Ep44: A Closer Look at Crypto and RE Investment Strategies with Dan Young

[00:00:00] Dan Young
The younger you are, the higher your risk portfolio. When you're younger, you can take more risks. You have more time to earn it back. And also your bandwidth is not there to babysit too many detailed things you have to actively manage. And when I talk about passive, you still have to treat everything like it's a business. So even if you have a real estate portfolio and you have a management company, it's still business. 

[00:00:17] Podcast Intro
You are working professional but struggling to balance the workload of your career, family obligations, and preparing for your financial future. If so, this podcast is for you. You've spent years learning your craft, and now it's time to focus on your financial future. This podcast will teach you what you need to retire wealthy and happy. Let's dive in. 

[00:00:40] Roger Jacobsen
Welcome to the Retire Wealthy and Happy podcast. I'm Roger Jacobsen. Today, I'm co-hosting with Anthony Esparza and our special guest. Take it away, Anthony. 

[00:00:50] Anthony Esparza
Hey guys, Anthony Esparza here. Got a great special guest today, Dan Young. He is the founder of PC Laptops, Zydax, and the Ugly Unicorn Crypto Hedge Fund. He is a multi-year Inc 500 winner as well as being on the AMD gaming advisory council and served on the intel board of advisors for 16 years Fun fact, he built the largest bitcoin mining facility in Utah in 2014, and another fun fact back when I previously spoke with him. He's on a journey to create a million millionaires. So, Dan Young, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:29] Roger Jacobsen
There's a lot of things we could talk about, so we can just kind of like figure out which rabbit hole we're going to go down. I think everybody in Utah is well aware because of the PC laptops name and the commercials, not everybody's aware of all the other outside things you've done. 

[00:01:45] Anthony Esparza
Yeah, maybe you could give us a quick insight to kind of your journey and I mean, it sounds like PC laptops was your, your first venture. And that kind of was the domino that started it all.

[00:01:56] Dan Young
Well, the big one is everybody can, I'll give you an actually the quick since the beginning story. I grew up poverty stricken. My, my dad was a janitor. My mom was a bank teller and there were immigrants who escaped from China during World War II. I always watched them struggling, working really hard. And one of my dad's friends, Uncle Henry, ended up selling his bank for like 780 million, and they had stock options and all that. And I sat down with him a lot. And I was just wondering why a lot of my relatives were barely making it or middle class. But I had a few of these uncles make hundreds of millions and now their estates worth billions of dollars. How do they do that? And so he said that, uh, Uncle Henry said he won't give me money, but he'll give me knowledge. And so I used to kind of try to follow him around a little bit. And so that's why I learned how to do stuff.

[00:02:45] 
The big one was selling. I sold sunglasses at Venice Beach, California when I was 14 years old to 15 years old. We set up a stand. We got great looking girls in high school. We put them on roller skates, bought sunglasses by the case, and we sold them for 10 for 1 pair, 15 for 2, and the girls would just go up to couples and say, hey, it's bright out here. They're super cute. Do you need a pair of sunglasses? And we would make 1, 000 a day at least. Wow. So, uh, as long as you got a personality, personality goes a long way, you know, as long as you care about people. And that was great because I was doing what I love. Got to hang out with the girls, got hot dogs and drinks and hamburgers. And son, you know, what do you want? Then I came to Utah and started a computer company. 

[00:03:28] Roger Jacobsen
Awesome. Always an entrepreneur, then. 

[00:03:31] Anthony Esparza
Um, so PC laptops and just chat with you in the past. And I don't know what came first in this order, but you did buy a duplex. You lived in one side, fixed up the other side. Is that right?

[00:03:42] Dan Young
And yeah, I mean, the shortcut of it is this talking to all the mentors over the years is really usually you'll have a money making basic income string. I worked at the mall when I first got to Utah. It was terrible money. Met some great mentors and started 1 of my companies. But the big thing is with tech, there's a lot of profit velocity. A lot of times very quickly, whether it's online or whatever you're manufacturing, and, uh, it's important to peel off some of that profit and buy more boring assets, more conserve assets. All real estate, right? Um, the big thing that I think a lot of young people could do, it's harder right now in today's rate environment and the way prices are, but there's always an opportunity is about that duplex and it was nice because I was able to rent out half and it's like house hacking.

[00:04:30] 
Right? You need to take that income you have and I paid my mortgage with it. So I live there. 150 a month cashflow positive, which was great. Meanwhile, working on tech and different things, our company within a year, we lost 25 grand the first year we did over a million in rev the next year. And then it just kept going. So we started all these other companies, but you'd have years, I'd have years, I'd make millions of dollars. And the years where we actually lost money. So, but the years that you made millions of dollars is the secret was just to live very within your means, right? Take that profit and be finding different investments like real estate. And back in the late nineties, one of my customers was a big stock guy or something for Merrill Lynch or something, or Goldman Sachs, which one of the big ones, well, it's not financial advice, but back then he was like, you should buy some Apple, this company, Apple is Google thing, it's Amazon bookstore. So he gave me like this list.

[00:05:22] 
And stocks, and so when I would have a good month, I would consistently invest and that turned into crypto, obviously, because the mining facility, we're not mining now, but we did from 14 to 17. Made a huge amount of money in crypto and peeled off 75 percent in 17 to buy more industrial real estate. So, it's almost like taking volatile assets. I call it almost like a 40, 40, 20, 40 percent of your income is like pretty boring stuff, you know, passive stuff. If you can get it like real estate, it's not totally passive unless. We use property management company when you have enough. So that's a good one. Then equities and some crypto exposure. I don't say go all in or anything crazy, just a little position there and also investing in individual businesses and projects.

[00:06:07] 
But the most important thing is to get your core business smashing out lots of profit or your main job first, because I see a lot of younger people do like, well, I want to be real estate. I want to be stock. I want to be crypto dude. I want to be Forex dude. And they ended up just floating sideways for 20 days, 20 years. And then they're not watching it. So they get sued because they did something wrong with the company and then they lose everything and they just keep resetting. That's a bad way to go. 

[00:06:30] Roger Jacobsen
You know, you definitely got to have something in your core business that starts out, takes care of the monthly net, and then you can move on.

[00:06:37] Anthony Esparza
People know you as PC laptops founder, especially in Utah. I'm sure probably everywhere, but building off a PC laptop, we haven't really talked much about crypto on Roger. I think that would be kind of fun. 

[00:06:50] Roger Jacobsen
Yeah, this is, this is really the first time we've had anybody that's done a lot of crypto on. 

[00:06:56] Anthony Esparza
So yeah, ugly unicorn fund could be interesting to learn about and see what you're doing with that.

[00:07:02] Dan Young
Pretty unique. So that crypto mine we built in 2014, we had over 4, 000 miners up on the first. A little bit and the electricity costs are just crazy. Mining is not really the way to go. I have a few friends that try to get free gas from landfills and methane and geothermal, but it's not really profitable for most people and they should really got to figure it out. But right now, blockchain. In itself is kind of like the internet to the late 90s, early 2000s. It's very new, but right now, finally, government regulated institutions are looking at these things. There's a big amount of ETFs being applied for Bitcoin right now. You have black rock. We met with actually a black rock rep the other day, but also fidelity, all the big institutions and all of crypto is 1.

[00:07:46] 
6 trillion and our crystal ball. Our analysts think. That if these ETFs get approved, you'll see, you could see in a short period of time, a 10 trillion market cap, which is crazy. But you know, you've seen Coinbase get sued finance FTX blew up all these scams out there. And what our fund does is we help people invest in crypto. We're third party admin, fourth party audited. You could have PPM. It's a hedge fund. So it's structured where a lot of accredited investors have invested into larger hedge funds. In real estate, let's say so the format, the reporting accountability is all this similar where most crypto projects are scams. Like you go to a family party and there's this dude, it's like, dude, check out this new, and it's basically a blockchain Ponzi scam. That's like 99%. The internet was a big scam hole in the beginning too, you know? So, but the people who figured it out. And met the right people, did the right diligence, did okay. That's what we do. We help people make a lot of money with that. That's awesome. 

[00:08:46] Anthony Esparza
And what do those like requirements look like to be involved in that? And as far as ETFs and blockchain goes? I mean, I've done a lot of research on it. Just, I'm probably not as knowledgeable as you are. But is that the future for payments and transferring money and?

[00:09:02] Dan Young
It's just software. So, I mean, all cryptocurrency ecosystems are is software. So there's going to be good software as we bad software. There's software that track supply chain does transactional payments. And really, if you look at all the software companies since the 90s, like, or even the 80s and 70s. Most of them didn't make it right, but if they solve the real problem. People they do, and that's like, part of our investing thesis is we try to look for at least for our real high upside projects. Things that have a docs team with a historical technological history of experience, and then also a roadmap that's viable and functional utility. If it has all those things, it's great. Now, the problem with our fund, I tell you, is it's only open to accredited investors because the government doesn't want people investing with the life savings that doesn't have a lot and lose it and then be like. Oh man. 'cause crypto is really bouncy, you know, it goes up, drops at 80%. It's just, but then again, apple drops 51% in 2001 in September in one day. So tech is kind of tech and it's just tech. It's tech software in my mind. 

[00:10:08] Roger Jacobsen
Yeah. We're well aware of, uh, well. Accredited investors, we do 506 B syndications, usually where we've have an intimate knowledge of where they are financially and have had that conversation. It's documented in the past and we know that they're going to put their money in and they know us and everything else. Right now we're starting 506 C. Where we can actually just tell the world, but we can only admit people that are accredited have a million net worth and 300, 000 as a couple income with reasonable expectations to continue. And it's the exact thing. You know, you don't want them to spend their life savings and get stuck. We're developing on an island right now in Honduras, that's a little bit more risky than the apartments in New Mexico that are like guaranteed to have working class people be able to afford it. So, different thing. So, how does somebody go about buying into your, would you call it a fund syndication? 

[00:11:05] Dan Young
Yeah, if they go to uglyunicornfund. com, they can watch a video, a full walkthrough of what we do, and how our thesis works, and they can fill out a little application there, and then we can validate their credit. We do AML check, we send them a PPM. They can look at it. Their attorney can look at it. Their CPA can look at it, ask us a million questions. And if everybody's comfortable, then they can engage with us. 

[00:11:30] Roger Jacobsen
What's the assets under management on that? What's the total right now? 

[00:11:33] Dan Young
This fund is structured like you were talking about. So we can actually advertise we're allowed a hundred investors with a hundred million dollar cap on the starter fund. We have a secondary fund that we're going to be launching because we are like. Almost 80 percent full with this fund and that'll be for like, qualified purchasers only, but we can have 2000 investors and we don't advertise. But now that we have a track record behind us right now, this fund is what probably like a little over 17M as of this last couple of days and it'll cap out. I think pretty. Fast in this bull run and be full but then the secondary fund will launch now for people that are home gamers A lot of people that are watching all who aren't accredited right and they're wondering how to engage in crypto It's the number one question I get when when they're ready if they have enough being a credit investor They can talk to me.

[00:12:22] 
But meanwhile, I give a lot of information for free I'll give you a quick summary here in 30 seconds one Don't keep a lot of money on coinbase or binance and stuff like that And the reason is, I've gotten like four text messages in the last month. People have been hacked for over 200, 000. They usually will steal, sim hack you, steal your email, and then take your money. And Coinbase isn't responsible for it if it's like consumer negligence, they say, right? It's in the terms. So it really pains me. I saw one guy got hacked for 400 grand. That was like 90 percent of his life savings. Oh, wow. Crazy. Because he wanted to earn 5%. They're paying a little over 5 percent yield on their cash, right? You hold USDC. And so he's like, that's a good place to store it. And then he gets hacked. It's like, geez. The second thing is use a hardware wallet. There's one called a ledger and it's all this news about how they're not totally secure. It's how you function, use hardware wallets. So I recommend people create one on all these hardware devices and only send funds there, right?

[00:13:16] 
For storage. Don't transact with that hardware key with projects and things like I'm connected to anything and then just set it right down your seed key and forget about it after you have it all backed up. You know, that's probably the safest way if a guy just wants to store it. But here's the problem. Retirement is the subject of this podcast. And if you hold, let's say, a million dollars in Bitcoin, you earn zero yield, zero. Right. But if you have a million dollar piece of real estate, you charge rent. Right. That's good. Right. So, what we do in our fund is we provide liquidity for decentralized exchanges. So they're like coinbase, except they're not a big corporation. And a lot of people like that because they're not afraid of it going bankrupt, you know. And we provide the liquidity. So someone wants to trade from Ethereum Bitcoin. They're using a lot of our funds, right? We make a fee and exchange fee, and then we pay that back majority of that back to our investors.

[00:14:09] 
So, when Bitcoin dropped 70%, this last cycle last year and a half. We only corrected 17 percent was so we outpaced the market by 53 percent on the bear market, which people were like, that's amazing. Now, on the upside, we've made our investors over 60 percent this year, which is pretty frigging awesome. Considering that we had some chop too, you know, so yeah. 

[00:14:29] Anthony Esparza
It's been a weird year for us as a whole, didn't know what direction it was going there. 

[00:14:35] Roger Jacobsen
That's incredible.

[00:14:35] Anthony Esparza
I am curious Dan, passive income, is this industrial, real estate, what do you got as far as passive income kind of working for you currently?

[00:14:46] Dan Young
Well, I mean close to passive, there's no true passive income, like true true. You still have to keep an eye on things a little, but you don't want to just set it and forget it. But right now, a lot of the buildings that we bought in the 2017 era and 2008 and 9 era are great. I mean, some of these buildings we bought just crap holes for half a million. They're worth two and a half, three million now. A lot of them are fully 195 percent rented out. When they get too debilitated, I'll just blow them up. And build something fresh on it, but we try to get every drop we can. But what's nice about that is I always make sure I use a property management company, and they usually charge about, I don't know, 5 to 8%, depending on the services they give you.

[00:15:25] 
But if it's a good one, you don't even have to fill your tenants. You don't have to bug people. And then I always queue up to sell buildings if I see a new one that I want, so I can do 1031, you know, where you sell a building, you buy it in a certain time frame, meaning you have some tax benefits, you know, a lot of people don't think about this because the problem with retirement is when you have cash flow coming in, you have a tax problem, right? And real estate's great because you can depreciate it. There's a thing called accelerated cost segregation. So, like, if I buy a bill for 6. 5 million, I got 3 million right off the 1st year. Freaking awesome. So, all that passive income, you want to try to offset it with good depreciation. So more real estate helps with that. Most of the other income is still active. Well, I guess our fund is sort of passive for investors because we do the work. That's why people like funds, uh, we do all the work on the crypto and then they just look at their statement every two weeks and they're like, okay, as long as it's performing, stay in, you know, 

[00:16:22] Roger Jacobsen
So Anthony and I are both realtors. Have you ever done any purchases with crypto on real estate?

[00:16:28] Dan Young
No, not at this point. I mean, the guys I want to sell, I mean, you'll see that's like some psycho dude be like, Hey, I'll take Bitcoin. So just be right down my wallet. I'll give you the whatever. But like, as of right now, it's slow diligence to buy building. It's slow build diligence to get financing. It's slow and crypto just mix that in the mix for buying real estate. What was the waste of time? Like, even for our 5 like, why are us dollars to our bank? It's like, well, I go through all this rigmarole until it's. A full integration into the system, right? 

[00:16:59] Anthony Esparza
Which could be years down the line, but it could be very possible It seems like and I don't know how much you can talk about this. 

[00:17:05] Roger Jacobsen
I try to do this with the well. This is, this podcast is for educational purposes and not investing advice in any way You can talk about whatever you want. 

[00:17:16] Anthony Esparza
Okay. Yeah, and I don't know if crypto and etfs are different or not But what cryptos out there? Provide great utility that you're kind of looking at. And, you know, as Bitcoin, one of those with high utility, that kind of 

[00:17:26] Dan Young
Bitcoin has no utility. Bitcoin is a storage of wealth. I mean, that's it. It does pretty much nothing. I mean, they've put a few like NFT type of things on there and some data, but it's just a storage of wealth. It's like not all that functional. Ethereum is one of the biggest. Blockchains out there. It's number two, and there's a lot of projects being built under Ethereum. L2, which are like layer two stuff. And you have a lot of smaller ecosystems with a lot of projects, some specialized like in banking, supply chain tracking, all kinds of things there as a hedge fund manager, I can't give token recommendations. But I can give people kind of broad market knowledge and the broad market knowledge is you don't even have to be a major genius to engage crypto. I think if you look at the top market cap projects and do your research and only invest what you're willing to lose. So it's usually small amounts for people, but it doesn't take that small amount.

[00:18:18] 
When I bought Bitcoin, I bought. Well, I put like a little over 25 grand to it. It was between 170 and 130, 170 of Bitcoin. It didn't require like life changing money to create life changing money. And if I lost it, I'm like, well, I could have ate a nice steak dinner, had a couple of drinks and the same thing, you know what I mean? Or vacation to a family Disneyland, same price, right? Skip one vacation, plan your future, maybe. 

[00:18:44] Anthony Esparza
Yeah, you never know there's probably gonna be tons of crypto with great utility like you're talking about once it finally sticks and makes It through all the stuff. It'll probably blow up I mean, I kind of stress about it because I feel like I'm behind and I need to be in it.

[00:18:58] Dan Young
So you're pretty young dude. You're getting started Yeah, I need to expect to get your ass kicked like five to ten times between now and our age or more Yeah, looking forward to it. I get my butt kicked all the time, but You just don't look backwards. That screws with your neck and you just learn from and you frame out and write down all what you learned to just don't do anything illegal. You don't want a free warm suit.

[00:19:20] Roger Jacobsen
We had a guy that was very smart about crypto because an sec attorney, like he was able to do syndications and stuff like that and spoke at one of the areas. And he basically said. Right now, there's a lot of instability in the market, but what you need to do is eventually find the Google or the Apple or the one that just one of them is going to blow up and when we figure that out, that's the big upside.

[00:19:43] Dan Young 
What I did actually in the very beginning of it is I did what I call it. I don't recommend you do this, but I did it. It's called the crap coin spread. And so basically, you look at the top 20 projects that are out there, and you just shotgun blast it and forget that you have it. And one of them actually that we hit in the crap coin spread is in 2014. We didn't buy this actually, typically, but when we were mining, Dogecoin was the easiest thing to mine and most profitable. And so. We mined Dogecoin and then hung on to a lot of it until the bull run years ago, and it was lucky. But that was pure luck, man, or stupidity, but it turned out okay.

[00:20:25] Anthony Esparza
I actually have a similar experience. I, you know, they got TikTok and all that stuff nowadays, and I was scrolling through TikTok one day, and I kept seeing this thing about SafeMoon. Safemoon was like a crap coin and it was worth like 000 something and I put three grand into it and like within two weeks, it turned into like 80, 000 and I ended up selling it. It was on TrustWallet. TrustWallet. Good thing you sold it, dude. I sold it. I was like, could I make it 200k? And I was like, don't be greedy. Just sell it. Well, the problem was TrustWallet had some hidden fee. I got like half of the profit and then transferred it to Binance. Binance took. Months to verify my ID the day they verified my ID Bitcoin crashed But it was still a good profit at the end all said and done It was awesome, but pure luck and it was like a pump and dump for sure.

[00:21:13] Dan Young
Good thing you don't own it now.

[00:21:14] Anthony Esparza
Yeah, it's a good thing I'm out any profits a profit it's good I'll take it I'll even crypto Industrial real estate and PC laptops. What other things do you got going on projects or anything cool you're working on? 

[00:21:29] Dan Young
A big one is I constantly buy stocks every single month, not a lot, always, but a small percentage of my income. I think it's always a healthy thing to do. Stocks. A little crypto, but really a lot of people ask, well, how is it allocated to have 52 years old? So 75 percent is real estate excluding businesses. But when you're talking stuff, that's not under my control is mainly real estate. But again, now the younger you are, the higher your risk portfolio. When you're younger, I think you can take more risks. You have more time to earn it back. And also your bandwidth is not there to babysit too many detail things you have to actively manage. And when I talk about passive, you still have to treat everything like it's a business. So even if you have a real estate portfolio and you have a management company, it's still business. So it's not like you want to disappear for 20 years and because you'll come back and probably got embezzled from and got charged 5, 000 times the management fees you should have. And you know what I'm saying? Like you got to pay attention, especially on your tax stuff, because if you just signed stuff without reading it, you could get it, go to jail.

[00:22:28] Roger Jacobsen
Yeah, we have sticks. Property managers that we work with at monument that are at my company and it is a constant, constant communication like this morning. We're on a group text and I probably got 20 texts to 1 of the managers where we're letting them know that we've finished the remodel and it's ready to go and updating constantly. Like, how many units are vacant? Why is this unit fixed and vacant? What do we have to do? Do we have to lower the price? Like super active where a lot of people just kind of set it and forget it. And you can't really trust a property management company. They're never like going to be perfect unless you make them. Be perfect. You have to call them on their mistakes. You have to figure out what the problems are. You'll be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, but you have to point it out. And this is unacceptable. And we need to fix this. And we do so many things above and beyond just letting them have a go at it.

[00:23:24] Dan Young
Yeah, I always joke with my wife, you know, because, uh, I don't know, I'm not super religious, but in the Bible, it says that a man was cursed to toil the soil and women. So, you know, it's tough to truly retire if you have a lot of stuff and speaking about that, like, I have 1 mentor named Jeff and he's got crazy. I'm going to ask. It's probably over a billion now in real estate and everything and Jeff is 72 now and he's like, man, I'm all about simplification. So he's really. Simplified his assets though, quite a bit. And again, and that typically goes with age, you move more to that simplification, but your returns, a lot of times aren't as high per dollar, but then you don't need them to be right. You need them just to be preserved and growing at a decent. 

[00:24:08] Roger Jacobsen
That's cool. I think simplification is something everybody finds later on in their life. Before it's like you can deal with the drama and the headaches and everything else. And as you get older, it's like, I just don't have that in my bandwidth. I can't deal with that during the day and then come home happy. 

[00:24:25] Anthony Esparza
So, yeah. And do you remember when we met at the retirement home? I came up to you, you were driving the turquoise Tesla. My parents, when they were at, 

[00:24:32] Dan Young
Yeah. It's been a while. 

[00:24:34] Anthony Esparza
So that's where I originally met you. I don't know if you ever remember that, but I was just some punk kid. And I was like, Hey man, nice Tesla and just got into real estate. I was telling you about everything. And that's when I found out you were PC laptops founder. 

[00:24:48] Roger Jacobsen
Yeah. That's kind of cool. What's your role in PC laptops right now? 

[00:24:51] Dan Young
Babysitting. I've got a president there and also Zydex, the bigger tech company. And the big thing is just roadmapping product. Where they're going and, you know, in any company, you'll have your marketing guys and girls, your salespeople, your operations, your finance, your logistics, people, your customer service support people. And so it's constantly going from 1 of those departments. Another. To optimize and make sure all the standard operating procedures are written being followed and really in the business, you have traffic and you have closes. Right? So you have leads and you have closes. And so you have to constantly work on those 2 halves on the front end of it. But it's really important for selling products.

[00:25:33]
 You got to make sure you have really great products. And that means reading through every customer complaint. And then if graphing that and then solving more problems by creating processes based on customer feedback, right? Loop around. That's a lot of work. It's fun. You know, just connecting the dots and doing what you need to do to make it happen. But any business, real estate, tech, all that requires. Similar type of things, even running a hedge fund, you have to have interested people who want to invest. You got to find them somewhere, you know, and then you got to solve their problems. And usually their problem, like with crypto is like they've gotten destroyed or rugged or whatever, but they want to be involved with it, but they want safety and security. So in our field, the problem that people have is safety, security, downside risk mitigation. They don't want to lose it all. You don't want. Crazy adjustment. So by solving those problems, most of the other funds that we compete with are trading funds. So a bunch of dudes are like trading crypto all day and get their crystal balls working.

[00:26:29] 
And I don't know of that many traders that have been wealthy more than a decade or 2. I just don't, but I know 99 percent of my circle. Are people who are doing business for 2, 3, 4 decades and every year is usually pretty good. 99 percent of the time, I mean, you do have those recessionary year or twos, but overall, but the problem is now is a lot of everyone's looking for this short cycle of quick buck subsidized money, blah, blah, blah. And it was funny. I was sitting with Michael Wolf. He has more storage units than anybody I know. And we were just talking about this, how like people there's a lot of times they're just so impatient and wanting this get rich quick where get rich slow is like building your house on a rock instead of like mushy sand, you know, but people don't, they just want it so fast. Now I think people can get money fast. Just take profits like that coin you mentioned and then put it in boring stuff and then forget about that. Just let it grow and maintain it. But it's a weird, it's a weird philosophy. 

[00:27:27] Anthony Esparza
That's my generation summarized in a sentence is everyone's looking for that get rich quick scheme and see all the mentors Advertising classes and I couldn't realize it's not real for me I try to focus on like just get better by 1 percent a day over a year 365 percent better if you can just do 1 percent.

[00:27:47] Dan Young
The most important thing for young people is to be clear on physical financial and spiritual goals, whatever you want, and then map out exactly what needs to happen to deem yourself successful in that area. And then you have to put a timeline. So within a year or 2 years, 3, 4, 5, and then schedule all the actions onto your phone that you need to do. And then you'll eat that elephant 1 bite at a time. 10 years will go by. You're like, crap, I got 50 million dollars now. Crap. This is great. I didn't even feel that way, but you're still eating frugal. It's still driving something fairly reliable and you're living in a modest home. And you're not YOLOing all day or buying bottles of weird alcohol for randoms, you're just focusing on what, you know, and then your meditation is working out, man, and taking care of yourself and eating right, then it was a scale more, it was just print more and more and more.

[00:28:36] Anthony Esparza
Awesome. What physical, spiritual, I know you said something about meditation. I know you do a little bit of that stuff. How important do you think that is to, and maybe it's more for mental clarity, or, uh.

[00:28:48] Dan Young
It's every, no, it's everything. I think, like, making money is cool, but you have to schedule every day 30 minutes to exercise. You have to know everything that you put in your face to eat. Like, you have to meticulously monitor that like a company, because your body is a company, in a sense, and the more energy and power you have, the quicker you can execute it and outflank any competitor. Most guys my age at 52 are just like, barely can walk, man. I can hike up anything all day freaking long. I can cold plunge it, red light it, freaking full stack it at the gym. You know, I mean, all this, I'll get into MMA. I don't freaking care. Like, and not that I'm trying to impress you, but impress upon you that I learned this because the older mentors, some of these guys are 70, 80. And for their age, I mean, they are vascular and smart. Their brain is sharp as a tack. So I think that's why most of us as, as entrepreneurs tend to like tap out. And that's because we don't have the energy anymore. Right? But if you have the energy, people like, Dan, how do you do this? Like, sometimes I'll get up at 4:30 a.m.

[00:29:52] 
Get them sometimes with my calls at 11 at night sometimes. And that's freaking fine with me a few days a week. You do need to have days where you're arrested a bore, but I can output more now than when I was 25 and I'm a lot more experienced. So I don't have to like brute force it as much. So I'd say like that physical thing. But don't let that physical thing. Don't be a gym rat where like you really think you need to work workout heavy more than 30 minutes to an hour or a day. Mm-Hmm. Anything beyond that. It's like diminishing returns. You're probably wearing your joints out. Just get a good 30 minutes. Even if you can walk your dog really fast for 30 minutes minimum, fine. Cool. But my pug will be happy. So it's like, you know, few birds, one stone and then killing all sugar. That's a big one. Like not all, but. Just really focusing. You're eating clean, grass finished meats and proteins and vitamins. Get your blood work checked, knowing what your glucose, your cholesterol is, your amnesies, testosterone.

[00:30:45] 
And that's a big thing with dudes. Like, if you are a guy past 4, your testosterone going down, you should go to a doctor, get it checked because that will kill your productivity. 90 percent you'll start gaining weight. You'll work out. Your arms will be buggy whips. But if you check out my Instagram and I'm not like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee or anything, but my energy is like freaking nuts. So that's how you do it. 

[00:31:07] Roger Jacobsen
We see that a lot in like the seminars we go to, like we'll go to Miami for fun launch live or something like that. And it's a big real estate thing. We'll have multi days. 

[00:31:18] Dan Young
That's Bridger, my fund partner, my 50 50 partner. Bridger Pennington is my 50-50 partner. Yeah, Bridger 

[00:31:24] Roger Jacobsen
Pennington's awesome and he's taught a lot of people about funds. And it was kind of funny because I had a really good friend named Earl that's a motorcycle guy that owns apartments with us. And I'm like, dude, we have to go to Bridger's thing in Miami. And he's like, hmm. I'm like, dude, there's going to be like 2, 500 people that are in funds. That are doing this, that, you know, they might invest with us or we might learn from them. And to the point he was like, eh, I don't know. I'm like, dude, we could go to Miami, rent Harleys and go down to Key West after the event. And then just have a good time. He's like, send me that link again. And so, yeah, we went to a fun lunch live, but the point is, is when you go to something like that, you have to like have the energy. To go through conversation after conversation and long after the daily seminar about the fund is over, you're still out there networking or you're tired and going home. So you have to have the energy to be able to last to actually get to the good conversations that you'll have. So definitely a big believer. 

[00:32:23] Dan Young
That's why Anthony for kids your age. Don't drink alcohol. Don't smoke. We don't do anything. Like that, that just screws with your brain. A lot of people say it relaxes me, dude. If you're stressed out, seriously, run as hard as you can, like Forrest Gump for like five minutes or even two minutes, even a minute, and you will be in a different mental state, you know, natural.

[00:32:45] Anthony Esparza
I like that. You said that I think we need to hear that. I see young people see a lot of us going and. Weird directions, especially now, world's changed. I wanna know what gave you that mental tick, what gave you that, like, I don't know if it's a mindset, or if it's a tick, or if you're born with it. How can somebody like me, younger or older, develop that, like, growth? Kind of mindset whether it's physical spiritual mental business Developing assets over 10 years of time What gave you that like mindset of just always getting a little bit better? And this kind of goes back to like there's no overnight success. It's all a long-term game. 

[00:33:19] Dan Young
Well, sadness is caused by impotent goals Sadness, some depression, because if you're not clear where you want to go, you feel like you're just running around in circles and you just don't feel like you have any purpose. So I encourage you to like, take a day, go to the mountains or somewhere alone. Don't bring anybody and just write down what you want to become. And get it in writing and that'll give you some clarity and take actions towards that every day in the calendar. And like I told you, you can set insane goals, like your big V Hacks, big hairy ass goals, but you can also have small victories. And if you make it, let's say you want to put on 15 pounds of muscle and lose 20 pounds in fat or something. Go move a pound or so in either direction. Then. Celebrate, be like, okay, that's great. Tell yourself I'm making progress. Cool. Log that. And then a year from now, you'll be freaking ripped and your energy will be up and you'll be like, wow, that was not too bad. It took a year, but not five minutes, you know, but if you could be disciplined physically, you can be disciplined mentally with business and then spiritually. Give yourself the time you need to do what you need to do there too. So it's just planning and executing. 

[00:34:24] Roger Jacobsen
I think it's the hardest thing for somebody like getting started. To actually write down and believe in their big, hairy, audacious goal, like if Anthony could take anything from this, it'd be like, you have to say, I'm going to be worth and believe in it. Like, I'm going to be worth 50 million might sound just crazy and impossible, but you still have to write that down as your goal in your road map so that you have some place to go and you can achieve that. And it's the analogy is used all the time. Like, you'd never drive to New York without a road map. Why would you live your life without a road map? But driving to New York sounds easy. It's kind of hard to say, I'm going to be a billionaire. I'm going to have three commas in my net worth. And we often just can't put that down and believe in it, even though.

[00:35:11] 
When you get older and you've had certain achievements, you're like, okay, now this direction, if you apply that to physical, I already know I can do financial. So now I can apply that to my physical goals or my mental goals or my family goals, whatever. And so it's really hard to start. And believe in it, but once you get some of that momentum behind you, then you can go ahead and move forward. Like your 3rd business is a lot easier than your 1st business. Your 3rd time of losing weight is a lot easier than your 1st time and you just believe and go. You guys are the vets out here. I think it's great to have you on here because I want to inspire you and it's cool that we're both realtors at the same place and I can kind of impart knowledge like, yeah, this is awesome for me.

[00:35:54] Anthony Esparza
I mean, I got to have people again. Dan's so awesome.

[00:35:58] Roger Jacobsen
To be respectful of all of our times. Why don't you lead us into the final 4, Anthony? 

[00:36:05] Anthony Esparza
Yeah, final 4. All right, Dan, you ready? Got four big questions for you. What is your favorite business book?

[00:36:10] Dan Young
It's actually not a business book, but it's just How to Win Friends and Influence People. I mean, that's a great book because that's really what influences what it's about to make things happen. Yeah. That's the number one skill. How to win friends.  

[00:36:23] Roger Jacobsen
I totally agree. We had a local RIA event where the speaker was like a life coach. And, you know, when you say fix and flip, it's like everybody shows up when you talk about wholesaling or making a bunch of money in syndication, everybody shows up and there was very low attendance. And I'm like, this is my favorite topic. I love negotiation, talking to people, finding out like wants and needs. And not only did I meet the speaker, I went out to lunch with her and I invited her on the podcast. And it's like, this is maybe the most interesting thing. To people, but when you get down and you realize that every conversation you have is negotiating, every time you meet people, you're negotiating, you really speak differently. You choose your words better, everything else. So I love that book too. Sorry for the segue.  

[00:37:14] Anthony Esparza
How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie. I believe. Am I right? Okay. What brings you happiness, Dan? Question number two. 

[00:37:22] Dan Young
Oh, a lot of things. But, um, the big thing is relationships with people. If I can help solve problems for people, or help them solve their own problems and stuff. If it's reciprocal, that's nice. But also, you know, spending time with family and then, but teaching is great. But I like to bring teams to success. So, I've had a few of my employees the last few years are like, Dude, I made it. I made a million dollars now. Like, wow, cool, dude, you know, what next? But it's great helping be part of helping other people be successful. And then obviously spending great time with family and having great experiences with them and teaching the kids and things like that. That's all super rewarding. And then stuff like this is fun. Maybe we can help a few people out there, younger and older people have some insight. 

[00:38:05] Anthony Esparza
Awesome. Question number three. What does your future retirement look like? And, or do you have a future retirement? 

[00:38:12] Dan Young
Yeah, I mean, retirement's an interesting definition. I think they'll always be projects that I'm working on, just the degree of the interest that I have in those projects. So the hedge fund will probably continue to scale. Our goal is to smash through a billion in the next 24 months. With the fund under AUM, so, you know, so that'll be fun. Tech companies continue to scale those, you know, as well. Real estate portfolio continues to grow with that. I don't think there's an official retirement event. Every single one of my old mentors that have retired have un retired within a year or so, too. Just because they get bored, right? It's like you got to feel like you got to use your Jedi horse skills for something. They don't really do any good alone in the mountains. Right. Good answer. 

[00:38:53] Anthony Esparza
And what is the best way to give back, in your opinion? 

[00:38:57] Dan Young
The best way to give is to teach. Because, like, I'm all about certain charities, though, for certain things, that's fine. To help kids that are being kidnapped, or dogs and cats and stuff. But people? You gotta teach them. And they gotta learn to be productive on their own. To be able to teach other people. Now, you do have, you know, innocent people that may not have them like mind or they're injured. I get that. It's important to donate to those causes, though. But most people, they're just conscious and are able. They could do a lot. And given those people handouts is the worst thing you can do. It's empowering educating, but then they got to change themselves. 

[00:39:30] Anthony Esparza
Right, it's like the saying, give a man a fish and he'll eat for the day, teach a man a fish, he'll eat for the rest of his life. 

[00:39:38] Roger Jacobsen
Something like that right? I don't know. Exactly. 

[00:39:39] Dan Young
Yep. 

[00:39:40] Anthony Esparza
That about wraps it up, Roger. 

[00:39:42] Roger Jacobsen
Once again, we had Dan Young today on the Retire Wealthy and Happy Podcast. We really appreciate you. I think that's it, Dan. 

[00:39:49] Anthony Esparza
Thank you so much. It's been an honor. Really appreciate the time and the knowledge and you're a cool dude, you're an awesome dude. And I really appreciate you, you being here.

[00:39:58] Dan Young
Go make the world better, guys. 

[00:40:01] Roger Jacobsen
We really appreciate you being on, and we'll see everybody else on the next podcast. Have a good one. 

[00:40:06] Podcast Outro
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