Digital Social Hour - Uncovering the Secrets of Building an Airbnb Empire with Sean Rakidzich | Digital Social Hour #33

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Hey everyone, I've got an exciting episode of our podcast for you today! We were honored to have the incredibly successful Sean Rakidzich join us, a YouTuber and business owner with four companies INCLUDING a massive Airbnb portfolio. Trust me, you won't believe how he's managed to own 155 properties on AirbnbIn this episode, you'll get an inside look at Sean's intriguing tactics for negotiating with landlords, how he stands out on Airbnb, and even his move towards suburban Houston and Austin as he continues to expand. Dive even deeper with Sean on why Airbnb is NOT real estate, but rather a hospitality business, and how the platform is saturated with short-term rentals. But there's more to Sean than his Airbnb success! Get personal with him as he shares his journey of traveling the world, exploring landscape photography, content creation, and writing a book on masculinity, influenced by his experience with microdosing psychedelics.You don't want to miss this riveting conversation, so tune in NOW and remember to stay tuned for a part two coming soon! Get ready to learn, be inspired, and maybe even question the traditional definitions of real estate and hospitality. Listen to the episode now, and don't forget to check out Sean's website and social media for more insights into his world! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

all right welcome back to the digital social hour i'm your host sean kelly along with my co-host wayne lewis what up what up and our guest guest today, Sean Rakijish. How we doing? Doing good. Thanks for having me, guys. How was that pronunciation? You nailed it, actually. First try, good job. All right. So give people a little backstory on what you do.

I am a YouTuber and business owner, so pretty good mix. I own four companies, but the one people seem to know about is my Airbnb portfolio, and then I've been teaching Airbnb for six years on YouTube. Nice. How many homes do you have on Airbnb? 155. Holy. What?

Yeah. You have a couple. 155 homes. 155. I thought I was doing my thing with nine, but shit. Hey, that's the thing. That counts. I mean, 155, right?

Yeah. So do you own all of the properties? Own zero. Sublease? Yep. Well, not technically, but yeah, a lot of people think it's called sub-leasing. Well, it's arbitration, right? Exactly right.

Yeah, it's more appropriate. It's arbitration. So the platforms you use is what? Well, Airbnb is the primary one. And Vrbo has been growing pretty well. I haven't heard of Vrbo. I've heard of Vrbo. You've heard of Vrbo?

So Vrbo is like HomeAway Expedia. So Expedia owns a bunch of sites like HomeAway and stuff. And then HomeAway was like this conglomerate of like 110 websites. A lot of them were like European. A lot of just like little bit in breakfast sites and they pushed them all together. And then when they all merged, Vrbo kind of took over the brand in large. But if you're on Vrbo, you're like on HomeAway and stuff like that too. So you basically put down $0 for those 155 properties?

Mostly, right? So sometimes landlords will want the first month's rent or they'll want a security deposit. You obviously have to come out of pocket for furniture. But before I did Airbnb, I owned a sales organization for 10 or 12 years. So one of the things I like to do is negotiate special terms with landlords, like not giving them rent up front. And a lot of times it works. Really? Yeah. How do you do that? Yeah.

What's the script for that? Well, I can give you elements of it because the sales system would probably be like a 45-minute long conversation kind of thing. Like first, I just call landlords, get them on the phone to try to get them to meet me. How do you get their number though? They're everywhere, right? Four rent signs. Okay. Right? So you could get on Zillow and try to get them to meet me. How do you get their number though? They're everywhere, right? For rent signs. Okay. Right?

So you could get on Zillow and try to find people like trying to rent on Zillow. But landlords that are doing it themselves usually just put a line, like a sign up in the yard or some stuff like that. Okay. If you find like a Zillow listing, sometimes you run into a real estate agent or property manager and you have to make like a more formal presentation to them, kind of like at scale, like, hey, I can rent a bunch of properties from you so let's do big business but a landlord you say hey i found your house online or i saw your yard sign it looks great i'd like to come in and take a look at the property and

since i own a business i'd like to you know meet with you and discuss like how my business operates see if there's a good fit can i bring you coffee tomorrow or friday or something to see your property so getting somebody on the phone to meet them at their property is probably the most important thing. Cause when you pitch arbitrage, they need to trust you. That's probably one of the biggest things. If you're trying to pitch arbitrage on the phone, like, Hey, I like your house, but I'd like to short-term rent it. You're just some stranger on the phone. They'll be like, hell no. Right. But if you meet them, you talk about their family, their dogs, whatever their history as a landlord, and you build rapport for like 20 ish minutes. And then you talk about your business model and after we do what i would call like our story

script for like the fact that we're doing good to do short-term rentals instead uh the our closing line is so what questions you have for me we don't even ask for the sale yet right what questions you have for me and we expect most landlords to really not know the industry well enough so then they'll ask all these questions like okay okay, so who's coming or whatever. 15 minutes in, you can actually see in their body language if they're comfortable or open-minded. And that's really at the point you ask to apply. You say, hey, so what's the next step? You got an application?

Something like that. So what would stop a landlord from simply taking all the information that you're giving them and applying it themselves? I get so much trouble for saying this with some people. Some people hate that I say this, but landlords are lazy. Gotcha. And it's not that landlords are lazy, like bad people, but the nature of short-term rentals or the nature of long-term rentals is passive, right? You buy a property, you get a tenant, you get a monthly check.

You usually get a property manager so you don't have to collect the monthly checks. You say, screw doing maintenance. Somebody else will do that. And landlords are trying to become as passive as possible with all the properties right so when they find out that there's more cash flow and short-term rentals they might go oh that's way cool but when they find out that they have to take a phone call at maybe even 1am right and they have to answer what they consider to be dumb questions twice or three times a week for people checking in they have to manage housekeepers to clean the stuff. They don't want to do all that. They're out.

So it's the work that they don't want to do. What's the best way to furnish these properties if they're not furnished? They're most always going to not be furnished and you kind of want it that way, right? The bar for design is getting higher and higher. Back in the day when I, 2014, the end of 2014 when I got started,

you could literally throw a bed on the floor and people were so like excited to do an Airbnb that they would sleep there, right? But it's not like that anymore. You can't just have like a frat dorm look. It has to be aesthetically friendly. It has to look good. Yeah, it's gotta look powerful. A lot of our walls are dark, actually.

We just went through and painted all of the walls dark. Any property that wasn't performing at scale to a certain like dollar amount, we just redesigned them. And the main thing we did was go with dark walls as a way to contrast. Yeah, because the main photo that you have on Airbnb, you get one photo, right? And there's a bunch of listings showing up in map view. And there are people are just scrolling through 20, 30, 40 listings. And a lot of them are like either outdoors, right?

Where you see like the outside of a log cabin and some water. Or inside you see white walls and nice furniture, but everything's clean and pristineistine but if you've got an interior photo where everything's really dark and moody people like whoa this one looks different and the whole law of contrast people notice what contrasts so they'll click on the one that's different if everything else was blue and you are orange they'll click on you so we went with dark walls for that reason right the best way to do it is honestly do it yourself and take a little time to try to figure out a design style that you think kind of even expresses yourself because you'll put more love into something that's self-expression right if a landlord was renting your furnished property they're probably doing the minimum and doing the minimum won't work on airbnb so you want to give it some love

like plants and chandeliers and like just all sorts of different stuff like texture and color and what cities are you targeting I was in eight I just shut down Philly watch crime crime it was actually really bad so there's a group of like 40 kids that were like in a gang that started breaking into a bunch of air B&B's they stayed in a bunch and then started breaking into him and stealing everything Wow then they killed a 75 year old guy on the street not in my property thank God but they got caught on a security camera like murdering some 75 year old dude wait was that on the street, not in my property, thank God, but they got caught on a security camera murdering some 75-year-old dude. Wait, was that on the news?

Yeah. I've seen that. Yeah, same kids. And then the sergeant of the police force finally got back to us about all of our criminal complaints. Wow. But after they caught the three kids or four kids that were involved,

they went back to not caring. And the whole gang was like 40 people. I heard they also shot a 13-year-old girl who ratted on them. Wow. And it was like six or seven months of just constant break ins and it was nuts they even left their school IDs a lot of them were in high school we even like had their school IDs

and called their school up and we tried everything to stop it but at that point it was like putting my housekeepers in danger and I'm like no we're not gonna deal with gangs I didn't know Philly was like that Philly can go hard, man. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so now we're all Texas. All Texas. Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, Austin. Real estate's cheap out there. Well, yeah, and that does affect the rental market, right? Cheaper real estate means cheaper rents, typically. But a lot of that's circumstantial now, too. Everything's in a bubble, right?

So a lot of things are also expensive, but people will list a price subjectively. So sometimes landlords are on a bind, and even people will list a price subjectively so sometimes landlords are on a bind and even though they list their price too expensive and it's not meeting the market if they go empty for two months like no tenant for two months they get nervous they'll give you discounts they'll give you free rent we'll get eight or twelve weeks of rent for free wow yeah when we when we activate a good place too in houston is like midtown area downtown area those places are so that used to be the spot right midtown downtown

and then east downtown because east downtown houston it's like just as close to georgia brown and all the good stuff yeah but it was where all the property was cheaper yeah back in the day yeah and so that was really good now we're in the suburbs we're doing a lot of like suburban houston stuff where like peril and sugarland yeah like sugarland katie baytown like just different spots like that pasadena's always popped for some reason. So are you doing homes or townhomes or apartments or mostly? Mostly apartments. We do have some houses, but mostly apartments.

Would you say Airbnb is recession-proof? No, no. I don't really think much is recession-proof. Airbnb itself is travel and hospitality. And some people like real estate is recession proof right depending on what the recession is right but one of our recessions was actually the deflation of the housing market market 2009 right the housing market was not recession proof in 2009 because it was the recession right so um if it's a currency issue or if it's an oil issue those are different right and when houston had like an oil issue, those are different, right?

And when Houston had like an oil recession in 2014, 15, Airbnb still boomed. So in that case, it was recession proof. It was pandemic proof too, because we started in a pandemic and boy, boy, boy. Because remember, nobody was coming to Vegas. It was dead. Everybody was partying in Texas.

100%. Yeah, so that got our- Oh, so your properties are in Texas? All of them, yeah. Because remember, Vegas was dead, even Toro. Yeah. Couldn't do anything here. People were riding their bikes on the strip,

but it was pointless. They call it revenge travel, is what they call it. Is that what it's called? Revenge travel. They called it revenge travel. Everybody got locked up, and then when they were finally able to travel, they were spending all their money in travel.

So they called it revenge travel. Yeah, and I also didn't realize how many conventions and trade shows going in Houston Texas and Texas in general like everyone goes there. Yeah, Houston's Houston's a huge city It's like fourth largest in the country lights. Yeah, it was it was creeping up on Chicago I don't know if it's bigger than Chicago yet But they said it was projected to become largest in terms of people right and 150 people are moving there daily Wow, I think Austin might be beating them per day. For real?

And so because Austin has less populace, its rate of growth is nuts. Are you doing a lot? Do you have a lot of properties in Austin? Yeah. We're pushing into Austin. We've got a good spread of properties in Austin. We finally found a property manager that's super progressive and wants to get into magazines and stuff. So he likes to play ball.

It's kind of fun. Nice. Austin is a growing place. Silicon Valley is out there now, right? Yeah. A lot of the growth is coming from that. But that caused a housing bubble, too. so like he likes to play ball it's kind of nice austin is a growing place silicon valley's out there now right yeah that's a lot of the growth is coming from that but that caused the housing bubble too and now austin home prices are like they think that they're going to pull back like 25 which could cause a washing out of the market and if that happens and a lot of people bail then there's going to be all this inventory empty and it could be a good time to do like

airbnb again you know so would you say air our arbitrage is safer than just buying houses on your own and then doing it that way the traditional way if you are going to do just Airbnb and you're not buying the home for other reasons then yeah I think so yeah well because it doesn't affect your DTI as much and then it's a it's a quicker get get it get in you have to understand when you buy a home, it's so much paperwork. It's so much legwork that you have to do, proof of income and everything else.

And you're locked into the property. Right. So let's say the market pulls back and you fail as a host and you want to unwind the deal, you have to sell the house. You have to pay a commission to the realtor both ways, right, in and out. And now that the markets are, like, the risk of the market is that the home prices might pull back next over the course of the next year, you could buy a house,

lose a few percent on like depreciation because home prices go down and then you have to sell the home. It could be a mess. Yeah. Right. Where with, with leases you just, you're out the money for the furniture. And if you don't like a deal, you could unwind the lease. You can get out of the lease and you don't have to worry about paying a realtor commissioner or anything. So when you're first getting into short-term rentals i think leases are probably the best way to go because it really is like some of the lowest skin in the game and some of the lowest consequence if you bail on it which is nice um and i'm actually writing a

book on this leases are a form of debt you know like a car lease like you do toro you mentioned right you can lease cars and put them on to, but a car lease is a form of debt. It goes in your credit, right? A home lease or an apartment lease doesn't go on your credit. Unless you're negative, unless you like get evicted or you skip out. Yeah, but if you have a thousand paid leases, you have zero reported, right? If you have 10 car leases, you can have 10 car leases reported, right? So you could, let's say you make a hundred thousand a year and you're applying to places where the rent's like under $2,000,

and they expect you to make $8,000 a month for a lease. You could take your same $100,000 a year and apply at 1,000 different places at the same time, get 1,000 different approvals, and now have 1,000 apartments off the same income. You can't go buy 100 homes on the same $100,000. Most places aren't running your credit. They're looking at your financials.

They just want to know, can you pay the lease? And there's no crosstalk. Landlords don't crosstalk. There's no regulatory agencies to make sure you're not over-releasing. This is a hack right here. Yeah. It's the Wild West still. It's pretty crazy.

That's crazy. And then, so let me ask you this. How do you handle places that say no to Airbnbs? Do you renegade them? Oh, no way. I'm not going i'm gonna do it that's not sustainable i've done that a couple times and a couple of the properties that we do have are still there that's funny i try to get them to allow us to even though they don't allow it in general as a professional organization as a business with a track, we try to get them to make the exception

because we are who we are. So we really try to meet it head on. We definitely don't do the whole, I used to call it ghost hosting. Where you're hosting the gym. We like the property, we're setting it shut up. Airbnb showed up to my boy's house. They said, you can't do this.

People physically showed up. Yeah, well, obviously if you get caught by the leasing office they'll shut you down some will but a lot of the time they won't just renew the lease but i mean we've we've kind of i think we've gotten booted from one place and you know what even if you get permission if you run a shit organization they're gonna want to kick you out anyway. Right? So in your case, you have to then become much more diligent about not having any bad guests. Right.

Really controlling who comes in. Right. And yeah, if you did it under the radar but had no problems ever, then in a way they may not catch you. At all. As long as your staff isn't,

as long as your customers aren't bugging their staff and not causing trouble, then yeah, you could fly on it. Yeah. But we don't want to take that risk. How do you prevent bad guests? And do you have any nightmare tenant stories?

Well, the gang in Philadelphia is pretty good, right? And it's not only that. I mean, we had an apartment in Houston get completely robbed once. Somebody stayed for nine days. They cleared everything out, robbed everything. And when we came to clean, everything was gone. But isn't his license on the app when he books the place? Well, yes.

But I mean, people use fake IDs or fake, or they'll do stolen accounts, all sorts of weird stuff. And Airbnb paid for everything, right? So that's all right. There's a mix of red flags when you're an Airbnb host, or even on Vrbo, right? There's a mix of red flags. If somebody books super last minute, that's red flag.

If they're local when they book, that's red flag. If you dropped your price too much, that's also red flag. And if they have no reviews, that's red flag. So some of the ways that they speak and how they communicate, you can look for red flags in communication. If you get a booking and you go to call the phone number and it says like the Google voice subscriber, can it be reached? You know what I'm saying? Red flag. So we look for combinations of red flags. Okay. We try to price our listing to get completely full enough days in advance that we don't get last minute bookings if we can prevent it.

Okay. But then if we get last minute bookings from locals or people with shady phone numbers, then we will actively look to find out if they're a risk. And you can type somebody's phone number and put it into white pages and it will show you if they have a criminal record without having to pull the criminal record. They won't show you what the record is, but they'll show you how many hits on the criminal record there is. So if they have a good number of hits on the criminal record, like say six or more traffic and or criminal record hits, you might go, okay, this person's got some history. And you can say, hey, Airbnb, I'm concerned. This person, you know, they booked last minute,

doesn't have any reviews. I punched their phone number into a public directory and it says that they have a criminal record. And I don't know if you guys screen them appropriately, but I don't know if this is a safe guess. You can do something like that. Doesn't Airbnb screen for criminal records? They're not always gonna get everything.

They use their own software. Oh, it does? They have to pay every time they scan a client. What? Yeah, when you use third-party services, right, there are ways to pull people's records. You can get on the Texas Vine and try to look up stuff. You could start to aggregate the data, but it's a lot of work. So Airbnb does some stuff within their software that cross-checks people and checks public directories and stuff, but they're not always going to get it.

Yeah, but you have to ask for access. Most people are going to deny a background check just because. Yeah, if you want to give somebody full, unadulterated access to a background check, you have to get it signed off on. In some apartments, we have to do that. The apartments, everybody has to be criminally screened, so we make them fill out a document for a background check and pay $40 for it.

How do you feel from a portfolio standpoint when it comes to a real estate portfolio and an Airbnb portfolio? Some people separate those, but would you say they're similar when it comes to... I feel like Airbnb is a higher return. Yeah, naturally. And it's better passive. Airbnb should make a higher return because it's an actively managed portfolio. And it's a daily return. passive income. And you should have another business entity conducting your short-term rentals. You have a real estate portfolio that should be getting rents paid from the hospitality company.

So now all of your real estate stuff, you got your long-term rents, your monthly rent roll, all this stuff stays. And then when you're running your hospitality business, you're doing dynamic pricing, you're managing housekeepers, you're doing guest communication, reviews, resolutions, inventory control, staging. There's all these business processes that exist inside of short-term rentals. None of this is real estate, right? Real estate doesn't go in at every single day. So you don't even compare the two. So when it comes to the debate, is Airbnb real estate and a real estate portfolio, it's no comparison. One is hospitality and one is actual real estate.

Do you guys pay rent for this box? The studio? I mean, we rent it out. Yeah. So let's say it was dedicated. You just only rent the studio, right? And the fact that you pay rent for the studio, does that make it a real estate business? In some cases, right? Well, no, because you're making money off the content, right?

The fact that you rented a piece of real estate to do content doesn't make it a real estate play. If your barber rents a barber shop and cuts hair, it's not a real estate play because he's doing his barber shop stuff out of a piece of real estate. Oh, you mean he's actually leasing the actual real estate to do business out of. And it doesn't matter if the barber owns or rents the barber shop. His barber shop, like his business, isn't real estate. So it's just the same way. Your short-term rental is not a real estate play.

It's actually a hospitality product. And it doesn't matter if you own that piece of real estate or if you rent it. Once that short-term rental company is operating, that's a hospitality business. So that settles the argument then.

Airbnb is hospitality. Interesting. Interesting take. Because there's so many people that go back and forth about that. Chick-fil-A will own their properties. McDonald's will own their properties. McDonald's is a real estate company, actually. Yeah, because there's so many stores will either buy or rent um chick-fil-a will own their properties mcdonald's will own their problems mcdonald's is a real estate company actually yeah because what they do is they actually try to buy land where they think it's

going to appreciate right and then they they set up this like almost no-fail business and then they get so much appreciation for their real estate so yeah like mcdonald's has this real estate holdings play involved as a franchise and as a franchise owner you technically don't own the real estate you own the actual operation aspect of the McDonald's but you don't you'll never allow they keep the land absolutely just yeah so then so then the franchise owner isn't in real estate you guys know Starbucks is a bank yeah I'm sick yeah yeah they got billions of dollars because people deposit on the app and they just leave the money there.

Yeah, it's like the whole gift card thing. Yeah. Starbucks is the bank, yeah. Yeah, it's sick. You can hold a float of a billion dollars and you can do a whole bunch of money. Yeah. Do you see Airbnb getting saturated?

Oh, it already has been, but it's actually getting washed out now. How is it getting washed out? The way it's getting washed out is, you know, the whole Airbnb bust thing? No. Okay, uh you probably know because you're airbnbust and people were calling the airbnbust this year right so what happened is after covid hit um all these uh people started getting into short-term rentals because the money was good the revenge travel led to higher revenue right and then next thing you know everybody's a guru right i can't tell you how many how many

kids are online saying i'll show you how to make a million bucks on Airbnb. And so now all these influencers are pushing short-term rentals. And then all these people get into it. And now there's all this supply. And then the winter hits and the economy starts to get choppy because of like, you know, recession fears. And then people stop spending money, right? And so now we've got nearly like 50% the normal supply of short-term rentals.

And then the average nightly rate drops like 15, 20%. So now both of those, the demand goes down and the supply has gone up like exponentially. And then a bunch of people ended up having empty calendars. And then Airbnb did an algorithm change right around November. And anybody who was slightly underperforming, they just kind of pushed everybody down like all the way and were protecting a small percentage of their portfolio that they wanted to perform. Interesting. Yeah.

Because they want to make sure that their best listings wouldn't quit. So they're like doing this who lives and who dies thing. Yeah. They have like a premier, a premier host. Wow. Yeah. And not just that though, even if you're not like a super host or anything, if your listing is consistently booked, you know, has good enough reviews and it's making them money, they want to make sure that you don't quit the platform. Right. Because you're not like a super host or anything, if your listing is consistently booked, has good enough reviews and is making them money,

they want to make sure that you don't quit the platform. Right, because you're bringing them money. Yeah, so imagine they have 100 hosts that could all quit. And if they evenly distributed not enough business to all of them, 90% of them would quit if they gave all of them even business. If they gave the top half all the business, then the bottom half would quit and maybe like 10% of the top half interesting so you'd lose 60% right so they basically mitigate their losses by catering to a

certain host right yeah they're funneling all the business to make some people that they want to keep right and so that's what caused the bust right and but that means that people are quitting, right? Which is a good thing, though, I think. I think it's a good thing because, like you said, so many scam artists, it's oversaturated. But I think saturation is actually good. It shows that there's a market there. So there's a pro and a con to saturation.

You're going to get a more volatile boom and bust cycle in low barrier to entry businesses like this. So since Airbnb is low barrier to entry, people can get in pretty easy. And when everybody's, hey, get in, the getting is good, a lot of people will flood in because there's not really anything stopping them. So oversupply will happen fast, but then those people who don't really have any business in the space and also don't have any wherewithal because they got into an easy business, they'll wash out just as fast. So your supply will actually crest and dip

much more fast than a regular real estate market. Where real estate is harder to get into, it takes time. And so since that's slow to build, what they say the real estate cycle's what, 18 years? A lot of people say? The boom and bust cycle's more like 18 years? I think short-term rentals is like two and a half to three and a half year boom and bust cycle.

Wow, that's quick. It's like crypto. Yeah, because anybody can get into it. The low barrier is the, what really defines the supply and demand curve. I want to touch up on one more thing before we wrap this up. You took a year off from work. Yeah. What did you learn during that year? And would you recommend other people try that? Um, how professional am I supposed to be on this podcast? You can be as much professional. Well, uh, since I took a year off year off i went there's a few things that happened right i immediately went into a form of depression i call it a crisis of purpose right

um i was a workaholic for 10 plus years right i grew up super poor on welfare i went homeless in 2009 started my first business out of a van that i was living in what business was that i sold newspaper subscriptions right and so i that? I sold newspaper subscriptions, right? And so I built teams that sold newspaper subscriptions. So like the Las Vegas Journal Review, I'd build like a sales team. Gotcha. And you'd see us in like grocery stores,

stuff like that. So I built a company out of that. And that's what got me to Airbnb is I had apartments where I was housing sales staff. And so I had all these apartments that were furnished and then nobody was staying in them. So I put them on Airbnb to like not lose money. But so being a workaholic from 2010 to 2020,

essentially I caught COVID and then realized like, man, I was overweight. I was not happy. I had bruises that weren't healing for like months. I was like sick. I had like Candida overgrowth and stuff like that. So then I decided to try to get healthy and then automate my business.

And I had that crisis of purpose where no one needed me all of a sudden first time in my life no one called me no one needed me i'm like what am i doing damn so wait my life i've been waiting no one needed you yeah because as the owner of a company you make sure that people know like that you're the boss and that people need you they call you ask you questions you have to go save the day all the time right so people who saves a superhero yeah i guess you could you guess you could put it like that. I needed people who would just accept me for doing nothing at that point, right?

My identity was directly tied to how much value I was providing every single day, right? And so the moment I was no longer doing anything, I felt not valuable. So I started taking psychedelics. Okay. Actually, yeah. I did acid for the first time

at burning man this last year um and they've helped me with like my childhood trauma a lot of the stuff that's caused me to be the workaholic guy acid mushrooms i started with mushrooms um i started with mushrooms and that was really what helped me with a lot of my childhood trauma wow um but acid helped me with like the existentialism of trying to be like an alpha dominant male thing. Okay. And you know, like the whole, I don't ever want to die kind of shit that, you know, we all- You had an ego death.

Kind of, probably a form of it, you know, probably a form of it. And yeah. And so that really led me to, I guess, a place of more peace and kind of like acceptance and altruism. And even though I'm back to running the company now, because the CEO stepped out when the bust happened and I started taking over everything. My relationship with work is different. I'm also doing like content on other stuff.

Now I'm starting a channel on how to do content and on TikTok, I'm doing dating and masculinity and spirituality content. So I see we should have touched on that. Oh man. I didn't know that. Plug that. I just plugged it. So,

but yeah, so like lots of changed. So I traveled the world for like, man. I didn't know that. Plug that. I just plugged it. But yeah, so like lots changed. So I traveled the world for like a year. I got into landscape photography, started doing psychedelics as a form of therapy. Do you still do psychedelics? Yeah. I mean, once in a while. Microdose?

Like every day or every other day? I don't microdose. But I will make it a point to intentionally have an experience. And I journal. Like if I do acid, I actually journal. I'm writing a book on masculinity, and a lot of my thoughts come from my acid wow whoa i gotta read that book yeah i will say acid changed my perspective when i did in college it really did there's a study that they did to show what's the difference between later their lives are better yeah but what's the difference between

acid and shrooms well acid's synthetic right it's fake, yeah. Yeah, what is it made by the government, probably? Supposedly. Yeah, it lasts for like 10 or 12 hours. Psilocybin in mushrooms is a toxin, and as your body processes it, it creates this psychedelic effect. Acid was like designed. And I mean, I can't tell you at a high level

what the real differences are, but I can tell you that the type of thoughts that I have are completely different. And I have clarity. I have energy on acid. And I'm actually, I was at a music show on acid. I'm journaling in my phone, just writing. As I'm listening to music, I'm journaling.

It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good time. All right, man. It's been a blast. We got to touch up on that on part two. But where can people find you and learn more about you?

Well, my name's Sean Rakijic on YouTube. That's how you find me. Or type in Airbnb and then look for the beard on the thumbnails um and then uh i mean you'll find my name on instagram just same place and then rocky jeech.com is our website wayne you can find me on instagram at right there all right sean kelly here thanks for tuning in guys digital social hour i'll see you next week peace