They're pretty tame, they want food. This is my horse that I ride. This is Zarr. Those horses are, that one's, all those light ones are super tame. That one over there, I don't know. This is the one I raised right here. This is a female, she's two. One of those with the light mare just came right up to me when I first came in and it's like I was petting it. They want food. Horses you have to give some grain usually. They have stomach kind of where they can eat it. Hey girl. Yeah I have the bigger horses down south at my other farm. I'll bring the big ones. The first podcast in my, one of my barns. A land podcast. Got hay. Straw. Wheat. Okay. This is an interesting episode.  So you got the straw here, you got hay here, wheat. But it's appropriate because we're talking about land. So John, we started to partner up buying land. We just closed our first deal in Texas. And so I was like, let's let the world hear what you're doing because a lot of people have been fascinated by this land arbitrage concept. So where are you from, Ursula? From Michigan. From Michigan. I've been in Texas for the last 11 years, like a second home. So you're 29 years old. Yes. And you're already have more than 10 million in real estate deals that you've done. Yeah I'd call it about 10 million. 10 million. You've got positive cash flow from the deals. Have any of the deals, have everyone been profitable so far? Everyone has been profitable. There's been like, I think two times when I first started off where I bought a piece of land where it was like bad title or something wrong. But you got a fix now. How many deals have you done in total? Over 500. Last recent kind was about 525-ish. So let's talk big picture. Listen to this episode if you are someone who realizes, you know, the most millionaires in the world have been made from real estate. Not billionaires. Most billionaires came from people who built and owned, you know, brands. But millionaires come from everyday ordinary people who buy up real estate and know how to do it. It's something they don't teach you in school at all, which is pretty insane. 50 trillion of estimated global net worth is in real estate. Whether it's commercial, raw land. We're going to talk today more about raw land, farmland, a little bit like that, you know. But all the different classes of commercial, residential, multifamily, you know, single family homes, blah, blah, blah. You have every taking land and doing development. And the thing I remember when I remember, you know how I first started getting into real estate? How's that? This is funny. I know you're not.  I got some questions. I saw a late night commercial. So I had started a business financial, kind of financial planning company. I was a CFP and I saw this just random commercial Carlton sheets. Have you ever heard of this guy? I have. He's like old school. It's like a rerun of an infomercial and he had all these people that he was showing had created wealth with real estate using his system. He had this system. I forget what it was, but maybe single family homes or something renting out. So I'm watching it and I'm like, huh, this seems weird. I was with the, I remember with this guy named Navon. He was a roommate. This is the first time I started making even a little bit of money. I went from sleeping in a mobile home to this house and they had a TV when I first moved in with two roommates. Anyway, the next week I had a financial planning like meetup with a potential client. I remember his first name was Scott. I remember he was, this is when I was in North Carolina. I go to Greensboro. I meet him, him and his wife and he's like, here's my tax returns. I'm making millions of dollars. I was a car salesman and I got into real estate. I'm making, this is the first time I'd seen a tax return where a guy was making millions and I was like, wow. So here's the crazy thing. I was thinking to myself, I just saw this infomercial on real estate. I drive back home from meeting this Scott guy in Greensboro and I watch it and this Carlton sheets thing would come on at midnight. It was like a late night and it was the client I had just met with with Carlton sheets in Hawaii being like, and Scott is one of my stop, a top students in testimonial and now is when I knew this infomercial is not BS because I called Scott the next day. I was like, I saw you on TV. He's like, yeah, I actually learned my system from a late night infomercial. He's like, I tweaked it myself and that's when I knew, by the way, this is actually for people who follow me or like, why are you into courses? That was the first time I really saw some dude buying a quote unquote get rich quick course because a lot of people made fun of Carlton sheets. I call it teaching you like it's a gimmick. Why do you have to pay? So I bought the Carlton sheet thing. I remember it was $400 and I was like, that is so much money and I bought it and then I started. Yeah. I mean, so let's switch over to you. That's kind of my story of like courses and how I got started and I started buying some houses in Rawling, North Carolina and then I progressed. Now I buy land. That's how we kind of, you know, kind of partnered up on these first deals we're doing together. But for you, what is the back story? Like were you completely broke at some point? I can never say I had a broke to riches story. I was an engineer as I went to school for Texas Tech, graduated petroleum engineering, and I guess I had that point where I was like, man, I'd like this, but I hate going to the office. Right. I was fricking hated like coming in. It was like, it wasn't even nine to five. It was like seven to five, like these grueling hours plus late night call because I was like doing drilling rings and everything.  And so I found out about this land business model actually on a podcast and somebody else's podcast. They're pitching their course and, you know, whatever, talking about land. And I was like, OK, I've always been interested in like flipping stuff, whether it be like garage sale or concert tickets, whatever, like hustling. I was like, maybe I can just do that with real estate and with land. It seems easy enough. So I bought that. What were you at this? 23. 23. OK. Yeah. So I bought that dude's course. It would have been November of 2016. And I bought another course. So I took two courses. How much were they? You remember? They're both. One was a thousand. One was 1500. One of them came with a free piece of land. Really? Yeah. They're like, by the course of 1500, you get a free piece of land. Where was the land like in the Sahara Desert? It was in the desert of Arizona. It was like a one acre piece out in Arizona. It probably worked like 150 months. Funny enough, I ended up selling that for 125 a month for 12 months. So $1,500. And I got the course basically for free. So you sold it with financing. Yeah. Seller financing. Just on a land contract. So the course ended up being free. Yeah. OK. That's cool. Yeah. So I took those two courses. It was November of 2016. I was like, man, I just want to find a deal and start small and kind of jump in. OK. And that's when I found my first deal in Texas. 53 acres for 8,500 bucks. An acre. Or total? Total. 170 per acre. 170. So why was it so cheap? What was wrong with it? Well, it was kind of in the middle of nowhere of West Texas. Again, the desert, no water, no real road access. It was just desert, Mesquite land. And I was like, I was looking. I was like, everything else around here is selling for like 12, 1,300. This dude was asking like 10 grand.  OK. And I was like in my office working engineering, like haggling with this dude on the phone while I should be working. And we ended up settling on 8,500 bucks. OK. And that was the first deal. I ended up selling it off in five different pieces of like 10 acres. So how much would you make? You put in how much 8,000? 8,500. And how much did you make back from that overall? I pretty much doubled my money. I sold a few of them off on owner financing again and a couple of them for cash. I ended up with like 17 or 18 grand. And then you took that and did you keep snowballing it to bigger? Yes. Well, thankfully, as an engineer, you make a lot of money. So I literally just took all that money plus the success from that first deal and just plowed it into more deals like that. So that was the start of it, like starting with those small pieces in the middle of nowhere, kind of more just like flipping. Right. So that was the beginning of an empire. Beginning of an empire. So, OK. Now, let's fast forward now. You've done over 500 deals. If somebody's watching, like, what's the top three tips for someone to get started? Is it as simple because you'll see people like, you know, I've been doing education stuff around business and entrepreneurship. And some people's like, just do it. But then people are like, I don't know what to just do. Like, let's say you lost everything you had. You had to start all over today. What size piece of land are you going for? What area are you looking at? What price per acre would you say? I mean, obviously that's variable. Like, we're here on the East Coast land. You can't buy any land here for 170 bucks an acre. No. Most of the land here is 8 to 12,000. And land's going up now because there's people worried about the future of the world and food and all that. So farmland's been going up. But how would you, what would be just like, you know, the three simplest ways you get started? Would you find five acres? Yeah, you divide it up. You got to start small for sure. So I would say five to 10 grand, even when I go to work a new area, like we're talking about doing deals in Virginia or whatever now, like I want to start small. Yeah. Like I don't want to just go in for like a $500,000 million deal. You know, you got to start, you know, five figures under 10 grand if you can. So you got to start small. But the thing is, is you got to get super familiar with an area because like the more knowledge you have on that area, the more arbitrage there is because boom, you instantly see a deal and you know it's a deal and you know exactly, okay, I buy this for five, it's instantly worth 10. Gotcha. So if I were to come work Virginia now, like I would just laser focus, find out, you know, what stuff is selling for here, what the county regulations are, you know, the realtors, brokers in the area, who else is working the area? Just pick a county because, you know, landowners have broken up counties. So you think this will work basically anywhere? Oh yeah, it works anywhere. I mean, I have people who I teach and know and stuff. I have a guy who's doing it in Virginia, one acre lots. What about someone in a place like Alaska would this work? Florida. What about outside the U.S.? You know, obviously there's different regulations, but the land arbitrage system, if you don't know what arbitrage is, it's you take something that's worth this and somebody pays you this and you do it relatively quickly. So we just did a deal together, 160 acres. Yes, sir. And we already had three of the lots sold when we closed and bought the land. So we already had money coming in, literally in the first millisecond of ownership, which is pretty cool. And then we've sold now, it's only been two weeks. Two weeks, I got half of it sold. Half of it sold off. So start super small.  Know your county in this case because land ownership is controlled by the county tax records. Now, number two, what do people need to know about? Like, I don't have, let's say somebody says, I have no money. How do I do this? What are the, what's the basics you would teach them about the financing side? How you get the, in general, getting the owner themselves to finance. Yeah. So if you don't know, by the way, what we're talking about, owner seller finance basically means instead of you having to get a bank loan or pay cash for the property, you get the person selling the property to write up a note that an IOU, that you owe them payments. So if you maybe don't have good credit, that's good. And their security, if you don't pay them back in general, depending on the state, is they own the land, they can take it back from you. So that's, you might think that's scary, but in a sense that's good. Yeah. Because if you don't have great credit or you don't have a track record, in general, bank, especially for raw land, banks are not going to find anything. They're not very friendly. No. If you have a great, if you're a billionaire or a millionaire and you have a great track record, you could convince them, even then you're going to have to put quite a bit down on raw land. One percent. Yeah. It's like the lowest of those. But a lot of banks are going to want 50 if you have no track record and it's a raw piece of land. So how do you get and find people who own land that are willing to sell it to you and take payments on it? Yeah. So one thing I've kind of started doing at scale and it's unlocked a tremendous amount of wealth is the seller financing. And I think I'm the only person I know who's actually sending out an offer letter for seller financing. So I will send them a hard offer, two-page offer letter that I have offering to buy their land on financing. Yeah. And then I'll explicitly say this is how much I'm going to give you down. Yes. And then how much I'm going to give you per month at what percentage interest over whatever rate. And what we do is there's two main ways we can do it. We can just pull the data from the county. Right. And we put it in a spreadsheet and mail them out. Or what I love to do is I actually, hard manual labor or hire someone else to do it, go into the county GIS mapping system. Okay. And start looking at these pieces of land on basically Google Earth and scraping them manually into a spreadsheet. And so I'll go into whatever county, whatever area interests me. And I'll pull up their GIS map and start clicking on pieces of land that don't have anything on them or don't look like they have anything on them. And I transfer their ownership data, their location. I put it in a spreadsheet. And I will individually apply each piece of land with a value that I think it's worth trying to offer like 70 cents on the dollar. Basically. That way you're instantly in the money. Instantly buying it under value. So it's mass messaging a whole bunch of people in a county with a letter like snail mail, old school, in their mailbox. There's still people that use the mail, not many, but, and they get the letter and it's well written out and it's two pages. And it actually has an offer like. Has an offer, yeah. And so what you're looking for is what they call in the industry motivated sellers. Yeah. Meaning they got something else going on. They maybe could sell the piece of land for $50,000. If they had a year because land in general sells much slower than homes. Yes. In this area. It's a big piece especially. Yeah. In the East Coast, there's a lot of, the average big farm takes three to five years to sell. That's crazy. Yeah. Now I was in Europe in Sweden. The average big farm will sell in three to five weeks. It's insane. So it depends what country you're in, you know, you're in, in the state. So you're looking for a motivated seller who basically goes, I don't want to have my house on the market and here's this letter from John and like I can have money right now. That's pretty tempting to people. And it's pretty crazy. The response rate is I've seen like 1%, which is actually pretty insane. Cause you know, you mail out three or 500 of these things and you got three or five acceptances. Yes. For big pieces. Like these are not small pieces. So like how much capital do you have and can you actually. And you can mail three to 500 people is not the cost of marketing. It's like the cheaper than Facebook. A couple hundred bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And so you generate. So basically you got to know the letter. It needs to, you have to know how to compile the important thing for somebody listening or watching is you have to know how to compile the offer. So you don't over offer. Yeah. You don't want to over offer. If it's where the thousand bucks at acre and you offer like, I'll prepare to give you 1500 bucks an acre. And they're like, sure.  But here's the thing. You have to make your offer competitive, right? Because no one in the right mind is going to sell their million dollar ranch for four or 500 thousand. It needs to be, you know, 70, 80 cents on a dollar. So boom, you're buying it undervalued. Then if you want to subdivide it or develop it, do whatever you're adding value from there. Exactly. So it's not just complete arbitraging by undercutting people. It's like we actually, and the deal we're doing deals together, that deal we're coming in there and making sure there's water and making sure that there's the ability because on a big piece of property, most people can't handle a big piece of property. Yeah. So you're doing a service to say, all right, here's 20 acres of it. And we're also providing that seller with a pretty good tax advantage too, right? He's getting to pay tax over time. He's getting monthly cash flow. He's not even like some tax burden on a sale of his land. Yeah. Because some, a lot of people, especially people who are older who own farms and they inherited them, their tax basis is super low. So when they sell this thing, maybe they've been sitting on the piece of land for 50 years. When they sell it, they might have a crazy amount of capital gains. And in every country in the world, the government wants their piece. So that's the third part, is you write the letter and then you negotiate a deal where you just pay them off monthly for the land. And then the arbitrage, by the way, and we'll get to that in a second, the arbitrage is where you then take that land, flip it, and have somebody else pay you more payments than you're paying them. And you keep the difference and you own the land. And one thing we talk about letter is, one thing I actually want to mention too, is there's so many of these big pieces just sitting online. Yeah. And they're illiquid. Some of my biggest projects I've actually found online because they're just listed on, you know, land websites. Yes.  They're un-motivated.  You know, there was one piece I bought. It was like $200,000. It's like one iPhone picture. And the dude's thumb's like covering the camera.  So there's actually just so much land just out there right now, just online where there's like so much opportunity to buy it at a great price because it's illiquid, these larger pieces. Yes. A lot of people can't afford them. Yeah. Yeah. So you're really, I mean, here's the thing I tell people about business. Everybody assumes that there's a lot of hardworking people who are working smart and people go, oh, I don't want to buy land because you know, all the good pieces are taken. What you learned in your 20s was like, if you get out there and start taking action, learn from somebody, like I said, you bought a couple of courses, learn from somebody, and then of course you eventually start learning from experience, but you get started off somebody's system and then you kind of tweak it over time. Like, there's not a lot of people doing this. There's no one, I tweaked it to the point where I don't know there's anyone doing this arbitrage, or you buy it on seller financing and then sell it on seller. I'm the only person I know that's really good. And think of this, there's over 300 million Americans. Yeah. There's one 29-year-old doing it. It's like, that just shows you like people are getting lazier, man. We got to make land ownership simple. That's what's so beautiful about selling it with owner financing. Yes. Collecting payments from people because they can, they don't need to use a bank. It's actually affordable. What we're doing, like the deal we're doing is $700 a month. Yeah. Affordable housing for people. Yeah. So it's actually good for the world too. It's not like you're just making money by doing something completely exploitative and destructive. It's like, no, we're like actually taking land that's underutilized. The seller's happy because they make money. The people we resell it to come in and they're happy because they have an affordable place and they didn't need to get a bank loan. So just to make it clear one more time, imagine this is a piece of land right here. Here's the piece of land. It's not on, it's not for sale. The owner of this, let's say, is this water bottle, Mr. Water Bottle. You like these high tech, we're on a farm, man. We're going to use what we have, not have a high tech diagram like they have on YouTube. So this owner right here, he didn't even have this necessarily for sale, this piece of land. Let's say it's 20 acres. You send letters to hundreds of people like this. A few of them reply. Out of 300 letters, you get three replies. This guy replies back, sure, I'll sell to you. You come in, you make an offer, you put a little bit of money down. We didn't put much money down on the deal. 10 to 15%. Yeah. You put a little bit down and then we pay this person monthly for five to 10 years.  And now we'll talk about how you find buyers. Now this person walks off with their money and now I'm going to use this headset. Now you own this. I'm a headset. John the headset. Now owns this. He goes out, divides it in four, divides it in 10, whatever. And then he sells that to individuals, but they don't have to have a bank loan. They give you a little money down and they make monthly payments. So John here has to make his monthly payments to this old owner, but he's getting all this income in from the current people. And the arbitrage is you resell the land for more than you pay this person. Usually I like to look for it by the way, at least double. Yeah. Double your money. You're getting 10,000 coming in, you're paying him five, like that's bare minimum. So yeah, imagine like you, exactly, you have to pay this guy 5,000 a month for seven years or 10 years. But these people here are paying you 10,000. So basically think about this is what's mind blowing what people don't realize. You get to take and that's, let's say 12,000, let's just do it. So let's say this person, you have to send a check for 6,000. These people are paying you 12, so you get to keep six. So you take six off the table into your own pocket. And the other six is from these people who are buying the land for you. That's what people don't realize about real estate. These other people, because at the end of the day, they're paying off the note for you. Now, of course you transfer the ownership to these people, but the point is you still own the land. That's the key thing. And we'll transfer ownership, then we'll go find another deal. There's so much land out there. And there's so many variations of these because some of this is by state. So you could do the notes, for example, where instantly you transfer title to these people. You can also some states, you would not transfer it till the end of the note payment. Also, you could give people, and this happens sometimes, some people will say, I'll just give you cash for it. Yeah, great. Yeah. Make more money quicker. So yeah, it depends on the state you're in, in certain states like that. Also, there's other ways to make money. There are companies out there. You could take this note that you have from these four people. You could resell it to someone else. Okay. And they give you an instant check for the whole thing. So maybe you paid $100,000. You might get a check for $180,000 literally a couple of months later. Yeah. Or a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks later. Depends how quick you want to do it. Yeah. So there's all kinds with real estate. There's many, you know, before crypto, before all this stuff, there was real estate. And that's how people were doing stuff. Before the stock market, people flipping stocks. We got the wind coming in. This barn here got years ago, tornado came through and blew it away. It's a cool barn. This has to be the first podcast recorded in a barn. That's right. On the land. I've got another barn over there we could do. I'm going to move it around. This one's cool though.  So it's good. There's so much. I mean, the cool thing about this opportunity, there's insanity land in this world. There is. I mean, there's so much land. You start flying over the earth and you're like, whoa. And remember, land also changes hand.  One day you might come back and buy it again. I have done that. You've done that. They're like, I don't want it anymore. Yes.  I'm going to buy it back at like 50, 60%. So you make money again. Yeah. I sold again. So land is like, land is very much, I mean, I like the land from like the, I have organic farms. I like rejuvenating the land. You know, I wouldn't want all of the farmland in the world to be subdivided. But at the same time, there's some land that is not that good farmland and humans need a place to live. So you buy that land. I'm more interested in that land. I wouldn't want to go into like prime farmland that's feeding the planet and cut it up for apartments. But there's also other things you can do. Like I was looking at some prime farmland in Illinois.  The farm, if you're growing corn, cows, crops for food, they don't care if they have road frontage, right? So you could sell off the front and then you could keep the back part in organic agriculture or in woods in forest if you want to have trees and you want to do something that's good for the environment. So this way can actually fit in with ecological sustainability at the same time also create financial independence for the person who knows how to do it. For sure. So question for you. You went to college. You got an engineering degree. Don't you think they should have? You know, most people have a minor and people will always pick like a BS minor. I was like, yo, I got an engineering degree. I'm like an art history. Not that art history is not a good thing to learn, but I mean, you can also learn art history by like making money and traveling the world.  So wouldn't it be cool if there was like a minor in practical, yeah, or like land, land arbitrage would be cool. Well, I'm blessed because from engineering and some of the stuff I've taken, like I got familiar with like economics and spreadsheets and all that stuff. If there's one thing I wish that there was a minor, they taught you in college is like a minor in like numbers or like economics or like business, but more just like applied, applied finance. Like what I have on my phone is like a yield calculator or like an interest calculator.  How much am I spending? Like keep it and it can be simple. Yeah. They have you do calculus, which is fine. So people need to learn calculus. You know, some people need advanced stuff, but the average person, you don't have to be somebody who memorizes formula. If you can kind of do the math in your head, like I pay $400 an acre and I sell it for 800. Anybody can do that math, but it's great if, what I guess I was saying about school is ideal if you start guiding people. And there's a great book by Richard Taylor who won a Nobel Prize in economics, speaking of economics.  It's great if you get nudged in the right direction. You know what I'm saying? And when, and I know I'm talking on a different subject now, but the education system in general nudges you in the wrong direction. For example, it forces you to read boring books. And then when people graduate high school or college, they're so burnt out. They've been nudged away from being a book reader. You know, and like you said, you've learned from listening and reading the systems that other people build. And it's very powerful. So anyway, back to, we can talk on that all day, but that's why we're doing this show episode is just so people can learn. Like here's a practical way that somebody, and you didn't inherit a whole bunch of money to start, right? You just started from scratch. I took my engineering money, started from zero. Just from your job. Yeah, now to 10 million. Yeah. Just from my engineer. I was making, I came out of school making 113,000 per year was my first offer. Then, you know, with bonuses and everything probably caught 125 to 150 per year. So I was making a solid amount, but I started with, you know, student debt, like had to move out, do this expenses. And then everything on top that I just piled into buying land. Yeah. Now, what are some of the pitfalls? So let's say somebody just goes out and that's why it's probably good that you took those two courses that you paid for, whatever you paid 2,500 bucks for those two, it kind of can help you from falling in the ditch. What are the biggest pitfalls you've seen when people, what's three pitfalls, mistakes, deadly errors for people trying to do land arbitrage you've seen other people do? Well, the first thing is not knowing your area, not becoming an expert. So they spend all this time and energy mailing out. Their offers are too high or they're way too low. Yes.  Is that what people do if you do too low? I got the worst.  I sent one out recently. The envelope, I hand stopped them to put dollar bills in there. And people got so upset. They were like, why are you sending me a dollar bill? They paid for the postage to mail me the dollar bill back.  I cannot even come close to mentioning what he said. He wrote it on my offer and sent it back with my dollar bill. So don't insult people by sending them a dollar, even if you just meant it to be kind of cool. So you don't do that anymore, right? Yeah. You got to know your area. It comes down to you got to know your area. Text this man. Text said people. Yeah. They might come be happy. They didn't send you a bullet back in the envelope, my friend. Get a bullet. That's what I'm going to do to you. Yeah.  If you offer too little, you're not going to get any deals. You're just going to get a bunch. Yeah. Because if you offer too much, even if you say, oh, well actually then backtracking from a high offer is tough to do.  You've set the bar so high. They're like, ah, I could get 3,000 bucks an acre. If you try to be like, no, no, no, I've hit 2,000. They're going to be like, forget it. Your letter says that.   If he ever writes you a letter. That is very true actually. Yeah. Dude, people who own farms, it's not a big city. They know each other. It's not that many people live out in some of those counties. Yeah. For sure. So yeah, that reputation is important. I think the second thing is outside of knowing your area. You have to, it's funny because I hear you talk about a lot recently not delegating. Yes. And like, you can't delegate what you don't know. I see so many people in the land industry and real estate in general. They're delegating to like VA's. Yeah. All this stuff. There's always be exactly. I saw a post, I think it was yesterday a couple of days ago. Someone's like, who do you hire for a VA to come up with your offer price? On letters for land.  That's like a heart surgeon. Being like, all right, what nurse can actually do the heart surgery? I'm like, well, then why are you the heart surgeon? If you want to make, listen, we talked about this. You're in my actual, John's in my advanced mentor program. People pay and kind of do shadowing program. He's been spending time. And that's one of the things that I told him is that there is a myth and it's going around on Instagram and TikTok because it goes viral because it sounds great. Just get something, you know, find a good industry and then hand it off and replace yourself. And I'm like, well, do you think Elon Musk can replace himself to build Tesla? The whole reason he's the richest man in the world and somebody changing technology is because he's the guy. And of course he doesn't necessarily cook his own food or it isn't necessary to do all the accounting for Tesla.  And you use what I always say is, assistants amplify you. They don't replace you. A great story I have because there's a huge problem in the land business. I was trying to buy a piece of land just from another investor and I was like, okay, I'm going to buy this and maybe give it away or do whatever. It's kind of the middle of nowhere. And so the guy sent me the location. I do some further digging and look it up. Like, dude, this piece of land is 50 miles from where you told me it actually was way out in the middle of nowhere in Texas. He's like, oh, well, that's the map my VA gave me.  This is one of your students because you got like a... Not my students. Another guy that I was trying to buy a piece of land from. I would never let my students do this.  I was like, you know, can I buy this piece for me? He sends me the GPS location and I do some further digging. And it was actually 50 miles from where he said it was. And this dude was trying to sell that piece of land to people. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, that's where my VA said it was. So you didn't actually go in and figure out where the land was actually located before you bought it. Right. And now you're actually trying to sell it with a wrong location.  I was like, you know, that's just a great example of a VA source. I'm like, man, you got someone who's probably not even in the United States trying to figure out where this land is located and just don't even double check it. Like that's crazy. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, that's not just in the land deal, but you can't delegate what you don't know. Over time, as you become a true expert, you've done 500 deals. It'll be a little easier for you to delegate some things. Now, if you need to do your first five deals on your own 100%, for sure, I'll do everything from ground up and probably more than five, but I'm just saying. So what do you think is a third pitfall you see? Probably not knowing how to sell the land. A lot of people. Right. So they buy it, but then they don't have the systems in place or just the knowledge and kind of just the basic marketing and sales knowledge to make it happen. And then it takes them a long time to sell the land or they can't sell it for what they thought they could and then that destroys their economics. So in the land, in the John, your land arbitrage system, what's the secret that helps you sell faster than people who are beginners or people that are in your training program? Yeah. So I do all the ads and everything myself basically, where I touch and make sure everything is the way I want it. And we do a lot of Facebook geotargeting. Yep. And Facebook marketplace. That's our Facebook's perfect. Yes. Geotargeting on Facebook and the Facebook marketplace. I don't know why more people don't use that for all types of real estate. Yes. Like you can actually run an ad on Facebook marketplace. I could post this farm for sale in Virginia, this location on the Facebook marketplace, then run a Facebook boost ad on that. And everyone around there will see that farm for sale. Yes. Everyone uses Facebook. So there's too many people out there just using Zillow or realtor.com or Lands of America, which, you know, you will get sales. But not as, you got that velocity. You can, like I said, we're doing deals together. We resold half of it in the first 10 days of owning it. Yeah. And also, that's also my email list, right? So I've built up an email list using Facebook forums a lot of times or other methods and just build that list. Then, you know, I shoot an email before I even buy it.  Yep. You have first dibs.  That's how I sold two lots like that out of hours just before. So as you do this more and more and commit to making money this way, you start building up kind of loyal customers. Yes. Who have done other deals and they kind of like to buy land and they like your system. I like to think of it more as like a brand too. Like it's almost personal brand, but, you know, a personal and business land brand. Well, you become like for me, I do a lot in Texas. Like everyone in my area knows like, hey, you have land. Like, do you have land here? Do you have land there? Yep. I've been able to get people coming to me instead of just passively posting my land and waiting for someone to try and buy it. Yeah. That's interesting. And that's taken, of course, you know, tens of thousands. I think it's in the hundreds of thousands. I was looking. I spent well over 100,000 just in Facebook ads and land alone in the last five years. So the deal we're looking at that we did, you projected the rate of return IRR to be over 200%, which is amazing. So that's a deal we did, you know, and you're basically looking over time. You got cash flow, you have profit. There's tax advantages that people, a lot of people don't know and aren't taught of being a real estate owner as well. Some cool things. Of course, you can deduct things like interest. You can deduct the expenses of subdividing and so on and so forth. But we're on track to hit that, by the way.  We're ahead of the plan. So you've got a nice, he's got a nice little software system generated, a report you can run your projections out. Of course, like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until I punch them in the face. So projections don't always perfectly line up with reality. In this case, we're doing a little better. Sometimes projections are under optimistic and you end up doing better, which is a great problem to have is when your projections, but of course, as we know in life, over time it averages out, but you really don't want to buy. You need what's called a margin of safety. So your margin of safety is like Warren Buffett's famous saying, you know, the margin of safety, you want to at least see yourself doubling your money. Yeah. That's like a minimum. At least 100% yield is what I like to look at. What's the most you've made on a property? Probably the one I'm doing right now, it's a big subdivision and I gave them 250,000 down and 1.25 million over 10 years. So I'm paying them like 14, 5 a month, I think. Okay. And all of a sudden done, it's going to be about $5 million of notes receivable. So I've turned 250 into... 200, because it's a lever. For those of you don't know, even though overall I have to pay a million bucks, it's leverage over time. You don't have to give that all at once. So you're saying 200,000, the lever, it ends up turning into 5 million. Now you need to subtract the interest that you paid in the 1.2 million. You're talking about making millions. I'm making 4 million from 250,000. That's good. That's game changing for most people. And the cool thing about this system for a lot of people, you're ambitious, we're starting to do bigger and bigger things together. But a lot of people are like, if I could just make a million dollars once, I'll retire on it. You know what I mean? Well, the genius thing about this is that's obviously a bigger deal. But you could buy a $5,000 piece of land and sell it for 15 or 20 on payments. So we talked about the pitfalls. We talked about your story. One of the things that I think people that follow me want to know is like, how big could this thing get? Because we've run some projections. You were estimated just for Texas. You think we can do $100 million worth of deals. I think so. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot. Like I said, the largest portion of the net worth of the world. Everybody talks about GDP and everybody talks about how much Apple's worth and how much Amazon's worth of trillion dollars. But I'm going the most of the wealth. At least, let's say, it's hard to know exactly 60 to 80% of all global wealth is just literally in this earth, dirt, real estate. And so it's a tragedy that more people don't know this. Now, by the way, there's different ways people make money. People make money in multifamily. You hear that a lot. Apartment buildings or duplexes, triplex all this and people make money buying homes. You see it on TV and they renovate and they flip. But people forget like land is a big, that's something that I do. You know, I'm very interested in land from, from the agriculture. I've got farmers cart food business and all that. But I'm glad that this word is getting out there because it's like, it's really accessible for almost everybody lived near a piece of land that if they knew, if they had the know-how, they could acquire it, either improve it and resell it or just sometimes just resell it. Yeah. I mean, the opportunity is, is definitely huge. And one thing I love about it is it's very simple. Yes. Also being in Texas, I've done, you know, deals in Arizona or deals, you know, in Wyoming. Like I've done multiple different states all across the country. Soon I actually have to live near the land in all cases. Now. So you can do it remotely. But you do need to, what we're talking about principle number one, the commitment. You got to commit to know that place. Yes. So you can just pop in and be like, yo, I live in Florida, but you know what? I'm visiting, you know, Ann Arbor, Michigan today. Let me buy a quick piece of land.  And you can become an expert from Florida and buy a piece. Yes. Up there, you know, I wouldn't recommend buying a large piece without seeing it, but you know, smaller piece for sure. And don't make it your first deal. Your first deal needs to be in an area. No. I agree. I like to tell people, try and start near you. That way you can go out and see the land. You can get the pictures. You can get boots on ground. But you know, that's still a wide radius. You can drive three, four hours. Yes. You know, so there's so much land and opportunity. And the cool thing is this works not just in the United States. There's basically every country in the world for the most part allows, you know, you can sell land and owner financing or seller financing. Like there's also other benefit because you can buy a piece of land and keep a piece for yourself because some people aren't going to do as many, you know, 500 deals, but you could use this technique. Let's say you want to own a piece of land because maybe you've always wanted to put a house on it or have a little place to keep some chickens or a farm or a place to take your kids and family. You can use this technique if you do it right and get effectively a piece of land for free. You probably make some money.   So if you've ever dreamed about owning real estate, owning a piece of land, owning something in the countryside, and by the way, you can do this in the middle of the city too. This is a cool system for people. Yeah, it is. There is so much opportunity. You can use land for just about anything in a lot of these different areas too. There he is. Livestock, animals. Ziggy. Mobile homes. What's up, bud? Ziggy, do you want to buy some land? If it had bones on it, he'll be happy. He wants some land. He's going to value, he's going to pay in bones.  He values land by the amount of bones per acre. 500 bones per acre. So if people want to learn more, I'm going to put a link below. John and I are doing actual deals together, but as I got to know John, he came through my mentor program. I was like, we need to build this and really get the word out. So I'm going to put a link below. You can go watch here and see if you qualify to be a student of John's. I'm doing it with him. We're building out kind of a system. I've been doing this and John has what you need. What I like about John too is he's an engineer. So like engineers like build out. How many videos is it so far? It's a lot. I'm very detail orientated, obviously. And there's a lot of real estate and land courses out there. Obviously, I mean, I would like to think that mine is the best, but the humbly think it is because it's just, it's just, it covers everything and the details of everything. It's got templates and it's got everything. So you can go out. There's a lot of information given in this. You can go out and search YouTube and some people just are like, I'm never paying for education, but I'm going to tell you this. I've said this before. People think, oh, it's self-serving that I'm just saying it because I sell courses. No, it's the reason I got into selling courses because courses changed my life. Same here. Same with you.  I'm like, no, I got into courses. I have, you know, I've made money in many different things. The reason I still do courses, it's not the main, it's a small part of my business revenue. But I do it because it's transformative and even when haters, you know, the few haters that say, oh, this is a scam.  I did my 67 steps course anywhere I go in the world. That's from 2014. Literally, I can go any city and people will be like, 2014, that changed my life. And this real estate. I have numerous students who have built already six figure businesses just buying and selling land in their first year. Yeah. And it's like, this is not some overview. Like I'm actually showing people how to create Facebook ads, you know, how to become an expert. How to do the letters. How to do the letters. How to value the property. If you don't know how to value the property, you can know everything else. That'll be a disaster. So good. We're going to put a link. Go watch. Go read this page. Go see the presentation. See if it's good for you to apply. You know, I wanted to do this free one.  I'm not going to sit at my barn for 20 hours. How many hours is it so far of the training? 20 plus. Yeah. And my goal is to keep adding as I do stuff or cool. And I'm recording stuff in there on the negotiation. I negotiate big deals. You know, I'm actually training John and some bigger stuff because he wants to keep expanding. So, you know, go there, grab the course. Also, if you're listening, you can just go to tylopez.com slash land podcast. Tylopez.com slash land podcast. L-A-N-D podcast. P-O-D-C-A-S-T. I'm going to have a special page up for those of you watching this on YouTube or listening on Spotify, podcast, wherever you're watching this Facebook, go to tylopez.com slash podcast. See about applying to be trained directly under John. He's done 500 deals. That's pretty insane by age 29. I've done deal with him. So, I actually know that this is legit in the sense that we own a piece. We own a land together. So, I always like to vet deals. He's been through my mentorship program as well. So, and you also investor in some of the deals that we have. So, he's put his money where his mouth is. Go to tylopez.com slash land podcast and see if you should get those 20 hours of training. If not, listen to this again. There's a lot here. There's enough to get you started.  There's a lot of, I tell people the only thing bad about podcasts is like you can't record a podcast long enough unless you want to set a world record for like a 20-hour podcast.  I always say I think the minimum is you should have 20% of your net worth in real estate. I don't, I like, I love crypto, NFTs, I buy big companies. I love e-commerce, social media brand, all that. No matter what, I look at my portfolio twice a year of just like where my net worth is and I want it and I want, I'm always looking to at least be at 20%. Why? Because like Mark Twain said, buy land, they're making more of it. They can make it more crypto. They're staking, they make more NFTs out of nowhere. They say you can't make more Bitcoin. Okay. 21 million, but they can make other competitors which dilute, but land, unless you go to Mars, which I'm not that excited about. The earth is not getting bigger. They're not in land. If anything is shrinking, water levels are rising. So that'll actually make land valuable. And it's a skill you should know yourself. You can pass it on to your kids. You can know that if you learn real estate, it's not a fad. It's not a fad. You look back Julius Caesar, Egyptian pharaohs. They were in the real estate business. Moses. They were all in the real estate business.  You owe it to yourself. Start with something simple. Don't take note of what John said. Like here, I've got over, it's almost 500 acres. I pieced together different land, negotiated deals, just like what John does. Don't start with 450 acres. These are multi-million-dollar deals. Start with as small as you can. One of the 67 steps, my mentor, Joel Salatin, he's like, make your mistakes small. And he called it in the back 40. In the back part of the farm where nobody could make fun of you. So don't bet your whole wealth on this, but own something. By the end of this year, try to own something in the next 12 months.  In addition, by the way, to your own residents. Your own residents is good, but that's not a business. Lots of people so own another place.  If you're doing crypto, if you're doing e-com, be like, wait a sec, I'm too heavy. All good asset managers know you got to look at your portfolio and not get the weighting wrong. So you can miss weight what you have. So yeah, more about John, John's system, John's training, super detailed. If you want to just lay it out for you, Tylopez.com slash land podcast. Put a link here or just type that in and I'll have a link on Tylopez too, but this will take you directly there. Thank you so much for doing this. Let's go see. I got some pigs down below. Everything is about spring time. So they're going to come out into this, into the suite. I keep everything outside, but they like to be in the barn sometime in the winter. The horses are all out. How many horses do I have? I have a couple farms. Two, four, six, eight. We have 11 here. I have about 30 horses. Got the other 20 somewhere on the other farm. One of them came right up to me. I was cutting it. A lot of those horses I raised from my baby. They're big. They're 2,000 pound Belgians. That's a baby, by the way. She's only two years old. People are worried about weight problems. I'm like, that horse Katrina weighs 2,000 pounds at age two. She doesn't worry about her weight. It makes her stronger. Need a little weight around the farm and move stuff around. You don't want to be too skinny. I don't know if you want to put on 2,000 pounds, Rick probably won't fit your frame too well. You don't have to sell all your clothes. That was a muscle. Rick says you can have 1,000 pounds.  I'm going to hitch up some of my horses. And I'm going to see how many men does it take to pull against these, even two of my horses is going to take a long. They have four legs. They can stick them in the ground. They roam to do it. Roam weighs 330 pounds. Some of these weigh 2,300 pounds. My theory, what's your theory? How many things is going to be? I think you're going to need about 20 to 30 per horse. I think 10. Oh man. You have it. No way. Can we bet a piece of land? Let's bet a piece of land. Is it 10 roams or like 10 roams? 10 roams. No way. Remember, humans have a disadvantage to things. One grip strength, right? You can't trust for all your strength in it. Number two, we only have two legs. So you put your feet down. Those horses have big feet like that. We shoe them. They put those eight legs down. Imagine if they weren't even trying, if you had to pull them, 4,600 pounds of weight, dead weight to pull around. I think it'll take about 30 to 40 guys to keep up with them. And yeah. Stonehenge, I went to in the UK. And I think they had, my theory, my conspiracy theory is they had elephants. That's what I think.  Now I don't know the only counter argument. I'm not sure an elephant trunk, some of those rocks weigh 20 tons. So you'd have to have elephants that you could train and you'd put a rope around it and put like four elephants grab it. And I think animals are smart, man. You could train them. Elephants and police or aliens. Yeah. Aliens. Aliens. Yeah. Well, if the aliens come, you still want to own land. This is true. I'm going to bring everything back to land for this episode. All right. We'll go walk around. All right.


What's up everybody? Jason here for jasperjasecasebrakes.com. This is our last eminence filler to unlock the break We're doing a little one box break 2019-20 panini premium hoops or hoops premium stock hobby one box break number nine So this is the last one where we're giving away a 365 a three thousand six hundred fifty dollars spot in eminence Everybody pays the same price at 140 to get a nice hit potentially out of the box and to win that three thousand plus dollar spot So the way this first guys is first rule randomized customer names and teams everybody's a team in the NBA And we're no better in common ship, but we'll open up this box potentially get something nice there Then at the end of the break, we'll take all the customer names about it originally Randomize them only in a new dice roller and customer number one wins the eminence spot, which will be coming up next in a separate video So Let's do the break roll the dice and we got ourselves a four and a five nine times one two three four five six seven eight Ninth final time Jay at the top done a nick. All right. You got four and a five nine times now on the teams one two three four five six seven eight Raptors done at the Boston Celtics Jay with the Raptors Gary with the Rockets St. Ian with the Warriors Adam with the Grizzlies Jay with the Pelicans Adam with the Bucks Nick with the Bulls Jay with the Hornets Gary with the Pistons Nick with the Wizards Roy with the Suns Jay with the Magic Cameron with the Heat Danny with the Cows Roy with the Kings Narick with the Lakers Danny with the Mavericks Matt with the Blazers Sean with the Hawks Chad with the Nets Danny with the Knicks Nick with the T-Wills Narick you have the Nuggets Nick with the Clippers Matt Al with the Jazz David with the Spurs Jay with the Pacers David with the Thunder Roy with the 76ers and Nick with the Boston Celtics So there you go All right, no trades guys quick little box break stick what you got and then we'll come back and round my customer name to see who gets That eminent spot Also, just let you guys know David just got a spot in the next hit crate if anybody wants to join in with David for left Hey crates are fun guys Let's get it rolling Yeah, let's do that immaculate baseball drill I'm down I'm down Daddy's young Nicole I was of it to Aaron Davis. How about a little Lou d'Or? Calvin Johnson that is a red and Kyrie tribute Excellent.  Oh Calvin still can't believe he has trading cards. Oh, I They said I don't I still can't believe he has someone like what? Rather too quickly holiday Is that really is that is that that's awesome, man? Tell me you collect them or do you not do you collect them or do you not? Kobe white very nice Paul mil sabin. Wow. We got a gold Josh Hart 5 out of 10 Pelicans not the pelican we would want but still out of 10 gold. It's pretty strong. All righty.  Good luck. So again, here's the dice really Here's the original customer names that bought in good luck everybody Roll and it is a again number seven We're rolling a lot of sevens guys three to four lucky number seven seven times. Good luck customer number one gets these spots one two Three four five six and Seventh and final time guys Boom seven times three to four seven Jay There you go, man Congratulations Jay You are now in the break and you're guaranteed to hit in eminence coming up next guys separate video eminence basketball


It's the end of the day, almost time for the bell How many options will you sell? Fire up your platform, get ready to enter But first let's get the mindset centered Hey, hey, let's get it Have success, find what works for you and forget the rest Stats and probabilities is what we're a dismiss Greed and profits will flow like honey Power our lives, let's start the show Come on trade hackers, get ready to go Zero day options, time to make bank Get locked and loaded, then be ready to play Hey everyone, welcome to Power Hour Live Friday, March 15th Everybody's doing well S&P down 33, Nasdaq down almost 200 Russell up 6.5, Dow down 180 Gold a little bit lower, Silver up 1.5% Notes and bonds a little bit mixed Ten year yield pretty flat Oil slightly lower, Natty gas down a little over 4% Grains mixed, Euro and the pound flat mixed Bitcoin slightly higher just above 70,000 VIX 14.73 had a little excursion to the 15th handle But back where it feels safe in the 14s What's up? What's up? I've got the Wuga on And then I also just entered another Re-entry So my re-entries today I got stopped out of one Without hitting profit target And then the other ones I've hit 60% On all three Unfortunately the one I got stopped out on Was the biggest of the four And then my challenge portfolio is killing it Had one that I reduced my stop and hit profit target So I got out of that for a small profit And then the other two are still rolling And then my 1DTE which is not on here Hit 45% Not bad Not too shabby at all Pretty good day Yeah so for me I was Man I feel like I played today a little differently Than I've traded in a long time honestly Like I was just super cautious today Very picky about my entries Sometimes I feel like the success I had October through January Caused me to be a little reckless And so only three trades today One was a winner I closed it out before getting stopped out Which is something I don't usually do But I would have gotten stopped And then my second one Still to be determined And then I have one power art trade on right now So But currently up a little over three grand Looks like it was going to get down and dirty But we never even made it down to the lower expected move Yeah Quantaeo same as Wuga 3020s I just don't like the trending price movement That it had today Like the big move up That started about nine o'clock central And then a big move down That started about 50 minutes later So I've been happy with being really careful Like I was today So this is my Wuga plus the other Entry that I just got into On my challenge portfolio Here's my one to one ratio Half of it that I've got left And then my three two Here's half of it that I got left About to be closed out See that one It's at 85 cents And it's trading at $1.15 So a little bit more decay And that one will come off Challenge portfolio up A little over 6% today About $9100 My other account Oh I did get hit on JSP So those did not survive the flush So that was about a $2,700 So my non-challenge portfolio accounts Pretty flat actually on zero DT Got a couple of time flies One of which March 22 is up a few hundred Up about 3% And the March 28 Has been It's at about 5% I would say depending on where you get filled To close it maybe a little bit less But I'm just going to hold I mean if it makes any bit of a decent move Well move down would be better But yeah I don't like the price movement I'm seeing right now Just slowly continuing upward Oh and then my futures Big day in the future is another 5k On those I booked a short in the Nasdaq Right out of the gate If you're on the morning stream You heard me on that one Got made $3,900 on that I jumped back in But I didn't want to go NQ Because I figured I'd give it all back So I went MNQ And it got smaller Still got a few short micros So that one's down I booked a little bit So that one's down about 2-something I booked 9.50 on gold And 8.50 on oil I was going to put on another duck If we got down to the expected move And I was also going to Enter a VXX vertical If we got down to the expected move And then we just bounced Never got there And then vol started crashing I also put on a I was talking about this in the Morning stream I put on a Just kind of a test It's a 1DTE It's 3DTE and NDX Because there was no 0DTE So that one's up just a couple hundred I was just curious how that would With 10 wide wings 1DTE or in this case 3DTE How that would act but Not as much decay as I'd hoped Especially not compared to Our normal 1DTE trade I'm actually going to just Put it in order to take this off Just try to get 320 Yeah Dark Avenger No trailing it's just fixed And then correct Once it hits 45% it's out Yeah Kelvin I'm just doing two For this month and then I'm I haven't decided yet But next month I might scale that up a little bit With two contracts I'm typically risking anywhere from 11-12 hundredish If it closes outside the range So I'll probably scale that up To three or four next month About 50 cents 50 cents still to get Out of 20% of my power hour trade Yeah so my NDX here's my So I've taken Where's my number of trades It's not there Anyway A little over 63% win rate About 3,000, almost 3,000 bucks But some of these earlier ones That I was taking I was kind of layering into A couple of them in the same day And I was doing them a little bit different So based on the way I'm just doing it now Just putting it on letting it expire It's probably A little bit higher win percentage And a little bit higher overall profit So far So it's not an up day or a down day So not doing my Three tranche power hour but I did just enter that Re-entry On the 30 calls And 15 puts Right as we are joining And then I've got Wuga So this is a combination Because I'm sharing the 51-30 call strike So this is both of them together Almost gonna hit my I need about 20 cents Yeah about 20 cents away as well Needed to kind of stay down Don't need it to rip up And I'm a dollar away from 40% of my Lunchtime Number one that I put on So that one definitely needs some down movement So Waterman there with On quad witching days NDX and RUT They do not have Um Yeah it wasn't a toss glitch There is no zero DTE Let you look at your option chain Yup They have the AM Explorations Like if you look at 34 days out you'll see that They have the AM Exploration, the ones that expired this morning But for whatever reason There's no PM zero DTE Explorations on at the end of each quarter Or quad witching Exploration quarters Or excuse me Every month they do that Once a month Got filled on half my power hour So that makes me feel better Still need some down movement By the way the On the morning stream I had to manually enter Some trades I thought there was I guess there was an issue for a couple Minutes with trade steward but The reality is Is that the way that Trade steward looks at the opening VIX It was showing that it was Contracted and so that's So it basically was filtering out My trades based on my VIX filter Is what I came to realize when I looked at the bot Activity logs Yeah there was an outage but that's not why my bots Didn't fire So it's showing that the overnight gap In VIX was minus 2.36% Or remember it was VIX had contracted until Like that 15 minute freeze And then the Stocks really started dropping And so VIX ended up Being up to open the day The overnight move was up Which would have Qualified those trades but Based on Excuse me Based on where trade steward Had the VIX opening They had it still contracted Well that's a good point Michael Todd So here's what it So here's on my Like my one DTE iron condor Has a 0.25% VIX filter Overnight move And it's showing the overnight gap here Minus 2.36 Oh Well What's interesting though is And About a Oh yeah I didn't see this before so at 931 In 16 seconds it was showing VIX gap was up 2.15% And then Two minutes later it showed VIX overnight gap was minus 2.36 And then it does show that there was some Some errors but So I don't know I'm not sure what the I just ended up manually entering Anyway so I worked out Just got filled on 40% Of my lunchtime number 2 Or lunchtime number 1 sorry 2.3 in my challenge portfolio Just got closed out At 95% profit Still just holding the 1 to 1 ratio Which is nice and centered 6.65 Does trade steward track Your total open max risk No It shows your buying power available And everything but same thing as Toss would show you here In the upper left At half my 20% My reentry closed half In the sectors tech is down Healthcare down Semiconductors Slightly red Regional banks Bitcoin up Oil up Biggest movers on stocks Adobe and Ulta had earnings Adobe down 14% Ulta down 4 Airbnb down 3 Amazon down 2 Meta down 2 Blockchain up 8 Tilray up 7.5 Coinbase up 4% NVIDIA up 1 NVIDIA took a break this week Hitting new all time highs Yeah I saw that So did the NASDAQ And I guess SPX did too Came close Few days Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Didn't push through though But I mean you know the day is not over We guys have a 70 point rally No kidding I just didn't be out before that happened I was really happy I traded today So I need to string together more Days like this consecutive I don't even know Krish I don't even know why I have it on there to be honest I think it's Uh 21 day Doesn't mean anything to me The V-slap is not a visual indicator Wuga it's uh It's too sophisticated To go on a chart Yes that's correct Wuga is up about 10% Yeah just you want to keep that to yourself Morrow it's a family program Where's your Wuga sitting at? Is it pre-centered? Wuga is up about 13% Uh It's under the 15 strike So I'm on oh wait no I'm on the 20 30 I've got a shared strike here Yeah it's under the 20 strike so I'm on the 20 30 Okay Oh thank you Krish Not set my little alarm So I forgot it is 215 So I gotta do my 6-7 Thank you for reminding me I just posted my 6-7 Next up here in about 10 minutes I'm gonna do the 3-6 Next week don't forget We will be graced By everyone's favorite Jerome Powell on Wednesday The FOMC Statement and press conference Monday Nothing I got there's A housing market index low impact So hopefully Monday will be a good Monday Tuesday Pre-market building permits But I can't imagine that's going to be too crazy Wednesday FOMC Thursday unemployment claims Pre-market And then flash Manufacturing services PMI 15 minutes after the bell opens And then Friday Our buddies Bar and Bostick Speak Bostick's not till after the market closes Bar is at 11am Central SPX coming down a little bit Check my trade plan So I do two trades So I don't trade in the morning Because the theta usually is non-existent As far as decaying goes So I don't trade in the morning And then I don't trade power hour So I just I do two FOMC trades One is I'm selling Premium Right before the Pre-market payment comes out So that would be at one o'clock Central time So right before that I sell premium Sell Nairn Condor And then As soon as the press conference Little after the press conference starts I close that out For whatever it gives me And then Shortly after the press conference Starts On a long strangle By premium To try to capture some of the move The idea is a lot of times You get a decent volatility contraction After the data is released But the movement isn't too crazy So it benefits the iron condor And then most of the movement happens Either during or after the conference So we're buying some premium To try to take advantage of that move It's got filled on 40% Of power hour number one Wuga is up about 24% I need to get ready for my 3.6 I really need to duplicate How I traded today It's definitely doing wonders For my weekly P&L Just being more cautious Yep, just More cautious about entries That's the big thing Not going to easily enter Throughout that big Drop down and then Reverse up Your chefs gotta be helping your Wuga, huh? Le Wuga Is up about 24% Yep, it's in good shape Just entered Just posted my 3.6 In the calendar channel Next up In about 15 minutes I'll do my 4.5 VIX just getting obliterated Down a dollar From the peak Yeah, on that 4.5 Because you get a credit a lot of times I always I don't put a profit target in I just I hold it until At least Monday And then I Then I decide I want my profit target to be Depending on how it's acting What are you guys going on this weekend Chadwick? Got a Surprise birthday party for my cousin In Mary's Volcans It's tomorrow And then I'm going to be Sunday morning I'm going to stay there and then Sunday morning I'm going to go Set up some ground blinds and listen for turkeys Very nice March 25th Opening day Is that opening day in Missouri or Nebraska? Nebraska That's always earlier, right? Yeah, yep Get a blind? No, you got a mo Oh, yeah, now I've already got I got my tractor all tuned up Ready to roll I've already done a little mowing Yeah, I'm going to It's got to be dry for Several days in a row I might be able to do it this weekend actually You know you can go till dark this year, right? I did not Yeah, they changed the rule You can go down there in the afternoon Sitting there, calling, trying to get something to come in Which is a good time to do that Interesting New rule in the state of Missouri Where are you at, E. Allison? Spokane I've spent some time in Spokane I like that area I grew up in Missoula, Montana So we would go over to Seattle and Spokane It's kind of our big city Big city Vacations Man, I loved Montana I was there this summer I'm going up there In May, Mother's Day weekend Okay Yeah, we were in Hamilton, which isn't far from Missoula That's where Jordan's wedding was It's at the stock farm Where they film a lot of Yellowstone episodes Hmm Yeah, the northeast Excuse me, the northwest In the summer When I moved to Kansas City when I was 12 And it was like The dead heat August Got up the airplane It was so humid I couldn't breathe I was like What is this? What is this humidity thing? Zero humidity up there Little things like You'd leave your cereal open And the humidity would Make it all Stale and weird We never experienced that in Montana We didn't understand that whole situation So we've been here for a while My last Challenge portfolio position is Let's see It's trading at $1.15 I've got a 95% order at $0.40 to close that one Good day for the challenge portfolio Because next week My position size is going to be cranking up Because it's based on a percent It goes up 30% Still a 9-point move, huh? Expected I like that And I should be hitting 60% here I am about I'm still about 60 cents away from 60% My NDX trade I've got an order at $3.20 It's bouncing around that area Well, I have no wife and no kids this weekend So I'm sure what I'm going to get myself into St. Patrick's Day on Sunday Big 12 tournament in town There's a lot to do I do have Got baseball practice Saturday afternoon And Sunday night And then Saturday evening I'm going over to a guy's Place We've been working with this developer On some Automated trading strategies So That's what happens when the wife and kids go out of town It gets crazy It gets nuts with automated trading strategies When's your first baseball tournament? We've got a scrimmage at the end of March And then the first weekend of April is our Official First tournament Yeah, ours too Stone, I haven't seen Stone lately He's over He's over 210 now Squat's about 19 He hit two baseballs About 390 Nice He is just strong He's eating Meals, he's Taking protein, he's doing speed training With the guy that's really good At North Kansas City High School I've been very happy with His effort in the last Since football's been over In the weight room and working on speed My college version of me Would not be happy with that Situation this weekend I'm a grown up now I'm a grown man Mature I hit 60% while we were talking On my lunchtime number one Luga is going to need a bounce back up I'm just getting down to Close to back to even for me I got filled on my Luga at 515 Man, my lunchtime number One Is dead center And it's got a 25 Point range So about 12 points on each side Might just let that expire At the money butterfly trading For only about a dollar 20 minutes to go So that's not going to play out for them homes today Yeah, I need a little bounce To hit 60% on my power Our trade Let's see, are you guys seeing about The debit for the 4-5? Is that right? Those of you trading the 4-5? Yeah Because of FOMC next week So I'm looking at the Shorts I'm looking at the 50-55 puts 51-80 calls 52-05s And the 50-30s Yeah, that's right Make sure I don't have any strike overlaps 52-05 And 50-30 All right, I'm good Builded a dollar 85 on that 4-5 Need a bit of a bounce For my power hour trade Yep, need a bounce I did get, I have booked 40% On that one, so it's still going to be a winner But I was so close To getting out of 60% 4-5 and 3-5 have been Posted and the last one I got to do 47% That's it, keep coming up baby I just posted a picture Of that My power hour trade in my secondary account That is what you like to see 50-95 Puts 51-50 calls All calendars have been Posted Over 11 minutes to go Need a little more bounce Woo goes up 18% I need Oh, there it is, 2-45 Hit 60% Nice, there we go 60% on the power hour Number 1 MOC will be coming out Here in about 10 seconds So I am ready today 2-point billion to the sell side Going short, what did I just say? 2-point some billion To the sell side, going short I thought I heard 4-point Yeah, 4-point 2-billion to sell side Did I say 2? Yeah Okay, I'm short 4-point 2-billion to sell side At the money fly Not gonna do it, but At the money fly Only a dollar 20-ish Still frustrated, I missed yesterday's MOC I would have made At least 3,000 Not much of a reaction yet A bit of a drop That's actually coming down a little bit more than S&P, Russell Still got some short M&Q Futures Wuga just closed out 352 Looks like I booked 40 dollars on the Wuga It's better than being read That's right Some short ES futures I'm looking to take 6 of 10 off 777 A little flush A little end of day flush Challenge portfolio did over 10k today 10,509 Made money every day today This week, that's always a good thing That is always a good thing I just got a fill on something Sold some calls Looking for the MOC flush into the close Couple more points down And I'll close 6 of 10 I'd like to see a quick reaction Off this MOC number Let's see Let's see if we get another little push down Be more trader Said we're headed to VWAP So that means we're definitely going down VSLAP Is going to overpower VWAP Alright, come on, just one little push Lower for the kids Anybody else on the MOC trade?  Just off the beach To come grace us with your presence for power Hour, I like it I already posted the 3,6 Krish That was my second one And the 3,7 was my last one Made a little more push down At 5 points I take off 6 of 10 So it didn't quite get there for me Let's get close, it wants it It wants to eat up that 51,77 Under 2 minutes ES75, I'll take that Come on, hit it It was touching it One more tick Hit it Teasing me Teased me So close, a tick One tick away If I just would have pulled the trigger one second earlier Now I'm back to even Both my lunchtime number 1 Expired Today They're gonna expire In range 3,2,1 Exit I lost 125 bucks I was up over 2,000 But it was a take away from hitting my profit target On that MSE Alright, well Good day Good day on futures Portfolio, okay day on my other count Good day No calendars on my calendar account Alright, to my friends Everyone have a good weekend Next week On Monday The 18th We'll be streaming live for 0DTE At the open And back for power hour live Alright all Have a good weekend, take care Cheers


As-salamu alaykiyya, As-salamu alaykiyya Just before the event of Ghadir, so the year prior to that, Imam Amirul Mu'min As-salam had been sent by the Holy Prophet As-salam on a deputation to Yemen. At that time, Imam Amirul Mu'min As-salam had dealt with certain people in that way, in Yemen, where some people had complaints about the way that he had dealt. When they complained to the Holy Prophet As-salam, the Holy Prophet said, you should deal with Imam Amirul Mu'min As-salam directly and whatever he's done. I agree and I support him in whatever he has done. So some people make this argument that because there was this disagreement or people were not happy with him during his deputation in Yemen, this is why the Holy Prophet As-salam made this announcement at Ghadir. This is easily dismissed as a point because of the ayat of Quran which is revealed regarding the event of Ghadir. For example, the ayat Surah 5 verse 67 which is revealed saying, Ya Rasulullah, you have to deliver that which has already been revealed to you. If you don't deliver it, it's as if you didn't deliver the message at all. That means that whatever is being announced at the day of Ghadir is not some little misunderstanding that has been clarified. It's something very significant, very important, very real in terms of having an effect on the whole ummah. Number one. Number two, after the Holy Prophet As-salam makes this announcement and he says that Ali is the Maula of all the believers after me, the first person to congratulate is the second Khalifa who says that congratulations to you, our son of Abu Talib. Today you've become the Maula of all the believing men and women. That means that it's not referring to friendship. This congratulations in itself is an indication that it's something to do with superiority and authority that's being congratulated. You will not congratulate, oh congratulations you became this person's friend. It doesn't make any sense. Number three, the person who came and he asked the Prophet whether he had appointed Imam Ali As-salam from Allah or from his own self was clear that this is to do with succession and to do with authority and not to do with friendship, otherwise he would not have asked this question. There was no reason for him to bring any objections. Number four, as I said, when people pledged their allegiance they were also very clear about what was going on. After that, when Imam Amirul-Mu'min As-salatu Salam comes into Medina and then the people, the Khidafat is usurped from him, he goes round to all the houses in Medina of the Mahajir-e-Ansa and he knocks on the doors and he asks them that have you forgotten what happened at Khadir and they all say that no we remember but we're too scared to speak out. If Khadir was nothing to do with succession, he would have said, Ya Ali, that was just a misunderstanding, that was just a little issue that had been created. Why are you referring to Khadir when it's to do with succession? So all of these points make it very clear that to say that it was just a little misunderstanding and that was being clarified and this is what the Holy Prophet was saying is a disingenuous way of sidestepping the actual reality and importance and significance and superiority of Khadir and of Imam Amirul-Mu'min As-salatu Salam as a whole. And it's indeed acceptable intellectually because one thing that we often invite people to reflect upon is that in our day-to-day lives when people have businesses, when they have organizations, when they come to the end of their life they start thinking about who will run it after them. They start thinking about who will ensure that they continue whatever they have set out, especially if they care about it, especially if they have a strong affinity towards it and they think it's going to even grow or it's beneficial. It's very unlikely that they will say, I'm not worried about what's going to happen. You decide after me and they'll just leave it as that. And that's very normal human behavior to make sure we appoint people to run the affairs when we're not there. In fact, we do it when we are away on a trip, for example, or when we retire, for example, from a particular duty or responsibility there's somebody who must step in and continue our work. Similarly, it can be therefore understood that Allah SWT is saying to the Prophet or Messenger, you must declare this to the people because without this declaration to ensure somebody looks after the religion after you and is the best person after you to do this, then it will all go completely haywire. It will not necessarily fulfill the objective that the religion will not continue to expand, will not continue to be received by the people and it will not guide mankind. Therefore, intellectually it's accepted. Similarly, it's accepted through the countless narrations that point to the incident of Ghadir as the cause of the revelation of these verses. In Surah 5, Ayat number 3, the Tafseer of Taqrib al-Quran al-Adhan by Ayatullah Shirazi, he mentions the Tafseer of this ayat.  And completed my favor upon you. This favor was not only the favor of Islam. Islam is the first thing, correct, the Shahadah, but we also have the third Shahadah. I bear witness that Ali is the vice-gerent of Allah SWT. So the favor of Allah SWT, when I have completed my favor, is the nama of the willaya. The favor, the grace of the leader of Ali, peace be upon him, the iman of the Amir al-Mu'min, peace be upon him. This is the great grace and nama of Allah SWT. Islam is to make you a pure believer in Allah SWT, but you alternate iman. So the nama of Allah, the grace of Allah is the iman, is the faith in the willaya of Amir al-Mu'min, peace be upon him. That's very important. We shouldn't stop up to only the two Shahadah. Yes, the Shahadah will stop us from being non-believers. It will make us pure, as a Muslim. But we also have to proceed to the level of the iman by submitting to the willaya of Ali, peace be upon him, and his pure family as well. Then the ayah says, and approved for you Islam as religion, وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ الْإِسْلَامَ دِيْنَا So Allah is pleased when you reach the stage of the willaya believing in the iman of Ahl al-bayt, the iman of Ahl al-bayt. So Allah is pleased when the Muslim submits to the willaya and the vice-gerency and the khilafa and the iman and the leadership of Ali, peace be upon him. وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ الْإِسْلَامَ دِيْنَا He becomes pleased. In other words, if I stop up to the second Shahada and I ignore the iman of Ahl al-bayt, peace be upon them all. It means that Allah won't be satisfied, won't be pleased with this Islam, which is an incomplete Islam. The complete Islam, and that's what Allah says in the beginning of the ayah, اَلْيَوْمَ اَكْمَاتُ لَكُمْ دِيْنَا I completed your religion, perfected your religion with the willaya of Ali, with his appointment of the iman of the leadership of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Without it, Islam is incomplete, imperfect and God forbid that might lead that person to the Hellfire. So the whole Ghidhi sermon, if you look at it, is very, very hard to misinterpret or to misunderstand the context of the situation and what Rasulullah s. s. s. was trying to actually declare. For those people who think that Ghidhi wasn't about the establishment of a successor or the declaration of willaya, they say that it was about clarifying the status of Ali ibn Abi Talib amongst the Sahaba and to make sure that people understood his status and to make sure that people understood that he was a friend of Rasulullah and not an enemy of Islam. I think the Ghidhi sermon is very clear. The fact that Rasulullah s. s. s. starts off with praising Allah s. w. t. talking about the authority of Allah s. w. t. And then talking about how Allah s. w. t. ordered him to give this sermon and to announce his successor. The fact that he talks about how Ali ibn Abi Talib is the successor and this is the decree of Allah s. w. t. The fact that he talks about giving allegiance to Ali ibn Abi Talib s. w. t. is like giving allegiance to Allah s. w. t. directly. The fact that Rasulullah s. w. t. mentions the hypocrites in the Quran, he mentions the enemies of the Ahlulbayt. And then finally Rasulullah s. w. t. to dictate and narrate to the people to repeat after me what I'm saying and pledging allegiance to Ali ibn Abi Talib as a whole community, as a whole ummah. There is no room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding the context. The context is clear that this was to do with the succession after Rasulullah s. w. t. The whole Qadir sermon was to declare the successorship, to declare the new leader of the ummah. And also if you were not to accept and you weren't to acknowledge and you were to go and do your own thing what the consequences were. If it was just a sermon of Qadir and three hours standing in the heat then yes it was possible for somebody to make this argument that maybe somebody because of the heat because of the fact they were standing for so long they misinterpreted or they didn't understand it properly or they didn't get what the Holy Prophet was trying to say what the meaning would have been if it was just that. However after the sermon for three days when there's a gathering of people and each one of them is coming and they are doing Salam, As-Salamu Alaikum Amir al-Mu'mineen, pledging allegiance to Imam Amir al-Mu'mineen in that very specific way and it's not just one or two or a couple of people who do this every single person who's there they all come including the women they all come and they pledge allegiance to Imam Amir al-Mu'mineen in that way. It shows that it's not something that is that they would not have understood or they didn't know or they didn't understand if they hadn't understood it until that point then there was no doubt after that that this is the reason why the Holy Prophet of Islam brought them there, stopped them there made them listen to the sermon and then took each one of them to pledge allegiance to Imam Amir al-Mu'mineen in that specific way and of course nobody afterwards after pledging allegiance asks this question or says that Ya Rasulullah what did you mean was it this we didn't understand it wasn't clear for us can you explain it further there's no account of that ever happening There is a lot of discussion today to say that this whole event was an announcement of the friendship of the Prophet with Commander of the Faithful and this is because the word Maula and Walee in Arabic has so many different meanings 19 some say and one of them is friendship one of them is to be a servant or master and so on and so forth but of course the way we know what it actually means is by looking at the context and the Prophet peace and blessings be upon him actually starts off by saying I have complete authority over all of you this is found in Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal he doesn't start off immediately by saying he actually says to people I am a person with that authority over you as the Quran says so he sets the scene he allows people to understand what this will I actually refers to so if we look at the conclusion of the event of Qadir so the Holy Prophet Islam makes this announcement and he everybody is now ordered after the announcement to come and offer allegiance to Imam Amirul Muhammad this takes three days obviously 100,000 people coming one by one to offer allegiance including the women who were ordered for the first time they had to offer allegiance so they needed to know how would they do it so a bowl of water was placed and Imam Amirul Muhammad would place his hand in the water and then the women would come and they would place their hand in the water and that would symbolize the fact that they had made bay'ah on the hand of Imam Amirul Muhammad after the sermon of the Prophet and announcing the leadership to Ali there were three ways of the Holy Prophet took bay'ah from the people to offer allegiance number one he took it verbally he said they said yes he confirmed that so he took the bay'ah verbally first and then he said a tent for three days Muslims came and gave bay'ah to Ali and the Holy Prophet the women were provided with a water bucket and they used to put their hands inside the water bucket and then the Imam comes later on and he puts his hands inside the water as well as a means of bay'ah with the women because it is not allowed for the strange women to shake hand with the strange men only relatives and daughters and so forth so the bay'ah with the women was in this way once this was happening there's a person who comes to the Holy Prophet of Islam Harith ibn-Nu'ma and he says to the Holy Prophet of Islam that you told us to pray and you told us to fast and you told us to do all these things and we did all of them now you forced your brother Ali a.s. on to us so is this from Allah or is it from your own self the Holy Prophet of Islam replies every single commandment that I gave you including this one is all from Allah so he leaves and as he's leaving he says that if you're speaking the truth then may Allah send down punishment on me and if you are lying then may Allah send down punishment on you as soon as he left area of Radir and he got onto his horse there was a small stone pebble that came down from the heavens and the verses of Quran were revealed the opening verses of Surat Al-Ma'arij says someone asked someone asked someone asked someone asked for the punishment of God and he received the punishment of God and we are told the rocks that fell from the heavens and immediately this individual was killed when he challenged the Almighty and when he clearly disbelieved and rejected the truthfulness of the Prophet in which the Prophet of Islam does not speak anything from himself it's all purity, it's all nobility it's all Haqq is Ma'asum when he challenged it before people Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala showed that this man this ignorant individual was wrong he was false and the Prophet of Islam what he said was absolute truth and it is something that must be followed you became my master and the master of the mu'mineen so he gave you the bay'a he shook the hand but sadly you see the history over turns and as the Quran says that you turned on your hills you turned on your hills and they failed to actually implement the instructions of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala the order of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala with regard to the Khilafah of Imam Amir al-Mu'min alaihi salam now we have Allah Ma'amini says 60 scholars, 60 from the Ahl al-Sunnah they actually narrate what happened next and this you know includes the companions such as Ibn Abbas Abu Huraira, Zaid Ibn Arqam they all narrate that one of the first things that happened there is that the second Khalifa came and said to the commander of the faithful he said to him congratulations congratulations to you Ali you have become my Mawla and the Mawla of every believing man and woman now this is certainly not meaning that he said you have become my friend and the friend of every believing man and woman the text is that the prophet has identified what the word Mawla in reality means in his book Al-Ghadeer which are now over nine volumes of the Ghadeer book he had collected all the sources of the non-Shia i.e. the Ahl al-Sunnah books who narrate the event of Ghadeer they narrate also this specific text of Al-Mawla so there is some kind of consensus very frequent and well known by the non-Shia scholars that the event of Ghadeer took place there were more than 110 Sahabi and companions who recorded this event and almost 83 of the Tabe'een and 360 Sunni scholars for the past centuries who recorded the event of Al-Ghadeer and it could be one of the most authenticated Hadith within the Muslim world Hadith Al-Ghadeer is one of the well known Hadith one of the famous Hadith within the Hadith and a famous event that took place in the history of Islam an objective analysis of the collection of narrations and Hadith that we have in the Muslim world today would bring anybody who sits there with an open mind to the conclusion that the narration is present that point to the incident and the event of Ghadeer have reached the level of complete authenticity known as Tawatur and when we look at scholars who have conducted the research in order to come to this conclusion we have the example for instance of Al-Lama Amini now Al-Lama Amini may Allah bless his soul he traveled to Egypt to many parts of the Muslim world to collect these narrations and he has 11 volumes known as Al-Ghadeer the collection of the books that grouped together the narrations and he has come to the conclusion that the incident and the narration of Ghadeer is narrated by over 110 companions of the Holy Prophet 84 of the Tabe'een those who came after the companions and he has put down detailed evidence with names and references of 360 scholars from the school of Khilafa from the Ahl al-Sunnah detailing how they have narrated that this incident actually happened and what actually occurred on the day itself names of companions who have narrated this particular event include Abu Sa'eed al-Khudri Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari ibn Mas'ood ibn Abba Zaid ibn Aqq you have scholars such as and others now when we look at for example books such as Shawaahad al-Tanzeel by Hasekani, Sunan ibn Maja they have given extensive details of what actually happened on the 18th of the Hajj and how the Prophet of Islam peace and blessings be upon him and the Holy Progeny made this declaration


A few weeks ago, I released videos on deet versus natural repellents that we can apply to our clothes or skin. But can things we eat also have a repellent quality? No word yet on vampires, but we do have it on garlic and other bloodsuckers. Check it out. Are some people just more attractive to mosquitoes than others? Apparently so, as identical twins are most likely to be similarly tasty compared to fraternal twins who will only share 50% of their DNA, demonstrating an underlying genetic component that can be sniffed out by mosquitoes. Although it's not clear it's because some people smell better or other people just smell worse. We know pregnant women are twice as attractive to malaria mosquitoes and also that mosquitoes are attracted to sweat. Human sweat contains components that are attractive to anthropophilic, meaning human-loving mosquitoes. The unique composition of human sweat appears to explain its tantalizing effect, though sweat from some body parts are evidently more tantalizing than others. Skin emanations collected from armpits were less attractive compared to hands or feet. Here's the graph. They think the difference may be caused by deodorant residues, since in a subsequent experiment volunteers were asked to avoid using skin care products for five days, and after that no differences were detected. The creepiest bit of research I found was this. The parasites that cause the mosquito-borne disease malaria, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, makes you more attractive to, you guessed it, the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. What better way for the parasites to hitch from person to person? Instead of leaving it up to chance, some parasites manipulate their hosts in elaborate ways. I've talked about how the toxoplasma brain parasite draws mice to the smell of cat urine to get into cat's brains, or how about the rabies virus concentrating in the saliva while tapping into the Cujo rage circuit in the brain. There's even a parasite that needs to get from an ant to a bird, so it turns the ant's belly bright red to look like a ripe berry and makes the ant stick it up in the air to confuse the fruit-eating bird. There's the ants before and after infection, just like malaria parasites making us particularly tasty to mosquitoes. Anything we can do to make ourselves less tasty? I've talked about the various mosquito repellents you can spray on your skin, both synthetic and natural mosquito repellents, but is there anything you can eat or drink to make you less of a target? When you search the scientific literature for diet and mosquitoes, a lot of articles like this pop up on diets for mosquitoes, like Skeeto snack for that artificial blood meal replacement. Feeding mice, different diets make a difference, but what about people? One of the most common anecdotes is that vitamin B-complex supplements protect against biting insects. Other anecdotal remedies include the taking of garlic, Marmite, Vegemite, Brewer's yeast tablets, and alcohol. But you don't know until you put it to the test. How about a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of garlic as a mosquito repellent? A belief in the ability of garlic to repel insects seems to be widespread, so researchers in Connecticut decided to see if it were true. They looked at the numbers of mosquitoes that did not feed on the subjects, the number of mosquito bites, the weights of the mosquitoes after feeding and the amount of blood ingested all determined on people on and off garlic. The data did not provide evidence of significant mosquito repellent. No surprise, given that even if you slather garlic oil on your skin within 30 minutes, mosquitoes don't seem to care. Eating garlic may, however, help against ticks. Because military personnel can sometimes be a particularly high risk for tick bites and tick-borne diseases, the Swedish military conducted randomized, controlled, double-blind trials of garlic to prevent tick bites among marines. Fifty swallowed the equivalent of about a clove a day of garlic, and fifty took placebo pills. Then they all switched, and there was a significant reduction in tick bites when consuming garlic compared to placebo, cutting the risk of tick bites by about 20%. 20% is better than nothing, but treating your clothing with something like permethrin has been shown to be 100% effective against deer ticks, the vector of Lyme disease, and so that may be better than counting on garlic bread to save you.