Seth Williams: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams, and today I'm talking with Seth Draley Ewan. So, I actually interviewed Seth on the podcast once before, way back in episode 9, which was a long time ago, back in 2018. And at the time, he was one of these really young land investors that people were starting to notice because he was sharp and thoughtful and already doing deals at a level that most people much older than him still had not figured out yet. And since then, needless to say, a lot has changed. The land business has changed, the market has changed, competition has changed, and Seth has had to change with it. He and his brother Bryce have built a long-running land business together, and over the years, Seth has become one of those people I've always wanted to have back on the show, because every time I hear him talk, I can tell this guy is super sharp, and there's usually something deeper going on beneath the surface, whether it's business strategy or market psychology or systems or risk or just the way he thinks about the world. But it's also another reason that this conversation matters. So about a year ago, Seth went through a major health event that changed his life in a very real way. We're going to talk about what happened, what recovery has looked like, how it affected his business and identity, and what it's like trying to navigate something difficult while showing up publicly and professionally. So it's going to be a great, honest conversation about business and resilience and family and adaptation and perspective. Seth, welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I'm doing good today. Thanks, Seth, for having me. It's been a long time coming. It's been many years.

Seth Williams: Yeah, I know. For those who have not heard Episode 9, actually, I don't even know how much we talked about it in Episode 9, but what is your origin story? How did you first hear about the land business? What originally pulled you into this space in the first place?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I was in college back in 2016. That's the year I graduated from Colorado State University. And I tried a couple different businesses back then and just didn't really go anywhere. And so after graduation, I did some odd jobs and I came across a, you know, land, you know, guru out there. I'm not going to give them any publicity, but they basically were doing cheap properties, you know, buy for X, sell for, you know, Z was one of those buy for, you know, 500 bucks. $1,000, whatever, and sell for two, three grand, something like that.

And I thought that was kind of interesting because it was something that I'd always had, you know, root to because I grew up on a farm in Tennessee, Colorado. We could talk about that a little bit later. But basically, I was like, well, if I can buy land this cheap, because coming from where I am, like, there's no way you could buy land for that cheap. So I was like, this is this has got some interesting ideas to it. So I went ahead and I found the course, I bought it, kind of went to the process. And after I had a deal that happened. I was like, OK, this is this is interesting enough. Let's create a company. So in 2017, I set up an LLC with my brother. He was 16 at the time. I was 21 at the time. So we have sorry, we got six years apart. So he was in high school. I had just graduated college. So he was a sophomore in high school at the time. So that's where we started. And we were We're starting with cheap stuff in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona...

Utah, Nevada, you know, stuff like that. And just really, we're trying to figure it out as we went and we got into coaching and other things like that. And over time, we realized that the methodology, the style, property types and everything really mattered. And so over time, we completely shifted from doing the really cheapy stuff all the way to doing minor subdivides. Today, we do flips, a lot of our stuff is way more expensive in terms of dollar amount and as well as location you know we still do stuff here in colorado we're here in timnith it's a suburban town out of fort collins which is where csu carter state university is, we're at the foothills of rocky mountain national park so we get to look at longs peak which is the one of the two most prominent mountains here in colorado we have longs peak and we have pike's peak that's where america beautiful was written down at Carter Springs. And we have Longs Peak up here in northern Colorado. And that's the picturesque, I guess, mountain of Rocky Mountain National Park. So we still live here. My health crisis, which we'll talk about, has prevented us from moving here in the process of moving to Tennessee, hoping to pick that up again, hopefully in the next next year. So we'll see it. There's there's some things to this. So I'm like, I just don't know what I don't know in terms of timelines and other things. I'm like, okay, it's better, but we're not quite there yet. So, That's kind of where we started.

Seth Williams: Colorado is an awesome place. I did a family vacation there a couple of years ago. And man, if I had to move to some other state, it would probably be there. What's making you want to move to Tennessee?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. So you fall in love with Colorado as a tourist, which is like part of our economy, by the way.

Seth Williams: I'm sure.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: We have skiing and we have the mountains and it brings in a ton of people every year. This year was really not a great experience for skiers because the snow didn't appear, at all people paid all this money and believe me you pay out the yin yang to come here and there was no snow they had to literally make snow and it wasn't even enough to get people excited to you know come here so, people get excited about the tourism they get to go see the beautiful rocky mountains they get to see all of our national parks and they get to skip over denver not the greatest city in the world but then they get to experience what the locals get to experience, which is back in 2007, our entire economy here completely shifted. We went from this flyover state to the place where people want to move to. So homes went from the national average to triple. Cost of living went up triple.

Everything that you could possibly measure has gone up exponentially. And so if you were to put Colorado on the same scale as New York or California or Illinois, you wouldn't be far off. And it depends on where you go. If you go to Denver, it's going to be even more expensive. You go up into the high country and go along I-70 where all the ski towns are. Those ones are going to be probably triple the average of California because you're in like millionaire and billionaire's alley. That's where everyone buys their multi-million dollar condos. And starting up there is just substantially more expensive. So Colorado has turned into this beautiful state. We've had this great economic boom. Real estate values are up, but then just cost of living here is way, way more.

Than it is everywhere else. You'd take the CPI and where we are here in Timnith, it's like 180, 190 of the CPI for basic goods. So we've just been like, okay, we've got enough in terms of what we have and we have enough ability to move. We don't, we're not tied to a particular time zone. We're not tied to a particular place. We do business all over the country. Why do we need to live here? Even though this is our home is where we grew up. We've had our family farm since the 1970s here. It's not the same place anymore. It's not the same economy. It's not the same environment. It's not the same people. In fact, the people that live here on our same street, California, Texas, like through into it's all in New York. We got all three of them. They all want to live here. They bring their money here. And like, this is great. I could buy more than I can there. I get to see the mountains and they bring their lifestyle with them. And it's just completely changed the dynamic of Colorado, like 360 degrees since about 2007. It's amazing how the whole country went through this transformation back then. And I was still in middle school back then. During that time, I didn't realize that was kind of the peak event, like, okay, we're going through this recession. We're going through this change, but Colorado was doing the complete opposite. We went through a minor recession, like the whole country went through.

This is a major recession at the time. But in Colorado, what it did, it sparked this complete change. And so for 2008 to 2015, that's when we started out all this investment coming in. And then starting around 2016, 2017, we started getting in. That's when Colorado just took off like a rocket ship. And other than what we're going through right now with this cooling of the markets, it has pretty much stayed going straight up. And so, you know, if you buy real estate here, you're going to benefit from it in the long term. You're buying rental properties, don't know that this is the greatest state to do business, and it's become very unfriendly. You know, there's just a lot of stuff to get into with that, but you're expecting to move here and love Colorado, and you're coming from a place like California, you're going to love it. You're coming to here from a place like Florida, Tennessee, Texas. It's a totally different culture. It's a very different environment, and it's a totally different dynamic. And we've had so many people that moved here during COVID and they're now reversing their decision. They're like, okay, I moved here, I got this job, but now I'm realizing the job I got, which was six figures plus, and it was a very generous salary, is actually just getting bigger. I've seen plenty of people in our neighborhood like, yeah, I make 150,000. They're like, where I was at, I was making 75, 80. They thought it was great. I, you know, dealt with my salary. They came in there and realized, oh, wait, that's the same standard of living just in Colorado now. I mean, that's the true reality of living here, unfortunately.

Seth Williams: Well, Tennessee has a lot to offer too. I was just there about a month ago and I loved it there. A lot of cool stuff going on in that state. I'm sure you'll like it whenever you get a chance to move. When you look at your business back when you started, you're doing the cheap infill lot thing and the desert squares that a lot of people were doing back then. That's how a lot of people get started. Do you think that kind of thing still works? Were like, did you change out of necessity?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I think it still works. Whether that's the model you want to do is a totally different matter. And just cost of doing business has gone up with mail, with all the different methodologies you can do these days. The problem is, it's not a, and when I say scalable business, it's a matter of what's the business you want to have. Do you want to run an operation where you've got hundreds of parcels and you're running an other finance empire and you want to do that all day long? There's some people that that's what they started, that's what they teach and that's what they still do and they haven't changed the model and it's worked for so long because there's so many properties that they could buy all day long they could sell all day long and there's never, an issue the problem i have is making 50 bucks on a property every month or 100 bucks on a property is not a scalable business when it's just me and my brother we do have a couple team members and we'll talk about them but, it's just not scalable to the point where you can really have freedom and you can really run a business that brings that are not revenue to make an impact on your life.

Seth Williams: It sounds like you're doing the bigger properties and you're doing subdividing. Do you do any other value add strategies other than subdivides? Or is that kind of the main thing you're looking for?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: That's pretty much it. There's the, I don't know if it's euphorism, I'm trying to remember the right word, but the style of going an inch deep and a mile wide versus a mile wide and an inch deep. I think we started out the wrong way, quite frankly. We started out an inch deep and a mile wide. We were like, okay, whatever comes in the door, whatever we send let's just do it no problem, So we ended up doing like 15 different states. And it sounds really cool. Like I've been business in 15 states. We've paid taxes in 15 states. We've contributed to 15 different states and dozens of different, you know, local economies through, you know, property taxes, et cetera. But it's not really how most businesses run when they start. If you're going to run a business, you run it from one place to your website, and you're selling the same kind of widget. Well, if you're doing the same thing with land, every time you sell something, it's a different widget. So it may be scalable, but the thing is, is you got to get to enough volume where it becomes enough total dollars, total volume and actually makes an impact. And we just realized over time, that's really not what we want to do. We want to go a mile deep and an inch wide, which is, you know, pick a place and really get your roots in there and you can make a lot more money that way. So we do a lot of flips and we do a lot of subdivides all on the same market. And we have been doing that since about 2020, 2021. one.

And I'm like, since we started doing that, it's just been a lot more focused and a lot more energy going into one place. It's been better in terms of scales and systems and everything than trying to figure out, okay, what's going on with this one property coming in from California and this one coming in from New York and this one coming in from Colorado, like Colorado. I'd not like the back of my hand, but if you show me a property that comes in, I'm like, I can give you a general idea of what I think it's worth, but I couldn't tell you about the local economy. I couldn't tell you anything about what's going on with that property. And that was how we're going with sending this stuff to so many places. Every time you send, you have no idea what's coming in because you don't know anything about the place until you've done business there. And then once you've done business there, I like this place and you send another campaign, you might know what's going on there. But generally, that's not how most land investors run their business. They just send mail or texts or cold calling and they just go spray and pray, so to speak, and hope that whatever they send sticks and they can get a deal out of it. I'm not really caring much about whether that's a good deal or a bad deal at the end of the day. Just the numbers look good. Out without much about that area, quite frankly.

Seth Williams: I mean, I know we could go on for quite a bit about everything that has changed in this business, you know, just the environment and like your strategy and all this. But I'm wondering, like, other than what we've already talked about, how you're doing bigger deals and subdividing and all that stuff, what are the most significant things that have changed in terms of like, you know, marketing strategy and how you sell stuff and what role sell the financing plays? And what are the things that really haven't changed at all since you got started? Like, what are the fundamentals? Like, yep, that's still how it works. Versus is like, okay, this and this, this is way different now.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. There's been a lot of changes and there'll be a lot more, I guess. Let me give you the framework that I have kind of adapt, which is to think about in terms of decades. If we want to be in this business for decades, there's going to be changes probably every year, entire time we're doing this business. So when we started MailWizit, you sent like a thousand mailers and you could get four or five deals. Now you send $10 mailers, you might get one, you might get nothing.

I'd say that's the biggest thing. Mail has been the constant and you can still use mail. There's other mediums that people use these days and those are going to become the common thing. As far as what's changed, I'd say is just the market we're in. You know, we started, it was a very different market than, I'd say we've gone through two or three different markets since we started. When we started really cheap stuff, so I couldn't really speak to like the whole country and it really wasn't economics of, okay, the whole country's doing well or bad. So therefore these little cheap desert squares are going to do good or bad. But now that we have gone up in price and people are getting bank loans and they're dealing with bigger dollars, we're dealing with actual economic impacts. I got 50 bucks to put down and I hope to God I can pay next month and have to find they can't. That's a totally different market than the actual market people are dealing with in terms of land and housing markets. So.

I'd say that's the biggest shift is just, you know, participating in the economy. You have to pay attention to those things and what people actually need and want in that economy. And so for like Colorado, they have pretty much outlawed to the point of regulating it out of existence. You can't put new manufactured homes here. We do a lot of business in Mississippi, and that is the bread and butter of the entire economy down there. People want to have freedom from renting and they want to have their own manufactured home. And so we've kind of aligned ourselves in a way to what the local market and economy is. But to say the economy of Colorado and the economy of this has appeared the same, this is ludicrous, just like the economy of Michigan versus Florida is the same. They're totally different. So while the country is going through this cooling period, which we've been going through for a couple of years, each economy and each market is completely different. And I think that's been our biggest shift in all this time is realizing that we can do deals in different places, but it doesn't mean it's going to be the same frequency or same clip or even the same type of fire up at the end of the day. Versus our model we had before, everyone was the same. Everyone's putting $100 down, $100 a month.

And to be down with the economy, no one cares because that's how everyone works this business. And that's how everyone else does it. You know, doing your own thing, your own way, I think is the most important thing. And sticking with your authenticity and your own story and how you want to do business, I think is far more important than, well, now everyone's texting. And now everyone's cold calling. The question you should be asking is, is that actually going to be something I want to do instead of that's how everyone else does it? That's been my biggest brat. we've tried everything. And I've realized if we try everything, we get at least say we've done it. But we've realized the mediums that we like most are the ones that have worked, you know, tried and chewed like mail. That's, that's been our bread and butter. I feel like that's going to stay there for a long time, especially with all the regulations that have come out, you know, with texting and cold calling. And I don't even know what to keep up with these days. I still get the emails from like launch control, which we haven't used for three years. And I'm like, every week, it seems like there's some new blunder, some new lawsuit going on with And I'm like, I just don't even want to mess with it.

Seth Williams: So if you're focusing still, is it just 100% mail like nothing else? Is it like you're still doing the blind offer thing or is it more neutral letters or like what does that first outreach look like?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, neutral all the way. I think at this point, there's several places where we could send a blind offer because I know exactly the range I'm going to offer. Like if I look at the property within about 30 seconds, I've been telling you everything about it using land ID and I can tell you what I'm going to offer on it. The problem is, is you don't know what the exit strategy is. And as good as AI is, we're working on a project on the side, trying to figure out how to take data and get road furnished and all the different things we need to subdivide. But at the end of the day, it may not make sense to subdivide. It may not make sense to go through that process. It might make more sense just to flip it. So going the neutral way, we can come in and kind of get options. We can go with a cash offer. We can go through a owner finance offer to the seller. We can do a subdivide. That's more internally, but kind of looking at the property itself. And then we can also look at it as just a flip if it really doesn't make sense to go through that other process so by going neutral you open the door a lot more than you do by, You know, say, this is what I'm going to pay. And that person looks at it and they say, I'm either like it or they don't. If they don't like it, you missed the opportunity to talk about offering more with an owner finance offer, partnering with them, or, you know, just being able to pay more. Because if you're going to go with a, you know, subdivide offer, we generally offer 80, 90 cents on the dollar, even sometimes 100 cents Apple Retail. Because we're going to go in and split it up. And that's where we get our value out of the property. You can't really do that if you're saying a neutral offer with 50, 60 cents on the dollar, and then you missed the opportunity to even have a conversation with them, which is where the real deals happen.

Seth Williams: Is there anything that comes to mind, things that you used to strongly believe about land investing that you no longer believe?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I'd say the biggest one, maybe you already touched on this, is just doing things the way everyone else does it. It's very ingrained in our business. If you go to any other business out there. People might have a framework like I'm a plumber. I'm an HVAC person and I go to school for it and then they build their own business and they might have a school where they learn about things. But at the end of the day, they're kind of building their business and putting it together on their own. In the land business, you come in, it's like, OK, here's a guru that teaches you. Here's how they do it. So just rinse and repeat it and don't deviate. So if they're doing Florida deals and that's all they do, then just stick with that. Well, that kind of takes the creativity out of the entire business. And so the model that I kind of came up with in the last year, I would say, is to kind of drive land ownership through creativity, ingenuity, and authenticity. And I kind of look at our origin story and I'm like, in the very beginning, it was like one of those off-putting things. I'm like, I grew up on a farm and I was like, everyone thinks of us as the dumb hicks. I'm like, they're some of the smartest people you'll ever meet. I just kind of suppressed that history and all of that in my background. I'm like, Those are some of the strongest things that people identify with. The people that are selling to us, they inherited a farm. They inherited property. I can identify with that because we've gone through the process. It was very emotional and very devastating when we lost a member of our family, but went through the whole process of cleaning that up.

Those things, I think you should lean into more. And in the beginning, I think that was something I completely went away from just because I was like, well, everyone else is from the city and this is what they're doing. And they're doing this flips and they're doing it through desert squares and whatever they're doing. It's like just kind of rinse and repeat. Don't deviate at all. Since we have kind of gotten away from that, like everything we do, we do it our way. And if we don't agree with it, we don't like it. We just don't do it.

There's a lot of things in the business these days. And there's a lot of snakes in our business these days that have entered the space in the last five years. And I'm like, I just don't fundamentally agree with how they do business. We don't need to do what they're doing at the end of the day. And I think that's kind of our downfall as land investors. There are so many other land investors that are not tapped into this community, that you wouldn't even know unless you got into the backwoods with some of these people. actually talk with brokers, talk with realtors. There's so many people that have been doing this for generations in terms of what we do now, which is minor subdivides, timber cuts, things like that. They don't even know about what land flipping is with desert squares. They have no idea. And so I feel like if people got more tapped into that community, they'd realize that this has been like a two and a half century old business model, even more than that. And they haven't really cared about what everyone else is doing. They're doing their own thing. I feel like that's the main downfall we've had as, as a community. I mean, it's very small, the number of people in our community. There's probably a lot more that you've never heard of though. And they don't really have a community. They have their family and they're doing their thing and they work with their surveyors. They work with their local attorneys and that's the extent of what their network is at the end of the day.

Seth Williams: I've talked to a number of different developers and timber folks over the past few months now. And I was kind of struck by this idea that like land flipping is actually a pretty new thing still. And it's a pretty small thing. When you look at all land investors, people have been doing this kind of stuff for hundreds of years, like you said, like even looking at like the timber business, like it's a completely different model and process you go through to find a property for the purpose of harvesting timber. You know, you get deals from your network, not from direct mail, the different professionals that you know, like that's totally different, but it's still a land investing niche, essentially.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: On the historical front. So I learned this a few years ago. I thought it was very interesting. So I think the Spanish word for entrepreneur is impresario. And an impresario was someone who was basically brought in in Texas to literally go divide land up and bring new sellers to the Republic of Texas. And so I thought that was very interesting. I learned that at the Alava. I was like, interesting. So entrepreneur is a land developer. And at the time, I was like, we're just flipping land. I'm like, we're kind of doing that. But now, like, we're kind of living the creed of what an impresario is.

Seth Williams: Yeah, that is very interesting.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: You know, new communities, so to speak, in terms of our, you know, splits and bringing new settlers to the land.

Seth Williams: Now, you and your brother, Bryce, have worked together for a long time since I think you said he was 16, which that alone is interesting that he was in a business at 16 years old like this. But I'm curious, how has that evolved over the years? Like, how do you two naturally divide responsibilities? Like, who does what and why?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, it's changed fundamentally in the last 11 months because when I had my health episode, he took over everything for six months. Literally, the energy I had was sitting on the couch. So he had to take over everything. Now, today I'm in the office every day. So I focus mostly on the finding of properties and coming up with kind of the it's more like the visionary kind of leadership. And he's kind of the implementer.

But he does all of our signings on all of our properties. He does most of the marketing stuff, coming up with new ideas to get properties moved, just doing different things. And with the revolution of AI we have been fully involved with that we pay for all of them now and it's been really wonderful to like 10x 100x kind of our productivity and being able to do these different things but, I enjoy finding properties and splitting them up on paper. We use land ID for that. I enjoy building relationships with people. That's kind of suck because talking on the phone, when I first got into having this health crisis, my entire face was completely known. And so when I was talking, I sounded very swerved. And I'm like, I just, I'm not going to talk to anyone. No one's going to understand me and they're going to think I'm broke, which is a whole other conversation, which I kept up drinking for years ago. So I'm like, this really sucks. So since then, I'd say around March, February, March of this year, it's been back to about 50-50 now. So I focus mostly on the acquisition stuff and implementing the higher level conversation with people. And then he does all the implementing of the systems and properties and marketing and getting yields done or things of that nature.

Seth Williams: It sounds like you kind of just answered this question, but I was going to ask, Is there any like hidden advantage of working with a sibling that outsiders might not understand? It sounds like obviously somebody can pick up the slack when you're going through an episode and you can't do it. Is there anything else that's just like an unfair advantage of being able to work with your sibling?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, I think there's quite a few. I never realized this until I started networking with people. This was like in the very beginning, didn't really have much of a network, but it started in 18, 19, 20, somewhere around there. Started talking with a lot more people and like, oh, I just do this on my own. So I'm like, so how do you come up with ideas? And AI was not around. So now you can go talk with Claude and go have a conversation about what you should do.

I think the unfair advantage is, okay, Price, what do you think of this idea? Or he has an idea, Seth, what do you think of this idea? And I give him my raw opinion, which is, you know, it's either really great or it's really shit. You know, and there's so many different ideas that come across our desk. I'm like, I don't know what to think. So we both bounce each other off on different ideas. If there's something that I can't do, he does it. He's really, really good with the marketing and using Adobe products. Our mom was a graphic designer for many, many years. And so he learned all the products and now luckily we have, you know, enough money as a company, we can pay for all the different design products out there. So he gets to play all day long with these different things to use for our marketing. So just having the ability for him to do his thing and do my thing, but be able to bounce ideas off of each other. I think that's the single greatest thing because they're so evil. That are solopreneurs in this space, you know, in a lot of different places, but in the lane space, especially. And they're like, so I got to wear the caps of everyone, at least in my space. I don't have to wear all of them. He wears half of them. I wear half of them. And we can switch them. Too because over time there's things that he enjoys there's things that i enjoy, and so we've been able to switch off you know some of those different caps especially in the last year, where he had to wear them all and i wore none so now we've been able to like there's been some things that i'm like you know what you just do that now i i don't want to do that anymore you do it because he enjoys it.

Seth Williams: Well on that whole thing of like if one of you were to just disappear or stop being able to do your part of the job if bryce disappeared for six months starting tomorrow is there any part of this business that would suddenly become really hard or would something fundamentally break if he wasn't around?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, I, there were things that definitely broke. I mean, when I was gone for basically six to eight months, I mean, there were just things that just didn't happen the same way, like quality control things that I'd be like, here's a little things that I notice that he doesn't because I'm very detail oriented. He's detail oriented, but it depends on the thing he's looking at. Like you might put more emphasis on whatever you're looking at. You're like, Oh, there's a, you know, dispelling here. He doesn't notice those things. When we're doing something with an image and there's one little hair on a piece of grass that's off, he's like, I got to fix it. Oh, you can't see it. He's like, no, but I see it. I'm like, okay. So those kinds of things, I'm like in the last, you know, six to eight months and spend all those things, like, I just got to let it go. I don't have the energy to even argue about these little things, but those little things make a big life and they make a big company. And so you got to make sure you balance those things off of each other when you're not there. You just kind of have to do the best you can. So I'm grateful I'm back now. But if Bryce were gone tomorrow and do this over again, I'm sure that our marketing would go in the toilet. Cause he's really good at that. Like I could do the other stuff really good, but on that side, he's like phenomenal. So that's definitely one of those areas where it's like, you know, we definitely would not be doing the same level of quality that we've been doing it.

Seth Williams: Yeah. I don't know if you said when you first got into this business years ago, did you get into it yourself? And then like Bryce saw what you were doing and then he hopped on board or was he like part of this from day one?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I found it. And then I said, Bryce, do you want to do this? He said, sure. And so we we started doing it and it was kind of interesting we first started because it was more technical at the time there was no like we need to have a great website and all this other stuff like we do all that stuff now out of passion because it's fun to do and to have something that we're really like really proud of but, back then it was just like okay bryce you can't sign, there's a lot of things you couldn't do because he wasn't of legal age possibly and reflecting on this because i've seen other people in our e-tipser community and other places like i'm trying to get my son involved and he's young or whatever, i'm sitting here thinking you know we probably did something you probably shouldn't have done back then because he was not actually of legal age but he was signing things and other things so there's definitely some things like you got to think those through but, like back in the time it was just like bryce help me find properties let's scrub data.

Just very basic things that, you know, he was learning in school, like, hey, let's try and implement that in our business. And he was, he went to a high school that is luckily a public high school. It's actually a K through 12 school. It's all hands on learning, which was very, very ahead of its time. Now it's becoming more popular. But basically, you know, if they're going to go learn about science, let's go out and field and actually use real science to actually learn about the science we're reading in the textbook. So they would go do trips to like Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain National Park. They would go out to Moab. They'd go see all these national parks and they'd have to go collect dirt and they would do studies on it, all this kind of stuff. So they would do a lot of hands-on learning. So you'd be like, hey, this was one of the cooler things was like, hey, we're going down to Alamosa, which is the foothills like entrance to Great Sand News National Park and Preserve. And he's like, be great if we could go camping. We're trying to put together a place to get us at once. You just go use our five acre parcel that's right next to it. And so they ended up using five acre parcel to go camp 20 kids on the property. And like, so we got to do some real practical things while he was still in high school for that. And then just taking the things he was doing and then implementing them in our business, just little small things here and there, you know, learning like computer skills, you know, just, okay, let's use that business. We got to go scrub thousand names. And, you know, we got to do that by hand. OK, well, no, we can use Excel. We can do all these different things, things that I wasn't thinking of. He was implementing in our business.

Seth Williams: Have you two been like best buddies since birth or has this business brought you closer together?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, this brought us together. I'd say before this, we were not, which is very interesting.

Seth Williams: So that doesn't surprise me because I think a lot of people, I mean, I guess if you're lucky enough to have your sibling be your best friend. Awesome. You know, I feel like most people, they're kind of just there. Like it's just kind of who a family you're born into and you just make it work but it kind of sounds like is that sort of how your situation was but this is kind of brought you closer together out of necessity or

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah i would i would say that's fair the other thing is we had some freaking bull miles or great or our grandpa and our great uncle his his brother had a very very long lasting relationship very close, he spent seven eight months out of the year with them right next to each other. So when he was, this was, you know, cause my grandpa was in his early eighties now, mid eighties and our great uncle passed in 2020. I was devastating for the family, but like he would go to Arizona for six months out of the year. Okay. I'm going to buy a house next to you. Cause I want to spend time with you. You're going to move to Carter Springs. Okay. I'm buying a house in Carter Springs. When they bought the farm, it was kind of the same thing. They wanted to be next to each other. So I kind of didn't really see that until later. And I was like, wait a minute. Now I know why there's a house here, the house here, the house here, and the house here. They became rental properties over time, but it was like, no, that's because Uncle Jim wanted to live next to Grandpa or vice versa. And so I didn't really see that till later in life. And I'm like, that was a pretty good gift because there's a lot of families, including my dad's side and my mom's side, that just aren't as close as they are. And I'm like, that's a much better model when you're close to family because... Being close to family better than not. Yeah. That's, it's just kind of interesting because most people don't have that experience. And so by doing this business together, it's brought us together. It's so many different ways that I can't even, you know, there's just too many of them.

Seth Williams: Are there hard parts about working with family that people might romanticize too much or things that maybe they don't think about?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. You gotta, you gotta differentiate family and business because you technically can make everything business or everything family. So like you know we just don't usually share our business stuff with people outside the family unless they ask you know that's just one of our big things but then on top of that i would say is, just making sure outside of business hours which we try to keep business hours banking hours so to speak that we're not pushing conversations that should happen during the day it's like okay, i'll just save that for tomorrow because you can literally talk about business, 24 7 which is wonderful but it's not necessary, even though you can't it's kind of like and i i've never had to go through this so i don't really fully understand it but it's like people that work nine five and then their boss is texting them after hours, because they can in this you know modern age it's like okay but that if i was in the same position why would i be texting bryce about something outside of business art so it's kind of the same kind of concept so we that's the one thing that is romanticized is like okay we can always talk to us i guess you could but there's a time and place for everything. And that's not always the case that hits you from business outside of it. Let's go on a business trick or whatever, which is a little different matter. But I'd say that's one thing people romanticize way too much is the ability to have business conversations 24-7.

Seth Williams: Let's pivot a little bit. Talk about your health experience, we'll call it. So for people who know nothing about this, what happened?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. So last June, the end of June of 2025, I woke up with my entire face on the left side, with my left side quite reversed, was completely paralyzed. Didn't realize it. I was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. And when I got there, I'll say this. Thankfully, they knew what it was. There's a lot of people that get this disease, Ramsey-Hunt syndrome. It's RHS is the acronym for it. Justin Bieber had it, which I didn't know until I read a book.

They're like, oh, yeah, he had it. And I'm like, sorry, other people have had it. But I went to the hospital. They said, well, it could be one of two things. I'm like, oh, this is wonderful. But they gave me the drugs for the one they said could be worse, which was Ramsey-Hunt syndrome. So the other one is Bell's palsy. There's other kinds of palsy that exist. And Bell's palsy is the minor version, so to speak. Like usually you get it in it within a few weeks, it goes away. Like you get back to your normal functioning phase. Ramsey-Hunt syndrome is a full frontal assault on your entire nervous system, and you may or may not recover there is no cure there's no protocol there's no nothing, which is really infuriating because like a month after I went to see like the number one RHS specialist in Colorado down at Enchutes medical campus, which is down in Aurora in the Denver area. And the guy that created this hospital is Phil of Enchutes. He's one of the billionaires we call Colorado home. He built this giant campus, all these fancy doctors got there with this whole ordeal to get down there, spent all of like five minutes with this guy. He said, yeah, you got RHS. That's confirmed. It's not Bell's palsy. Come back to me in a month. I'm like, so what do I do? He's like, oh, there's nothing you can do.

Seth Williams: Oh, that's frustrating.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I didn't go back to the month. I'm like, so what am I going to come see you for? Oh, we'll just see if there's anything that's changed. I'm like, so in my introduction to our wonderful medical system that we have in the United States, it's a complete crapshoot. So basically the fact that I got the diagnosis, I'm like, at least now that I know that I can do more research on my own and see if there's things that can do. So I've had to basically create my own protocol.

For what I need to do to try to be a better. So I've been doing a lot of alternative ways to get there. Number one is chiropractic care. Number two is acupuncture care. And the third one, I didn't realize until a few months in, and that just happenstance, I came across someone at our local Harvest Festival and struck up a conversation with them. They were a physio, a doctor of physical physiotherapy, which is a subset of physical therapy. So physical therapy, if I know because you injure your arm or leg or something, then you get it rehabilitated by a physical therapist. A physiotherapist is the same, but for your central nervous system, which I didn't realize was a thing until she's like, oh, yeah, we can do all kinds of things to try and help heal your central nervous system. Because what I did, my entire body is basically fried every fiber of my being. I literally couldn't walk very good. It was completely imbalanced. That was the main thing. When I first got this, you know, paralyzed the left side of my face. But what it really did was it was a shingles infection in my ear. So it started as an infection in the ear. Like, oh, it's an ear infection. Take these antibiotics. Then a few days later, that's what has happened.

What it did was it attacked the ear. Now your ear on both your right and your left controls all the facial functions in your face. There are three connectors between your right ear and there's three connectors on your left ear that connect between your forehead, your philtrum, which is your lip, upper lip, and then it comes down to your chin. So when it hit my left ear, it fried everything on the left side. But then on top of that, my entire body just could not function. Like from lifting like 200 pounds to I couldn't lift a coffee cup without anything in it. My body just could not handle it. So it literally fried my entire central nervous system. So in this entire process since last June, I've been seeing those three different care providers off and on every month to just kind of give it a boost. Then doing exercises every day. I don't do them as much as I did in the beginning. I was doing like two hours a day of ad-hulling exercises between like.

Smiling in a mirror and pulling I still do this today like pulling my face so that it can get that sensation like it's fully open and just giving myself a fascia massage which is, a whole other area of the people who I don't know about you have your skin you have your fascia and then you have your muscle, and then under your muscle you have your bones well the fascia if it gets stuck, nothing else can move. And so they just have to like constantly grind the face with this, like, it's like a stone, basically. It's kind of a stone massage. You kind of do that to try to get to the fascia that's underneath to try and release all these different neural pathways that are stuck. I'd say the biggest thing I've learned throughout this whole process is that your central nervous system, if it's not well regulated, can cause all kinds of diseases beyond what I have that can just flare up overnight and start to attack your entire body. What it is, is it's a culmination of things. Even though it's a singular event, like it happened overnight. It's like getting hit with a bus. It just happens. There are many other things that happened in the past that probably led up to it. And you probably didn't see them coming. So there's many, many things that I was not doing.

There was like no stress relief. Like, okay, how do you relieve stress? What does stress actually do? How often are you in your sympathetic versus your parasympathetic system? I have no idea what is that, right? I can explain that later. But all these different questions you start asking is like, when do you do this? How often do you do this? Have you been exposed to this your environment your lifestyle your diet your exercise all those things they may all be on point, but if you're not doing all the other things to relieve the stress and get yourself into the parasympathetic system they can just start that compound into this giant avalanche that will hit you one day, and all you have to do is go talk to gemini or claude believe me there are dozens hundreds of diseases out there that just sit dormant in your body and all it takes is a traumatic event and I will just wake up one day. Unfortunately, there's one's a lot worse than what I have. So I'm always cognizant now of my stress levels of the things that I'm doing to regulate my central nervous system because A, this could come back again. It could go back to day one at any point in the future. There is no guarantee that it will ever get better from where I have it now. There's no guarantee that it won't come back. And there's no guarantee that another one plus this will decide to attack me again that's just the reality of the situation.

Seth Williams: Anybody watching the video i think will probably agree i think you look great if you didn't tell me that there was this issue i probably never would have like occurred to me oh something happened to seth you know but i know we were talking about before we started recording that this kind of reminds me of like a stroke i've got grandparents that have had strokes you do too and i think in those cases like they're able to regain some of what they lost but not all of it Is this kind of the same thing or is it not quite that bad? Because it seems like you've bounced back pretty well. I mean, I'm sure you're probably still dealing with stuff, but just from the outside, like I wouldn't look at you and think like, wow, this guy's been through the ringer.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: You know, it's funny you say this, the word stroke, because when I first was in the ambulance and I was on the phone with 911, that is a fun experience. Let me tell you, I was going in the ambulance, you know, I need to pay a really hefty fine for that. They initially thought I had a stroke because they were like, what are the symptoms? Like, oh, you could have. This is wonderful, by the way. Having a panic attack because like, oh, you could have had a stroke, could have had a heart attack, could have had both, could have been this, it could have been that. I'm just like going down the list of things it could be. And I'm like, what?

So I nearly blacked out. I remember that I was like, I nearly blacked out when I was on the phone with them because I'm like, what are you saying to me right now? Then I get in the ambulance like, oh, we think it's a stroke. I'm like, oh, God, because I'm sitting here consciously thinking about what they're saying is I'm in the giant car with them trying to pump my blood out. All the things that you see in the movies where they try to get a valve going with blood. That's what they were doing. They got it all over me. So that was a really fun experience. Let me tell you. What's even more fun is that our hospital is in Loveland. So where we are in Timnith, Windsor area, there's no hospital, but you go to Fort Collins, there's two or three different ones and there's one in Loveland. The one in Loveland. Loveland is known for two things. they create the weirdest traffic, intersections that exist on the entire planet like it is absolutely insane the level of traffic coordination that they create that doesn't exist anywhere on the planet except for there, the second one is roundabouts and they love them so everywhere has a roundabout so when you're going to the hospital, which we do all the time because it's you know it's right along the interstate on i-25 there's about 15 roundabouts you have to go around to get to the hospital and we always joked it'd be, really fun in an ambulance to go around those roundabouts let me tell you it is the worst experience ever because you're going like this.

You're going there. So there were two paramedics in the car, one driving. And they're like, yeah, we were pretty confident. This is a stroke. You know, the doctor will talk to you about it. Got there like, no, it's something called your facial palsy. That's for sure. Which is just your face is not working properly, but there's different reasons why it could not be working. One of them could be a stroke, but then they're like, we think it's Bell's palsy. But then that's when we got into the whole conversation of, well, it could be Ramsey Hunt syndrome or it could be this. So they ended up giving me the one pill. There's two pills they give you. One is preposome. They give me a steroid and then they give you this other one, which is like molecular. And it looks like a pill you would take if you were in a nuclear silo. The pill is like this big blue and you had to take two of them like four times a day for a week. That's all they gave. And then they said, Jerome, your honor for that. They said, that's the only thing we can give you for this to hopefully improve your chances. But thankfully, I left the hospital without having a stroke.

They could have given me one with all the information they gave me with one or diagnosis by a professional. They just, oh, this could be or this could be. I'm like that. I learned from one of our good family friends who's a dispatch officer. And he's like, they're not supposed to tell you what they think anything is on the phone. They're just supposed to say, OK, I'm writing down your symptoms when you get to the hospital. They'll tell you. Like they told me everything that they should have been telling me. I'm like, that's wonderful. And I was like, well, they nearly put me into a panic attack. I'm like, they did. I nearly blacked out all the stuff they were telling me. Like I'm 30 years old and you're telling me I'm having a stroke. I'm having a heart attack, potentially both and all these different things. So thankfully I didn't have a stroke, but they gave me this diagnosis and they said during wrong. So it's similar to a stroke in a way because everything in my body was fried. When you get a stroke, your entire body's central nervous system is fried, usually on the entire sphere of one or the left, you know, right or left side. So from your head all the way down to your toes. In my case, it was just the face, but then everything else in my body that was working.

All of a sudden was working. Just doing very hard basic things, picking up a grocery bag, picking up a glass of water, walking, all of that I had to basically relearn. Like, I used to go for 10 to 15 mile walks. This was days before I had this happen. Went for a 15 mile walk. I could barely walk maybe 10 feet without having to use a cane or use something to stand upright. Right. So I've come a long way, but there's energy spikes that just I do little simple things and just, you know, fries me for the whole day and even potentially some other days. So like I was telling you before, we went up to our family cabin, which is up in Conifer, which is just west of Denver. And we're at forty five hundred feet in elevation here. If you go up to Rocky Mountain National Park, it peaks at fourteen thousand five hundred feet. are cabins at 9,700 feet. Spent maybe six, seven hours up there and then drove back down the mountain. It wiped me out for two and a half days. It just didn't have the energy. So these little things, it's like I can do a lot of the things I can now, but there's some things that just take all the energy out of me. All I can do is focus on resting to get back to a normal place that I was before.

Seth Williams: What do you think was the scariest part about this whole experience that people around you might not have seen? Was it the initial, you know, being in the ambulance, being told all these things it could be? Was it that or was it more like in the days and weeks following that when you're like trying to come to terms with this new reality of like what happened to me and like what if I don't get better like was there a moment where you almost like had a little panic attack because of all these things going on

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Oh yeah many many many times I've come to the realization now it is what it is I'm doing the best I can to get better whether I get better to what I was before or not it's a probably different matter, Yeah. In the early days, I'm like, I would look at myself in the mirror and I would just cry because I'm like, who the hell is that guy? I mean, I'm happy to share a photo with you so you can show your viewers because I'm like the face that I had before and just a few days after was like night and day.

Seth Williams: Yeah, it is very interesting. So I've had episodes in my life, nothing like what you're talking about, but where I wasn't able to use my voice for like months at a time. And something like that, it's just amazing how you take for granted the stuff that's just there, like this ability that's just given to you. And then all of a sudden, you don't have it. And like, it just feels like it breaks everything. Part of it I think is your identity but also like just these very simple things that like a three-year-old can do that I can't do right now because my voice doesn't work or in your case your face doesn't work right whatever the thing might be and it's terrible but there is some kind of weird growth I think that comes from that hardship or just uh even just an awareness of like what a gift it is to be able to use this basic function in your body so when something affects you the way that this did like does it also affect your identity more than people realize like is there part of it like just seeing your face like that is me

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah i i'd say many many things in that way because it's hard to put this in terms that you know your viewers can understand but basically growing up on a farm, in what was rural it's not rural anymore rural colorado you have a certain identity and you have a certain way of doing things and a certain way of life and over time that changed because the city grew up around us basically so it became like city farm folk, but going through this I'm like I had this identity that I had before and afterwards and like some of the things that I felt very strongly about I'm like I just don't care about anymore like my entire vision of life on gratitude and.

On God, on many, many, many different levels. There's just many things I'm like, you know what? Why? I'm throwing that out. So I'll give you one great example of this. I had to look at the four categories I think I mentioned earlier, which is your lifestyle, your diet, your exercise, and your environment. And for me, I realized very quickly, probably not necessarily my lifestyle because I had changed that quite tremendously. I was 230 pounds in 2020. And last year, I was 130. I've gone up and down a little bit on the weight by fact about where I was before. So I had completely changed my life. But then the environment I was in, we were going through so many different things to clean up the estate of my great uncle, among other things, where I was exposed to, you know, things that I'm like, you know, I probably shouldn't have been doing that without a mask or some sort of filtration system, like all kinds of things that I learned about afterwards, that I'm like, well, there's no way I would have known. Like, this is a big one. Exposure to lead paint, exposure to asbestos. It happens every day and you wouldn't know it. You wouldn't know how much cheaper. It's incredible how many homes from the seventies and eighties.

The whole house was built around that. So that was me growing up. Then we moved out of the farmhouse i'm like holy crap the whole house was asbestos the whole house was like paint the whole house was a cancerous environment we're like you know that probably contributed to it you're cleaning out the farm there's all kinds of toxins that were flubbed around there i'm like whatever when you grow up on a farm you're just like it is what it is what am i going to do about it and you move on so that's one thing i'm like very conscious about what i'm breathing in if it's a it's a poor quality um air day because we know we have the wildfires are called around like i'm not going outside as much as I want to and I could do it. I'm not doing it because that's not going to be good for my lungs. What am I eating? Okay. Well, I thought I was pretty conscious before because I track everything. It's like, how much am I eating? What is basic biochemistry?

Like all the different things you kind of learn in school and you're like, you forget about it. We found an adult. You're like, oh, that doesn't matter to me. Yes, it does. It's very, very important. So your environment's important or lifestyle's important. It's, you know, kind of a mixture of the next two, which is diet and exercise. But before I was like good with exercise, the diet is like using, I heard someone call it the American junk diet. So it was like AGD, I think it was, something like that. But basically just the regular American diet. Whatever that is that's what people are eating i'm like mine was probably 50 50 american diet and then trying to be conscious about certain things now i'm conscious about every single thing that goes on my body because it will affect me one way or the other if i eat too much sugar, if i eat too much gluten there are certain things that just crash my whole system so, growing up on a farm we had wheat fields every single season so i love and trust farmers to all a tea in china that they bring us our food to our table.

At the same time, I'm like, okay, so why do I feel sick every time I eat? I started paying attention to little things that I'm like, used to be like, whatever. Those little things add up into the big problems. And so since this beginning of this year, I went gluten-free. Sugar, I pretty much killed, which before I thought I was doing pretty good. Then I actually measured how much sugar I was eating. I'm like, holy crap. Yeah, sugar is a huge inflammatory. basically there's different foods that will either inflame or de-inflame your body, and sugar is a big one that will inflame your body gluten is a huge inflammatory food so there's all these different things i've had to pay attention to in my diet and lifestyle and exercise and environment that before i'd have been just like whatever, i can't change it well sure you can you can change where you live to an extent you can change where you go, you can change what you eat you can change how much you eat you can change when you eat, so like those are three levers that anyone can do you can do you know diet restriction you can do food restriction and you can do time restriction if you ask me i think all three are necessary but i do intermittent fasting quite a bit so that's another thing i've introduced, so all these things as far as like i just do whatever the average person does, the average person is dying very slow death, in this country because they're just eating junk, doing whatever and doing the air, which is not caring.

So I had to fundamentally change every single aspect of my life to get better because there are so many people that have this disease that have exactly what they look like and how they felt on day one. They still feel that 10, 15 years later.

Seth Williams: It's really interesting how this is apparently brought on by like a culmination of different things that you might not even consciously be aware of, like stress or your diet and all this stuff. I'm wondering, you probably don't even know the answer to this. Maybe I could ask Claude about it, but like, is there some self-assessment I could take to be like, my stress levels are this on a regular basis. Here's my normal diet. I'm at risk because of this. I don't know. Like, how could I look at this and be like, like, how do I make sure that I don't ever get this or any average person listening to this? Any idea?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, I mean, so let's say this. Gemini does better because I've tried them all. Chantiputti might be better. Another new model just came out. Claude is very stingy about answering anything medically.

Seth Williams: Sure.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: It says, here's what you should do. Go see this doctor. Here's what I think. Go see this doctor. It's very cushy about go see the doctor. If you've seen the doctors, I've seen their complete waste of time and a joke. And I love doctors, but the ones I have seen have just been a complete joke, and a waste of time and quite frankly. So you've got to be your own advocate and you've got to do your own thing. So AI has been the greatest asset in this and that I can look at everything and say, OK, let's sit down for an hour and let's figure out what the problem is and let's figure out a solution for it. Because what I thought was just is what it is before. There's actually a solution for it.

Seth Williams: Yeah.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: The biggest fundamental thing is just understanding what you're eating. Imagine you're a biochemist. And if you don't know what a biochemist is, you got to go look up what biochemistry is. It's amazing what they do. It's literally just figuring out what makes humans tick with what you eat and what your body is composed of. It's a composition of your genes. It's a mixture of what you eat. And the most important thing is you, because if you eat one thing and I eat one thing, we're going to have very different reactions to it. That's fundamentally what biochemistry does. So understanding what you eat, understanding what you do for exercise, what you'd have for pain in your body at any given moment in time, what are things that recur over and over. Like, this is just me. It's like, why does Tums and Heptobismol make so much money in America, but they don't make any money in Europe? I'm like sitting, you're thinking on before I went gluten-free and went kind of sugar. It's mostly sugar-free. That was a pretty common thing. And I'm like, well, why do I need to take this pill after I eat? That's a very fundamental thing. And then I realized, well, it's probably because your body is actually not accepting what you just Your stomach churning is not a normal activity for your body.

That's a food poisoning reaction. So I'm like, okay, so let's go through all the foods I ate. So I literally gave it like an excelsiority of everything that I was eating when I was eating it. And I was able to tell me, maybe you should think about this. And some of the things I was eating every day or every week. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. This is like, my body is not accepting it. So three things that I did were the sugar, like added sugar. The second one was gluten. And the third one was tea like iced tea which is a fundamental drink in america we drink it all the time and i was saying that that is probably not good for you and i started not putting in my system i'm like wait a minute now i don't feel you know there's many different side effects from it but, you just have to start taking it down to a scientific level and going through every single aspect of your life then you can give it to claude give it i would say Gemini is probably the best out of the three if I was going to give you one, and say, okay, what are you seeing? Imagine you're a professional doctor, that understands all the different aspects. And I'll tell you, it's giving me answers that I've brought to my doctors and they're like, how did you know this? I'm like, oh, I didn't. This is who I asked. Like, oh, okay, that figures. I'm like, yeah, that's because it's replacing you in many ways for basic stuff. You know, you can't fix having a surgery or something, but like just asking for general knowledge, like it's very good at taking the details and saying.

Seth Williams: I saw this video on Reddit a few weeks ago of this general physician and he was talking about how over the past year, a lot of patients have been coming in with some very complex questions like they show up sounding like they've already talked to a doctor they've deeply researched this and i'm just thinking duh they're talking to ai about this like there's no other way they would know all this stuff but i do think ai is a massive probably widely underutilized tool for this kind of thing because i know my my nephew got diabetes a couple years ago something his parents have been doing a deal with this is before every meal, they take a picture of what he's about to eat and they weigh it. They give it a chat GPT. And it's like pretty accurate with like what this is going to do to his blood sugar. And the thing about sugar, man, it's like it's in everything, especially in America. Like they put it in hamburgers and McDonald's, you know, they put it in the ketchup and in the peanut butter and all the stuff you wouldn't even know sugar's in there. And they just dump it in there because it's addictive. It gets people to eat more of that thing. It's a lot of stuff the average person probably doesn't think about, but it sounds like you've had to deal with that in a big win

Seth Drehle-Ewan: You kind of hit on a point so diabetes that's potentially one of the things that i had and i didn't know it so what you have is it's like as i have to give you the book later because i think it's something your listeners should listen to it's it's a very very very long detailed book that talks about disease and outliving like how do you live long like what are the things that people are dealing with and it's like, probably like seven and eight americans have diabetes and they don't know it just based on the diet they're eating. And it's very easy to reverse if you just change your four different categories. But the main one is diet. It's like if you go off of this American standard diet, you can pretty much reverse diabetes pretty quickly because it's not a genetic thing. Genetics plays a part of it, but it's mostly what you're eating. And if you completely do a 360 on what you're eating, you can reverse the biochemistry of your body. So I think it's very interesting when you listen to these books about diabetes because...

Probably a contributing factor. It's a disease of inflammation. Anything that's a disease of inflammation just inflames everything else and gives you a better chance at getting something. So you're asking like, how do you avoid this? And then there's a great quote from Warren Buffett. I love Charlie Munger, rest his soul and Warren Buffett, but he said, you get one car in your life, and you have to take care of it. Like there's no other car in the world because it's your body. And if you, which is really interesting when you look at what he eats, but no, it's, it's so true. And I'm like, I look at everything I eat now, like, if it doesn't get me where I need to go, then I have to question whether I'm going to eat it. And I'll still eat something, you know, whether I have a few side effects, I still have one is taste. I can only taste five categories. There's no in between. So I only taste salt, bitter, sour, spicy. I'm trying to think there's one more, but you know, the general category is of taste. You know, I couldn't tell you the difference between a lemon and a lime. I can't tell you the difference between an apple and an orange. They just taste sweet to me. It's like a metallic taste because it fried my taste buds.

Seth Williams: Has that made it easier to eat well? Because you can't taste stuff that otherwise would have tasted really good before?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. It's become a lot easier to eat because I'm not so focused on, well, I don't want to eat that thing or that thing. I still crave things and I'm like, I don't know that I crave it. It's like an old craving. I just crave the sweetness or the saltiness. I've had to be very, very careful with the salt because if it doesn't have salt, I can't really taste anything unless it's really powerful. So like when we do something like spicy, if it's got a hint of spice, I'm like, well, I can taste a little bit. So I'll add more. Because if I do that, at least I don't need to add salt. Because if it doesn't have a strong enough flavor, I just add salt to it. And I'm like, I'm sure it's salted enough. I'm sure there's plenty in there, but I can't taste anything. So it's very interesting. I mean, because I just don't taste anything. There's three or four things I'm still dealing with. That's one of the main ones. I'm like, I wish it would just come back to the dried nuts.

Seth Williams: Yeah, totally.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, what do you do? I don't know. I've done all the research I can.

Seth Williams: I'm curious. Has this experience changed the way you think about ambition or money or stress or what success even means?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, fundamentally in every way. I mean, I don't know what I had before. So I'll just tell you what my definition of success is today. If you can do what you want to do where you want it with whom you want and not have to worry about time. Or location, I think you have ultimate freedom. And I think there's lots of just speak on the land space. And there's a lot of people in the land space that are always like in pursuit of the next deal, which is great, or pursuit of the largest company or the largest whatever, or the biggest profit or wherever you see all these things. I've seen them on your podcast, you know, other people, but it's like, I'd love to know what's going on in the background, because the more time I can spend with my grandparents while they're still alive, worth having spent my parents and my brother spend time on our business doing fun creative things that to me is more important than okay let's send a hundred thousand mailers because we're going to make a lot more money, well then you created a lot more work if we can just create enough, to have a good life and be able to have enough time in the day to do what we want to do that's good enough for me yeah and you before probably would have been let's do as much as we can. And I'm like, I'm still wanting to do that. But at the same time, I'm like, I would rather do more in my life than try to do less of my life, but with more money, you know, you kind of have to trade off time. And if you have ultimate time freedom, then you have more freedom than the person with all the money in the world. You're going to have all money in the world and you don't have any time. Then what's the point?

Seth Williams: Yeah. Sometimes I look at ambition. I almost wonder if it's like a version of an unhealthy addiction or something like that. I mean, that's going too far, but because I've got a lot of ambition too, but not as much as some people I know. But to your point, it's like ambition can really screw you up. If like you don't even really know why you're doing it, if you're just chasing some dopamine hit of like the thrill of a deal or something, but it's like, but it's actually kind of robbing me in a lot of other ways that I'm not paying attention to, then like, is it really helpful or is it harmful to you?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I have some examples in my head of what you're talking about. It's like, you got to find a good balance. People talk about the work-life balance, but I'm like, it's even more fundamental than that, it's like, okay, do you, you know, I don't know, I already don't have kids or anything, but it's like, if you want to spend time with your kids, can you do that in any moment in time? Can you say, okay, we're going to go do X, Y, or Z and not have to worry about anything. And a lot of people, the answer is no, because they're too busy. Or you see this, it's wonderful to watch Hallmark movies. I identify with them more often than not because I'm like, here's this guy, he has nothing. And then there's this guy with everything and he has no time. And the other guy has the whole world. He's so rich in life and he can do whatever he wants, but he doesn't have all the money in the world. I identify with both worlds with the same tunnel, like people that just work to work to make more money. And I just don't. I think that's the biggest fundamental shift. I just don't identify with it anymore because I don't see the point. I really don't.

Seth Williams: I don't know where you're at spiritually, but you mentioned God earlier. Has this whole thing improved your relationship with God?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, it's tested it quite a bit because I'm like, the biggest question I ask every day is why me? I don't have an answer for that one, but it's definitely probably closer to him. Yeah, just in life, it's like that. And for me, that's another big shift. It's just there's more important things in life than just what you're doing at the moment. It's the people and the impact you make most importantly the impact you're gonna make on the world and in your relationship with him so, that to me has been the biggest thing but I ask him every day and I'm like I ask him to help me and we're getting there and people say hey you look I know you said the same thing we haven't seen each other for a while so you're like I saw you before and you see me now but, when I started out it was like it was like someone took a baseball bat to my left side of my face and just smashed it in and it's like why would someone do that and keep them alive. And unfortunately, there's many, many people that the disease hits them on day one and they don't change, period. Their standard of living goes from what it was before to day one and that has not improved at all.

I think the tools he's given me, the people he's given me in my life have been really helpful because they've asked me questions and they've pushed me in ways that I didn't think I would be able to do myself. As great as AI is, there are people with professional backgrounds that I've been working with that I'm like, they're asking me questions and they're pushing and doing things that I would have never even thought of. So when we get to the end of this, I have my favorite book. I'm going to ask you what your favorite book is, Seth. But the most fundamental thing I learned in this in the most recent months is that I don't breathe right. Breathing is the most fundamental human thing that you do to live other than drinking water eating. And I was told by a doctor, you're not breathing right, and it's killing you. And it's like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, is there a way to solve this problem? Like, that's a really big statement to say to me. She's like, yeah, you can fix it. And here's how you do it. Yeah, there's just a lot of things that I've had to rethink of what's important and, you know, time with every day is important and breathing. Basically that's when I breathe every day, I spend 30 minutes to an hour just sitting there in stillness. Um, that's become probably the most important part of my entire day.

Seth Williams: It sounds like from what I'm hearing, some good things have come about from this experience, right? Like you've learned a lot about yourself, what really matters. You've gotten a lot of good perspective. You've grown a lot in maturity. So with those good things, I'm wondering if you could rewind the clock and just avoid this altogether. Just like, nope, that never happened. Would you do that? Or is there anything you would have missed out on if you had not gone through this?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Well, I'm still going through it. So I don't know if I have a really good answer for that.

Seth Williams: What you've gone through so far, maybe.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, what I've gone through so far has been help. So I don't know that I would go back and say, sign me up for this again, to be quite frank with you. I'll say the lessons I've heard of just being more still and being more calm and being more open and relaxing, like that's the most important thing you can do. Like I wouldn't learn that. So that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned is, and this is just my product of being American. We're always in the culture of go, go, go, go, go. There's never any time to just sit and think or go still or do nothing. And the European culture is like the total opposite of America. It's like the more time you can spend away from work, the more time you can spend with family, the more time you can spend doing nothing, the better the life is, which is the total opposite of America. So I'm like, I I've identified more with that. I'm like, where are my goals and where I want to live and things I want to do. I've identified more with that because of this experience, but I would never wish this upon my worst enemy because it is, it's the worst. And there are days that I just can't do anything even to this day. And I hope that gets better to a point. I mean, I have a lot more good days than bad days, but it's heart wrenching when it's like, I want to go do something that takes 10, 20 minutes and then it wipes you off for two or three days.

Seth Williams: Yeah.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Like, I know if I do this again, it's going to happen again. You're just going to use your little 20 minutes of work that you wanted to do. You're going to get wiped out for the next two or three days. Is that worth it? It sucks.

Seth Williams: To word this a different way, am I correct in hearing you that you're saying all the perspective you've gotten, the things you've learned, the maturity you've gained, you would rather not have that. Like you would rather just have a pain-free past year where you did not have to go through this and you're not currently going through this. Is that accurate?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, it's you got to do the trade off. The problem is I'm still in the middle of it.

Seth Williams: So I'd be curious to ask you this in like a few more years, you know, when you're presumably out of this, like what chance it would be then?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: It's hard because I asked that question. I still ask the question of why me every day? How do I get healthier? And the third one I ask is what am I learning from this? And I don't have any answer because I'm like, that's the best answer I've got for you right now is just being more present, being more still and being more, I'm going to say this is something that I don't think we talked about, the parasympathetic and sympathetic system. So your sympathetic system is your central nervous system where you were in fight or flight. Unfortunately, in our culture and in this country, we spend most of our time in that system. The parasympathetic is your rest and digest system. And so I've spent a lot more time on that in the last year than I did the other one. I think it was a systemic disease, for lack of a better word, of being in that sympathetic system that caused this entire situation. And I think a lot of people end up having random events.

Seem random, but they're not. Having a random heart attack or random stroke or having a random fall is not a random event. It's a series of events and it potentially is decades of events culminating into that moment. And just learning about disease in general, disease doesn't just magically appear. It happens because of a lot of things happening. And there's been the one thing that breaks the straw on the camel's back. And for me, it was having this ear infection that turned into the RHS shingles event. If we go even a step back further, I had chickenpox when I was a kid. And at the time, it was common to get the vaccine as well. Unfortunately, when you mix the vaccine with the actual virus, you are a higher likelihood of getting shingles. And RHS is caused by shingles virus attack. So if you had both of those, you're a little higher likely to have Ramsey-Hunt syndrome. And the only way to prevent it, so to speak, is to spend more time in the parasympathetic system than the sympathetic system. So I've given some strong thought to the idea of moving to Europe and kind of experience their way of life to see like, okay, what are things that I'm currently doing that they already do? Like, it's a normal thing. Like them going to lunch for three hours is a normal event.

That is not normal in the United States. Not working is not a normal event here in the United States. Like, it's like trying to figure out what can I do even more, you know, to prevent this from happening again to me and other things are happening in the future. I think that's my biggest takeaway. It's like, what can I do? Because everyone says, like, a lot of times it's out of your control. I'm like, for that's what I believe. I'm like, it's complete BS. Everything's in your control. When it happens is out of your control because something will happen to you someday. If you continue living the life you're living the way you're living it, unfortunately.

Seth Williams: You know, I don't know if this has gotten you closer to God necessarily, but if it has in any way, in my experience anyway, God is worth anything I have to give up. Like if there's anything that could happen to me that would improve my relationship with him, it's worth it. And that's a hard thing to say. I think especially when you're in the middle of it, because it's like, this hurts right now and I don't like the pain, make it stop. But there is nothing in this life that's worth trading in place of that closeness to God. So if it does improve that, it's worth seizing that and like holding on to that for dear life. Because, I mean, that's really the best thing that could ever happen to you.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: When you get down to it, eternal is far more important than what's happening here. And I think that's where I've realized like the three categories of what's important here is the impact you make, the relationships you have, just the life that you're living for you. because you're not going to be here. You're going to be somewhere else someday. And that's far more important. Trying to trust in that a lot more. It's harder in the moment, to be honest with you, but I'm working on it every day.

Seth Williams: Yeah, me too. I know. And it's weird because I can tell you this stuff, but I still trade away things that I shouldn't. It's the weirdest thing to mentally know what's true, but not be able to actually do it right in real life. It's really annoying. So if somebody listening right now feels like life has punched them in the face, physically, emotionally, or financially, what helped you keep moving forward? What could they learn from what you've been through?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: I think just what you talked about is building a relationship with God. I think that has been the biggest takeaway in many ways. Any of those would be a financial punch or a physical punch, health punch. Any of those are life-changing. You're going to get through it at the end of the day. We all live a life, right? Hopefully the health episode doesn't kill you. That's, you know, luckily for me, it didn't. I felt like it would at the time. But everything that you have is recoverable. I just have found over this entire experience that what I caught was important before is not. Because you can always make more money. You can always get new things. What you can't necessarily do is get new. Or, I mean, yes, you can. I mean, it's just a matter of people are talking about relationships is a big thing.

It's like you can either have new relationships or you can have more solid relationships. Sometimes relationships go away, but you can get all that stuff back. And one thing you can't do back is your soul. So I've learned in this process and through looking at what we did before or doing now in our business and what we do in life, it's just keeping that in mind more than anything. Because you only get one soul. You only get one lifetime here, but your soul lives on forever. That's just my general opinion. And if you sell it away for something that you don't like, for immediate gain or whatever it is and like you know it could be a financial gain it could be a relationship gain whatever it is then you're no better than some of the people that run our country in washington i'm just like when i see them i'm like they're the epitome of what i don't want to do i'm, like i want to have the best relationship i can on this planet and you can't do that if you're selling your solo hate for a single day, you know, for the next buck or whatever it is you're in pursuit of.

Seth Williams: You know, not everybody out there is a spiritual or Christian or Bible-believing or God-fearing person or whatever you want to call it. And a lot of times when I hear them talk, I hear them talk about, you know, I want to have impact, you know, or I want to do something for my kids or, you know, they talk about things like that. But when I hear that, it's like, well, if there is no God, if there is no eternity, if this life is the only life, then like literally nothing matters. The impact doesn't matter. Your kids, they don't matter. We're all going to die. Lights out. Nothing ever mattered. It was all just pointless. So if you care about impact, I would challenge you, why do you care about that? Because that's clearly not going to serve any eternal purpose either.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah. You kind of took that in a different direction. I was going to say, if you zoom up this year to the 250th anniversary of America, you probably can't even remember your great... I mean, I'm going to say this. I know who my eighth great-grandfather was. He fought in the Revolutionary War, but I don't need to know anything beyond that. So the fact is at the end of the day, people may not even know what your name is or what you did, but you have an impact.

To put it in perspective, eight generations is the equivalent of 10,000 people impacted. So you may not see the impact. You're like, well, this is my thing. And I always see this all the time when you go to like museums or now hospitals or whatever. You're like, all these people don't need money. Sometimes companies that people like, who the heck is this person? No one knows. You go Google them. No one knows who they are. The impact is important to the person that's making it. Hopefully it's a positive one. You can always make a negative impact, but I think it's important to have a mission. And where that impact is going because you have the ability to make positive or negative change in the world, i'd say being positive is a better thing to think negative but will someone remember no no one's going to remember you in two generations, let alone eight generations or 20 generations and we may not see the planet go to you know 20 more generations who knows how long we have left, what's important is what you're doing in your life now and doing the best you can at it And that's the most I can hope for in daily pics. This is just doing the best I can. My grandpa, he's a historian. He loves doing genealogy. And so he found our.

Bryce and I, I'd be our eighth great-grandfather, Abraham Shelley, in North Carolina, was our Revolutionary War descendant. And he was what got us into the Sons of the American Revolutionary War organization. And me, my mom and her sister, my aunt, that'd be their seventh generation, got them into the DARS, the Women's Organization for the Daughters of the American Revolution. So, For them, it's like, okay, that's the impact they made. But then look at the country that they built from nothing back then. And this year, just because it's the 250th, I'm like, you sit here and think about those things. And it's like, well, how many people did it take to get our country where it is? And you look at it, it's a very small amount in relative terms to what the world looks like today and what America looks like today with over 300 million people. And it didn't take many people to do what they did, but they made the largest splash we've ever seen and it impacted my life so there i made a difference even if i don't know anything about their life without them we wouldn't we wouldn't be in the society we are today it'd be totally different right love watching parody movies and shows where it's like here's what the world would have looked like if blah blah happened it's like you know that's really interesting it could have been a totally different world you lived in.

Seth Williams: Yeah man that is fascinating to think about for sure well seth before we started recording this you said you wanted to end this a little bit differently and ask me three questions, which at first I was like, what are you talking about? That's not how this works. But apparently you've got three questions for me. So before we wrap it up, what are those? How can I help you?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Okay. So what is your favorite hike saw? Mine is Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum, which is famously used for different rocket movies and space movies.

Seth Williams: Yeah, that's a great question. There's so many good ones out there. I don't know why this is popping in my head, but it is a great song. Jump by Van Halen. That one, maybe?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Cool. Second one, what is your favorite book?

Seth Williams: This is kind of like the song question. It's pretty hard to answer one definitive choice on that. But one book I read about four or five years ago that I keep coming back to the lessons that I learned in it was Crucial Conversations. Just a great book about such an important topic about like, how do you have difficult conversations with somebody where the stakes are very high, where doing it wrong could be very costly. How do you have those conversations in such a way where everybody walks away feeling way better about the situation, like really dealing with difficult issues the right way? And I thought that book just nailed it. So I'll go with that one.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Mine is Breath by James Nestor. That's the book that my physiotherapist doctor gave me. She said, go read that book. Then you'll learn how to breathe right. Right.

So I read that one. It's a yellow book. You can get it on audio. I listen to audio books every day when I work out and do other things, but I'm breathed by Jade's Nestor. The last one, what is your favorite experience you've ever had? And I'll give you mine. So you maybe had something to bear to. So my favorite experience when I was, I think it was about nine or 10, we went up to the Athabasca Icefield in Alberta, Canada, which is between Jasper National Park, and Banff National Park, beautiful country. And you get to go take a walk on an ice field that's millions of years old. I guess it's not millions, it's thousands of years old since the last ice age is when it was there. But the you get to go take like a water bottle and you get to drink water that's never been touched by humankind. That was the most profound experience I've ever had. I've been to a lot of places in the world, but there's only one place in the world where you can do that, like at a tourist attraction. And you take these giant buses that literally sit, I don't even know, 20 feet off the ground because the tires are so huge. And you really drive across the crevasses of the glacier and you get to go experience, the top of the glacier looking down at the vastness of it. But that water, I'll tell you, there's no water that tastes like it on the planet. There is not one water company that tries to replicate it that can replicate glacial water. it's the most pure oil you'll ever drink in your life.

Seth Williams: Wait a minute are you telling me it tastes better than Aquafina that's not possible right

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Like we have pretty good water in Colorado. That's why we have a lot of breweries here. It's breathtaking.

Seth Williams: Like what does it taste like? I mean, water is water, right? Or is there like minerals in it that aren't anywhere else? Or is it like in your head? Like you know how special it is. So you kind of plant it up in your head. Or what's so special about it?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Oh, I just since then, I've never had anything that tastes like it. So I was tame and I'm 31. So in 20 years, I've had anything before that. I didn't have anything. It's just there's the minerals in it. The purity of it. It's just like there's nothing like it because I don't even know how to describe this. Even if you had fresh water from rain that had been recycled, that water has been recycled. I don't even know how many times the water just goes up and down, up and down. This has been captured before when there were mammoths walking on the planet. And that water has never been touched, by humankind. So it's just a very different taste. It tastes crisp. That's why I said you've got to experience it to understand what I'm saying because there's nothing like it. There's some things in the world you just can't describe it unless you experience it. That's one of them. And luckily that glacier is still, I was looking at it because it was like, back then they were talking about the glacier melting and I'm like, it has receded quite a bit since then, but it is still open to the public. You can still go up there on the giant buses and experience being on a glacier. Which is the only place outside of, I want to say when you look it up, might be more today, but back then the only place in the world you could see, the glaciers and drive on these buses was Antarctica. Or in this glacial field.

Seth Williams: I know what you're talking about, though. I've never done exactly what you're talking about, but I have had special experiences in life when I've been like hiking way out in the wilderness, going up to the top of a mountain or just seeing stuff that not everybody gets to do this. Like, this is a very rare thing. This is not like a national park where there's like crowds of people. Like, I had to work really hard to get to this place. And there's something very special about that when you have that realization and just kind of hits different. So for me, it's more of a collective experience of just being a parent, I think. Just having kids and I've been very fortunate in my profession since they've been born. It has left margin in room for me to still give a lot to them and experience what they have to give. Kids give way more than they take. Maybe it's my kids. I don't know. I don't know if some kids actually are really difficult, but I just get along so well with mine. They're the kinds of kids that I would have been best friends with when I was a kid like we just click really well and even before they could talk just being able to have that experience of being a parent and knowing that like part of me is in this human being you know and I remember hearing people talk about this all the time before I had kids and I was like whatever okay it's great good for you but it finally clicked when I had my kids and it's an amazing thing so it's been the best thing for me.

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Well, I finally got to interview Seth Williams.

Seth Williams: How does it feel? Very cool. You just got to do something that very few people ever get to do. Well, Seth, thank you for opening up, being part of this interview. Glad we could do it. If people want to get a hold of you or check out your website or whatever you got going on, you don't have to share anything, but is there anything you want to share?

Seth Drehle-Ewan: Yeah, people, if they are interested and want to reach out, they can reach out on my website at debroseland.com and my email is seth at debroseland.com. I'll give that to you so you can rock it if people are arrested.

Seth Williams: Yeah, you bet. So I will include that in links to a handful of other things in the show notes for this episode, retipster.com forward slash 279. And Seth, again, thanks for being here. All the listeners out there, thanks for tuning in and we'll talk to you next time.