December 30, 2025 • 38 mins
Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com and join my community at https://TKOwners.com
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"How'd You Do It?" Podcast: My new passion project with my wife where we ask parents how they raised their kids in the faith: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ILzjEkp0dW8vPVR7Ywy1K
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It’s a wrap on 2025. This is my annual deep dive where I break down everything: the businesses I started, the ones that failed, and exactly where I’m making money. I’m sharing specific net profit numbers across 7+ income streams, not just revenue. I also talk about why I finally killed the Secret Pickleball Club idea , the "return on headache" that led me to move on from other ventures , and my investment strategy for the year, from "NEFL" stocks to angel investing. Plus, a look at why I impulsively signed up for an ultra marathon with zero training
Mentioned in this episode:
- My 2024 Year-End Recap: If you’re interested in how my 2024 went (filmed from a hotel room in San Francisco), you can watch that here: https://youtu.be/kd3wxK_FAO8
- "Middle of Nowhere" Video: This video is my pride and joy. I had a lot of fun filming it—"I started a business in the middle of nowhere": https://youtu.be/zdqqBELJQ1Q
- Appliance Rental Video: My first long-form video to hit a million views, featuring Kyler: https://youtu.be/UCdWRg1KQLY
- Book Flipping Video: Mindi turning $1 into $5,000 from books: https://youtu.be/kHRKeDqsoG8
- NEFL Stocks: My breakdown of why Founder-Led companies with Network Effects outperform the market: https://neflstocks.com/
- TKOwners: My community for business owners: https://www.tkowners.com/
- PlaymakersAI: My community for AI consultants and automation: https://playmakersai.com/
- Fast Tree Care: The tree trimming business I own with my partner James. It's been flat lately and we've been a bit complacent, but it's still profitable: https://fasttreecare.com
- Backyard Funhouse: My sport court and installation business: https://backyardfunhouse.com/
- Texas Snacks: My Buc-ee's resale business (that finally got our tax refund!): https://texassnax.com/
Enjoy!
---
Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-yt
Ask me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-ask
Learn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjk
Learn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cof
Follow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-x
Free weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nl
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Kerner office. It's a wrap on 2025 and every
year I do this year end episode where I talk about my
investments this year, businesses I started, businesses
that failed, net worth updates, income updates, where I'm making
money, how I'm making money, what I'm working on, what I'm
failing on, personal life, business, everything.
(00:20):
This is an episode that won't dobig numbers, but for the people
that like this podcast and come back every week or every month,
you should like it a whole lot. And I appreciate you.
I appreciate you for liking morepersonal episodes like these.
I'll try to be as specific as I'm comfortable being, but it's
just tricky because I build a lot of stuff in public.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
(00:40):
And people ask in the comments sometimes like, hey, how's this
going? How's that going?
And sometimes they're going really well and sometimes
they're already shut down. So I have a huge list of
everything that I've been talking about, working on,
etcetera, and another huge list of things that I've never really
talked about that I want to cover.
So I want to tie up my 2025 in this episode.
I did the same thing from a hotel room in San Francisco when
(01:03):
I was on a trip across the West Coast with my family a year ago.
And you can find that in the show notes if you're interested
in how my 2024 went. But at the end of this, I'll
talk about some of my income sources, where my income's
coming from and what it looks like.
But first let's touch on the businesses, the businesses that
I own or have owned in the recent past or present.
(01:24):
These will be in no particular order.
It's just basically as I remembered them and jotted them
down on this Google doc I have in front of me.
So I started a firewood businesswith some teenagers from church
little over a year ago. This was a spontaneous idea that
came up on a camp out and it wasjust a way to help them earn
money for college. It's called College Fund
Firewood. And I bought a log splitter and
(01:48):
I asked my tree trimming companyto drop off big oak logs on my
property. And it was just a way for me to
kind of teach entrepreneurship to young people and support them
in that. And it went well.
We did it last season. We made couple 1000 bucks and
all of it went to the boys to their college and now they're
either on missions or in collegeand we're doing it again this
(02:08):
year. But it's been slower to get it
picked up. I haven't been super proactive
about getting the next generation, if you will, over to
my place to start splitting logs.
But the splitters ready to go. It's gassed up and I got lots of
logs for them. So the next business I'll touch
on is BFH Backyard Funhouse. This is actually going pretty
well. So we built a sport court in our
(02:29):
backyard and I was too cheap to hire it out to a general
contractor. So I found a bunch of
subcontractors to do it myself. Concrete guy, fencing guy, got
to paint lines on the court, I got to do the electrical and the
lights and all that. The end of the day I spent about
28,000 to build this and it would have cost about 5055
(02:50):
thousand and that includes a padfor a shed that I put in.
So very happy with that. And I turned that into a
business where we install sport courts and putting greens and
you know, basketball hoops and in ground trampolines in
people's homes. And we have Facebook ads running
for that right now. We've got a bunch of quotes out,
like a ton of quotes out, a lot of good stuff in the works, but
(03:11):
no revenue yet. We have yet to close any jobs.
I've spent about $4000 in Facebook ads on my business
partner James, who is the same partner for Fast Tree Care.
He built the website and it looks amazing.
And it's just, it's hard to get your first customer, especially
if it's a high ticket service like this.
I mean, the jobs were quoting are between 10,000 and 100,
$1000 each. And so it's a long sales cycle
(03:32):
and it's not really the right season for it.
But this is one that I'm just asexcited about today, if not more
so than I was when I originally talked about it a few months
ago. And it's one that we're actively
pursuing. Next business is Fast Tree care,
the other business I have with my business partner James.
This one's been pretty slow lately.
I haven't put much attention into this.
And it's also the wrong season, but we're still doing thousands
(03:53):
a month, sometimes 10s of thousands a month, and it's just
pretty flat. We're just kind of complacent
and it could be doing a lot better, but it's profitable and
it's still there. Next one is Secret Pickleball.
If you'll remember, I have a shop behind my house.
It's about 2100 square feet. And I wanted to launch an indoor
private pickleball club for this.
And I posted a bunch of Facebookads for it with a type form that
(04:15):
had 19 questions and I got a tonof inquiries.
I was incredibly enthused at theresponse and this club.
So the business model is basically 99 bucks a month and
you can play pickleball A defined number of times either
in double S or singles. And if people don't play that
often, I can fit up to 200 members.
If they play a lot, I can only fit about 100 members.
(04:38):
So my Facebook ad test showed methat it will not be hard to fill
this to capacity, that it would gross about 15,000 a month and
net call it 10 to $12,000 a month.
But a lot of big problems here. I need to add a new septic
system, which is like 12 grand. I need to expand the building,
(04:59):
which is like 20 grand. I need to add a bathroom because
you can't have a pickleball clubwithout a bathroom.
That's going to be like 15 grand.
I got to paint it. I got to demo this weird
structure inside of it. I got to add gravel, I got to
add a security system. It was going to be a lot of
money, a lot more than I thought.
I budgeted about 30 or 40,000, but after getting a bunch of
quotes, it was going to be about70 to $90,000, which is still a
(05:22):
great return on investment if itNets 10 to 12,000 a month.
But I was afraid that the city would shut me down because it
wouldn't be zoned appropriately and it was just going to be a
big lift to maybe get shut down by the city.
And I want to do other stuff with my shop.
I don't want it all tied up. I want to do woodworking out
there. I want to liquidate pallets of
washers and dryers, which is what I'm doing with it right now
(05:43):
and I'll touch on in a minute. I just want freedom and
flexibility with that building. I don't want to tie it up as a
big wall club. So the validity of that business
idea is still very strong, as strong as it ever was.
But I just decided to not go through with it because it's
just too much. I invested some money into it,
but not too much. Where I didn't feel too bad
backing out, there was a business called Side Vending.
You may remember a year and a half ago I posted a video about
(06:05):
perfume vending machines that went mega viral, 20 million
views. We got in touch with the
manufacturer, we started importing them, we sold them and
it just did not go great. We had a hard time with the
sales cycle. We had a hard time managing
sales people. We had a hard time in a few
different areas of this business.
So we sold a handful of machines.
(06:27):
We did 6 figures in a short period of time.
We were profitable. But then we just said, you know
what, the ROH on this return on headache is not great.
And when you're publishing a tonof content, you get a lot of
inbound for cool opportunities and cool stuff.
And so the opportunity cost of doing one thing becomes higher
and higher and higher. And so as the months wore on and
(06:49):
other opportunities started presenting themselves, it was
like, you know what, this isn't worth the headache right now.
So much like the secret pickleball business, like it's a
very viable thing to import and sell vending machines, extremely
viable. You make thousands of dollars
profit per machine, but it's just not something that I wanted
to mess with. So we just moved on from it.
Next business was a agency that helped people get more leads for
(07:13):
their local or home service business and that was going
pretty well. We're doing thousands of dollars
a month in monthly recurring revenue.
We were getting results for our customers, but back to
opportunity cost, we just moved on from it.
So Long story short, we just moved on from it.
Still a very viable business. We weren't the first or thousand
people to start that business. It wasn't a new idea, but like
(07:35):
any business, it's usually harder than you think it's going
to be and the opportunity cost wasn't worth it.
Next business, a Texas snacks that is my Bucky's resale
business, which you've heard about a zillion times so I won't
go into, but it's doing great. We we've been double paying
sales tax for a while now, for years and we've been trying to
work with the state of Texas to get reimbursed for all of these
(07:57):
overpaid sales taxes. And it was this huge audit
process. We had to submit tons of
receipts and Kirk, my business partner, how to do a ton of
work, and my accountant and my employees.
And it was just this major pain,major, major headache, but
really a headache you only have to go through once because now
that we have systems in place, it won't happen again.
Anyway, it took years and years,but we finally got $170,000
(08:22):
check back from the state of Texas for sales taxes that we'd
overpaid. And that was great.
That went straight into our personal checking accounts, mine
and Kirk's, and that was a nice Christmas bonus for us.
So it's just, you know, this business is an overnight success
five years in the making. All it took was to be a viral
hit and then to kill your other business, to focus on a full
(08:44):
time and then to move locations and then to almost get shut down
and then to not be profitable for a while and then have to pay
off the debts of the other business that used to be a part
of and do this math, massive, painful audit with the state of
Texas and figure out how to operate in a low margin business
environment. And all we had to do is figure
out all those things in real time and we're an overnight
(09:05):
success. So that is a great business.
It's very profitable and I'm very grateful to my business
partner Kirk for doing a great job there.
He's the reason why it's successful.
I've got the coolest startup story, but he's been the 1
putting in all the time and effort for five years now.
Next business is our pet cremation business, still going,
going strong, pretty steady, Eddie, not growing really fast,
(09:26):
not shrinking at all, growing a little bit.
It's profitable. Every month we do 10s of
thousands in monthly recurring revenue.
But we are looking for more veterinary partners for more
customers here in DFW, preferably that own veterinary
clinic that we could work with. But it has a strong margins.
We've got a solid system in place, but we're just not
actively trying to grow it really fast.
(09:47):
It's it's kind of a long sales cycle business, but once you get
a customer, they tend to pay youthousands a month for many years
to come. I owned an RV park with my
business partner Nick in Waco, TX and we sold that at the
beginning of 2025 and maybe it was last year, actually end of
2024, I don't remember, but we're glad we did.
It was a goodbye, but it was also a big headache and not
(10:14):
worth our time. So we sold it and I think that
the new owner is doing great with it.
So I always like selling an asset like that and seeing the
buyer continue to find success. While we're talking about real
estate, I'm still a general partner in a fund called Blue
Metric. Our parks are called Stream Side
Parks and I have ownership in about 10 different parks, which
(10:34):
is about a little over a third of the portfolio.
And I help fundraise for these parks and I help source them and
it doesn't require a lot of my time because the operations team
is great and we have $111 million portfolio under contract
right now that we're about to close on that will almost double
the size of the fund. So when I came on board, I think
(10:56):
we had like $50 million worth ofparks.
Today it's closer to 150 millionand it will be 200 and 72150
somewhere in there after we closed this big purchase.
And I'm not trying to make it sound like we've had all that
growth because I came on then like no, I just came on at the
right time and the team kept doing what they were doing
(11:17):
before me and they probably would have done just about as
well if I hadn't joined. But I have been able to
contribute there and it's felt good and it's been a good
symbiotic relationship for both parties.
I am buying 53 acres outside of the Dallas Fort Worth Metro
Bucks, spending about 700,000 onit.
And it also comes with two double wide mobile homes in
decent shape. It has 2 water mains, it has a
(11:39):
pond, it has a Creek through it.About 40% of it's in a
floodplain which is why it's only 14,000 an acre.
But it's 45 minutes from my house in the path of progress,
the path of growth. And I just don't see how you can
go wrong buying raw land. Well it's it's raw land, but
it's also improved. There's two mobile homes on it
that I'm going to rent out for about 1500 bucks a month each.
I don't see how you can go wrongbuying land in the fastest
(12:02):
growing Metroplex in the country.
Values peaked in 2022 or so. And they're depressed a little
bit right now, but they're heading back up.
So I feel like it's a good time to buy.
And I just want this to be a generational asset that's in my
family forever. And I want to take my boys out
there and shoot deer and clay pigeon.
And the rent from the mobile homes will come close to just
(12:23):
paying the payment on the park. I am going to get a loan for it
and I'm going to raise some grass fed beef.
It'll hold about 25 Black Angus because generally speaking you
can do 2 acres per grass fed cow.
So with the rental income plus the beef, I should make a 10 to
(12:43):
$20,000 a year profit. It is AG exempt which means my
yearly property taxes are next to nothing. 500 bucks a year or
something. So I'm not trying to make a
bunch of money on this. I'm just trying to have some raw
land that I can go camp on and hunt and just hold for a long
time. And it should compound quite
nicely, 15 to 25% IRR when it's all said and done.
(13:07):
I launched a community this yearcalled TK Owners.
TK owners.com. You've heard me talk about it,
most likely. I launched it with a few
friends, Taylor, Brandon, Kamal,Nick, Peter.
We launched on April 30th, my son's birthday and it's gone
great. It's a place for people to build
businesses with each other and to get a little more support on
(13:29):
ideas that I talk about. I do weekly Ask me anything's in
there and we've done about 600,000 in revenue since
launching and the vast majority of that is profit.
We do quite a few lifetime memberships, so our monthly
recurring revenue is good. It will be to 100 KA month and
(13:49):
not too long, but our monthly sales are are much better
because we sell a lot of annual and lifetime subscriptions.
So very pleased with that business.
It's just tricky when I post about all these business ideas,
people aren't likely to take action on them if they don't
have enough support, right? There's a direct correlation
between people launching businesses based on my content
(14:10):
and how much time they spend with me or with my content.
So the more time they spend withme or my content, the more
likely they are to launch. So yes, it is a great business
for me. It's profitable, I enjoy it.
I'm in the business of business,but also it's a great way for me
to fulfill my mission of helpingto enable entrepreneurship and
helping to enable 1,000,000 people to start a business.
Ultimately, that's the that's the big goal here.
(14:33):
TK Owners is more general and I launched a couple months ago
another community that's very, very specific for people wanting
to become AI consultants to do AI implementation or
automations. It's called Playmakers.
That's Playmakers, ai.com. And that was going great.
We did 600,000 in revenue our first couple months, maybe
400,000 our first month. Most of that profit and people
(14:56):
are starting businesses, they'refinding customers, they're
posting their wins and it's going great.
You can check that out at playmakersai.com.
I have another business that I own a minority stake in called
Glide. Glide builds software for
skilled nursing facilities. And this is thing has been in
the works for three years. It started as an AI newsletter,
(15:18):
pivoted a couple times, gone through some partnership
changes, a lot of headaches, butZach is an awesome operator.
He's doing a great job. We've signed some really big
clients lately and I don't want to talk about our revenue
because this is a pretty competitive space, but it's
going very well and we're very pleased with it.
Another thing I'm doing temporarily most likely is I'm
(15:38):
liquidating pallets from Bee stock, like Overstock return
pallets from Costco in my shop back there.
I've got about 26 double palletsof outdoor furniture and
appliances that I'm selling on Facebook Marketplace.
And if you think like Chris, like opportunity cost, like,
isn't that beneath you? Not at all.
Because it doesn't take a lot oftime.
(16:00):
And I have my kids help me with it.
They take pictures, they help melisted on Facebook Marketplace.
And I'm making a video about it with Shannon, who you've
probably heard on this podcast. So I'm trying to see how quickly
I can make $10,000 in profit. So it's a business and it's also
a piece of content at the same time.
All right, And as far as contentgoes, let's talk about content
for a minute, then I'll talk about investments I made this
(16:21):
year, talk about net worth updates and income.
So I'm still putting about 3 short form videos a day.
I've got a guy named Austin thathelps with my shorts.
Austin, shout out. He's awesome.
He lives in Idaho and he helps me.
He's kind of like an analyst. He helps me script my shorts and
find shorts ideas. And shorts have been kind of
(16:44):
slow lately. I have a ton of people copying
my format, my green screen, you know, look at this freaking
thing right here. They're mostly using AI and like
Hagen and like these lame tools.I don't know why they don't just
use their own face and voice. I don't know.
But that's made it a lot more diluted.
So my videos have not done as well over the last few months.
(17:07):
And it's forced me to get more innovative, more creative and
come up with new formats, which we're in the middle of doing
now. And it's a good challenge to
have because I've said several times on this podcast, like the
more effective a growth hack, the shorter its lifespan people
catch on, right? Especially when millions of
people are watching his videos by the nature of these videos.
So that's got more competitive, but I'm still getting
(17:29):
consistently over 100 million views a month across all
platforms. Most, the vast majority of that
being short form videos. Over 95%.
I'm doing a lot of long form videos as well, two to four a
week, some out and about style, documentary style.
I've had some videos hit hundreds of thousands and my
first hit 1,000,000 views in my appliance rental video with
(17:52):
Kyler and those are a lot of funto film.
I had a video that I filmed in the middle of nowhere that I
hope you watched because it's like my pride and joy.
I had a lot of fun filming it and I just felt a lot of pride
watching it. It was just, it was just very
enjoyable to make. That one's called like I started
a business in the middle of nowhere.
I think we'll link to it below. But it's tough because the
(18:14):
talking head podcast style videos, they typically don't do
as well because there's not a lot going on.
You know, there's not a lot to watch, but sometimes they do if
the concept is interesting enough, like turning $1.00 into
$5000 from books, that's interesting enough.
That long form video did very well and the audio did very
well. Mindy's awesome.
(18:34):
I just published that a couple weeks ago.
You probably heard it, but all else equal, you really got to go
out there and do the thing like crying the stumps in person and
the video will perform much, much better.
So I'm trying to do a lot more of that.
But it's also hard because sometimes you go spend all day
filming with a crew and you script it and you storyboard it
and do all this. You spend all this money editing
(18:55):
it and it does even fewer views than a talking head podcast.
You just don't know, right? You think you do, but you don't.
So still experimenting with that, but having a lot of fun.
Just hired my first full time producer, Carly.
She's awesome. She used to work for Airac, a
big YouTube channel. She's worked with Mr. Beast and
she's helping me systematize some stuff.
(19:17):
Audio podcast has been kind of flat for a while.
It's very hard to grow. I got a boost from Diary of
Aceo, but it's been the holidaysover the last week or two, so
it's kind of shrunk a little bit.
I don't know how much of that ispermanent versus just seasonal,
but it's growing, just not nearly as fast as I'd like.
My newsletter has grown a ton, from about 77,000 subscribers a
year ago to 240,000 today. I started doing paid ads with a
(19:41):
guy named Kevin a couple months ago to grow it.
So it's growing a lot faster thanks to paid, because before
that I'd only done organic. So the newsletter's kind of a
business in and of itself. It's quite profitable and it's
fun to write and Molly helps me with that.
Shout out to Molly. Open rates are very steady at
about 55%. Mixed click through rates 3 to
(20:03):
5%. Unsubscribe rate point 2.3%.
And I'm adding between 700 and 1500 new subscribers a day more
content stuff. I'm doing more sponsorships,
working with brands like Busy who I love to use for entity
formation go high level. Of course, Beehive.
I invested in Beehive just today, by the way, made an Angel
(20:24):
investment in them. I've been begging them to invest
for a while. I'm doing sponsorships with
Claude, the AI company, Repplett, Lindy.
I also Angel invested in Lindy this year.
Only brands that I really love, like I genuinely love, and
that's been a good stream of income.
Last note regarding content, I'mlaunching a podcast that I've
been recording for a year and a half and I've never published.
(20:46):
It's kind of a nonprofit passionproject that I've wanted to do
for literally a decade. It's called How do you do it?
We're going to link to it. It's just a passion project.
It's my wife and I, and we talked to active Christians that
are older and have mostly grown kids that are out of the house
and ask them, how'd you do it? How did you raise your kids in
(21:07):
the faith, so to speak, in a waythat would keep them in the
faith after leaving the home? Like very tactical like this,
right? Like specifically like how old
were they when you gave them a phone?
What was your vacation policy? What did grounding them look
like? Looking back?
Do you regret being too strict or not strict enough?
So we've recorded 5 episodes andwe're going to start publishing
(21:27):
them. So I've just been
procrastinating. If that sounds interesting to
you, I would love for you to check it out.
Angel investments. I made handful of Angel
investments this year. Lindy, Lindy dot AI.
It's basically the Zapier for AII.
Interviewed the founder, fell inlove with their story.
He's a killer. So I begged them to invest and
they let me. So I wrote a 5 figure check into
(21:49):
that. My good friend Arthur is the
chief growth officer. I think I have that right for a
company called Otera OTTERA and they are enabling FAST channels,
right? So you turn on your smart TV and
you see all these random FAST channels.
That is a tidal wave. To give you some perspective, on
my YouTube channel, in 2024 I think 7% of my views were on
(22:12):
TV's and in 2025 it was 40% from7 to 40% in one year.
People are watching YouTube on TV's now and people are watching
random channels on TV is like myfriend Kevin Espiritu.
He has a YouTube channel with 7 or 8 million subscribers called
Epic Gardening. He has a fast channel and so
people will watch him on their TV, not on YouTube, but on his.
(22:33):
He has his own channel, right? It's like a digital channel that
is exploding right now and his company is exploding and they're
riding that tidal wave. And he's a great guy.
I've known him for 10 years, go to church with him and I wrote a
5 figure check into his business.
And Beehive, I've been begging Tyler let me invest, let me
invest for about 6 months and they opened up around.
(22:55):
So I wrote 5 figure check into that.
And my friend Brandon, he started a business called
Foundation AI, which is now called David davidmarketing.co.
And then the AI side of things is get David dot AI.
He's implementing AI automationsinto small businesses.
I obviously love that space. I talk about it all the time.
(23:17):
And I love Brandon. I believe in him.
So I wrote a 5 figure check intohis business as well.
And you know, Angel investing, most of these go to zero.
They take years or decades to pay out.
So it's too early to tell. But all of these are going well
so far. It's only been months, but happy
with the outcome of all of theseso far.
And then I've made really randomodd Angel investments over the
(23:40):
years, most of which have not gone well.
Let's see, Virtuix, they're building full body VR gaming
system. They're trying to be like the
Peloton for full body VR gaming.Invest in them like five years
ago. Golf board, it's like an
electronic battery operated golfcart.
(24:01):
Invest in them a while ago, maybe Gum Rd. that's actually
done well. They've doubled in valuation.
Hilite, which is kind of like Lululemon.
They have not. I think they've already failed
Keene, which was like a smart home gadget company.
I think they've already failed. I've written most of those off.
But it's kind of funny, like yougot proximity bias.
(24:21):
You know, you invest in people, you know because you assume
they're smarter than the averageperson.
And that seems kind of like a fallacy.
Like just because you know them personally doesn't mean they're
more likely to succeed. But in my experience and in my
friends experience, like people usually have a lot of success
investing in people that they know personally.
So I'm taking that bet. But I will say, if you're
(24:43):
listening to this and you're wondering if I will Angel invest
in your business, the answer is probably no.
Just because I'm, I'm not an Angel investor, I don't want to
be. I don't want to look at decks.
I don't want to hop on calls with founders to be pitched to.
Like, that's not meant to sound harsh.
It's just not my love. Like I want to build things.
I don't want to invest in things.
So it's not really something I'mlooking to do more of.
(25:06):
In addition to those Angel investments, I bought more
Bitcoin this year. I've been buying and holding
Bitcoin since 2016. I firmly believe in it.
I'm pulling up my Robin Hood account as I talk here.
Not buying any more Ethereum forthe time being.
Finance coin, XRP, like a lot ofthis stuff I've just been
holding forever and some of it may still go to zero.
(25:29):
I don't know. But I just, I don't want to
sell. I'd rather just keep holding so
I dollar cost averaging a Bitcoin every single day and I
have a lot of Bitcoin. It's it's a big part of my net
worth. I started buying precious metals
for the first time this year. Thank you Peter for finally
twisting my arm and convincing me.
It's kind of funny there's been some data that shows that you
know, often times investments dothe best when you buy at the all
(25:52):
time high, which is completely the opposite of what you think
buy low, sell high, etcetera. But often times when you buy at
the all time high, you're buyingmomentum, right?
And it just keeps going up. OK, not investment advice.
I'm not an investor right? So don't listen to anything I'm
saying. I Bakley bought Bitcoin at an
all time high $700.00 Felt foolish.
(26:13):
Wasn't gold and silver. It's only been a few months, but
it was at an all time. They were both at all time highs
and silver has been absolutely on a tear.
Who knows? But when I buy, I never sell.
And I said that on the episode ayear ago.
I just don't sell. If I had to sell to pay the
mortgage to feed my family, of course I would.
But I don't. I don't get in and out of
positions. I buy things forever, whether
(26:35):
it's land, stocks or crypto. So I did buy gold and silver a
few months ago and I'm holding for the time being.
I'm not buying anymore, but I bought physical gold and silver
and I have them safely secured stocks.
I bought a lot of stocks this year.
My biggest holding is Robin Hood.
I firmly believe in Robin Hood. I'm a big nephel guy.
(26:56):
NEFL, network effects, founder LED.
I like buying stocks that enjoy network effects.
As in companies that get more valuable as more people start
using it, like Facebook, like eBay, marketplaces, Robin Hood.
Bitcoin has network effects. I'm obsessed with network
effects. So if a stock in my opinion has
network effects and its founder LED, it's it outperforms the
(27:17):
market. In fact, I did an episode about
this a couple months ago, a video and I bought a domain name
Nephil stocks, NEFL stocks.com. You can see for yourself, you
can back test and you can see how stocks have outperformed the
market when they were founder LED and had network effects.
I firmly believe that anything in life, it all comes down to
incentives, right? If something is wrong, if
(27:37):
something is right, it's becausethe incentives are either
aligned or they're not. And if a company is founder LED,
the incentives are usually aligned.
He wants his baby to keep going.Well, like Mark Zuckerberg, like
Elon Musk, like the Robin Hood CEO, Bryan Armstrong, Coinbase
CEO. So Robin Hood is my first
biggest holding. I bought hundreds of shares of
(28:00):
that this year, more in previousyears.
Tesla's my second biggest holding, never selling that.
Coinbase is my third biggest, then Meta, then Google.
I'm like insanely bullish on Google and how they'll stack up
in the AI race. VOO, you know, just the index.
That's my sixth biggest holding.Then Zoom.
And I'm not really bullish on zoom.
(28:21):
I just bought a lot after COVID at way too high of a price and
I'm I've almost broken even on it, but I'm not selling it.
Amazon, then Chipotle, then AMR Alpha metallurgical resources
and I just copied Manish Paprizetrade there.
I've no idea what they're doing,but he's smarter than I am so I
copied it. Coupang, the Amazon of South
(28:42):
Korea, another Nephel stock. The founder is an absolute
monster, just like Jeff Bezos IREN.
It's like the data center play open my own open stock.
I don't think I'm not bullish onit, but whatever.
It's doing well, but I kind of regret it.
Uber going very well. Alibaba, Netflix, Unity, the
(29:03):
software business. Garmin been holding for a while.
It's done really well. Angel Studios, they make clean
movies. That stock is not going well.
It's down about 50% since I purchased it, but we huddle.
StubHub just went public this year.
Both founder LED and enjoys network effects.
Down 22% since purchasing it. And then Airbnb, which is just
(29:24):
doing OK. It's been very flat for a while.
Those are all of my stocks and Idid a big boy thing.
I opened a Roth IRA for both myself and my wife and I learned
what that is. And that's maybe the most mature
thing I've ever done. So I'll be contributing to that
every year. I had some crypto debt.
(29:45):
I borrowed against my my Bitcoinyears ago to buy more Bitcoin.
I paid that off this year. We sold our minivan and my Tesla
Model S this year, swapped out my car with a cyber truck lease.
I did all the research and it told me that I would save more
money if I'd leased a cyber truck as opposed to purchase it
because they depreciate like a rock.
(30:07):
So far, it's maybe the best vehicle I've ever owned.
I love it, I love it, I love it,and we'll see if the lease
decision paid off. It's only a two year lease.
I think I paid 1300 a month for that.
And then I got my wife, Sequoia,a 2024, had 3000 miles on it.
Sequoia in the lunar rock color,and she loves it, looks awesome.
It's really the first vehicle that she's actually loved.
(30:29):
So we've graduated from the minivan.
On a personal note, I'm considering some goals for 2026.
I've never been much of A gold person, but I want to be.
I set a bunch of gold last year and I failed at most of them,
but I think all of us equal. It's better to have goals than
not. I signed up for an ultra
marathon this Saturday. I have not ran since June and
(30:51):
that was only four miles. I ran 11 miles in all of 2025.
I'm completely out of shape. I haven't gained my weight back.
I weigh 260 lbs for all my 20s, but I'm sitting at about 2:10
right now. I try to be closer to 200 and
I've been working out in the yard and stuff, but I have no
cardio capacity right now. And I was standing in line for a
(31:11):
ride at Six Flags talking to my 15 year old who is a cross
country runner. He's never ran more than 8
miles. And I've been trying to convince
him to run an ultra and he's like, no, I don't want to, I
don't want to. And then finally I was like,
I'll give you 300 bucks if you run one with me.
And I'm, I'm like, I'm as out ofshape as you get.
And he's like done. So I pulled out my phone.
We found an ultra in Waco this Saturday, which is what, January
(31:35):
3rd? I don't know, it's called the
Waco Resolution Run or something.
And we signed up with a 50K, which is 31 miles.
And I'm not running at all this week.
I'm not training. I just want to see how it goes.
So it's going to be painful, butit's going to be awesome and my
son's going to do great. And it sounds, I don't know, it
sounds more intimidating than itis.
Think of it like a hike where you do a lot of running because
(31:57):
there's a lot of walking on an ultra.
Even like the best ultra runnersin the world strategically power
walk up hills. They they strategically walk at
times. It's normal, it's accepted.
So I'll just do a lot of walkingand hopefully I can finish in
under 6 hours. And I'm excited to see what my
boy is capable of because most people don't know what they're
capable of physically, mentally or otherwise.
(32:18):
So I feel like you know how you do one thing is how you do
everything. And if he pushes his limits in
this, and if I push my limits inthis, it will open up doors in
other parts of our lives. So I have run 14 ultra marathons
between like 2019 and 2022, giveor take, my last one being 100
Miller three years ago. So my body will remember, like
(32:42):
my muscles will remember to an extent I think, I hope, but that
only goes so far. So I will report back on how
that goes. I kind of want to wake up at
5:00 AM everyday this year, whether it's a Sunday, Saturday,
whatever. I'm an all or nothing person.
So when I set goals that are like, all right, only eat sweets
on Sundays, it just doesn't go well.
It needs to be like, I eat no sugar this year or I don't have
(33:04):
a sugar goal and I do whatever Iwant.
So I'm curious to see in the comments genuinely, this isn't
just like engagement bait. If you guys have set goals
around waking up early and what was the structure of that goal,
what did it look like? How well did you do at it or
not? Very curious about that.
I want to transcribe the whole Book of Mormon just like write
(33:26):
the whole thing down in a journal instead of reading it
with my ADHD. Like I I cannot focus when I try
to read the scriptures. I just can't pay attention like
I can I could. I don't want to just write
myself off but I don't. It's extremely hard.
I still do it almost every day because I think it's a good
thing to do even if I don't retain anything.
But I feel like if I transcribedit onto a journal, I saw an
(33:49):
Instagram reel about someone that did this with the Bible.
I feel like if I did that, I would get more out of it.
So I think I'm going to try that.
I got a new job slash calling inmy church nine months ago.
I basically helped my pastor andI was very intimidated by it.
But it's been amazing and I loveit.
And I get to hang out with the youth a lot and I get to push
(34:09):
myself and be uncomfortable a lot.
And it's difficult, but I really, really have enjoyed
doing that a lot. And to wrap this up, you know,
this is a business podcast. People love hearing about
income, real numbers. I don't really like talking
about that. It does really well, like when I
talk about how much money I make, whatever those pieces of
(34:30):
content do really well, but it'salso awkward.
So I want to try to find the balance between like showing
people what's possible and also keeping cards close to my chest
because I'm somewhat of a private persons.
But this year was incredibly transformative for me in every
sense of the word. There's a lot to be grateful
for. And I think I counted and I'm
(34:51):
making six figures of net profitfrom 7 to 8 different sources
each. So any of them could go away
tomorrow, but I could also gain one or two more tomorrow from
other things. Much of that is driven by
content. And I think people are quick to
write that off and say, oh, you're cheating because you have
an audience. It's like, well, if you
(35:12):
consider, you know, learning skills for 15 years, you know,
starting 80 different businessesand then posting about those
experiences and then using that as a distribution channel as
cheating, OK. But it certainly wasn't the
shortcut. These are hard fought lessons.
I'm not like a 19 year old like regurgitating business books
that I'm reading. Like I've actually done these
(35:33):
things and I'm still doing thesethings.
And it would be foolish of me tonot use advantages that I have
to grow a business. I know people that are really
good at making content and they feel kind of prideful about not
wanting to have to rely on that to start a new business.
And I just think that's foolish.Like if you became the best
person in the world at Facebook ads, why wouldn't you use
(35:54):
Facebook ads to grow your next business just because like
you're prideful about it and youwant to see if you could do it.
OK, but why handicap yourself ifyou don't need to?
So I'm always going to be extremely mindful about things
that I promote, things that I talk about, things that I start
because I don't want to waste people's time or attention.
I know that's like the world's most scarce and valuable
(36:15):
resources attention. So I am going to be very mindful
about that. But at the end of the day, like
if I can offer something that people want to pay for and that
they will find more value out ofthan what they pay, then I'm
going to see if I can do that ina good, sustainable, moral,
ethical way. So 2024 was I think my best
earning year ever, and 2025 did about three times more than
(36:38):
that. My main YouTube channel makes
between 15 and $30,000 a month of profit.
My secondary YouTube channel makes between $503,000 a month.
My Facebook page makes between 10 and $30,000 a month.
My communities each make net profit between 30,000 and
(36:59):
$150,000 a month. And when I say make, I mean like
make net profit to me, not revenue.
Texas Snacks six figures a year in profit RV park stuff 6
figures a year of profit Sponsorships closing in on 7
figures a year of profit Newsletter 6 figures of profit
(37:19):
Mid to high 6 figures TikTok 5 figures Audio Podcast 6 figures
Other bets like other random 1 offs 6 figures.
Oh, I forgot, I haven't RV slashmobile Home Park community.
That's another six figures a year of profit and you will
never, ever catch me say the phrase multiple 6 figures.
(37:42):
If it's 900,000, it's six figures.
If it's 100,000, it's six figures.
Spark Loop helps monetize my newsletter.
That's five figures high 5 figures a year of profit.
Twitter 1000 bucks a month, 2000bucks a month, Amazon affiliate,
other affiliate stuff, a few 1000 bucks a month.
And I think that's just about most of it.
(38:02):
I have no idea what 2026 will bring, but I'm very grateful.
I'm grateful for all of you for being a part of this, for
helping me, supporting me, for your kind words.
I receive much, much, much, much, much more support than I
do negativity. And for that, I'm very grateful.
So thank you for following along, listening, watching
however you consume this. But just remember, all of the
(38:25):
time you spend consuming this orother business content, it's
kind of a waste if you don't take action from it, right?
Strive to get your dopamine fromaction and not from information.
OK, that's not my quote, but I heard it and I love it.
So I'm taking it. Action, not information.
Go take action and you'll be better off for it.
So love you guys, appreciate you.
(38:45):
We'll see you next time on the corner office.
Welcome to the Kerner office. It's a wrap on 2025 and every
year I do this year end episode where I talk about my
investments this year, businesses I started, businesses
that failed, net worth updates, income updates, where I'm making
money, how I'm making money, what I'm working on, what I'm
failing on, personal life, business, everything.
(00:20):
This is an episode that won't dobig numbers, but for the people
that like this podcast and come back every week or every month,
you should like it a whole lot. And I appreciate you.
I appreciate you for liking morepersonal episodes like these.
I'll try to be as specific as I'm comfortable being, but it's
just tricky because I build a lot of stuff in public.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
(00:40):
And people ask in the comments sometimes like, hey, how's this
going? How's that going?
And sometimes they're going really well and sometimes
they're already shut down. So I have a huge list of
everything that I've been talking about, working on,
etcetera, and another huge list of things that I've never really
talked about that I want to cover.
So I want to tie up my 2025 in this episode.
I did the same thing from a hotel room in San Francisco when
(01:03):
I was on a trip across the West Coast with my family a year ago.
And you can find that in the show notes if you're interested
in how my 2024 went. But at the end of this, I'll
talk about some of my income sources, where my income's
coming from and what it looks like.
But first let's touch on the businesses, the businesses that
I own or have owned in the recent past or present.
(01:24):
These will be in no particular order.
It's just basically as I remembered them and jotted them
down on this Google doc I have in front of me.
So I started a firewood businesswith some teenagers from church
little over a year ago. This was a spontaneous idea that
came up on a camp out and it wasjust a way to help them earn
money for college. It's called College Fund
Firewood. And I bought a log splitter and
(01:48):
I asked my tree trimming companyto drop off big oak logs on my
property. And it was just a way for me to
kind of teach entrepreneurship to young people and support them
in that. And it went well.
We did it last season. We made couple 1000 bucks and
all of it went to the boys to their college and now they're
either on missions or in collegeand we're doing it again this
(02:08):
year. But it's been slower to get it
picked up. I haven't been super proactive
about getting the next generation, if you will, over to
my place to start splitting logs.
But the splitters ready to go. It's gassed up and I got lots of
logs for them. So the next business I'll touch
on is BFH Backyard Funhouse. This is actually going pretty
well. So we built a sport court in our
(02:29):
backyard and I was too cheap to hire it out to a general
contractor. So I found a bunch of
subcontractors to do it myself. Concrete guy, fencing guy, got
to paint lines on the court, I got to do the electrical and the
lights and all that. The end of the day I spent about
28,000 to build this and it would have cost about 5055
(02:50):
thousand and that includes a padfor a shed that I put in.
So very happy with that. And I turned that into a
business where we install sport courts and putting greens and
you know, basketball hoops and in ground trampolines in
people's homes. And we have Facebook ads running
for that right now. We've got a bunch of quotes out,
like a ton of quotes out, a lot of good stuff in the works, but
(03:11):
no revenue yet. We have yet to close any jobs.
I've spent about $4000 in Facebook ads on my business
partner James, who is the same partner for Fast Tree Care.
He built the website and it looks amazing.
And it's just, it's hard to get your first customer, especially
if it's a high ticket service like this.
I mean, the jobs were quoting are between 10,000 and 100,
$1000 each. And so it's a long sales cycle
(03:32):
and it's not really the right season for it.
But this is one that I'm just asexcited about today, if not more
so than I was when I originally talked about it a few months
ago. And it's one that we're actively
pursuing. Next business is Fast Tree care,
the other business I have with my business partner James.
This one's been pretty slow lately.
I haven't put much attention into this.
And it's also the wrong season, but we're still doing thousands
(03:53):
a month, sometimes 10s of thousands a month, and it's just
pretty flat. We're just kind of complacent
and it could be doing a lot better, but it's profitable and
it's still there. Next one is Secret Pickleball.
If you'll remember, I have a shop behind my house.
It's about 2100 square feet. And I wanted to launch an indoor
private pickleball club for this.
And I posted a bunch of Facebookads for it with a type form that
(04:15):
had 19 questions and I got a tonof inquiries.
I was incredibly enthused at theresponse and this club.
So the business model is basically 99 bucks a month and
you can play pickleball A defined number of times either
in double S or singles. And if people don't play that
often, I can fit up to 200 members.
If they play a lot, I can only fit about 100 members.
(04:38):
So my Facebook ad test showed methat it will not be hard to fill
this to capacity, that it would gross about 15,000 a month and
net call it 10 to $12,000 a month.
But a lot of big problems here. I need to add a new septic
system, which is like 12 grand. I need to expand the building,
(04:59):
which is like 20 grand. I need to add a bathroom because
you can't have a pickleball clubwithout a bathroom.
That's going to be like 15 grand.
I got to paint it. I got to demo this weird
structure inside of it. I got to add gravel, I got to
add a security system. It was going to be a lot of
money, a lot more than I thought.
I budgeted about 30 or 40,000, but after getting a bunch of
quotes, it was going to be about70 to $90,000, which is still a
(05:22):
great return on investment if itNets 10 to 12,000 a month.
But I was afraid that the city would shut me down because it
wouldn't be zoned appropriately and it was just going to be a
big lift to maybe get shut down by the city.
And I want to do other stuff with my shop.
I don't want it all tied up. I want to do woodworking out
there. I want to liquidate pallets of
washers and dryers, which is what I'm doing with it right now
(05:43):
and I'll touch on in a minute. I just want freedom and
flexibility with that building. I don't want to tie it up as a
big wall club. So the validity of that business
idea is still very strong, as strong as it ever was.
But I just decided to not go through with it because it's
just too much. I invested some money into it,
but not too much. Where I didn't feel too bad
backing out, there was a business called Side Vending.
You may remember a year and a half ago I posted a video about
(06:05):
perfume vending machines that went mega viral, 20 million
views. We got in touch with the
manufacturer, we started importing them, we sold them and
it just did not go great. We had a hard time with the
sales cycle. We had a hard time managing
sales people. We had a hard time in a few
different areas of this business.
So we sold a handful of machines.
(06:27):
We did 6 figures in a short period of time.
We were profitable. But then we just said, you know
what, the ROH on this return on headache is not great.
And when you're publishing a tonof content, you get a lot of
inbound for cool opportunities and cool stuff.
And so the opportunity cost of doing one thing becomes higher
and higher and higher. And so as the months wore on and
(06:49):
other opportunities started presenting themselves, it was
like, you know what, this isn't worth the headache right now.
So much like the secret pickleball business, like it's a
very viable thing to import and sell vending machines, extremely
viable. You make thousands of dollars
profit per machine, but it's just not something that I wanted
to mess with. So we just moved on from it.
Next business was a agency that helped people get more leads for
(07:13):
their local or home service business and that was going
pretty well. We're doing thousands of dollars
a month in monthly recurring revenue.
We were getting results for our customers, but back to
opportunity cost, we just moved on from it.
So Long story short, we just moved on from it.
Still a very viable business. We weren't the first or thousand
people to start that business. It wasn't a new idea, but like
(07:35):
any business, it's usually harder than you think it's going
to be and the opportunity cost wasn't worth it.
Next business, a Texas snacks that is my Bucky's resale
business, which you've heard about a zillion times so I won't
go into, but it's doing great. We we've been double paying
sales tax for a while now, for years and we've been trying to
work with the state of Texas to get reimbursed for all of these
(07:57):
overpaid sales taxes. And it was this huge audit
process. We had to submit tons of
receipts and Kirk, my business partner, how to do a ton of
work, and my accountant and my employees.
And it was just this major pain,major, major headache, but
really a headache you only have to go through once because now
that we have systems in place, it won't happen again.
Anyway, it took years and years,but we finally got $170,000
(08:22):
check back from the state of Texas for sales taxes that we'd
overpaid. And that was great.
That went straight into our personal checking accounts, mine
and Kirk's, and that was a nice Christmas bonus for us.
So it's just, you know, this business is an overnight success
five years in the making. All it took was to be a viral
hit and then to kill your other business, to focus on a full
(08:44):
time and then to move locations and then to almost get shut down
and then to not be profitable for a while and then have to pay
off the debts of the other business that used to be a part
of and do this math, massive, painful audit with the state of
Texas and figure out how to operate in a low margin business
environment. And all we had to do is figure
out all those things in real time and we're an overnight
(09:05):
success. So that is a great business.
It's very profitable and I'm very grateful to my business
partner Kirk for doing a great job there.
He's the reason why it's successful.
I've got the coolest startup story, but he's been the 1
putting in all the time and effort for five years now.
Next business is our pet cremation business, still going,
going strong, pretty steady, Eddie, not growing really fast,
(09:26):
not shrinking at all, growing a little bit.
It's profitable. Every month we do 10s of
thousands in monthly recurring revenue.
But we are looking for more veterinary partners for more
customers here in DFW, preferably that own veterinary
clinic that we could work with. But it has a strong margins.
We've got a solid system in place, but we're just not
actively trying to grow it really fast.
(09:47):
It's it's kind of a long sales cycle business, but once you get
a customer, they tend to pay youthousands a month for many years
to come. I owned an RV park with my
business partner Nick in Waco, TX and we sold that at the
beginning of 2025 and maybe it was last year, actually end of
2024, I don't remember, but we're glad we did.
It was a goodbye, but it was also a big headache and not
(10:14):
worth our time. So we sold it and I think that
the new owner is doing great with it.
So I always like selling an asset like that and seeing the
buyer continue to find success. While we're talking about real
estate, I'm still a general partner in a fund called Blue
Metric. Our parks are called Stream Side
Parks and I have ownership in about 10 different parks, which
(10:34):
is about a little over a third of the portfolio.
And I help fundraise for these parks and I help source them and
it doesn't require a lot of my time because the operations team
is great and we have $111 million portfolio under contract
right now that we're about to close on that will almost double
the size of the fund. So when I came on board, I think
(10:56):
we had like $50 million worth ofparks.
Today it's closer to 150 millionand it will be 200 and 72150
somewhere in there after we closed this big purchase.
And I'm not trying to make it sound like we've had all that
growth because I came on then like no, I just came on at the
right time and the team kept doing what they were doing
(11:17):
before me and they probably would have done just about as
well if I hadn't joined. But I have been able to
contribute there and it's felt good and it's been a good
symbiotic relationship for both parties.
I am buying 53 acres outside of the Dallas Fort Worth Metro
Bucks, spending about 700,000 onit.
And it also comes with two double wide mobile homes in
decent shape. It has 2 water mains, it has a
(11:39):
pond, it has a Creek through it.About 40% of it's in a
floodplain which is why it's only 14,000 an acre.
But it's 45 minutes from my house in the path of progress,
the path of growth. And I just don't see how you can
go wrong buying raw land. Well it's it's raw land, but
it's also improved. There's two mobile homes on it
that I'm going to rent out for about 1500 bucks a month each.
I don't see how you can go wrongbuying land in the fastest
(12:02):
growing Metroplex in the country.
Values peaked in 2022 or so. And they're depressed a little
bit right now, but they're heading back up.
So I feel like it's a good time to buy.
And I just want this to be a generational asset that's in my
family forever. And I want to take my boys out
there and shoot deer and clay pigeon.
And the rent from the mobile homes will come close to just
(12:23):
paying the payment on the park. I am going to get a loan for it
and I'm going to raise some grass fed beef.
It'll hold about 25 Black Angus because generally speaking you
can do 2 acres per grass fed cow.
So with the rental income plus the beef, I should make a 10 to
(12:43):
$20,000 a year profit. It is AG exempt which means my
yearly property taxes are next to nothing. 500 bucks a year or
something. So I'm not trying to make a
bunch of money on this. I'm just trying to have some raw
land that I can go camp on and hunt and just hold for a long
time. And it should compound quite
nicely, 15 to 25% IRR when it's all said and done.
(13:07):
I launched a community this yearcalled TK Owners.
TK owners.com. You've heard me talk about it,
most likely. I launched it with a few
friends, Taylor, Brandon, Kamal,Nick, Peter.
We launched on April 30th, my son's birthday and it's gone
great. It's a place for people to build
businesses with each other and to get a little more support on
(13:29):
ideas that I talk about. I do weekly Ask me anything's in
there and we've done about 600,000 in revenue since
launching and the vast majority of that is profit.
We do quite a few lifetime memberships, so our monthly
recurring revenue is good. It will be to 100 KA month and
(13:49):
not too long, but our monthly sales are are much better
because we sell a lot of annual and lifetime subscriptions.
So very pleased with that business.
It's just tricky when I post about all these business ideas,
people aren't likely to take action on them if they don't
have enough support, right? There's a direct correlation
between people launching businesses based on my content
(14:10):
and how much time they spend with me or with my content.
So the more time they spend withme or my content, the more
likely they are to launch. So yes, it is a great business
for me. It's profitable, I enjoy it.
I'm in the business of business,but also it's a great way for me
to fulfill my mission of helpingto enable entrepreneurship and
helping to enable 1,000,000 people to start a business.
Ultimately, that's the that's the big goal here.
(14:33):
TK Owners is more general and I launched a couple months ago
another community that's very, very specific for people wanting
to become AI consultants to do AI implementation or
automations. It's called Playmakers.
That's Playmakers, ai.com. And that was going great.
We did 600,000 in revenue our first couple months, maybe
400,000 our first month. Most of that profit and people
(14:56):
are starting businesses, they'refinding customers, they're
posting their wins and it's going great.
You can check that out at playmakersai.com.
I have another business that I own a minority stake in called
Glide. Glide builds software for
skilled nursing facilities. And this is thing has been in
the works for three years. It started as an AI newsletter,
(15:18):
pivoted a couple times, gone through some partnership
changes, a lot of headaches, butZach is an awesome operator.
He's doing a great job. We've signed some really big
clients lately and I don't want to talk about our revenue
because this is a pretty competitive space, but it's
going very well and we're very pleased with it.
Another thing I'm doing temporarily most likely is I'm
(15:38):
liquidating pallets from Bee stock, like Overstock return
pallets from Costco in my shop back there.
I've got about 26 double palletsof outdoor furniture and
appliances that I'm selling on Facebook Marketplace.
And if you think like Chris, like opportunity cost, like,
isn't that beneath you? Not at all.
Because it doesn't take a lot oftime.
(16:00):
And I have my kids help me with it.
They take pictures, they help melisted on Facebook Marketplace.
And I'm making a video about it with Shannon, who you've
probably heard on this podcast. So I'm trying to see how quickly
I can make $10,000 in profit. So it's a business and it's also
a piece of content at the same time.
All right, And as far as contentgoes, let's talk about content
for a minute, then I'll talk about investments I made this
(16:21):
year, talk about net worth updates and income.
So I'm still putting about 3 short form videos a day.
I've got a guy named Austin thathelps with my shorts.
Austin, shout out. He's awesome.
He lives in Idaho and he helps me.
He's kind of like an analyst. He helps me script my shorts and
find shorts ideas. And shorts have been kind of
(16:44):
slow lately. I have a ton of people copying
my format, my green screen, you know, look at this freaking
thing right here. They're mostly using AI and like
Hagen and like these lame tools.I don't know why they don't just
use their own face and voice. I don't know.
But that's made it a lot more diluted.
So my videos have not done as well over the last few months.
(17:07):
And it's forced me to get more innovative, more creative and
come up with new formats, which we're in the middle of doing
now. And it's a good challenge to
have because I've said several times on this podcast, like the
more effective a growth hack, the shorter its lifespan people
catch on, right? Especially when millions of
people are watching his videos by the nature of these videos.
So that's got more competitive, but I'm still getting
(17:29):
consistently over 100 million views a month across all
platforms. Most, the vast majority of that
being short form videos. Over 95%.
I'm doing a lot of long form videos as well, two to four a
week, some out and about style, documentary style.
I've had some videos hit hundreds of thousands and my
first hit 1,000,000 views in my appliance rental video with
(17:52):
Kyler and those are a lot of funto film.
I had a video that I filmed in the middle of nowhere that I
hope you watched because it's like my pride and joy.
I had a lot of fun filming it and I just felt a lot of pride
watching it. It was just, it was just very
enjoyable to make. That one's called like I started
a business in the middle of nowhere.
I think we'll link to it below. But it's tough because the
(18:14):
talking head podcast style videos, they typically don't do
as well because there's not a lot going on.
You know, there's not a lot to watch, but sometimes they do if
the concept is interesting enough, like turning $1.00 into
$5000 from books, that's interesting enough.
That long form video did very well and the audio did very
well. Mindy's awesome.
(18:34):
I just published that a couple weeks ago.
You probably heard it, but all else equal, you really got to go
out there and do the thing like crying the stumps in person and
the video will perform much, much better.
So I'm trying to do a lot more of that.
But it's also hard because sometimes you go spend all day
filming with a crew and you script it and you storyboard it
and do all this. You spend all this money editing
(18:55):
it and it does even fewer views than a talking head podcast.
You just don't know, right? You think you do, but you don't.
So still experimenting with that, but having a lot of fun.
Just hired my first full time producer, Carly.
She's awesome. She used to work for Airac, a
big YouTube channel. She's worked with Mr. Beast and
she's helping me systematize some stuff.
(19:17):
Audio podcast has been kind of flat for a while.
It's very hard to grow. I got a boost from Diary of
Aceo, but it's been the holidaysover the last week or two, so
it's kind of shrunk a little bit.
I don't know how much of that ispermanent versus just seasonal,
but it's growing, just not nearly as fast as I'd like.
My newsletter has grown a ton, from about 77,000 subscribers a
year ago to 240,000 today. I started doing paid ads with a
(19:41):
guy named Kevin a couple months ago to grow it.
So it's growing a lot faster thanks to paid, because before
that I'd only done organic. So the newsletter's kind of a
business in and of itself. It's quite profitable and it's
fun to write and Molly helps me with that.
Shout out to Molly. Open rates are very steady at
about 55%. Mixed click through rates 3 to
(20:03):
5%. Unsubscribe rate point 2.3%.
And I'm adding between 700 and 1500 new subscribers a day more
content stuff. I'm doing more sponsorships,
working with brands like Busy who I love to use for entity
formation go high level. Of course, Beehive.
I invested in Beehive just today, by the way, made an Angel
(20:24):
investment in them. I've been begging them to invest
for a while. I'm doing sponsorships with
Claude, the AI company, Repplett, Lindy.
I also Angel invested in Lindy this year.
Only brands that I really love, like I genuinely love, and
that's been a good stream of income.
Last note regarding content, I'mlaunching a podcast that I've
been recording for a year and a half and I've never published.
(20:46):
It's kind of a nonprofit passionproject that I've wanted to do
for literally a decade. It's called How do you do it?
We're going to link to it. It's just a passion project.
It's my wife and I, and we talked to active Christians that
are older and have mostly grown kids that are out of the house
and ask them, how'd you do it? How did you raise your kids in
(21:07):
the faith, so to speak, in a waythat would keep them in the
faith after leaving the home? Like very tactical like this,
right? Like specifically like how old
were they when you gave them a phone?
What was your vacation policy? What did grounding them look
like? Looking back?
Do you regret being too strict or not strict enough?
So we've recorded 5 episodes andwe're going to start publishing
(21:27):
them. So I've just been
procrastinating. If that sounds interesting to
you, I would love for you to check it out.
Angel investments. I made handful of Angel
investments this year. Lindy, Lindy dot AI.
It's basically the Zapier for AII.
Interviewed the founder, fell inlove with their story.
He's a killer. So I begged them to invest and
they let me. So I wrote a 5 figure check into
(21:49):
that. My good friend Arthur is the
chief growth officer. I think I have that right for a
company called Otera OTTERA and they are enabling FAST channels,
right? So you turn on your smart TV and
you see all these random FAST channels.
That is a tidal wave. To give you some perspective, on
my YouTube channel, in 2024 I think 7% of my views were on
(22:12):
TV's and in 2025 it was 40% from7 to 40% in one year.
People are watching YouTube on TV's now and people are watching
random channels on TV is like myfriend Kevin Espiritu.
He has a YouTube channel with 7 or 8 million subscribers called
Epic Gardening. He has a fast channel and so
people will watch him on their TV, not on YouTube, but on his.
(22:33):
He has his own channel, right? It's like a digital channel that
is exploding right now and his company is exploding and they're
riding that tidal wave. And he's a great guy.
I've known him for 10 years, go to church with him and I wrote a
5 figure check into his business.
And Beehive, I've been begging Tyler let me invest, let me
invest for about 6 months and they opened up around.
(22:55):
So I wrote 5 figure check into that.
And my friend Brandon, he started a business called
Foundation AI, which is now called David davidmarketing.co.
And then the AI side of things is get David dot AI.
He's implementing AI automationsinto small businesses.
I obviously love that space. I talk about it all the time.
(23:17):
And I love Brandon. I believe in him.
So I wrote a 5 figure check intohis business as well.
And you know, Angel investing, most of these go to zero.
They take years or decades to pay out.
So it's too early to tell. But all of these are going well
so far. It's only been months, but happy
with the outcome of all of theseso far.
And then I've made really randomodd Angel investments over the
(23:40):
years, most of which have not gone well.
Let's see, Virtuix, they're building full body VR gaming
system. They're trying to be like the
Peloton for full body VR gaming.Invest in them like five years
ago. Golf board, it's like an
electronic battery operated golfcart.
(24:01):
Invest in them a while ago, maybe Gum Rd. that's actually
done well. They've doubled in valuation.
Hilite, which is kind of like Lululemon.
They have not. I think they've already failed
Keene, which was like a smart home gadget company.
I think they've already failed. I've written most of those off.
But it's kind of funny, like yougot proximity bias.
(24:21):
You know, you invest in people, you know because you assume
they're smarter than the averageperson.
And that seems kind of like a fallacy.
Like just because you know them personally doesn't mean they're
more likely to succeed. But in my experience and in my
friends experience, like people usually have a lot of success
investing in people that they know personally.
So I'm taking that bet. But I will say, if you're
(24:43):
listening to this and you're wondering if I will Angel invest
in your business, the answer is probably no.
Just because I'm, I'm not an Angel investor, I don't want to
be. I don't want to look at decks.
I don't want to hop on calls with founders to be pitched to.
Like, that's not meant to sound harsh.
It's just not my love. Like I want to build things.
I don't want to invest in things.
So it's not really something I'mlooking to do more of.
(25:06):
In addition to those Angel investments, I bought more
Bitcoin this year. I've been buying and holding
Bitcoin since 2016. I firmly believe in it.
I'm pulling up my Robin Hood account as I talk here.
Not buying any more Ethereum forthe time being.
Finance coin, XRP, like a lot ofthis stuff I've just been
holding forever and some of it may still go to zero.
(25:29):
I don't know. But I just, I don't want to
sell. I'd rather just keep holding so
I dollar cost averaging a Bitcoin every single day and I
have a lot of Bitcoin. It's it's a big part of my net
worth. I started buying precious metals
for the first time this year. Thank you Peter for finally
twisting my arm and convincing me.
It's kind of funny there's been some data that shows that you
know, often times investments dothe best when you buy at the all
(25:52):
time high, which is completely the opposite of what you think
buy low, sell high, etcetera. But often times when you buy at
the all time high, you're buyingmomentum, right?
And it just keeps going up. OK, not investment advice.
I'm not an investor right? So don't listen to anything I'm
saying. I Bakley bought Bitcoin at an
all time high $700.00 Felt foolish.
(26:13):
Wasn't gold and silver. It's only been a few months, but
it was at an all time. They were both at all time highs
and silver has been absolutely on a tear.
Who knows? But when I buy, I never sell.
And I said that on the episode ayear ago.
I just don't sell. If I had to sell to pay the
mortgage to feed my family, of course I would.
But I don't. I don't get in and out of
positions. I buy things forever, whether
(26:35):
it's land, stocks or crypto. So I did buy gold and silver a
few months ago and I'm holding for the time being.
I'm not buying anymore, but I bought physical gold and silver
and I have them safely secured stocks.
I bought a lot of stocks this year.
My biggest holding is Robin Hood.
I firmly believe in Robin Hood. I'm a big nephel guy.
(26:56):
NEFL, network effects, founder LED.
I like buying stocks that enjoy network effects.
As in companies that get more valuable as more people start
using it, like Facebook, like eBay, marketplaces, Robin Hood.
Bitcoin has network effects. I'm obsessed with network
effects. So if a stock in my opinion has
network effects and its founder LED, it's it outperforms the
(27:17):
market. In fact, I did an episode about
this a couple months ago, a video and I bought a domain name
Nephil stocks, NEFL stocks.com. You can see for yourself, you
can back test and you can see how stocks have outperformed the
market when they were founder LED and had network effects.
I firmly believe that anything in life, it all comes down to
incentives, right? If something is wrong, if
(27:37):
something is right, it's becausethe incentives are either
aligned or they're not. And if a company is founder LED,
the incentives are usually aligned.
He wants his baby to keep going.Well, like Mark Zuckerberg, like
Elon Musk, like the Robin Hood CEO, Bryan Armstrong, Coinbase
CEO. So Robin Hood is my first
biggest holding. I bought hundreds of shares of
(28:00):
that this year, more in previousyears.
Tesla's my second biggest holding, never selling that.
Coinbase is my third biggest, then Meta, then Google.
I'm like insanely bullish on Google and how they'll stack up
in the AI race. VOO, you know, just the index.
That's my sixth biggest holding.Then Zoom.
And I'm not really bullish on zoom.
(28:21):
I just bought a lot after COVID at way too high of a price and
I'm I've almost broken even on it, but I'm not selling it.
Amazon, then Chipotle, then AMR Alpha metallurgical resources
and I just copied Manish Paprizetrade there.
I've no idea what they're doing,but he's smarter than I am so I
copied it. Coupang, the Amazon of South
(28:42):
Korea, another Nephel stock. The founder is an absolute
monster, just like Jeff Bezos IREN.
It's like the data center play open my own open stock.
I don't think I'm not bullish onit, but whatever.
It's doing well, but I kind of regret it.
Uber going very well. Alibaba, Netflix, Unity, the
(29:03):
software business. Garmin been holding for a while.
It's done really well. Angel Studios, they make clean
movies. That stock is not going well.
It's down about 50% since I purchased it, but we huddle.
StubHub just went public this year.
Both founder LED and enjoys network effects.
Down 22% since purchasing it. And then Airbnb, which is just
(29:24):
doing OK. It's been very flat for a while.
Those are all of my stocks and Idid a big boy thing.
I opened a Roth IRA for both myself and my wife and I learned
what that is. And that's maybe the most mature
thing I've ever done. So I'll be contributing to that
every year. I had some crypto debt.
(29:45):
I borrowed against my my Bitcoinyears ago to buy more Bitcoin.
I paid that off this year. We sold our minivan and my Tesla
Model S this year, swapped out my car with a cyber truck lease.
I did all the research and it told me that I would save more
money if I'd leased a cyber truck as opposed to purchase it
because they depreciate like a rock.
(30:07):
So far, it's maybe the best vehicle I've ever owned.
I love it, I love it, I love it,and we'll see if the lease
decision paid off. It's only a two year lease.
I think I paid 1300 a month for that.
And then I got my wife, Sequoia,a 2024, had 3000 miles on it.
Sequoia in the lunar rock color,and she loves it, looks awesome.
It's really the first vehicle that she's actually loved.
(30:29):
So we've graduated from the minivan.
On a personal note, I'm considering some goals for 2026.
I've never been much of A gold person, but I want to be.
I set a bunch of gold last year and I failed at most of them,
but I think all of us equal. It's better to have goals than
not. I signed up for an ultra
marathon this Saturday. I have not ran since June and
(30:51):
that was only four miles. I ran 11 miles in all of 2025.
I'm completely out of shape. I haven't gained my weight back.
I weigh 260 lbs for all my 20s, but I'm sitting at about 2:10
right now. I try to be closer to 200 and
I've been working out in the yard and stuff, but I have no
cardio capacity right now. And I was standing in line for a
(31:11):
ride at Six Flags talking to my 15 year old who is a cross
country runner. He's never ran more than 8
miles. And I've been trying to convince
him to run an ultra and he's like, no, I don't want to, I
don't want to. And then finally I was like,
I'll give you 300 bucks if you run one with me.
And I'm, I'm like, I'm as out ofshape as you get.
And he's like done. So I pulled out my phone.
We found an ultra in Waco this Saturday, which is what, January
(31:35):
3rd? I don't know, it's called the
Waco Resolution Run or something.
And we signed up with a 50K, which is 31 miles.
And I'm not running at all this week.
I'm not training. I just want to see how it goes.
So it's going to be painful, butit's going to be awesome and my
son's going to do great. And it sounds, I don't know, it
sounds more intimidating than itis.
Think of it like a hike where you do a lot of running because
(31:57):
there's a lot of walking on an ultra.
Even like the best ultra runnersin the world strategically power
walk up hills. They they strategically walk at
times. It's normal, it's accepted.
So I'll just do a lot of walkingand hopefully I can finish in
under 6 hours. And I'm excited to see what my
boy is capable of because most people don't know what they're
capable of physically, mentally or otherwise.
(32:18):
So I feel like you know how you do one thing is how you do
everything. And if he pushes his limits in
this, and if I push my limits inthis, it will open up doors in
other parts of our lives. So I have run 14 ultra marathons
between like 2019 and 2022, giveor take, my last one being 100
Miller three years ago. So my body will remember, like
(32:42):
my muscles will remember to an extent I think, I hope, but that
only goes so far. So I will report back on how
that goes. I kind of want to wake up at
5:00 AM everyday this year, whether it's a Sunday, Saturday,
whatever. I'm an all or nothing person.
So when I set goals that are like, all right, only eat sweets
on Sundays, it just doesn't go well.
It needs to be like, I eat no sugar this year or I don't have
(33:04):
a sugar goal and I do whatever Iwant.
So I'm curious to see in the comments genuinely, this isn't
just like engagement bait. If you guys have set goals
around waking up early and what was the structure of that goal,
what did it look like? How well did you do at it or
not? Very curious about that.
I want to transcribe the whole Book of Mormon just like write
(33:26):
the whole thing down in a journal instead of reading it
with my ADHD. Like I I cannot focus when I try
to read the scriptures. I just can't pay attention like
I can I could. I don't want to just write
myself off but I don't. It's extremely hard.
I still do it almost every day because I think it's a good
thing to do even if I don't retain anything.
But I feel like if I transcribedit onto a journal, I saw an
(33:49):
Instagram reel about someone that did this with the Bible.
I feel like if I did that, I would get more out of it.
So I think I'm going to try that.
I got a new job slash calling inmy church nine months ago.
I basically helped my pastor andI was very intimidated by it.
But it's been amazing and I loveit.
And I get to hang out with the youth a lot and I get to push
(34:09):
myself and be uncomfortable a lot.
And it's difficult, but I really, really have enjoyed
doing that a lot. And to wrap this up, you know,
this is a business podcast. People love hearing about
income, real numbers. I don't really like talking
about that. It does really well, like when I
talk about how much money I make, whatever those pieces of
(34:30):
content do really well, but it'salso awkward.
So I want to try to find the balance between like showing
people what's possible and also keeping cards close to my chest
because I'm somewhat of a private persons.
But this year was incredibly transformative for me in every
sense of the word. There's a lot to be grateful
for. And I think I counted and I'm
(34:51):
making six figures of net profitfrom 7 to 8 different sources
each. So any of them could go away
tomorrow, but I could also gain one or two more tomorrow from
other things. Much of that is driven by
content. And I think people are quick to
write that off and say, oh, you're cheating because you have
an audience. It's like, well, if you
(35:12):
consider, you know, learning skills for 15 years, you know,
starting 80 different businessesand then posting about those
experiences and then using that as a distribution channel as
cheating, OK. But it certainly wasn't the
shortcut. These are hard fought lessons.
I'm not like a 19 year old like regurgitating business books
that I'm reading. Like I've actually done these
(35:33):
things and I'm still doing thesethings.
And it would be foolish of me tonot use advantages that I have
to grow a business. I know people that are really
good at making content and they feel kind of prideful about not
wanting to have to rely on that to start a new business.
And I just think that's foolish.Like if you became the best
person in the world at Facebook ads, why wouldn't you use
(35:54):
Facebook ads to grow your next business just because like
you're prideful about it and youwant to see if you could do it.
OK, but why handicap yourself ifyou don't need to?
So I'm always going to be extremely mindful about things
that I promote, things that I talk about, things that I start
because I don't want to waste people's time or attention.
I know that's like the world's most scarce and valuable
(36:15):
resources attention. So I am going to be very mindful
about that. But at the end of the day, like
if I can offer something that people want to pay for and that
they will find more value out ofthan what they pay, then I'm
going to see if I can do that ina good, sustainable, moral,
ethical way. So 2024 was I think my best
earning year ever, and 2025 did about three times more than
(36:38):
that. My main YouTube channel makes
between 15 and $30,000 a month of profit.
My secondary YouTube channel makes between $503,000 a month.
My Facebook page makes between 10 and $30,000 a month.
My communities each make net profit between 30,000 and
(36:59):
$150,000 a month. And when I say make, I mean like
make net profit to me, not revenue.
Texas Snacks six figures a year in profit RV park stuff 6
figures a year of profit Sponsorships closing in on 7
figures a year of profit Newsletter 6 figures of profit
(37:19):
Mid to high 6 figures TikTok 5 figures Audio Podcast 6 figures
Other bets like other random 1 offs 6 figures.
Oh, I forgot, I haven't RV slashmobile Home Park community.
That's another six figures a year of profit and you will
never, ever catch me say the phrase multiple 6 figures.
(37:42):
If it's 900,000, it's six figures.
If it's 100,000, it's six figures.
Spark Loop helps monetize my newsletter.
That's five figures high 5 figures a year of profit.
Twitter 1000 bucks a month, 2000bucks a month, Amazon affiliate,
other affiliate stuff, a few 1000 bucks a month.
And I think that's just about most of it.
(38:02):
I have no idea what 2026 will bring, but I'm very grateful.
I'm grateful for all of you for being a part of this, for
helping me, supporting me, for your kind words.
I receive much, much, much, much, much more support than I
do negativity. And for that, I'm very grateful.
So thank you for following along, listening, watching
however you consume this. But just remember, all of the
(38:25):
time you spend consuming this orother business content, it's
kind of a waste if you don't take action from it, right?
Strive to get your dopamine fromaction and not from information.
OK, that's not my quote, but I heard it and I love it.
So I'm taking it. Action, not information.
Go take action and you'll be better off for it.
So love you guys, appreciate you.
(38:45):
We'll see you next time on the corner office.
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