it's not for you and it's not the road God wants you to go down, you're not going to be able to go down it. And it's not going to happen. So I'm trying my hardest to understand that it's not what God has intended for your life isn't just going to show up in your hands. You have to work for it. You have to will yourself, but you can only

will yourself because God's in your corner. And ultimately, what's happening for you and what you're willing yourself to is because of him. And you have to take in his plan for your life into account when it comes to being driven and going after what you want and all that. So I have a hard time with that, but I'm trying to navigate that. And I sometimes idolize probably my work too much. And I try to work on that too. But that's where I stand on my faith. And I believe that it needs to be the foundation. And I'm better man when I'm working on that. I think us as people are a better people when that's at your foundation. We're not where we need to be, but we're not where we were. That's right. We're getting a little better every day. We're getting a little better every day. Do you want to do the advice?

Oh yeah. I would do some advice. Okay. There's one last section before the whiskey minute and then this this bad boy is going to be wrapped up. So let's go relatively quick. I will give you the short version of it because I think that it's pretty, I think I put my thoughts pretty good here. First of all, best thing I tell young people

that I didn't know at the time was... If they're 26 years old, what are you telling them? Don't worry about what other people think because I did. I, you know, we were the, we were of the world for sure. We worried about how we looked,

the clothes we bought, the car we drove, all the stuff we thought we needed. We didn't need any of that because at the end of the day, I can tell you when you when you sell your, when you sell your $800 stereo for $100 a garage sale

because you need to buy groceries, you learn that all that shit's not worth that much. And the other part is listen, especially to your spouse, like really listen and put yourself in their shoes. If you want to have a good relationship, you need to listen more than you speak, and build good habits. You know, I late in life, I mean relatively really got regimented on my day and how I do things and having good habits.

And there's plenty of habits I still have that are bad. but I should have started that much earlier. And the last two things. Old friends will never be new ones. So the ones you have that are good value of them. Because I have two guys that I grew up with, out of all the guys I hung out with that, you know, we started recently doing a men's trip every year.

And those are really my two best, friends and those are old friends and you're never going to get the chance to make old friends. So if you have some, the relationships that are really good value them and be there for those people. And the last thing I'll say is that you cannot put a price on a, you can't put a price, as a man, you can't put a price on a good woman because she will bring out the best in you and she will also be the only one that will stand by your side when shit goes south and uh just know that a wife can handle way more than what you think she can and uh i am living proof of that and uh cherish that relationship and uh pour into it as much as you can that's good for me i'm going to talk to an 18 year old not a 26 year

because I'm 26. I guess if you're 18 or 26, 20, whatever. Whoever you are or whatever age, but talking to my younger self, I think you need to, you need to, if you can learn this, the earlier you learn this, the better off you'll be.

Stack days and take your life seriously. I think a lot of people in this world do not wake up with intention or intensity about what they're going to do and how they're going to get it done. A lot of people in this life, coast, they don't have a plan for the day. They're just flying at the seat at their pants every single day. They don't move with intensity. They don't move with intention.

And if you want to be a doer and you want to get shit done and you want to go somewhere, you need to learn to get your ass up and be intense about it and be intentional about what you want to do and have a plan for your day. And it's really all about stacking days at the end of the day. The most successful people that I know are ridiculously consistent. Consistency stacked over day after day after day after day after day is what's ultimately going to get you to where you want to go. And the quicker that you can learn this to, again, again, talk about what you said,

good habits, build good habits, build a routine, have a plan, move with intention, move with intensity. Take your life seriously. There's guys that play football in high school that are intense as fuck and then they get in the real world and where's that intensity? It's gone. Why aren't you applying that same intensity that you put on the practice field when you were in high school to your life now? I don't understand that. Like, look at this shit as, look at this shit is like this is matters your life matters treat it as such i don't think people treat it like that enough i think there's a lot of people that don't move with a lot of intensity when it comes to their life and i think if you can learn to do that that'll put you ahead of a lot of people and that'll get

you going in the right direction but i will say this take your life seriously but also learn when to not take your life seriously because if all you are is hard-nosed motherfucker all the time. Drive, drive, drive, drive, drive. One, you're going to burn yourself out. And two, nobody likes being around that guy. No. Okay? I'd probably be felling that a little bit

in my early 20s too much. And it's not good for you. Be goofy. Be goofy around the people you can be goofy around. Be a dumb ass around the people you can be a dumb ass around. Have a little bit of fun. Let your guard down a little bit when the time is right. But when it comes to making progress,

and pushing your life forward, take it seriously. But know when you can take your life not so serious, too. So that takes time to figure that out, but that's what I would say. That's pretty good. I think we did pretty good. What whiskey are we drinking? This is Still Austin, Castrink. Still Austin is, they're kind of hitting on all cylinders.

They're out of Texas, and they've brought a lot of good stuff to market. but this is cast strength and it's kind of hot, 118 proof, and this isn't a very old, they have a lot of older stuff out now. I've had this bottle for a while, but anyway, we're going to give it a whirl.

I think I have two other bottles is still Austin, and it's pretty good stuff. I'll tell you right off the get-go. This, you can actually, to me, you can kind of smell a little like, it's almost like cherry.

So I'm getting, getting boozy like that. Yeah, it does. You can actually it smell sweet. It smells sweet. But it's going to be, I bet you she's got a little bit of a hammer to it because it's only about two years old. That's not bad, honestly. I mean, I didn't take a whole pull like you did, but I had a little draft of it. Yeah, it's got a little it's got a little burn on the backside. Back end for sure, yeah. But it's got good spice on it. I mean, you can totally drink it if you let it, uh, probably hitting it again is a little better.

Yeah, it's definitely got some burn on it. I mean, it's not age that long, so. But it's got good, I think, for as long as it has been. For as young as it is, it has good flavor. It does have good flavor, I'll give it that. Yep, for sure. I would mix that and, I mean, I'd throw an ice cube in there at least. Yeah.

Or a little bit of water here. A little water, it'd be fine. How much is it? Oh, it's not, this stuff's not expensive at all. Yeah. I didn't pay for this bottle. Our good friend from Kansas sent it to us. Jay.

And I just kind of forgot about, I never did a whiskey minute with it. So I thought I should. So shout out to Jay. Jay's the man. He sent us a lot of snacks and a lot of whiskey. So he's the man. Fan of the show or friend of the show. 6-5.

I was going to say a 6-8. Okay. Good enough. Above average whiskey. Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. Good price point. Yeah.

All that. I've enjoyed today. I've enjoyed today, too. I wanted to say that I know this episode went long, but I hope that you guys relate, I hope it was good. I hope it was valuable. We got deep,

and I think that's what we want to try to do more of, is keep it real and be, go deep, because that's the shit that needs to be talked about. That's the real stuff that we need more of in this world, not a bunch of the fake stuff. but one thing I wanted to say was we are starting to do some polls on YouTube.

So if you subscribe to Barn Talk or you listen on Spotify or you're signed up to the newsletter, we're going to start polling you guys because we really want to know more about you. We really want to know like what you guys do, what you drive, what you listen to because we want to try our best to make the best content for you. And so we put out our first poll the other day

Man, it was, we want to know you guys better. What do you do? That was the poll. And man, some of the responses were just awesome. Like, you know, we thought this show was a lot of farmers, which there are a fair amount of farmers. But, man, we got loggers, we got railroads, railroaders, we got electricians, we got welders. We got a McDonald's manager in rural America. We got a guy that listens in Antarctica.

There's a bunch of guys that are in the trades that listen to this show. that, you know, haul of shitload of stuff, that finance stuff, that are insurance in the rural sector. Man, it's just, it's really awesome to hear. Bloggers, railroad guys, electricians.

It's, it's awesome that we get to talk to you guys. And I just can't say enough thank you to you for tuning in or watching. And it's so fun to have built this show to speak to you guys. And we just want to serve up the best content that we can possibly serve up to you. So we're going to do more of this. We want to do more polls, learn more about you guys. So get active on those polls. Comment, interact with the polls.

We want to know what you guys think. We want to know what you guys do, what you listen to. Like I said, whatever it is, because we just want to make the best shit we can make for you. We want to make the show the absolute best that we can make it. So thank you to all that voted on those polls. or listen to the show or support us or anyway, because it's, this is super fun. Yep, it's a, we love you guys.

We do love you. We enjoy doing this. This is the highlight of my week, so. And I love you, Dad. I love you too, buddy. I appreciate you sharing all that you share today. That's not easy shit to share. Thanks for dragging me along.

Yeah, well, thanks for, thanks for not giving up. I mean, thanks for not giving up. It's, I'm, what, what would you say? about the 26 year or 20 like 26 year old son what do you think you're right you i say this about i tell anybody that'll listen like people don't realize well first of all i joke about this but it's 100% truth uh i tell my wife all the time if we would have known that they were going to turn out as well as they did we would have had more kids

but she was convinced that you know one of them was going to be like me and uh so she's like, nah, two's enough. But you guys, just the level of maturity that you and your brother got, which I don't honestly know how you got it, but like for the age that you are, like just the comparison, what you know and your access to knowledge and how you've been able to take that and use it compared to me at that same age is amazing.

Is there anything that you look at me and you're like, uh, he's going to find this out or, uh, he, he needs, he's going to learn this one way or another or. I think you know you just can't do it. It's exactly what you said.

You get very impatient when things don't happen at the speed that you want them to happen at. And you're going to, you're going to get to where like that doesn't bother you so much because you just know that that's the work. the way it is, but I know it just drives you crazy. And the other thing is that you really hate it. Like what you want to do, what you want to do when you want to do it is very important,

but what you know you have to do that somebody else is making you do, you fight you, that pisses you off. Boy, you hate having to do. And you just got to like embrace the suck and just be like, yeah, okay, I got to do it. Because sometimes the world just doesn't run on your time. But that's just youth. I mean, you'll get there.

Yeah. And eventually you'll have kids of your own and a wife and you'll be like me to where nothing, nothing revolves around you. They all, you revolve around them. And then that's surrender. And you're just like, all right, well. Yeah.

What it is. Okay. Well, that's good. Yep. Well, I appreciate it. I'm glad that I'm proud to be your son. I'm proud to have you as a co-host. And I'm glad that we got this episode done today.

If you guys got value from it, share it out with the people that you know. Leave your review on Spotify or Apple. So sign up for the newsletter. We love you guys. We appreciate you. And we'll see you back here next week for another episode.