[00:02:30] Patrick Donley: I am really happy to have you on today. I’ve been spending a lot of time the last couple days just learning about you, reading all your content you’ve got on Twitter.

[00:02:37] Patrick Donley: You’ve got an amazing story, and I really, there’s so many directions I could go right now, but I wanted to start off with being a missionary in Hungary. I wanted to talk about that, hear about that, and just some of the lessons you learned, like being a missionary and knocking on doors. 

[00:02:53] Chris Koerner: Yeah, absolutely. So I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, and as most people know, we send 18 and 19 year olds out across the whole world for 18 to 24 months to serve others and to talk about our church.

[00:03:09] Chris Koerner: So I got sent to Hungary. We don’t choose where we go. We just fill out an application, I get a medical screening and submit it, and then we’re told where we’re going. And so I went to Hungary in 2006 to 2008. 

[00:03:23] Patrick Donley: Tell me about that. You’re there, what’s an average day look like when you’re canvassing, basically and teaching people about, you’re getting a lot of doors shut in your face, I would imagine.

[00:03:33] Chris Koerner: The vast majority, yeah. On An average day, you wake up at 6. 30, you will read your scriptures for a half hour, or maybe even an hour, by yourself, and then you read your scriptures with your companion for 30 to 60 minutes, and then you’ll go work out. for 30 to 60 minutes. Maybe it’s the weights. Maybe it’s you go on a run and then you plan your day that takes about a half hour and then you just, you hit the streets and that looks differently based on where you are.

[00:03:58] Chris Koerner: If you’re in Provo, Utah, then you’re probably not canvassing at all. You’re just handling referrals from other members of the church. If you’re in Budapest, Hungary, you’re probably knocking doors or going to a busy city center. and just approaching people on the street. 

[00:04:13] Patrick Donley: So you obviously learned Hungarian before you took off.

[00:04:17] Patrick Donley: Is that how it worked? You studied the language and then were sent there? 

[00:04:22] Chris Koerner: So everyone goes to what’s called the missionary training center. There’s about 15 of them worldwide. The biggest being in Provo, Utah, and that’s where you learn the language. If you will be speaking a different language and it’s just where you learn how to be a missionary and you’re there for a minimum, depending on where you’re going, a minimum of two weeks to a maximum of, it used to be 12.

[00:04:41] Chris Koerner: And today it’s closer to nine. So depending on how hard the language is, depends on what determines how long you’re in the MTC for. So I was there for the maximum amount of time, which was 12 weeks. 

[00:04:53] Patrick Donley: And you’re fluent in the language now? 

[00:04:56] Chris Koerner: I was, there are not a lot of opportunities to practice Hungarian in Dallas, Texas.

[00:05:00] Chris Koerner: I can understand it much, much better than I can speak it. I’ve been back to the country twice since coming home in 08 and it’s tough. Like it’s really tough because you just hear it and you’re like, okay, yeah. And then you just go to respond and it’s. It’s just like spaghetti. You can’t get it out.

[00:05:16] Patrick Donley: So did you meet and become really close friends with Hungarians while you were there?

[00:05:21] Patrick Donley: People, maybe you, who opened their door to you and were able to listen? 

[00:05:26] Chris Koerner: Yeah. We were immersed. We, you, at the time, you only called home twice per year. Oh, wow. And you would write letters or emails once per week. Today, it’s different. You can call home every Monday. But it was different back then.

[00:05:38] Chris Koerner: And the idea was to be completely immersed. You are one of them. You don’t have a job. You don’t have hobbies. You are a full time missionary.

[00:05:48] Patrick Donley: I think I heard you say, aren’t more people not able to complete their assignment now? Like them, not that they become softer, but like it’s harder to complete the assignment.

[00:05:57] Patrick Donley: Is that accurate to say? 

[00:05:59] Chris Koerner: Yeah, this is more of me speaking candidly and off the record as a general observer of trends in my church, and just a nerdy stats guy. These numbers aren’t published anywhere, so I don’t know for sure, but anecdotally, it’s been pretty well documented that 10 to 20 percent of missionaries go home early today.

[00:06:20] Chris Koerner: Whereas, and once again, I don’t represent the church. These numbers aren’t published anywhere. I don’t even know if they’re true. This is just my total guess. But it used to be closer to low single digits, one to five percent. No one really knows why. My guess, my complete hunch is that social media and smartphones changed everything.

[00:06:38] Chris Koerner: And It’s just a much bigger shock to the culture and the system to go from constantly connected to not connected at all. And so it’s actually really interesting because that trend is reversing and you’re hearing much less missionaries come home early. And I think, again, totally guessing that we’re just becoming acclimated to it.

[00:06:57] Chris Koerner: Like it’s, This is the new norm and it’s like service distribution curve and everyone freaked out and they left their friends and they were off Instagram and off Facebook and then and now it’s like the church has done a better job of preparing missionaries and. I think, maybe five years ago, an 18 or 19 year old left home addicted to their phone, addicted to social media, and that was taken away completely, whereas now phones are so normal, that age of missionaries are actually less addicted to their phone than maybe even a millennial, right?

[00:07:26] Chris Koerner: Because they’re just, they’re so used to it. They’re better able to manage it, I should say. So when they step away from it, they’re better able to manage their lives. That’s just a guess. 

[00:07:35] Patrick Donley: So you were what, 18 to 20 when you did this? 

[00:07:39] Chris Koerner: 19 to 21 at the time, and today it’s 18 to 21. 

[00:07:44] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk about, prior to that, I wanted to get into kind of your early hustles.

[00:07:48] Patrick Donley: You had a guy named Danny that you worked with. I wanna hear about Danny and some of the lessons that you learned from him. 

[00:07:54] Chris Koerner: Yeah, Danny was a great guy. He was the father of my wrestling partner, Robert, he was from New Jersey. He was a hustler, just a New Jersey entrepreneur, hustler, had started and owned restaurants.

[00:08:06] Chris Koerner: pest control companies, and you name it. He was just a slick talker, great at taking something for a dollar and selling it for two. And I worked for him. And at the time, it’s just yep, this is my job. I push a spreader all summer. I spray houses. But then decades, years later, a decade later, I look back and I was like, That’s where I learned business.

[00:08:24] Chris Koerner: That’s why I was immersed in business for four years. That’s why I am who I am because of that experience with Danny. 

[00:08:31] Patrick Donley: And he had like a unique billboard sign. Didn’t he have some funky sign up that was voted like the eyesore in the town? 

[00:08:41] Chris Koerner: Yeah, I was in Titusville, Florida is where I grew up and he had a company called Quantum Pest Control and right there on US1 next to the Indian River, there’s a big billboard that had his logo, Quantum, and then it was just a massive toothbrush with a massive cockroach on top of bristles that said Got Bugs.

[00:08:58] Chris Koerner: That’s it. No number, just the logo and the words Got Bugs and that drove all of his business and I just thought that was brilliant. 

[00:09:05] Patrick Donley: And someday you may do a pest control company in the holding company? 

[00:09:09] Chris Koerner: Oh, who knows? I’m not against any company. I love all business. I would use that billboard for sure.

[00:09:15] Patrick Donley: Yeah, it was cool. If people haven’t seen it on Twitter, it’s worth checking out. I wanted to talk to you about your writing and this woman, I think maybe in high school that inspired you, Jane Spidell. You’re a really great writer. Like your content, I really appreciate it and appreciate good writing. And I wanted to hear about Jane Spidell and just how you got started writing.

[00:09:36] Chris Koerner: Thank you. I appreciate that. She was my yearbook advisor and I joined the yearbook just because it was another class. And she, I tweeted about this, but I had an assignment to write about a part of the school that I had to go observe for an hour. And she was very dramatic. She was just, I don’t know, there’s no other word for it.

[00:09:53] Chris Koerner: She was very dramatic. She was extra. And so I wrote this very sarcastic essay about the beauty of the orchestra room. And I just made it, I was just, I was being sarcastic. And she took it seriously and she loved it and it touched her. And that made me the assistant executive editor based on that one essay, which meant that I became the executive editor the next year of my senior year.

[00:10:15] Patrick Donley: So that’s where you started to hone your craft of writing. 

[00:10:19] Chris Koerner: Yeah. And then, I started starting businesses and my writing changed to be more copywriting to convince people to buy things. And I just, I never really took a course or read a book. Yeah. I just learned from what I saw in ads that seemed to work and copied and changed to fit my own needs.

[00:10:37] Patrick Donley: Yeah, so now you’re doing a newsletter, you post on Twitter frequently. I wanted to hear a little bit about how Twitter has affected your career. 

[00:10:45] Chris Koerner: Yeah, so it’s, I feel like I’m still in the very early days of Twitter. I’ve only been posting consistently there for 15 months. I had another stint on Twitter a few years ago.

[00:10:57] Chris Koerner: That was a completely different experience. I have a lot of experience writing or posting stuff to Twitter, but only about 15 or 16 months of doing long form, intentional, thoughtful content on Twitter, my current account. And the jury’s still out on what, how much of an effect it will have on my businesses.

[00:11:14] Chris Koerner: Cause I’m not really actively promoting things, but it’s just brought some incredible opportunities and people into my orbit. That’s hard to quantify. 

[00:11:22] Patrick Donley: Nick Huber, the sweaty startup guy, he talks about writing being a superpower. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. There’s, for some reason, people that can write, we put them up on a pedestal and look at them like this guy.

[00:11:34] Patrick Donley: And yeah, I think it’s a great skill to have and anybody ought to develop it. Are you a big reader? 

[00:11:40] Chris Koerner: Not as much lately. I used to be, but I just haven’t dedicated much time to it over the last few years. But I think what is unique about my Twitter content is a lot of times you have people that can write really well.

[00:11:52] Chris Koerner: But they’re not actually doing things in life or in business that are worth writing about. They’re good at putting words together, they know all the skills, they’ve taken a course, they’ve read the books, but They’re just writing about some kind of surface level fluff or regurgitating stuff that they’re reading in those books.

[00:12:05] Chris Koerner: And then you have people that are doing really cool things in business or in entrepreneurship, but they’re not really good at writing about it, or they don’t care to write about it. It could be excellent writers, but they’re just not on social media, which is great, more power to them. And I think I’m different in that I’m doing both, right?

[00:12:19] Chris Koerner: I’m actually doing things. I’m starting companies. I have real experiences and I don’t mind being transparent about them because there’s no one to fire me. I’m not controversial, so there’s no fear of getting canceled. So I’m just taking what I’m doing and then taking some writing skills and putting them together.

[00:12:36] Patrick Donley: Nick had the same point that you got to be doing interesting things in order to post good content. And I wanted to get into the companies that you’re running. You’ve got a holding company called CoFounders. So tell me about that. And then just like some of the companies that are within the holding company and the one or two that you’re most excited about right now.

[00:12:54] Chris Koerner: Yeah. So CoFounders. that is a company called Mining Syndicate, which is where I’m sitting today. It is a company that sells crypto mining hardware and services like hosting and software as well. So we’re basically a data center for crypto miners, but we get most of our revenue from selling the hardware, not the services.

[00:13:13] Chris Koerner: And then I have a company called Texas Snacks, and we resell Bucky’s products, Bucky’s being a 50 chain kind of mega gas station. It’s like the Disney of gas stations. That’s a whole story in and of itself. Transcribed And then I have a company called Fast Tree Care, which we started last summer with an operator, and that’s just a boring old tree trimming business.

[00:13:32] Chris Koerner: That’s a lot of fun. And we have a company called Volterra, which is an AI software that helps skilled nursing facilities find more medical codes to bill for. That’s pre revenue, but we’re about to go live with our first handful of customers. And then we own an RV park in Waco, Texas. Just a simple RV park.

[00:13:51] Chris Koerner: Small one. And then we are constantly incubating slash working on three to five other projects. Some of them may never launch. Some of them could be really big businesses. 

[00:14:01] Patrick Donley: So let’s go into that a little bit. I know you’ll partner with MBAs and business students, things like that. Talk to me about that process.

[00:14:08] Patrick Donley: If there’s somebody listening right now that is intrigued by what you’re up to and wants to get involved, like how do you vet people? How do you split equity? Like how does the whole thing work? 

[00:14:18] Chris Koerner: Yeah. Yeah, so our job, our position is posted on hundreds of universities across the country. And so we look for students that are entrepreneurial.

[00:14:29] Chris Koerner: We don’t care where they live. We don’t care what their GPA is. We don’t care what their major is. It literally makes no difference. We just want someone that has made a dollar. with entrepreneurship before. Maybe it was a lemonade stand. Maybe it was a massive company. And we don’t even care. We just want them to have that gene.

[00:14:46] Chris Koerner: We can’t make them an entrepreneur and we don’t want to try. So they have to have the gene. Furthermore, we want them to have three qualities. We want them to be humble, just willing to learn, sponge, moldable. We want them to be grateful, just grateful for the opportunity. We just, there’s a direct correlation between kids that are really grateful to have been chosen, and their success.

[00:15:05] Chris Koerner: And then the third is energy. We want them to have high energy. They could be introverted. That’s fine. I am as well. We just want them to be excited. We want to hang up with them. And then just feel energized from the conversation. If they meet those criteria, then we give them three business ideas to choose from.

[00:15:21] Chris Koerner: We give them a salary, we give them a timeline, and we fund the idea itself. And we take majority equity in the business, maybe 51%, maybe 70%. And then we just hold their hand, and we tell them exactly what to do, and how to start it, and how to be successful. 

[00:15:40] Patrick Donley: It sounds awesome. It’s such a good idea. And these are all college age kids for the most part.

[00:15:44] Patrick Donley: You’re not hiring people that are further along in their career, correct? Correct. Yep. Yeah. Those three qualities you listed, Warren Buffett’s got a similar thing of what he looks for in managers and leaders. And it’s a very similar list. 

[00:15:56] Chris Koerner: I heard that just recently. And I think one or two of them, there was some overlap.

[00:16:00] Chris Koerner: I think integrity was one. 

[00:16:01] Patrick Donley: Integrity, energy are definitely two of them. I like humility and gratefulness. That’s just being teachable, being a learner. Yeah, those are huge. So let’s go into, you had mentioned Buc ee’s. I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I had mentioned earlier. I really hadn’t heard of Buc ee’s up until a few months ago.

[00:16:16] Patrick Donley: And I saw it on Twitter, maybe through you, maybe through Michael Girdley. I’m not sure exactly, but tell me about Texas Snacks, Buc-ee’s and what you’re doing with that portion of the company. 

[00:16:26] Chris Koerner: Yeah. So Buc ee’s is, like I said, it’s a massive gas station. They’re 60, 000 square feet. They have over a hundred.

[00:16:31] Chris Koerner: If you drive by one, you will remember it there. They started in Texas. They opened their first one outside of Texas and Alabama, and now they’re in about a dozen states or so, but opening more every quarter or two. And they’re very unique. They just have an amazing brand. It’s this cartoon beaver.

[00:16:46] Chris Koerner: And I don’t know what they did, but they tapped into something magical to where if you go to a Buc ee’s, you have to talk about it. You have to fall in love with it and you just love it. It’s just an amazing experience. 

[00:16:57] Patrick Donley: What is it about it? I’ve never been to one, obviously. So what is it about it?

[00:17:00] Patrick Donley: What have they done right that taps into this customer love that gets created? 

[00:17:06] Chris Koerner: I think a lot of it is confirmation bias. So they have a great brand. And so I think a lot of people that go there have already heard about it. They’ve heard good things, so they’re expecting a great experience. And then, there’s a hundred gas pumps and it’s just unusual.

[00:17:18] Chris Koerner: So they’re just, they walk in with this wide-eyed wonder, and then you walk in and it’s just busy. It’s just got good energy. Everyone’s friendly, they’re known for their bathrooms. Their bathrooms are spotless, super nice. And then they have a full restaurant there serving Texas barbecue. And they just have a whole wall of jerky, a whole wall of candy, thousands of snacks.

[00:17:37] Chris Koerner: All like a lot of unique products, items that you couldn’t find anywhere else, and it’s just a great experience. That’s what it is. It’s an experience. It’s not a gas station. It’s closer to Disney than a gas station. 

[00:17:49] Patrick Donley: So your idea was to sell Bucky’s products. So talk to me about that because they originally said no to you, right?

[00:17:57] Chris Koerner: Yeah they originally ignored me and so I went to a Buc ee’s and just out of curiosity, I pulled up their website on my phone and they didn’t sell online and that just boggled my mind. At this time, they probably had 30 locations. Each location is guesstimated between 20 and 30 million a year.

[00:18:14] Chris Koerner: So we’re talking half a billion dollar company plus at the time and they didn’t sell online and you go there for the snacks, but they also have all this merch, dozens of different shirts and really, cute looking clothes that particularly women loved to wear, and nothing was online. And at this time, I owned a third party logistics company that e-commerce brands would outsource their fulfillment operations to us.

[00:18:38] Chris Koerner: And I thought, man, Buc-ee’s could be a great customer to us. Let’s try to snag them. I started emailing the executive team saying, Hey, we have this company called Send Eats, and we can manage all of your e-commerce, white glove, we’ll put up your website, we’ll do everything for you, let us know.

[00:18:52] Chris Koerner: No response. Crickets. And I just thought, This needs to happen. I’m going to do this myself. I’ll do it for them. And so I looked into it. I was like, all right, am I going to get sued here? And there’s this law called first sale doctrine, which states that anyone can sell whatever they want. They just can’t pretend to be another brand.

[00:19:09] Chris Koerner: So I can resell Bucky stuff, just like I can resell my iPhone. I just can’t pretend to be Apple. And so we launched a website. We called it Beaver Snacks at the time, because their mascot is a beaver. And. We put a big disclaimer saying we’re not Buc ee’s, we’re buying and then reselling their products with a markup.

[00:19:26] Chris Koerner: So we launched, I took my family to Buc ee’s, we bought one of everything, it was like 3, 000. Everyone was looking at us sideways, and didn’t know what to think of us because they had never seen this before. And brought it back to our warehouse, hired a photographer. took pictures of everything, put it on the website, and then I started emailing reporters.

[00:19:44] Chris Koerner: And I just said, Hey, this is who I am. This is what we’re doing. We’re launching a business. We want to get Bucky’s attention. So I didn’t tell reporters this, but internally, I’m thinking worst case, they say, this is not okay. We’re going to sue you. And even 

[00:19:55] Chris Koerner: if they have no grounds to sue us, we’ll just shut it down.

[00:19:58] Chris Koerner: I don’t want to mess with that. Best case, they say, Hey, we’ll partner with you. Or best case it’s, Hey, we’ll partner with you. We will partner with you, you now have a profitable company. And so I emailed reporters and I was on the phone with a lawyer by the end of the day, the Bucky’s in house counsel.

[00:20:12] Chris Koerner: And he said, listen, we don’t mind what you’re doing. We have no interest in selling online. We don’t mind if you do, but please make a few changes. We don’t want you to use the word beaver because it’s confusing. Change the name, more disclaimers, make the disclaimer easier to read, and you have our blessing.

[00:20:28] Patrick Donley: Why do you think they had no interest in doing it themselves? Seems like it’s a, I don’t know what the revenue would have been, but it’s got to be a decent chunk of change for giving up. 

[00:20:37] Chris Koerner: Yeah, I think that they’re trying to optimize for the in store experience. I don’t know this. They haven’t told me this, but my hunch is that they think it would cannibalize their in store sales or incentivize people to not come to the store.

[00:20:50] Chris Koerner: And I think they want the Buc-ee’s experience to stay exclusive and elusive and unique. Whereas if you can just click and order it, and it’s even if their sales go up and even if it doesn’t hurt their in store sales, it’s just not as much of a novelty. 

[00:21:06] Patrick Donley: So you’re going directly to the stores each week or a couple times a week to buy merchandise to then sell online.

[00:21:13] Patrick Donley: Is that how the logistics of it work? 

[00:21:16] Chris Koerner: Yeah, so we have pretty close relationships with the general managers of two different stores and then decent relationships with other stores as well. And so we will place an order beforehand and they will receive it from their distribution center, palletize our order, and let us know when it’s ready.

[00:21:33] Chris Koerner: And then we will show up, we’ll make sure everything’s in there, and then we’ll go to the front counter with everyone else, they will kind of portion off our line, our aisle, and we’ll swipe that card for tens of thousands of dollars, and then load it up in our box truck and drive it to the warehouse.

[00:21:47] Patrick Donley: That’s incredible. And this all developed because you already were doing it. It’s called 3PL, right? Third party logistics. You were already doing this for other food companies, right? Like ice cream and candy bars, whatever, like you were already doing that, right? 

[00:22:02] Chris Koerner: Yeah. We didn’t need that. We could have done it from our house if we wanted.

[00:22:06] Chris Koerner: It just made it a lot more convenient. We already had software. We had the skills. I have an e-commerce background, so it made it a lot easier. Funny enough, like after two years of, Doing both of the Texas Snacks company that we owned and the e-commerce fulfillment for other brands. We just looked at our financials every month and said, man, this 3PL stuff does not make any money.

[00:22:26] Chris Koerner: We’re just, this is such a hard business. It’s a high margin for error. Let’s just fire our customers. And only do the Bucky stuff. And so we did. 

[00:22:36] Patrick Donley: So the company, the holding company, is co founders. Do you have partners? I know you’re partnering with the college kids that we mentioned, but do you also have a partner that, it’s like you’re Charlie Munger, your right hand man, that is bouncing off these ideas and figuring out what to pursue.

[00:22:50] Chris Koerner: Yeah. His name is Nick Huleski and he was one of my mission companions in Hungary. He was my first. So they call that your trainer. So he helped me learn Hungarian and we’ve been best friends for 18 years now, ever since. 

[00:23:03] Patrick Donley: You talked a little bit about the entrepreneurial gene. Do you think that’s something that’s innate in people or do you think it can develop?

[00:23:12] Chris Koerner: I think it could be either or. For me, it was developed. It doesn’t run in my family at all. I just, I grew up poor. I lived across the street from a golf course and my first business was selling golf balls. They would land in my yard and in the ditch across the street. And I would go gather them up and put them in a red rider wagon and wash them and walk them to the clubhouse and sell them in the parking lot until the owner would yell at me.

[00:23:34] Chris Koerner: That was out of necessity because there was no money for a yearbook or for candy or for a bike. You had to earn it if you wanted it, right? I had to earn it. Yeah. 

[00:23:42] Patrick Donley: Do you do that with your own kids? So if they want something, you put the onus on them to 

[00:23:47] Chris Koerner: No, so they do chores. They all have a chore chart and they earn money.

[00:23:51] Chris Koerner: They can buy whatever they want with that. But it’s not like Super hardcore. We also buy them things. What I was saying yes to is that all four of our kids are very entrepreneurial. My wife is entrepreneurial as well. It’s just, it is in our DNA as a family. So for them, it’s nature and nurture.

[00:24:09] Chris Koerner: It was just nurture. 

[00:24:11] Patrick Donley: And so are they working in some of the companies that you’ve got going? Do you put them to work like doing fulfillment or from time to time? 

[00:24:18] Chris Koerner: They’ll do fulfillment for Texas snacks. Not super often, but really it’s more of they sell stuff at school and we help them with that.

[00:24:26] Chris Koerner: My daughter will make bracelets. My kids will go to a Winco, which is like a budget grocery store where you can buy candy by the pound and I’ll give them like a 5 budget and we’ll do competitions. So they can see who can turn that 5 into the most amount of money at school by reselling the candy. 

[00:24:44] Patrick Donley: I think I heard you, you said you do something similar with a Robin Hood account, right?

[00:24:48] Patrick Donley: Like they trade and you have a competition to see who can trade. And 

[00:24:52] Chris Koerner: We did that once with crypto actually, just for fun. And it was bad timing. None of them. 

[00:24:59] Patrick Donley: It was when things were collapsing. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s get into that. I wanted to hear about, you’ve got some great stories about John McAfee of McAfee security fame.

[00:25:11] Patrick Donley: Very fascinating guy. I think they’re, I think you had mentioned they’re making a movie about his life. Tell me about how you got connected with him and just like that entire story. 

[00:25:20] Chris Koerner: That’s a long story. So I’ll give you the highlights. And that is 2017. Crypto was just booming. Bitcoin was going from 3, 000 to 20, 000 over the course of two months.

[00:25:31] Chris Koerner: And I was deeply entrenched in all of that. I first bought Bitcoin in 2016. And I’ve just been curious about it. And so I had a thesis in 2017 that crypto altcoin specifically. So everything aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum, I had a thesis that these prices were driven by hype and I wasn’t a genius. A lot of people thought that, but my thesis was that this would be measurable.

[00:25:54] Chris Koerner: And so I developed an algorithm that took the hype of an altcoin, which was altcoin. Derived from how many social media mentions and mentions on Twitter and on Reddit and all those platforms, I would make a hype score and I would divide it against the market cap. So if a token had a really high market cap and no one was talking about it, then my algorithm would say, sure.

[00:26:15] Chris Koerner: And if I had a very low market cap, I would say, bye. And I put this together and then I started tracking it and it worked. And I thought, wow, this is, this could be huge. This is really big. I found alpha and, to find alpha in the stock market is impossible. Hard to do.

[00:26:28] Chris Koerner: In crypto, why not? So I was a nobody on social media. I had no following. 

[00:26:32] Patrick Donley: And this was 2017, correct? 

[00:26:35] Chris Koerner: 17. Yep. Late 2017. Good timing. Yep. And in a sense, bad timing in another sense, because it was all about to crash. But I thought, okay, I need to reach out to John McAfee because he was the biggest influencer on crypto Twitter at the time.

[00:26:48] Chris Koerner: He had about 800, 000 followers. And so he’s notoriously unreachable. I tried to guess his email to no success until finally I did. I used an app to see if he would open my emails and he finally opened it and he wouldn’t respond. So I just kept emailing saying, John, I’ve got something big I want to show you.

[00:27:03] Chris Koerner: He finally responded. And he was very critical, very, standoffish and said, I don’t believe you. And I said, let me show you in person. I thought if I could present in person, then he’ll buy into it. So he finally said, yes, so come to my house in Tennessee. And so I flew to Alabama. I stayed at a friend’s house in Northern Alabama, and then I drove up to his house and he said, I’ll send you my address in the morning.

[00:27:25] Chris Koerner: So I started driving to his city. which is Lexington and he wouldn’t respond to my email. I didn’t have his address until the last minute he gave me his address. So I showed up and he wanted me to show up at 1 23 PM and this was late February 2018 at this point. And I presented this to him and it was wild, it was wild.

[00:27:45] Chris Koerner: He had a whole camera crew from Australia there. He had bodyguards, he had assault rifles laying on the ground. It was everything you’d imagine and I presented this to him and he loved it. He understood it immediately. And he said, what do you need from me? And we launched a company together. 

[00:28:00] Patrick Donley: That’s crazy.

[00:28:01] Patrick Donley: And how did it unfold from there? 

[00:28:04] Chris Koerner: Yeah. So I asked him to tweet about me twice per week, and I would give him a quarter of the profits and the whole play was to start a free community for people that wanted access to these things. Altcoin picks and then to, once they started relying on it and investing in it and liking it to start charging for full access to all of the picks.

[00:28:22] Chris Koerner: And so we did, we launched a discord community. We had tens of thousands of members. He would tweet about me twice per week. He did everything he said he would do. We ended up launching a token and it grew to a 30 something million dollar market cap. We were listed on a dozen major exchanges and then the market just started crashing.

[00:28:42] Chris Koerner: It was crashing the whole time, but you couldn’t tell. We thought it was just dipping temporarily. Turned out to be a two year bear market and we just fought that the whole time. And so the market cap dropped, people would leave the community and it ended up just dying a slow death. 

[00:28:58] Patrick Donley: It’s such a good story, actually.

[00:28:59] Patrick Donley: I remember that time, 2017. He could move a market with a single tweet. 

[00:29:05] Chris Koerner: Yeah, he could. We were always very careful about that. We didn’t have an ICO. We didn’t want to sell any tokens. We didn’t want him to really move the market. And he ended up getting in trouble for a lot of those tweets. 

[00:29:16] Patrick Donley: Yeah. He ended up going to prison, right?

[00:29:18] Patrick Donley: He’s since passed away, but I think, didn’t he get put in prison for tax fraud or tax evasion? 

[00:29:23] Chris Koerner: Tax fraud. 

[00:29:24] Patrick Donley: Yeah. Yeah. Did you have any trepidation going into business with him? Were you like this guy, you seem like the antithesis of him. Like you’re this Mormon guy, right? He is the exact opposite of drinking and partying.

[00:29:36] Patrick Donley: It just seems like a wild lifestyle that he’s led. It just seems like there couldn’t be two different partners. 

[00:29:41] Chris Koerner: Yeah. I did. We were very different. Yeah. And I wanted to keep it more like a business owner slash influencer relationship as opposed to a business partner relationship. And so I call him a partner in the sense that there would not have been a business without him.

[00:29:55] Chris Koerner: He wasn’t one of many influencers that we use as part of a strategy. He was the only distribution channel that we had. So in that sense, he was a partner in a literal sense. He was not, he didn’t own any equity. He never invested. I never gave him money. It was just a rev share agreement, but yeah, I did have trepidation, which is why I structured it like that.

[00:30:13] Chris Koerner: I trepidation walking into his house. 

[00:30:15] Patrick Donley: I bet with the bodyguards and the assault rifles, it had to have been quite an experience to just be part of that whole scene. 

[00:30:22] Chris Koerner: Yes, it was. 

[00:30:24] Patrick Donley: So you’ve since started a Bitcoin mining company. Like, how did that come about? Have you, did you toss aside like all the altcoin stuff and like you’re focused strictly on Bitcoin now?

[00:30:35] Patrick Donley: Because I know you’re like a big Bitcoin guy. 

[00:30:36] Chris Koerner: Yeah. Yeah, so the crypto company died in 2019. And then in 2021, Bitcoin is booming again. It was the next cycle, right? And China had banned mining in the summer of 2021 overnight. And so the difficulty rate plummeted, which meant mining became extremely profitable.

[00:30:54] Chris Koerner: Very profitable. And so all of us enterprising Americans, such as myself, latched onto that. And we started looking for ways to mine Bitcoin. And so I started looking for facilities for places to lease that had heavy power on site. And I was striking out until I finally found a place 30 minutes from home for sale.

[00:31:11] Chris Koerner: And I reached out to the seller directly and I bought the facility from him. When I say I bought the facility, it wasn’t a business. There was no LLC. There were no employees. It was just a lease in a rented building that I’m sitting in right now that already had all of the infrastructure and transformers on site to enable hundreds of Bitcoin miners immediately, which was very hard to find, especially at the time.

[00:31:36] Patrick Donley: Did you have any miners at all at that point? 

[00:31:39] Chris Koerner: The facility did come with miners. So what I bought came with miners that were mining Bitcoin directly, but we took that asset. And we turned it into a company which is today the Mining Syndicate. So we basically spent a lot of money for access to a lease and infrastructure and a handful of miners that were netting like 15 grand a month at the time.

[00:32:00] Chris Koerner: We knew that was very short lived because they were late model miners. We sold the miners because we didn’t want to be in the mining business. We wanted to be in the hardware and in the hosting business. 

[00:32:09] Patrick Donley: So say more about that. So how you’re not selling, tell me more about that. You don’t mind Bitcoin.

[00:32:15] Patrick Donley: You are selling, you’re like a server, basically. 

[00:32:18] Chris Koerner: We sell. So if you, let’s say you wanted to mine Bitcoin, we would sell you a 5, 000 machine, which would mine you like call it 12 a day in profit of Bitcoin. And then we would sell you the electricity. And the services which would be about 200 bucks a month.

[00:32:34] Chris Koerner: So we make most of our money selling that machine. And then we break even on the hosting. That’s our business. 

[00:32:40] Patrick Donley: So had you done any of your mining on your own prior to this? Did you have any experience at all doing your own mining of Bitcoin? 

[00:32:49] Chris Koerner: I had almost no experience, which never detracts from me for better or worse.

[00:32:53] Chris Koerner: I had bought two miners from eBay throughout this whole process to learn. I plugged them in. I was like, okay, I’m an expert. No, I didn’t have much experience at all. 

[00:33:04] Patrick Donley: And Texas is a hotbed for mining, isn’t it right now? So what’s on the horizon for them, let’s talk a little bit more about Bitcoin.

[00:33:10] Patrick Donley: It’s something you have strong conviction in. Do you make any price predictions for this coming? 

[00:33:15] Chris Koerner: Yeah, I can make predictions, but I’ve never been good at them. To me, Bitcoin is just math, which is why I like it. It’s provable scarcity, which not even gold has. We think gold is scarce. We don’t know how scarce it is, right?

[00:33:25] Chris Koerner: So I think Bitcoin is a gold replacement, not a gold killer, but just a superior alternative to gold that will eventually overtake gold’s market cap, which would mean one Bitcoin would be like three or 400, 000 each. I think it’s a statistical inevitability that Bitcoin will hit a hundred grand. And then a million dollars each.

[00:33:44] Chris Koerner: Is it going to be in months or years or decades? I don’t know. I do think we’ll hit a hundred grand this cycle over the next 18 months and maybe even 150 or two. 

[00:33:52] Patrick Donley: And so you do not trade in and out of positions with Bitcoin. Like you, you buy, you hold and you huddle 

[00:33:58] Chris Koerner: Yes. 

[00:33:59] Chris Koerner: I’m so bad at investing in stocks, but what I am good at though, is I’m good at never selling.

[00:34:05] Chris Koerner: It did take years to learn that. So if I buy a stock, I will never sell that stuff. If I buy Bitcoin or Ethereum, I will never sell it because The pain that I feel from selling too early is much greater than the pain I feel from losing money. 

[00:34:20] Patrick Donley: Wasn’t one of your first investments Circuit City? 

[00:34:23] Chris Koerner: Yep, that was my first investment.

[00:34:24] Patrick Donley: It was your first, and that was a pretty big loss, wasn’t it? 

[00:34:28] Chris Koerner: At the time, it was a third of my net worth, which was a whopping 500. So I was 21, but I have forfeited a lot more money selling things too early. Like when the last time I did that, and the last time I will ever do that was in March of 2020.

[00:34:43] Chris Koerner: When I freaked out and I sold all my stocks. Nope. I don’t like where this is going. And you name it. Yeah. Nvidia, Tesla, Shopify need I say more? I like that my Tesla has already tripled. I’m going to sell it now. Yeah. I had eight X more to go after that. 

[00:34:57] Patrick Donley: Yeah. It’s painful. My brother did the same thing.

[00:34:59] Patrick Donley: He panicked and yeah, it’s a huge upside that you end up missing out on. 

[00:35:03] Chris Koerner: Yeah. I just, I don’t do that anymore. Like I’ve held Bitcoin at 85 percent drops. Like I don’t sell. 

[00:35:10] Patrick Donley: How do you deal with the volatility? The drop from, let’s say 60, whatever it was, 67, 000 down to 15 or 16, 000. What do you think about that psychologically?

[00:35:19] Patrick Donley: How does it affect you? 

[00:35:20] Chris Koerner: I use friction wherever I can. So there’s a lot of friction between me and being able to sell Bitcoin. Passwords, two factor authentication, multi setup or something. All of it. Yeah. And I just don’t like, honestly, I, when I sold Bitcoin too early, when I sold those stocks, that was when I was more of a speculator and not a believer.

[00:35:38] Chris Koerner: Yeah. I think Bitcoin’s going to be here forever, right? And so I just, I would sell it to pay the mortgage or to feed my family. Like I’m not stupid, but I don’t sell it even if it’s dropping 80%. I just can’t, I’m not good at timing it. And I don’t want to get good at timing it. So I don’t think about it. So I don’t sell it.

[00:35:56] Patrick Donley: I think that’s smart. I want to get into real estate a little bit. Talk to me about your first real estate deal. How did you first get turned on to real estate? Cause I know that’s one of your passions too.

[00:36:04] Chris Koerner: I first got into real estate in 2008. Great timing. I, at the time, Obama instituted the first time home buyer tax credit.

[00:36:12] Chris Koerner: You remember that? I do. And it was 8, 000 and he changed it eventually. To be like a, what was it like a tax deduction, but in the beginning it was a check to your bank, right? And as a 21 year old with 500 to my name. That was very attractive. And so I got home from my mission at 21 and I just felt like I could take on the world.

[00:36:34] Chris Koerner: I had all the confidence in the world. And so I started reading all the business books and all the real estate books. And I started college and I wanted to be a homeowner and I didn’t have any money. So my wife and I started waiting tables. We were in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and we, seven months into marriage, bought a three bedroom, one bath house, Tuscaloosa for 90, 000.

[00:36:55] Chris Koerner: And it had been sitting on the market forever. And we didn’t know what we were doing. We used the same broker that was listing it. To buy it, she said, Oh, the sellers won’t budge on price. So don’t even ask. So I go, okay, whatever you say. And it had been sitting for a year at the same price and they definitely would have come down on price.

[00:37:12] Chris Koerner: I didn’t know what I was doing. Anyway, we bought the house, we moved into it. We got 8, 000 from Obama. We took that and we bought a rental house five minutes away. And those are our first two homes. 

[00:37:21] Patrick Donley: And that has since led to mobile home parks, right? 

[00:37:25] Chris Koerner: So that led to a third rental house. And then I moved to Dallas, Texas, and I partnered with a couple of guys.

[00:37:31] Chris Koerner: We bought a small RV park in Oklahoma, and then we bought 24 more mobile homes and or RV parks. Over the next two years, we sold the portfolio. in 2021. And then I started buying them with Nick, my partner at co founders last year. And then I’m also a GP on some deals occasionally with other partners as well.

[00:37:53] Patrick Donley: So what is it about mobile home parks that you like? You’ve done, are you doing value ads when you buy them? 

[00:38:00] Chris Koerner: I love it because it is, you’re really buying land and you’re maintaining the infrastructure under the land and not the houses itself. Most people don’t realize that they think, Oh, mobile home park.

[00:38:11] Chris Koerner: It’s going to have all these maintenance issues. Yes. If you own mobile homes, that’s not what we do. So we will buy a park and sometimes the tenants on the homes, sometimes the park owns the homes, regardless after closing on the park. We will give or sell the homes back to the tenants if they want them.

[00:38:28] Chris Koerner: If they don’t want them, then we will give them plenty of time to move. And then we take a hit on the top line revenue, but we don’t really have to manage anything after that. We just own the land and rent it out. 

[00:38:39] Patrick Donley: So is this something you’re looking to add more mobile homes to your portfolio or are you tapped out right now?

[00:38:45] Chris Koerner: It’s a passive thing. So people DM me deals and if they’re attractive Sometimes I’ll just assign them to someone else or occasionally we’ll buy one ourselves, but it’s not something I’m really looking to scale, but I’m also not avoiding it right now either. 

[00:38:59] Patrick Donley: So I want to hear about an average day for you.

[00:39:01] Patrick Donley: You’re creating a bunch of content. You’re writing 30 words a week, I believe. You’ve got all, the holding company, co founders, all these businesses underneath it. How are you running like an average day for you while still maintaining a family, a wife, all of that? 

[00:39:16] Chris Koerner: Yeah, so an average day for me is I wake up at six or so and I just shower and go straight to the office, one of two offices.

[00:39:25] Chris Koerner: And I just started working. I drink caffeine and I just put on my AirPods, put on something in the background and I will just, I’ll get the inbox zero right away. I will just knock out a to do list. I will write a long form tweet and I will just hop from helping my operators, hop on calls with them impromptu and I’ll write content.

[00:39:45] Chris Koerner: I’ll write my newsletter and I leave my calendar pretty much empty most of the time. I just don’t like structured meetings, and I’ll just I’ll tackle fires one at a time, and I’ll do that until about 6pm, and then I’ll come home, and I’ll eat dinner with my family every night there’s never really a reason to miss dinner, I don’t travel that much, and then I’ll take the boys to basketball practice, I’ll usually work in the car while they’re practicing, and then I come home, hang out with the kids, put them in bed, And then I’ll watch something with my wife and sometimes I’ll have the computer open and I’ll watch Love is Blind.

[00:40:19] Patrick Donley: Tell me about Parkinson’s Law. What is Parkinson’s Law and how does it affect your life? 

[00:40:25] Chris Koerner: Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it. Back to high school, if you had a big, huge project due three months from now, You’re probably going to get it done the night before, and it’s probably going to be great.

[00:40:37] Chris Koerner: At least that’s how I work. Whereas if you only have an hour to do something, then you’ll get it done in that hour. And so the same principle is true with Elon buying Twitter and firing 80 percent of people, and it just keeps going. And then the same principle is true with just taking on way too many projects and too many people or too many companies.

[00:40:55] Chris Koerner: So I just let the most important things bubble their way to the surface. If I let something slip, if I forget to do something. Then that’s just a message to me that it wasn’t that important. I’m not going to forget my family, right? That’s not in my work bucket. So that’s the most important.

[00:41:10] Chris Koerner: And then if there’s a big fire, like an investor, we’re raising money that just lives in the top of my head and it will get done and everything else, like whatever my time kind of gravitate towards is what’s most important because it’s what I’m placing importance in and everything else just falls to the wayside and maybe I pick it back up in a month.

[00:41:28] Chris Koerner: When it’s more important than, or maybe I never pick it back up, but I used to fight that and just really try to hone in on one thing. This works really well for me and it’s what I love doing. And honestly, it doesn’t feel like working 12 hour days every day. It’s no different than a nine to five guy working six hours at the office and then fishing for six hours if that’s what he loves.

[00:41:50] Chris Koerner: Like it all feels like play to me. 

[00:41:52] Patrick Donley: Stephen Covey’s a Mormon and he’s got the Franklin planter that I used to really be into. My wife actually is still into the Franklin planter. She carries it around and it’s like a big, massive, bigger than an old telephone book and she lives her entire life.

[00:42:06] Patrick Donley: By that. Do you, is that something you utilize to like to structure things and keep track of things and prioritize? 

[00:42:13] Chris Koerner: No, so I have a very low tech system. I have Chrome tabs open, and if it’s an open tab, then it’s a to do list. A few Google Sheets that I leave pinned in Chrome at all times that I’m always referring to.

[00:42:24] Chris Koerner: I’ve got my Reminders app on my iPhone, and then I have unread emails and unread texts. And that’s everything that I need to do. I have a calendar, right? For stuff like this podcast, but most days there’s one or two things in my calendar. It’s something that I’ve fought for years and but now I’ve just stuck with it because it works.

[00:42:44] Patrick Donley: I want to get into the idea generation. You’ve got a ton of ideas that you come up with, whether it’s businesses or tweets that you’re, threads that you’re writing. Talk to me about that creative process. Where do you come up with ideas or where do you, where’s like the fertilizer, the source of some of these ideas come from?

[00:42:59] Chris Koerner: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s like I consider it like the 10, 000 hour rule, right? Like when my work is my hobby and it’s all that I do outside of my family, then I just see things everywhere. And I thought of this analogy a little while ago. Like I’m not a musician at all. I would like to be, I love music. I played the guitar a little bit, but it is on my bucket list to have a hit song.

[00:43:22] Chris Koerner: I think that would be awesome. But the thought of writing a song is just so foreign to me. Whereas some people are like that, I don’t have any ideas. Like, how do you think of these ideas? And so I think of Taylor Swift. And she has hundreds of songs, maybe thousands that we don’t even know about.

[00:43:36] Chris Koerner: And they just flow. She’ll just see something outside and write a song. And it’s just because that’s all she is. That’s all she knows. That’s all she sees and thinks about. Her brain is wired in that way and it’s trained to be wired in that way. And that’s just how I am. Like, I just, I don’t know. I don’t try to think of ideas.

[00:43:53] Chris Koerner: I don’t have a process. I just see things out there and I think, I just attach commerce to it or business to it like, Oh, this could be improved by, Oh, you could monetize it like that. That’s just how my brain works. 

[00:44:06] Patrick Donley: I find it fascinating. Is that why you’ve partnered with some of these like college and MBA students because you’ve got so many ideas that you want to pursue and you give them free reign and let them run with it?

[00:44:17] Chris Koerner: Yeah, exactly. I like FastTreeCare. I bought FastTreeCare. com, the domain, like six years ago, and I just kept renewing it. I was like, that is a good domain. How is that not taken? And I had helped a friend as a favor, start his tree business and it went amazingly. And so I thought, All right, that’s just idea number 72 and one day the stars will align or not and if they do then I’ll launch this business and it did and it’s a great business and it’s a great domain name and it’s awesome and so co founders is a vehicle for me to plant those ideas with other people and because I, I love it.

[00:44:51] Chris Koerner: People tell me a lot like, what if you just did one thing? I do one thing and it’s start businesses. I don’t do one business because I wouldn’t enjoy that. 

[00:44:59] Patrick Donley: Do you find Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny, he, I think he made the comment that it’s like Pareto’s law, 80 20 rule that 80 percent or what?

[00:45:09] Patrick Donley: 20 percent of your companies are generating 80 percent of the revenue. Do you find that to be the case? Absolutely. Yeah. So is that Bitcoin mining? Is that a Texas snack? 

[00:45:20] Chris Koerner: Right now it’s Bitcoin mining just because it’s the most established and we’re selling a high ticket item. So to have a 100, 000 day means we just have to sell 20 items because that kind of makes it easier to be a bigger business.

[00:45:32] Chris Koerner: But CoFounders is very new. Like our AI startup is four months old. Our RV park is eight months old. Texas snacks is old, but that’s just like a three or 4 million business and then a mining syndicate. And then, yeah, so I, I don’t know what that 80, 20 will look like in the future, but yeah. 

[00:45:51] Patrick Donley: I want to shift gears a little bit.

[00:45:53] Patrick Donley: You used to be a pretty heavy dude. 260, you said. You’re not that anymore. So talk to me about that process of getting into ultra marathons and losing a bunch of weight and just the training that was involved in that. Like you had a comment with Chris Powers. It was like something about the importance of seeking out and finding hard things to do, which I am totally in agreement with. Making yourself suffer goes against our grain.

[00:46:16] Patrick Donley: Tell me about the ultra marathon stuff. 

[00:46:19] Chris Koerner: Yeah. So I celebrated my 10 year anniversary in 2008 with my wife and I was this size when I got married. I was this exact size all throughout high school, throughout my mission. And then I got home and I got married and I just let myself go and I gained 50, 60 pounds.

[00:46:36] Chris Koerner: And my wife, bless her heart, never once said a word. She’s not the type. Hey, watch what you’re eating. What are you doing? Hey, maybe you should work out. Never ever once. Really? She just loved me. Yeah. Never. And she never gained a pound. She had four kids and she always just lost it and then had another kid.

[00:46:52] Chris Koerner: And so she’s the same size today that she was in high school. And so despite her never saying anything, we were on our 10 year anniversary and I just looked in the mirror and I was like, What are you doing? What? Who are you? What? Nothing. There wasn’t a person that made a comment. I don’t know what the trigger was.

[00:47:06] Chris Koerner: It was just, I hit a point and I was like, this is unsustainable. And I had, I had tried over the years, half heartedly lost 20 pounds, gained it, lost 30, lost 10, but I was like, no. I’m done. And I had heard about keto, but I didn’t know anything about it. And I was like, ah, let’s try that. All right.

[00:47:21] Chris Koerner: When I come home from Hawaii, our anniversary, I’m going to start keto. So I did. And I just didn’t look back. I just went to a strict keto. I lost all the weight and I didn’t really do much exercise. It was just a diet. I played racquetball just a little bit on the weekends, but after I lost the weight, I hit my goal weight.

[00:47:36] Chris Koerner: And I was like, okay, now you got to keep this off. I didn’t want to be on keto forever. So I thought, I’ll just start running. So I just went outside and I don’t have a background in running. I wrestled in high school and that’s it. So I just started running around the neighborhood and I’d always told myself I never ran a race.

[00:47:50] Chris Koerner: I’m the all or nothing type. And so I thought, man, it’d be a cool story. If my first race was a marathon, it’d just be cool to not work up to it. That’s the extent of my thinking. And so I just googled a marathon training plan. I followed it to a t. I ran a marathon two and a half months later, and then I learned what ultra marathons were.

[00:48:06] Chris Koerner: I didn’t even know they existed, and I ran an ultra marathon a month after that. And then I ran 13 more over the next two years. 

[00:48:13] Patrick Donley: So an ultra marathon is, what’s the shortest mileage? 

[00:48:19] Chris Koerner: 50K, which is 31 miles. And what’s the 

[00:48:22] Patrick Donley: longest you, what was the longest one you did? 

[00:48:24] Chris Koerner: 139. 

[00:48:26] Patrick Donley: 139. So something like that takes how long?

[00:48:29] Chris Koerner: 35 hours. Holy smokes. That’s crazy. Yeah, it is. It’s pretty crazy. 

[00:48:35] Patrick Donley: I mean, that’s wild. I biked across America. That was like my big journey. So I appreciate that it’s pretty wild. No, I appreciate these kinds of stories and I think they’re great to seek out, but I can’t imagine running whatever 36 hours through however long, like that blows my mind.

[00:48:50] Patrick Donley: Honestly. 

[00:48:52] Chris Koerner: Yeah. At the end of the day, it comes down to. Dialing in your nutrition, and I mean that while you’re running, right? Like you, you gotta learn how many calories you need per hour to keep going. Just like how much gas your car needs every hundred miles, right? And then you gotta dial in your, you gotta take electrolytes.

[00:49:09] Chris Koerner: That’s the big secret. You just gotta have your salt, potassium, magnesium. And then the third is you just can’t quit. Like you just walk. That’s not an option, right? No, it’s just not. And you walk a lot. So you say running, but there’s a lot of, there’s more walking than running. 

[00:49:26] Patrick Donley: Are you sleeping? Like taking a little cat nap along the way or?

[00:49:30] Chris Koerner: No, I never have. People do. It’s common on especially multi, like hundred, two or three hundred mile races that I’ve never had. 

[00:49:38] Patrick Donley: Is it something you would do that level of distance again or is it like a one and done? Like I did it, I proved I could do it, I don’t need to do it again? 

[00:49:45] Chris Koerner: I would, I definitely would.

[00:49:47] Chris Koerner: I never quit one, which I’ve since learned is rare. They have a 30 to 40 percent dropout rate, which makes sense. I just, on the 140 mile one, I remember being out there. And it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life by far. And I wanted to quit. I just thought I have four kids and they’re going to ask me why I quit.

[00:50:06] Chris Koerner: And I can’t tell them daddy broke his leg. Daddy got bit by a snake. I just have to tell them it was too hard. And that was the only reason I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t quit. And they would have been like, Yeah, of course. It’s hard. I just, I couldn’t stomach them remembering that even if they never did.

[00:50:25] Chris Koerner: I just couldn’t do it. 

[00:50:27] Patrick Donley: No, it’s a great example to set for them. I want to get more into your kids. You’ve got a daughter that had a lung transplant and this story is really amazing. So tell me a little bit about her, the condition she had and then what led to the lung transplant and then we’ll go from there.

[00:50:42] Chris Koerner: Yeah, she had a disease called pulmonary hypertension, which means a high blood pressure in the lungs. It’s extremely rare, especially if it’s idiopathic, which means the doctors don’t know the cause for it. Sometimes older smokers will get it, but it’s very rare to be born with it, one in a million. And so we didn’t even know she had it until she was three.

[00:51:01] Chris Koerner: She just kept having breathing issues. She was misdiagnosed with asthma. And finally, our pediatrician, it was just, Like maybe it’s pulmonary hypertension and like that just set off this chain of events. And so she was diagnosed with it. We’d never heard of it. And we learned it was terminal. There’s medication you can take.

[00:51:17] Chris Koerner: So basically what it means is the arteries in her lungs are too narrow. She was born that way. And so the heart works on overdrive 24, 7, 8. to push it through. Her resting heart rate was in the 120s to 150s. Oh, wow. 24 7. Couldn’t climb upstairs. Her lips, everyone thought she wore purple lipstick because her lips are always blue.

[00:51:34] Chris Koerner: And from three to nine, it just got worse. And she’d be on oxygen sometimes. Sometimes she had, we were in a trial in Denver. We tried everything. But we, there’s no cure. And so at age nine, the doctor’s listened, she needed a double lung transplant. That’s the only way out of this. And it’s not really out of it because lungs don’t last forever, but it was just the best option.

[00:51:55] Chris Koerner: And so we had to move to Houston to be close to the Texas Children’s, which is the best lung hospital in the country. And she was on the waiting list for six weeks and we got a call late at night and we took her in and she got a lung transplant. And it’s been two years almost to the day and she’s been healthy ever since.

[00:52:13] Patrick Donley: That’s incredible. Super incredible. And so what is the, like the issue will she have to have, you said there’s a time limit on lung transplants. Will she have to have another one in her twenties or something like that? 

[00:52:25] Chris Koerner: So the first year is the riskiest and we got out of that. And so the average lifespan of lungs is like seven to 10 years.

[00:52:33] Chris Koerner: Yeah. And so doctors will do a second transplant if all of the stars align, if they say it’s okay, it happens in a minority of cases. So that’s the hope of a double, like a second lung transplant at some point in the future. 

[00:52:49] Patrick Donley: My wife’s father had an idiopathic term, right?

[00:52:53] Patrick Donley: Idiopathic lung issue and also had a lung transplant and same thing, gave him 5 to 10 years. And I think he was older when he had the transplant. He was in his late sixties, I think when the transplant happened, but he was able to get a lot more years than he probably otherwise would have.

[00:53:07] Patrick Donley: So you have since become a donor. So talk to me about you and your wife and what you guys have done, trying to give back to, thank the little boy that saved your daughter’s life. 

[00:53:18] Chris Koerner: Yeah. So a month or two after she got her transplant, I learned about living organ donation, which basically means donating your portion of your liver.

[00:53:26] Chris Koerner: Because livers actually regenerate. You only have one, but it will regenerate. So donating a portion of your liver or donating one of your two kidneys or donating blood marrow. And so I learned about it, I didn’t even know it was a thing. I just thought you’d be an organ donor on your driver’s license.

[00:53:40] Chris Koerner: And I had learned about doing it altruistically. which are also known as non-directed, where you just give it to a stranger. And it only happens a couple hundred times a year. 

[00:53:51] Patrick Donley: Nationwide, just that people choose to do this, you’re saying? 

[00:53:54] Chris Koerner: Yeah, there’s about 4, 000 kidney donations a year, and about 95 percent of them are to a loved one, the rest are non directed.

[00:54:02] Chris Koerner: I just felt immense gratitude to Sam. The boy who tragically died, he gave my daughter his lungs and I wanted to pay it forward. It seemed like a very logical way to do it. Once I learned about the low risk of a procedure that it is. 

[00:54:18] Patrick Donley: Yeah, you told me it’s like a colonoscopy or a giving birth or something like about the same odds of 

[00:54:24] Chris Koerner: about three and 10, 000 mortality rate.

[00:54:27] Patrick Donley: And what was the stat? I read that if just one in 10, 000 people did this kind of kidney donation, they would tell me about that. I don’t know the exact numbers. 

[00:54:38] Chris Koerner: Yeah, so I had to back-end this math myself. Once I learned it, I just wow, I, the McAfee story, I just wanted to shout it from the rooftops.

[00:54:46] Chris Koerner: If one in every 10, 000 healthy American adults, so not just Americans, not just adults, but like healthy American adults, were to donate their kidney. then no one would die waiting for a kidney. Whereas today about 5, 000 people a year die on the transplant list. Wow. And 

[00:55:05] Patrick Donley: your wife also did the same procedure.

[00:55:07] Patrick Donley: You and your wife both gave a kidney and went through this process. 

[00:55:11] Chris Koerner: Yep. Just two weeks ago, two weeks ago, she did hers. 

[00:55:14] Patrick Donley: Wow. That’s incredible. So to find out more about it, I think you mentioned an organization or a website. What was that? 

[00:55:21] Chris Koerner: Yeah. The national kidney registry. I think it’s like the NKR kidney registry.

[00:55:26] Chris Koerner: org. 

[00:55:27] Patrick Donley: I’ll put links in the show notes to this. I’m interested in it. I don’t know that I would, I really admire people that do something like this, so pretty cool stuff. Before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn’t touch on that you wanted to talk about? 

[00:55:40] Chris Koerner: No, I don’t think so. We had talked about this earlier where I’m doing this live call in a show.

[00:55:45] Chris Koerner: I call it the Dave Ramsey for Entrepreneurs, where I love it. Yeah. People can call in and just ask me business questions live on Twitter through Twitter spaces, and

[00:55:53] Patrick Donley: you’ve done one so far, you’re planning to do 10. Is that what you said? 

[00:55:57] Chris Koerner: I’m going to do 10 as an experiment to see how it goes.

[00:56:00] Chris Koerner: And yeah, you just, it’s on Twitter at noon, every Friday, and you can call in through Twitter. And just ask me any business question and I’ll answer it live on the spot. 

[00:56:10] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. I think it’s a great idea. How do people find you on Twitter? How can they find you elsewhere online? What’s the best way for people to sign up for the space thing and just learn more about you?

[00:56:20] Chris Koerner: Probably on my website. It’s chris kerner. com. K O E R N E R. On Twitter, I’m MHP underscore guy as in mobile home park guy. Pretty active there. 

[00:56:31] Patrick Donley: Awesome. Chris, thanks so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate your time today. 

[00:56:35] Chris Koerner: Absolutely. Thanks, Patrick. 

[00:56:37] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode.

[00:56:39] Patrick Donley: I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

[00:56:43] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.