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

All right, welcome back to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly, along with my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And our guest today, Sean Rockijich.

How are we doing?

Doing good.

Thanks for having me, guys.

How was that pronunciation?

You nailed it, actually.

First try.

Good job.

All right.

Um, so give people a little backstory on what you do.

Uh, I am a YouTuber and business owner, so pretty good mix.

I own four companies, but the one people team seem to know about is my Airbnb portfolio, and then I've been teaching Airbnb for six years on YouTube.

Nice.

How many homes do you have on Airbnb?

155.

Holy what?

Yeah,

155.

I thought I was doing my thing with nine, but shit.

Hey, that's the thing.

I mean, 155, right?

Yeah.

So, do you own all of the properties?

Own zero.

Suble-leases.

Yep.

Oh, not technically, but yeah, a lot of people think it's called subleasing.

Well, it's the arbitrage, right?

Exactly right.

Yeah, yeah.

It's more appropriate.

It's arbitrage.

So the platforms you use is what?

Well, Airbnb is the primary one, and Verbo has been growing pretty well.

We do some.

I haven't heard of Verbo yet.

I've heard of Verbo.

You heard of Verbo?

So Verbo is like Home Away Expedia.

So Expedia owns a bunch of sites like Home Away and stuff.

And then Home Away was like this conglomerate of like 110 websites a lot of them were like european a lot of just like little bit and breakfast sites and they pushed them all together and then when they all merged verbo kind of took over the brand and large wow but if you're on verbo you're like on home away and stuff like that too

so you basically put down zero dollars for those 155 properties mostly right um so sometimes landlords will want like the first month's rent or they'll want a security deposit.

You obviously have to come out of pocket for furniture.

But

before I I did Airbnb, I owned a sales organization for like 10 or 12 years.

So one of the things I like to do is negotiate special terms with landlords, like not giving them rent up front.

And a lot of times it works.

So really, how do you do that for cheap?

Yeah, what's the script for that?

Well, I can give you elements of it because a sales system would probably be like a 45-minute long conversation kind of thing.

Like first, I just call landlords, get them on the phone to try to get them to meet me.

How do you get their number though?

They're everywhere, right?

For rent signs.

Okay.

So you could get on Zillow and try to find people like trying to rent on a Zillow.

But landlords that are doing it themselves usually just put a sign up in the yard or some stuff like that.

If you find like a Zillow listing, sometimes you run into a real estate agent or property manager and you have to make a more formal presentation to them, kind of like at scale, like, hey, I can rent a bunch of properties from you.

So let's do a big business.

But a landlord, you say, hey, I found your house online or I saw your yard sign.

It looks great.

I'd like to come in and take a look at the property.

And since I own a business, I'd like to, you know, meet with you and discuss like how my business operates, see if there's a good fit.

Can I bring you coffee tomorrow or Friday or something to see your property?

So getting somebody on the phone to meet them at their property is probably the most important thing because when you pitch arbitrage, they need to trust you.

That's probably one of the biggest things.

If you're trying to pitch arbitrage on the phone, like, hey, I like your house, but I'd like to short-term rent it, you're just some stranger on the phone.

They're like, hell no, right?

But if you meet them, you talk about their family, their dogs, whatever, their history as a landlord, and you build rapport for like 20-ish minutes, and then you talk about your business model.

And after we do what I would call like our story script for like the fact that we're doing good to do short-term rentals instead,

our closing line is, so what questions do you have for me?

We don't even ask for the sale yet, right?

What questions do you have for me?

And we expect most landlords to really not know the industry well enough.

So then they'll ask all these questions like, okay, so who's coming or whatever?

15 minutes in, you can actually see in their body language if they're comfortable or open-minded.

And that's really at the point you ask to, you know, apply.

You say, hey, so what's the next step?

You got an application?

Something like that.

So what would stop the landlord from simply taking all the information that you're giving giving them and applying it themselves?

Why most

I get so much trouble for saying this with some people, some people hate that I say this, but landlords are lazy.

Gotcha.

And it's not that landlords are lazy, like bad people, but the nature of short-term rentals or the nature of long-term rentals is passive, right?

You buy a property, you get a tenant, you get a monthly check.

You usually get a property manager so you don't have to collect the monthly checks.

You say, screw doing

maintenance.

Somebody else will do that.

And landlords are trying to become as passive as possible with all the properties.

So when they find out that there's more cash flow and short-term rentals, they might go, oh, that's way cool.

But when they find out that they have to take a phone call at maybe even 1 a.m., right?

And they have to answer what they consider to be dumb questions twice or three times a week for people checking in.

They have to manage housekeepers to clean stuff.

They don't want to do all that.

They're out.

So it's the work that they don't want to do.

What's the best way to furnish these properties if they're not furnished?

They're most always going to not be furnished and you kind of want it that way, right?

The bar for design is getting higher and higher.

Back Back in the day when I 2014, the end of 2014 when I got started, you could literally throw a bed on the floor and people were so like excited to be doing Airbnb that they would sleep there, right?

But it's not like that anymore.

You can't just have like a like a frat dorm.

It has to be aesthetically friendly.

It has to look good.

Yeah, it's got to look powerful.

A lot of our walls are dark, actually.

We just went through and painted all of the walls dark.

Any property that wasn't performing at scale to a certain like dollar amount, we just redesigned them.

And the main thing we did was go with dark walls as a way to contrast.

Yeah, because the main photo that you have on Airbnb, you get one photo, right?

And there's a bunch of listings showing up in Map View.

And people are just scrolling through 20, 30, 40 listings.

And a lot of them are like either outdoors, right?

Where you see like the outside of a log cabin and some water, or inside you see white walls and nice furniture, but everything's clean and pristine.

But if you've got an interior photo where everything's really dark and moody, people are like, whoa, this one looks different.

And the whole law of contrast, people notice what contrasts, so they'll click on the one that's different.

If everything else was blue and you are orange, they'll click on you.

So we went with dark walls for that reason.

The best way to do it is honestly do it yourself and take a little time to try to figure out a design style that you think kind of even expresses yourself because you'll put more love into something that's self-expression.

If a landlord was renting you a furnished property, they're probably doing the minimum.

And doing the minimum won't work on Airbnb.

So you want to give it some love.

Like plants and chandeliers and like just all sorts of different stuff, like texture and color and stuff.

And what cities are you targeting?

I was in eight.

I just shut down Philly.

Crime.

Crime.

it was actually really bad.

So there's a group of like 40 kids that were like in a gang that started breaking into a bunch of Airbnbs.

They stayed in a bunch and then started breaking into them and stealing everything.

Wow.

Then they killed a 75-year-old guy on the street, not in my property, thank God, but they got caught on a security camera, like murdering some 75-year-old dude.

Wait, was that on the news?

Yeah.

I've seen that.

Yeah, same kids.

And then the sergeant of the police force finally got back to us about all of our criminal complaints.

Wow.

But after they caught the three kids or four kids that were involved, they went back to not caring.

And the whole gang was like 40 people.

I heard they also shot like a 13-year-old girl who could like ratted on them.

So, and it was like six or seven months of just constant break-ins and it was nuts.

They even left their school IDs.

A lot of them were in high school.

We even like had their school IDs and called their school up and we tried everything to stop it.

But at that point, it was like putting my housekeepers in danger, you know?

And I'm like, no, we're not going to like my housekeepers.

It's not working.

I deal with gangs.

I didn't know Philly was like that.

Philly can be

can go hard, man.

Damn.

Philly?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So now we're all in Texas.

All Texas.

Yeah, it's Houston, Fort Worth.

Real estate's cheap out there.

Well, yeah, and that does affect the rental market, right?

Cheaper real estate means cheaper rents typically.

But a lot of that's circumstantial now, too.

Everything's in a bubble, right?

So a lot of things are also expensive, but people will list a price subjectively.

So sometimes landlords are in a bind.

And even though they list their price too expensive and it's not meeting the market, if they go empty for two months, like no tenant for two months, they get nervous.

They'll give you discounts.

They'll give you free rent.

We'll get eight or 12 weeks of rent for free.

Wow.

Yeah.

When we activate a lot of people.

A good place, too, in Houston is like Midtown area, downtown area.

Those places are.

So that used to be the spot, right?

Midtown, downtown, and then East Downtown.

Because East Downtown Houston, it's like just as close to George O'Brown and all the good stuff.

But it was where all the property was cheaper back in the day.

And so that was really good.

Now we're in the suburbs.

We're doing a lot of like suburban Houston stuff.

We're like Periland, Sugarland.

Yeah, like Sugarland, Katie, Baytown, like just different spots like that.

Pasadena's always popped for some reason.

So are you doing homes or town homes or apartments or mostly?

Mostly apartments?

We do have some houses, but mostly apartments.

Yeah.

People say Airbnb is recession proof?

No, no.

I don't really think much is recession proof.

Airbnb itself is travel and hospitality.

And some people like real estate is recession proof, right?

Depending on what the recession is, right?

But one of our recessions was actually the deflation of the housing market 2009, right?

The housing market was not recession-proof in 2009 because it was the recession.

So if it's a currency issue or if it's an oil issue, those are different.

And when Houston had like an oil recession in 2014-15, Airbnb still boomed.

So in that case, it was recession-proof.

It was pandemic-proof too, because we started in a pandemic.

And boy, boy, boy.

Because remember, nobody was coming to Vegas.

It was dead.

Everybody was partying.

in Texas.

100%.

Yeah, so

that got our

see your properties are in Texas?

All of them.

Yeah.

Because remember, Vegas was dead.

Even Toro.

Couldn't do anything here.

People were riding their bikes on the strip.

It was pointless.

Yeah, they call it revenge travel.

That's what they call it.

Is that what it's called?

Revenge travel.

They call it revenge travel.

Everybody got locked up.

And then when they were finally able to travel, they were spending all their money on travel.

So I called it revenge travel.

Yeah, and I also didn't realize how many conventions and trade shows going in Houston, Texas, and Texas in general.

Everyone goes there.

Yeah,

Houston's a huge city.

It's like fourth largest in the country.

What?

Yeah.

It was creeping up on Chicago.

I don't know if it's bigger than Chicago yet, but they said it was projected to become bigger than it was.

Largest in terms of people, right?

Population.

And 150 people are moving there daily.

Wow.

I think Austin might be beating them per day.

For real.

And so, because Austin has less populace, its rate of growth is nuts.

Are you?

Are you doing a lot?

Do you have a lot of properties in Austin?

Yeah, we're pushing into Austin.

We've got a good spread of properties in Austin.

We finally found a property manager that's like super progressive and wants to get into magazines and stuff.

So he likes to play ball.

It's kind of funny.

Nice.

Austin is a growing place.

Silicon Valley is out there now, right?

Yeah.

That's a lot of the growth is coming from that.

But that caused a housing bubble too.

And now, Austin home prices are like they think that they're gonna pull back like 25%,

which could cause a washing out of the market.

And if that happens and a lot of people bail, then there's gonna be all this inventory empty, and it could be a good time to do like Airbnb again.

You know, so would you say Airbnb arbitrage is safer than just buying houses on your own and then doing it that way, the traditional way?

If you are going to do just Airbnb and you're not buying the home for other reasons, then yeah, I think so too.

Yeah, well, because it doesn't affect your DTI as much, And then

it's a quicker

get in.

You have to understand when you buy a home,

it's so much paperwork.

It's so much legwork that you have to do, proof of income and everything else.

And you're locked into the property.

Right, right.

So let's say the market pulls back and you fail as a host and you want to unwind the deal, you have to sell the house.

You have to pay a commission to the realtor both ways, right?

In and out.

And now that the markets are like risked, the risk of the market is that the home prices might pull back next over the course of the next year, you could buy a house, lose a few percent on like depreciation because home prices go down, and then you have to sell the home.

It could be a mess.

Yeah.

Right.

Where with leases, you just you're out the money for the furniture.

And if you don't like a deal, you could unwind the lease.

Literally.

You can get out of the lease, and you don't have to worry about paying a realtor commission or anything.

So when you're first getting into short-term rentals, I think leases are probably the best way to go because it really is like some of the lowest skin in the game and some of the lowest consequence if you bail on it, which is nice.

And I'm actually writing a book on this.

Leases are a form of debt.

You know, like a car lease, like you do tour, you mentioned, right?

You can lease cars and put them on tour, but

a car lease is a form of debt.

It goes in your credit, right?

A home lease or an apartment lease doesn't go in your credit.

Unless you're negative, unless you like get evicted or you skip out.

Yeah, but if you have a thousand paid leases, you have zero reported.

If you have 10 car leases, you can have 10 car leases reported.

So you could, let's say you make $100,000 a year and you're applying to places where the rent's like under two grand and they expect you to make eight grand a month for a lease.

you could take your same hundred thousand a year and apply at a thousand different places at the same time whoa get a thousand different approvals and now have a thousand apartments off the same income whoa you can't go buy 100 homes on the same 100 grand front most most places aren't running your credit they're looking at your financials they just want to know can you pay the lease and there's no crosstalk Landlords don't crosstalk.

There's no regulatory agencies to make sure you're not over.

This is a hack right here.

Yeah, it's the Wild West still.

It's pretty crazy.

That's crazy.

And then, so let me ask you this.

How do you handle places that

say no to airbnbs do you renegade them like oh no way i'm gonna do it anymore that's not sustainable i've done that a couple times and a couple of the properties that we do have are still there that's funny um

i try to get them to allow us to even though they don't allow it in general as a professional organization as a business with a track record we try to get them to make the exception because we are who we are right so we really try to meet it head on

We definitely don't do the whole like, I used to call it ghost hosting.

Yeah, we just renegade.

We like the property.

Yeah.

We're setting it shut up.

Bro, they Airbnb showed up to my boy's house.

They said, you can't do this.

Like people physically showed up.

Yeah, well, see, if the, obviously, if you get caught by the leasing offices, they'll shut you down.

Some will, but a lot of the time, or they won't just renew the lease.

But, I mean, we've, we, we've, kind of, I think we've gotten booted from one place.

And you know what?

Even if you get permission, if you run a shit organization, they're going to want to kick you out anyway.

Right.

So in your case, you have to then become much more diligent about not having any bad guests, really controlling who comes in.

And yeah, if you did it under the radar and but had no problems ever, then in a way they may not catch you.

At all.

As long as your staff isn't, as long as your customers aren't bugging their staff and not causing trouble, then yeah, you could fly on it.

But we don't want to take that risk.

How do you prevent bad guests?

And do you have any nightmare tenant stories?

Well, the gang in Philadelphia is pretty good, right?

And it's not only that.

I mean, we had an apartment in Houston get completely robbed once.

Somebody stayed for nine days.

They cleared everything out, robbed everything.

And when we came to clean, everything was gone.

But isn't it licensed on the app when he books the place?

Well, yes.

But, I mean, people will use fake IDs or fake, or they'll do stolen accounts.

They'll do all sorts of weird stuff.

And Airbnb paid for everything.

Right.

So that's all right.

There's a mix of red flags when you're an Airbnb host or even on Verbo, right?

There's a mix of red flags.

If somebody books super last minute, that's red flag.

If they're local when they book, that's red flag.

If you drop your price too much, that's also red flag.

And if they have no reviews, that's a red flag.

So some of the ways that they speak and

how they communicate, you can look for red flags in communication.

If you get a booking and you go to call the phone number and it says like the Google voice subscriber cannot be reached.

You know what I'm saying?

Terrible.

That's a bad sign.

So we look for combinations of red flags.

We try to price our listing to get completely full enough days in advance that we don't get last-minute bookings if we can prevent it.

But then if we get last-minute bookings from locals or people with shady phone numbers, then we will actively look to find out if they're a risk.

And you can type somebody's phone number and put it into white pages, and it will show you if they have a criminal record.

If not, without having to pull the criminal record, they won't show you what the record is, but they'll show you how many hits on their criminal record there is.

Interesting.

So

if they have a good number of hits on their criminal record, like it's like, say, six or more

traffic and/or criminal record hits, you might go, okay, this person's got some history.

Right.

And you could say, hey, Airbnb, I'm concerned.

This person, you know, the book last minute, doesn't have any reviews.

I punched their phone number into a public directory and it says that they have a criminal record.

And, you know, I don't know if you guys screen them appropriately, but I don't know if this is a safe guest.

You could do something like that.

Doesn't Airbnb screen for criminal records?

They're not always going to get everything.

They use their own clients.

Oh, it does.

They have to pay every time they scan a client.

What?

Yeah, when you use third-party services, right?

There are ways to pull people's records.

You can get on the Texas Vine and try to look up stuff.

You could start to aggregate the data, but it's a lot of work.

So Airbnb does some stuff within their software that cross-checks people and checks public directories and stuff, but they're not always going to get it.

Yeah, but

you have to ask for access to access.

Most people are going to deny a background check just because.

Yeah,

if you want to give somebody full, unadulterated access to a background check, you have to get it signed off on.

And in some apartments, we have to do that.

The apartments like everybody has to be criminally screened.

So we make them fill out a document for background check and pay 40 bucks for it.

How do you feel from a portfolio standpoint when it comes to a real estate portfolio and an Airbnb portfolio?

Some people separate those, but would you say they're similar when it comes to, I feel like Airbnb is a higher return.

Yeah, naturally.

And it's better passive in consequence.

Airbnb should make a higher return because it's an actively managed

and it's a daily, it's a daily return.

Yeah,

it's that you are changing the nature of the product.

So Airbnb is not real estate, right?

Okay, so what do you consider it?

It's hospitality.

Which is hospitality.

You can have a real estate portfolio, but then be conducting Airbnb out of it.

And you should have another business entity conducting your short-term rentals, right?

You have a real estate portfolio that should be getting rents paid from the hospitality company.

So now all of your real estate stuff, you got your long-term rents, your monthly rent roll, all this stuff stays.

And then when you're running your hospitality business, you're doing like dynamic pricing, you're managing housekeepers, you're doing guest communication, reviews, resolutions, inventory control, staging.

There's all these business processes that exist inside of short-term rentals.

None of this is real estate, right?

Real estate doesn't go in and add it.

So, you don't even compare it to.

So, when it comes to the debate, is Airbnb real estate and a real estate portfolio?

There's no comparison.

One is hospitality and one is actual real estate.

Do you guys pay rent for this box?

The studio?

I mean, well, we rent it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so let's say, say, you were, like, say it was dedicated.

You just only rent the studio, right?

And the fact that you pay rent for the studio, does that make it a real estate business?

In some cases, right?

I mean, because you know how you're making money off this, you're making money off the content, right?

The fact that you rented a piece of real estate to do content doesn't make it a real estate play.

If your barber rents a barber shop and cuts hair, it's not a real estate play because he's doing his barbershop stuff out of a piece of real estate.

Oh, you mean he's actually leasing the actual real estate to do business out of.

And it doesn't matter if the barber owns or rents the barbershop, his barber shop, like his business, isn't real estate.

So it's just the same way, your short-term rental is not a real estate plate.

It's actually a hospitality product.

And it doesn't matter if you own that piece of real estate or if you rent it.

Once that short-term rental company is operating, that's a hospitality business.

So that settles the argument then.

Airbnb is hospitality.

It's interesting to be an interesting thing.

Yeah, because there's so many stores that are going to build those buyers by the way.

Chick-fil-A will own their properties.

McDonald's will own their properties.

McDonald's is a real estate company, actually.

Yeah, because what they do is they actually try to buy land where they think it's going to appreciate.

Right.

And then they set up this almost no-failed business, and then they get so much appreciation from the real estate.

So, yeah,

like McDonald's has this real estate holdings play involved as a franchise.

And as a franchise owner, you technically don't own the real estate.

You own the actual operation aspect of the McDonald's, but you don't, you'll never own the reality.

They keep the land?

Absolutely.

Interesting.

Yeah, so then the franchise owner isn't in real estate.

You guys know Starbucks is a bank?

Yeah.

Oh, sick.

Yeah.

Starbucks is a bank.

They got billions of dollars because people deposit on the app and they just leave the money there.

Yeah, it's like the whole gift card thing.

Starbucks is a bank.

Yeah.

It's sick.

You can hold a float of a billion dollars and you can do a whole bunch of money.

Yeah.

Did you see Airbnb getting saturated?

Oh, it already has been, but it's actually getting washed out now.

How is it getting washed out?

The way it's getting washed out is, you know, the whole Airbnb thing?

No.

Okay, so you'll probably know because you're in the Airbnb space.

People were calling it it the Airbnb this year, right?

So what happened is after COVID hit,

all these people started getting into short-term rentals because the money was good.

The revenge travel led to higher revenue.

And then next thing you know, everybody's a guru, right?

I can't tell you how many, how many kids are online saying, I will show you how to make a million bucks on Airbnb.

And so now all these influencers are pushing short-term rentals.

And then all these people get into it.

And now there's all this supply.

And then the winter hits and the economy starts to get choppy because of like, you know, recession fears.

And then people stop spending money.

Right.

and so now we've got nearly like 50 the normal supply of short-term rentals and then the average nightly rate drops like 15 20 percent so now both of those the demand goes down and the supply has gone up like exponentially and then a bunch of people ended up having empty calendars and then airbnb did an algorithm change right around november and anybody who was slightly underperforming they just kind of pushed everybody down like all the way and were protecting a small percentage of their portfolio that they wanted to perform Interesting.

Yeah, because they want to make sure that their best listings wouldn't quit.

So they're like doing this who lives and who dies thing.

Yeah, they have like a premiere,

a premier host type of thing.

Yeah, and not just that, though, even if you're not like a super host or anything, if your listing is consistently booked, you know, has good enough reviews and it's making them money, they want to make sure that you don't quit the platform.

Right.

Because you're bringing the money.

Yeah.

So imagine they have 100 hosts that could all quit.

And if they even list, evenly distributed not enough business to all of them, 90% of them would quit if they gave all of them even business.

If they gave the top half all the business, then the bottom half would quit and maybe like 10% of the top half.

Interesting.

So you'd lose 60%,

right?

So they basically mitigate their losses by catering to a certain host.

Right.

Yeah.

They're funneling all the business to people that they want to keep.

And so that's what caused the bust.

Right.

And but that means that people are quitting.

right so they're which is a good thing though i think you know i think it's a good thing because it's like you said it's it's so many scam artists, it's oversaturated.

But I think saturation is actually good.

It shows that there's a market there.

So

there's a pro and a con to saturation.

Yeah.

You're going to get a more volatile boom and bust cycle in low barrier to entry businesses like this.

So since Airbnb is low barrier to entry, people can get in pretty easy.

And when everybody says, hey, get in, the getting is good, a lot of people will flood in because there's not really anything stopping them.

So oversupply will happen fast.

But then those people who don't really have any business in the space and also don't have any wherewithal because they got into an an easy business, they'll wash out just as fast.

So your supply will actually crest and dip much more fast than a regular real estate market.

Where like real estate is harder to get into, it takes time.

Absolutely.

Right.

And so that, since that's slow to build, what they say the real estate cycle is what, 18 years?

A lot of people say

the boom bus cycle is more like 18 years.

Yeah.

I think short-term rentals is like two and a half to three and a half year boom and bus cycle.

Wow.

That's quick.

It's like crypto.

Yeah, because anybody can get into it, right?

The low barrier to entry is what really defines the supply and demand curve.

I want to touch up on one more thing before we wrap this up.

You took a year off from work.

Yeah.

What did you learn during that year, and would you recommend other people try that?

How professional am I supposed to be on this podcast?

You can be as much professional.

You're so professional.

Well, since I took a year off,

there's a few things that happened, right?

I immediately went into a form of depression.

I call it a crisis of purpose, right?

I was a workaholic for 10 plus years, right?

I grew up super poor on welfare.

I went homeless in 2009, started my first business out of a van that I was living in.

What business was that?

I sold newspaper subscriptions.

Right.

And so I built teams that sold newspaper subscriptions.

So, like the Las Vegas Journal Review, I'd build like a sales team.

Gotcha.

And you'd see us in like grocery stores, stuff like that.

So I built a company out of that.

And that's what got me to Airbnb: I had apartments where I was housing sales staff.

And so I had all these apartments that were furnished, and then nobody was staying in them.

So I put them on Airbnb to like not lose money.

But so being a workaholic from 2010 to 2020, essentially,

I caught COVID and then realized like, man,

I was overweight.

I was not happy.

I had bruises that weren't healing for like months.

I was like sick.

I had like candida overgrowth and stuff like that.

So then I decided to try to get healthy and then automate my business.

And I had that crisis of purpose where no one needed me.

All of a sudden, first time in my life, no one called me.

No one needed me.

I'm like, what am I doing?

Damn.

So wait, my life had been meaning.

No one needed you?

Yeah, because as an owner of a company, you make sure that people know that you're the boss and that people need you.

They call you, ask you questions.

You have have to go save the day all the time.

Right.

So people.

So save the superhero.

Yeah, I guess you could, you could, you could put it like that.

I needed people who would just accept me for doing nothing at that point.

Right.

My identity was directly tied to how much value I was providing every single day.

Right.

And so the moment I was no longer doing anything, I felt not valuable.

So I started taking psychedelics.

Okay.

Actually, yeah.

I did acid for the first time at Burning Man this last year.

And they've helped me with my childhood trauma, a lot of the stuff that's caused me to be the workaholic guy.

So acid, not shrooms?

I started with mushrooms.

I started with mushrooms, and that was really what helped me with a lot of my childhood trauma.

Wow.

But acid helped me with the existentialism of trying to be an alpha dominant male thing.

Okay.

And, you know, like the whole I don't ever want to die kind of shit that you know we all had an ego death.

I made probably a form of it.

You know, probably a form of it.

And

yeah.

And so that really led me to, I guess, a place of more peace and kind of like acceptance and altruism.

And even though I'm back to running the company now because the CEO stepped out when the bust happened and I started taking over everything, my relationship with work is different.

I'm also doing like content on other stuff now.

I'm starting a channel on how to do content.

And on TikTok, I'm doing dating and masculinity and spirituality content.

I know nice.

We should have touched on that.

Oh, man.

I didn't know that.

I just plugged that.

I just plugged it.

But yeah, so like a lot's changed.

So I traveled the world for like a year.

I got into landscape photography, started doing

as a form of therapy.

Do you still do psychedelics?

Yeah.

I mean, I micro-dose like every day or every day?

I don't microdose, but I will make it a point to intentionally have an experience and I journal.

Like if I do acid, I actually journal.

I'm writing a book on masculinity and a lot of my thoughts come from my acid experience.

Whoa, I got to read that book.

Yeah.

I will say acid changed my perspective when I did it in college.

It really did.

There's a study that they did that showed

12 months later, their lives are better.

Yeah, but what's the difference between acid and shrooms?

Well, acid's synthetic, right?

It's right, yeah.

Yeah,

what is it made by the government?

Probably?

Supposedly.

Yeah, it lasts for like 10 or 12 hours.

Psilocybin in mushrooms is a toxin, and as your body processes it, it creates a psychedelic effect.

Acid was like designed.

And I mean, I can't tell you at a high level what the real differences are, but I can tell you that the type of thoughts that I have are completely different.

Wow.

And like, I have clarity, I have energy on acid, and I'm actually, I was at a music show on ASCII, and I'm journaling in my phone, just writing.

As I'm listening to music, I'm journaling.

Crazy, yeah, yeah, so it's a good time.

All right, man, it's been a blast.

We got to touch up on that on part two, but where can people find you and learn more about you?

Well, my name is Sean Rocky Jeech on YouTube.

That's how you find me.

Just or type in Airbnb and then look for the beard on the thumbnails.

YouTube thumbnails.

And then,

I mean, you'll find my name on Instagram, just same place.

And then rockyjeech.com is my website.

Wayne.

You can find me on Instagram at

right there.

All right, Sean Kelly here.

Thanks for tuning in, guys.

Digital Social Hour.

I'll see you next week.

Peace.