How To Evaluate Modern Alternatives With Stefan Von Imhof

Welcome back, Invest Like a Billionaire podcast listeners. We have got a fun episode today with Stefan von Imhoff. He is the co-founder of alts.co. You may have seen his newsletter around. So they started this newsletter educating about alternative assets and not just any kind of alternative assets, but what he calls modern alternatives. And so these are alternatives we haven't spent a lot of time on the podcast discussing. You know, we normally focus on the big three, you know, real estate, hedge funds, private equity. But this is getting into collectibles like baseball cards. This is getting into music streaming rights. This is getting into farmland. It's getting to some really unique asset classes that we haven't touched on a lot. So we're really excited to dive in here. I think you're going to love hearing about these new assets. Now, it is very early stage innings. We're not promoting anything and saying this is what you should be investing in, but it's just interesting to see the evolution of the space. And just as always, want to give a disclaimer. Just because we bring somebody on the podcast does not mean we are recommending them as an investment. You got to do your own due diligence if you're interested. It's something that's just interesting, and I think you're really going to enjoy. So here you go. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast, where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors. Welcome back to the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I am your co-host Ben Fraser, joined by fellow co-host Bob Fraser. Today we are joined by Stefan von Imhoff, and he is the co-founder of alts.co, which, as he described in our conversation beforehand, investing in modern alternatives. And we're going to get into what that means. And really excited to have you on the show, Stefan.

Great to be here, guys.

Well, talk a little bit about your story. So you live in Australia, and you said you're actually in Portugal right now, which is pretty cool. But Talk about just how did you get into this space, where, kind of your background a little bit.

Sure. So I started the Alts newsletter back in 2020. It was a lockdown child, so to speak. There was basically nothing better to do for 4 months straight in Melbourne, Australia during the lockdown. So I just started writing about what I loved and what I knew. And at the time I was the head of product at Flippa.com. Which I think you guys know is a marketplace for buying and selling businesses, online businesses, e-commerce, micro SaaS, that sort of thing. And you know, at Flippa, we kind of saw that world as alternative investing, right? So it's investing in cash-flowing content websites, investing in micro SaaS businesses. It's active investing, but it's still, I think, still to this day, one of the most compelling alternative investment classes out there, truly.

To actually buy an online business?

Buying an online business, buying a passive content site, yeah, there's a lot to be said about that. So yeah, so I started writing about that world and around the same time I was starting this newsletter, it was kind of focused on that side of alternative investing. There was a gentleman named Wyatt who's now my co-founder and Wyatt who lives in Spain, he and I never met in person but he had a very similar newsletter and he was kind of talking about alternative investing from a different angle. So he was coming at it from the world of what was happening in fractional investing, and collectibles, and culture, and like sports memorabilia. And that's a really big growing alternative investment class, as I'm sure you guys have heard. I just didn't have the expertise in that area. Wyatt did. So he had his newsletter, I had my newsletter, and it was clear like, you know, we were kind of butting heads a little bit, but we also got along really well. So I basically just rang him up one day and I was like, you know, look, man, I don't know if you want to maybe just join forces. I don't really want to compete. And that was pretty much it. We've just been working together ever since. And we've been building alts together ever since.

Very cool. So one of the things I love— I'm actually on your newsletter and that's actually how we found you— is you kind of do these deep dives into these different alternative investments. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to bring you on is you're doing things that aren't, you know, the traditional alternatives that we're maybe more familiar with, that our audience is probably more familiar with, which I would classify as, you know, real estate, hedge funds, private equity, kind of the big three, you know. And so what you're focusing on are more the collectibles, like you said, the memorabilia, doing different culture kind of driven investments. And so talk a little bit about that space. It's definitely a budding space. You know, people have heard about NFTs, obviously cryptocurrency, cryptocurrencies have kind of jumped in the scene.

So, you know, but what's the landscape? Give us the, like, what is the biggest of these? You call them modern alternatives, right? So what are the, what are the three biggies in modern alternatives?

I think collectibles and culture are, are the biggest right now. I think there's just a groundswell of interest and folks kind of pouring into, you know, cultural assets, sports memorabilia, really driven by sports. Cards and game-worn jerseys and all sorts of sports memorabilia. I think that's driving a lot of the industry forward. There's a ton of other stuff happening though. There's stuff happening in comic books, video games. It all has to do with grading. So once you get a— anyone can buy an asset and call it an alternative asset, but unless it's graded and graded by a recognized body, it doesn't really have a whole lot of value, and there's no way to really ascertain the value. So what's happening is there's all of these graded pieces coming online, and they're being distributed through these new fractional investing platforms. You may be familiar with some of them. Some of them include like RallyRoad is a big one. There was a company called Otis that was just bought by Public.com. There's a company called Collectible. And so these are kind of like the big companies coming up through the fractional space. And so they're basically buying these assets—

So you buy a fraction of a rare comic book.

Exactly. So they basically micro-IPO these comic books or these video games or these sports memorabilia, these cards. And this is all fine and dandy, but what we realized is, you know, everyone's so excited about this space because you're right, you can buy a piece of a Hank Aaron card. That's awesome for a collector, that's huge. But the problem is no one was really doing the hard work to like value that stuff, right? Like Just because there's a dinosaur skeleton for sale that you can buy, you know, 100th of a 100th of a percent of doesn't mean it's actually valued properly. And if you do the hard work, you can find out that yeah, there actually is a way to find comps. And so that's kind of how we got our start. We started doing the hard work of comp analysis that no one else was really doing. And that's basically how everything kind of, you know, got started. So now we're able to see which assets are a good deal, which assets are undervalued, which ones are overvalued, which ones you should buy at IPO, which ones you should hold, just like stocks, just like real estate, just like anything else.

Okay. So, so just to break it down. So, so the biggest part of this space is really what you call cultural collectibles. So sports memorabilia, etc. And that's the biggest.

I think so.

Okay.

And I mean, that's definitely a multibillion-dollar industry for sure. Right?

Yeah, there's a— there's a— I mean, it's hard to draw the line, but it's— there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of money sloshing around there.

Yeah.

So what, what's driving a lot of that? I mean, it seems like maybe there's just some general interest, you know, in alternative investments in general seem to appeal more to the younger generations anyway, right, who are looking for something new or interesting. But also, to your point, seems like there is some level of democratization an access to own something that previously was not fractionalized or you couldn't own a piece of in these, these, you know, platforms that allow you to trade that with some level of confidence you're not going to be scammed. Right. So is that what's driving more of this kind of flow of capital into these spaces or a kind of combination? What are you seeing at the high level?

It's a lot of trends kind of converging at once. It's a really fascinating moment for investing. You know, maybe we talk about some of those trends a little bit. I think the biggest one is around the rise of the retail investor. right? So like, you know, this is probably something you guys have covered a ton, but like 20 years ago, you know, what did you do with your extra cash to invest? You gave it to a financial advisor, right? Then, you know, you have like Wealthfront and like Betterment that come along and they're like, nah, you don't need a financial advisor, it's expensive, and like, you know, just give your money to us and our robo-advisors and we'll invest for you. And then like Robinhood comes along and is like, well, you know, actually you don't want to do the robo-advisor thing, just you can invest yourself through our app, and you can buy crypto, you can buy stocks, you can buy funds, you can buy real estate, whatever you want, right? So— or at least REITs, sorry, not real estate. But the point is like they put the power in the hands of the investors, right? And that is a really, really big trend because now you've got like a whole generation that's growing up with like this idea that they can self-direct their investments. So that is trend number 1. Number 2, I think, is that there's a big nostalgia play here. Nostalgia is powerful. It's weird on one level to invest in the past, because it already happened, and it doesn't really move society forward, but it's powerful stuff. I think for a certain demographic, maybe the millennial, Gen X, that area, I think folks that grew up in the '80s collecting, collecting video games, collecting comic books, the fact that they can buy like blue-chip assets now, even if it's just a fraction, that really pulls at people's heartstrings. So I think the emotion plays a big part in things as well. There's other trends, I think obviously like the actions of the Fed and post-COVID, like we don't have to get into all that. I think that definitely helped. I think that was a catalyst for everything kind of kicking into high gear. But, you know, I think those two trends are the big ones kind of combined together. Really powerful stuff.

Trying to get my head around fractional ownership of a baseball card. I mean, you know, you don't have the joy of holding something in your hand, right? And showing it off to your, to your buddies, you know, after, you know, after you pass the round of beers around, that would seem like a kind of a big loss. And then, gosh, what if it gets— you're not in control of it, so it gets stolen or something. And then I imagine there's manager fees and costs and fees layered on. So. I don't know, it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, you know, why doesn't it suck?

I guess I think that, um, some of your points are good. I mean, in terms of like not being able to touch the asset, um, there's something, um, to be said about that. Uh, but I, I think that again, like the generations that are kind of coming up in the world and investing, they're very digital native. I don't think they care as much. I mean, NFTs are a perfect example of this. Now we can talk all day long about NFTs. That's a tangent we may not want to go down. Uh, it's controversial. There's a whole lot to be said, but the point is that what is an NFT? It's digital ownership, right? And that, that is a kind of the tip of the iceberg.

It's not only digital ownership, it's a digital asset, right?

So digital ownership of a digital asset. Exactly. I mean, so it's like they don't need to physically hold assets like, you know, maybe previous generations would. So I do, I feel what you're saying. I don't think it's as big of a deal. What about the fees?

What about the fees? And I mean, is this so somebody actually vaults this and I assume there's vault fees and there's management fees. Is this like a 2 and 20 kind of thing or, you know, how does it typically work?

So the way it typically works is, so a platform will typically, by the way, this goes beyond collectibles. This, there's all sorts of, different markets that this happens, and fractionalization happens. It happens in farmland. It happens in franchises. But basically, there's different models for each kind of business. But generally speaking, a platform will acquire an asset in full, usually in full, from an owner, right? Now, they may— that may be— they may get it from an auction. They may get it from a private sale. Most of the stuff happens through private sales. But basically, they buy the asset either maybe like half of it, and the seller retains 50%, you know, equity, or they just buy it outright. So now the platform owns most likely a majority of an asset. What the platform then does is they use a Reg A— I don't know if you've heard of Reg A or Reg A+. Yeah, so basically, it's a Reg A offering on each asset. So there, it's basically a micro-IPO. Is the way to think about it. And so they file the paperwork with the SEC that has to be publicly available. Right. And this is where we get a lot of our information from as far as what they paid.

When is there a standard fee structure? Because Reg A's, you can do anything. You can, you can, you can have fees of, you know, 89% if you want it and do whatever you want with a Reg A+.

You can— the fees vary from platform to platform. A lot of the platforms, though, because there's so much interest in the space, they're kind of abstracting away the fees for the most part. What they'll do is they value the asset at a certain amount. And so they basically, you know, they'll value it at like 20% more than they bought it or so, right? So that's kind of how they make their money. But this isn't a hard and fast rule. There's all sorts of creative stuff happening with different companies and the way they handle how they make money.

Typically, you know, there's no third-party valuation, there's no kind of market or trading, and, and it's not really transparent, uh, you know, structure necessarily, right? So those are all red flags.

So this is where we come in because we add that transparency to the market, right? So what do you need? What do you need to make a good market, right? You need transparency, you need liquidity. So the first is being solved by— I don't mean to promote ourselves too much, but like by us and by a few other companies that are doing that now. Right. So you're creating the market, you're creating the market. Yeah. For the transparency. Yeah, absolutely. And then the liquidity is a whole nother story. So what these platforms are doing now is they're, they're micro-IPOing these assets, but now they've opened up trading windows. Now they're not 24/7 trading windows. They're not even full, you know, like equity market trading windows, but they're trading windows where people can buy, sell shares. There's a current bid-ask spread, just like stocks. So it's like anything else. So the markets are becoming more liquid. Liquidity, I wouldn't say it's an issue. It depends on the platform. It depends on the asset sometimes. It's still early days, for sure. I know that's a cliché to say, but it is definitely still early days.

Are these assets typically insured? And that kind of thing. So yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. They're insured, they're vaulted, they're stored, and the platform usually takes care of all that.

Yeah, you got to have a lot of trust in your operator. This is like having a private stock market. I mean, you know, Guy's manufacturing stocks and creating his own market. It's like you got to have a lot of trust in something that is not regulated.

Yeah, I think it'd be a great place to kind of dive in because a lot of our listeners, this might be something that is newer to them. It sounds super risky. Like you said, it's his early innings, which it is. There can be a lot of opportunity, but there can also be some big landmines, right? As you're navigating it. And, oh yeah, we're seeing this, you know, as, as this kind of next generation is, you know, investing in the meme stocks, investing in crypto, investing in these new assets. And it's very volatile and it's, it's hard to see what intrinsic value is. So from your perspective, um, kind of as, you know, uh, you know, a higher level in this space, what, what are you seeing? Like, what are the places to look out for? Where are you seeing the opportunities? But then where are you seeing the landmines for people? Yeah.

As a financial investor, right? So where would you— where are you putting your money and where do you see the real opportunity and the real value first? And then let's hit the negative. What are the pitfalls, things you got to watch out for?

So in terms of the— I mean, the biggest pitfall, you guys mentioned a few different items. I would say that I wouldn't worry so much about the trust of the platform side. These platforms are very highly scrutinized now. Um, so I wouldn't worry about that. Now, I would worry— I think one of the risks is just on buying an overvalued asset, or buying even a fraction of an overvalued asset, which can absolutely happen.

And which is a way to hide fees.

We help prevent that. We show you what's— exactly, we do that hard work of comp analysis, right? And we have a whole database, and we know what an asset should be valued at compared to the benchmarks. We've created those benchmarks now.

So you're creating third-party valuations, which is, which is key. I actually saw— I bought a bike online. It was an awesome bike. And I saw it was a Reg A+. They did a Reg A+ stock offering. You could buy a fraction of the company that made this. Well, the company is barely profitable and they're selling their shares of the company at something like a $300 million valuation, which is insanity. I mean, and they sold $500,000 worth of stock. And they're cheering themselves on, patting themselves on the back. I'm like, well, great for you, but bad for all your investors.

I mean, it's—

so it seems like this is ripe for that. So, so you're actually creating, creating a market. You're, you're doing third-party valuation and pricing of these assets.

Absolutely. But, but there's, you know, there's a lot to be said about the, um— I mean, there's also a lot of opportunity on the, on the other side of the coin. There's a lot of stuff that's undervalued, right? There's There's assets that come online and we can't believe how cheap they are compared to what they should be selling for. Now, you know, as time goes on, kind of those arbitrage opportunities slip away. I think we have maybe another few years left of some really good arbitrage opportunities, right? But you better believe we're going to look for them and we're going to find them in the meantime. They're still out there.

So, so yeah, so where do you think the real opportunity is? So we've hit some of the pitfalls, but where, where, where are you really thinking that, you know, you're putting your own money to work and your, your mom's money, right? Where you, where you putting that?

My mom doesn't have any money, so it's definitely mine. Um, well, yeah, like, I, I think that, um, there's different markets that I— there's some markets I really, really love. Um, the ones that I love tend to be the ones that produce cash-flowing, um, uh, assets. So, so let's, let's take a step back. So like a lot of the collectibles and a lot of that kind of stuff, you know, it's It's great. A lot of it's getting into Greater Fool Theory territory, right? I don't think it's that big of a deal. It's just, it's not like NFTs, which is basically 100% Greater Fool Theory. Let's not kid ourselves.

I mean, what that means is you have to have a buyer who's a greater fool than you to pay a higher price for something that has really, you know, questionable intrinsic value, right?

Yeah, quite questionable intrinsic value. Now, some NFT projects definitely have intrinsic value. They definitely have utility. You look at Bored Ape Yacht Club, you know, there's value there. So gotcha, maybe we can shelve that for later. But, but yeah, I think with a lot of collectibles and stuff like that, you know, you're paying for the fact—

yeah, you're paying for the popularity, which today the movie comes out, the popularity rises. 10 years from now, everybody's forgotten that movie, and maybe it's not as valuable.

What was the guy I saw?

Well, well, there's a couple— okay, so like, take like, uh, someone like, you know, who's still playing, right? Like a sports, uh, star who's still playing, like Patrick Mahomes, right? Like, like He's— we don't really know what's going to happen with his career. It could go up, it could go down, you know, but like someone like Michael Jordan who's like clearly the GOAT, like retired, like it— there's— it's just— it's set in stone as valuable, right? So, you know, it depends on the player. There's a whole lot of ins and outs. I think that— but back to the original point that you asked about like what the— my favorite asset classes are, it actually has nothing to do with collectibles at all, right? So my favorite— my favorite asset classes are anything that produce cash flow. So I like farmland, I like alternative real estate, especially vacation rentals. The reason I like vacation rentals is because they are priced like, you know, residential real estate, but they cash flow like commercial real estate, you know, which is a fantastic combination. The one that I love the most though is music rights. Music rights are like the most underrated asset class, alternative asset class out there.

Tell us about music rights.

Okay, so the reason I love music rights so much is because, you know, there's this kind of thinking out there right now that Spotify killed, you know, uh, music and killed artists, killed royalties. Yeah, that's, that's not the case at all. It didn't kill art. It, it didn't. Yeah, but it changed them significantly. And so what used to happen is this, like, back in the '90s, as an artist, you come out with an album And you get a really big spike up at the beginning. I mean, huge money coming in, huge, huge money coming in. And then it kind of falls, and then it kind of bumbles along, and then it just kind of stays low for a very long time. With Spotify and with streaming, what that's done is you don't get that big spike anymore for an artist, but what you get is just consistently growing revenue over time. The royalties aren't as high, the price per stream, the revenue per stream is very low, but there's more and more streaming devices every year. There's more time spent streaming. And so those— we have 10 years of data now on Spotify, more than 10 years. And so what we're seeing in the data is that it's just consistent cash flow. And anytime you have consistent cash flow, you have buyout opportunities. And so let's take, let's take a step back and think about what that means. Now, you know, there are— if you're, if you're a musician, and you're earning, let's say, you know, $50,000 a year. So, you know, not enough to like really make a dent in the world and live the life you want, but also not chump change, right? If someone comes along and is like, look, I'll give you $250,000 for the rights to your catalog, you keep playing, anything from this date forward is yours. Anything from this date past is mine, and I will give you $250,000 upfront, 5x basically your streaming revenue. For an artist, that's a huge— you can buy a house. I mean, that's a huge—

As an investor, you're getting a 20% return if the revenues stay steady.

Which they have been, which they've been steady. You're seeing a lot of buyouts now for music royalties. Springsteen sold his catalog. I mean, going back to the old days, Bowie sold his catalog. Dylan Bob Dylan sold his catalog, but that's all happening at the high end. There is no one touching the low end at all. There are some big music investing funds. Hypnosis is a big music rights fund that amazingly no one's heard about. They're huge. But again, that's all high-end activity. So nothing's happening below $1 million, $2 million, $3 million. And so there's a lot of opportunity there, and that's what I'm most excited about.

That's really cool. I mean, yeah, it kind of goes similar to, like you talked about earlier, the cash flowing businesses, e-commerce businesses where, you know, you get this high cash flow. And from a, you know, real estate investor, you know, who a lot of our listeners are, you don't see those kind of cash flow numbers anywhere. Obviously your collateral is, is, you know, maybe not as strong. Um, but you know, high cash flow, high yield is, is pretty attractive. So where, where are a lot of these, uh, royalties trading? How do you, how do you purchase the rights to a catalog of music?

There's a couple of different marketplaces that have popped up now. So again, with the fractionalization, right? So one of them is called Royalty Exchange. It's royaltyexchange.com. And you basically can buy full tracks. You can buy full albums. A lot of the artists you may not have heard of, some you definitely have. But yeah, it's a full liquid marketplace for buying and selling music royalties. There's another one called Songbets. Songvest.com. So these are coming up, and that's to say nothing of what's happening at the intersection of music and NFTs, which there's a whole ecosystem happening there. There's not a lot of money sloshing around yet, but give it time and there will be. But the best advice I would have, and by the way, it feels weird saying this because I've personally never, we haven't done this yet, but look beyond the marketplaces, right? Don't just look at what's out there, go and make a deal happen on your own. Find the artists that might be willing to sell you their rights and also find a good lawyer to help you with the paperwork because that's going to be a big part of it as well. But, you know, just make things happen on your own. This is something I learned at Flippa when I was at Flippa is, you know, the best deals are off market, right? Like there's good deals on Flippa and Microacquire and Empire Flippers and these platforms, but the best deals are the ones that aren't— don't ever make it to the platforms, right? So you really just got to go out and hustle and and find them yourself. And I definitely look forward to doing that. We have not done that yet, but it's, it's going to happen.

Seems like maybe 6 months ago I looked at some royalties somewhere for music and it seemed like they were at the ask price was going to net me like a sub-5% return or something like that. I'm like, nah, you know, is it, is it— they're probably all over the map, but is it possible with some digging to find decent returns and, you know, double-digit returns?

Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. I personally know someone who's bought rights at 30% annual returns. Yeah. I mean, like for real. And that's, again, there's no sign of that streaming slowing down. So I mean, there's some great investments to be made for sure. I think on the platforms, they tend to trade for, depends, about 8 to 12x annual net streaming revenue is generally what you see. But for higher-end stuff, it goes much higher. Yeah.

So it—

yeah, functionally, how does that work? I mean, in real estate, you have kind of a chain of title, and as you transfer ownership, you know, you have—

you're getting in the weeds here.

Yeah, but I'm just curious.

I haven't done it yet, so I don't know exactly what it entails. I do have exactly the right lawyer in mind ready to go. We'll talk later.

Yeah, yeah. No, it is something as a musician and an artist, it's something I've always been curious about. And I think one of the kind of first kind of things that got on my radar was seeing Ryan Tedder, who's, you know, a big music songwriter. I think he sold a catalog of his songs for something like a quarter of a billion dollars or some just insane number, I think $250 million to sell the catalog of songs that he'd written. And they're all like these big hits. You know, he's the lead singer of a band. He's The Stingrove, but yeah, he's, you know, I saw that transaction. It just, it just shows you that there's just the interest level that's coming into the space. But for all the reasons you're saying, right, it's, you know, it's trying to change the economic model and where you're not getting these big pops of, you know, income right away from album sales, but it's just growing. And as there's more streaming over time, it's stable.

It's just stability. That's the name of the game. Yeah.

Yeah. What, what other areas are you seeing? So we've talked about collectibles, we've talked about music royalties. You mentioned some of these alternative, you know, real estate plays. You know, talk a little bit about the farmland. I'm curious what farmland, how you, how you cash flow that.

Same thing. I mean, the great thing about farmland is that it produces yields literally, you know, I mean, it's crops are sold and you can get a share of the revenue from that. But then of course, it's land. Which they aren't making any more of, and we all know how that works. And so, I mean, farmland also is disappearing, right? There's less and less farmland in the US every year due to sprawl, due to development, due to all sorts of stuff. Um, so yeah, I mean, there's a reason Bill Gates is buying up like most of the US's farmland. I think he's the single biggest, uh, landowner now in the world, or in the US. I should probably check that fact, but, um, you know, he, he knows something other people don't, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's at the end of the day, like in the spectrum of like what's important in life, and it's hard to think of anything more important than land that produces food at the end of the day. It's probably the safest like long-term bet you can make. It's not sexy. None of the young kids coming up give a lick about farmland. I try to sell them on it. They're like, "Nah, boring." I'm like, "All right." But a Bitcoin, right?

But a Bitcoin. Their expectations are totally different.

Totally skewed because of crypto. I'm telling you, man, it's like, it's a whole new world. But, um, you know, they'll, they'll wise up soon. Maybe actually right now. I don't know when this is going to air, but you know, Bitcoin had a hell of a hell of a day today. So, right. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, you know, going back to the very beginning, you talked about, you know, buying cash flowing businesses, content businesses online, and that, that's something that I've actually always been a fan of. You know, I used to be a commercial lender and did kind of small scale M&A. And if you, if you just look at, you know, the, the multiples these trade at, it's usually, um, you know, 3 to 5, maybe a little bit—

3 to 5x.

3 to 5x of—

3 to 5x.

You can buy an online business and for 3 to 5 times an annual, annual earnings, which equates to what, a, you know, 30, you know, 20 to 33% annualized return.

Yeah. Plus, if you have any kind of ability to increase the value there, like, you know, do the value-add strategy like you do in real estate, there's— that's pretty awesome. And then on top of that, it's active. But it is active.

It's a job.

That's a job. It's even more than real estate is. And that's what people don't realize, you know. I mean, we all know the real estate, it takes a lot of work. It's worth it, but it takes a lot of work. But people buy these content sites for 3x and they think they're getting the best deal in the world. And oftentimes they don't realize just how much effort it takes to, to, to actually maintain. And so, you know, it's, it's a more active investment. It's a little riskier, as we know. You may buy something for 3x, but it may go to— it may not bring in a whole lot of money.

It may go to 0x.

I mean, right? Yeah, yeah.

So what do you think?

Because, you know, I was— sorry, it's funny because, like, you know, the, the whole, you know, with alts and, like, what we do is basically it's due diligence on on these assets, alternative markets, right? But that's actually what I was doing at Flippa as well. So like, I created Flippa's first due diligence program. And so I was, you know, we never had anything like that before, but I knew that the market needed like to understand like how to truly value a content site. And so I put that together and it's, you know, it helped a ton of customers. They still have it today. And I kind of carried that whole like mindset over into the world of to more alternative markets.

Awesome. What are some of the— I mean, you talked about some of the big trends driving the movement here. What are some of your predictions? Where do you see this going? Why are you excited about this kind of modern alternative niche in the alt space?

I definitely don't think that the— I mean, I'm basically making a life bet that this is not a flash in the pan, that this is definitely here to stay. I think that people are investing in themes now more than ever, right? Like, uh, you even see it with equities, right? So I mean, look at like the, the world of ETFs, right? There's more ETFs now than stocks, right? Like, it's crazy. Like, why is that? Why are there so many ETFs? Because ETFs are basically themed investing, right? And like, even within ETFs, it's like, okay, what are the, what are the, the biggest growth ETFs? They're all, uh, ESG, right? And why is that? It's not because ESG has the best returns, it's because people want to invest in what they believe in. They want to do right for the world and invest in the climate change, the environment. We were seeing this like, invest with your emotion, invest with your feeling, invest in what you feel is right, almost tribalism in a way. We saw it with the meme stocks, with GameStop and all of that nonsense, and it was nonsense for sure. But it also— there's something you got to learn from that, is that people are investing in voting, basically, in what they believe in. And so I don't think that's going away at all, right? I think that— in fact, I think alternatives offer an even more direct way to vote what you believe in and to invest in what you believe in, as opposed to just ETFs or REITs or whatever it may be, or kind of like targeted funds. I think alternatives just blows that wide open. If you're a music fan, what can you do with equities? Well, you can invest in publicly traded record labels and stuff like that. That's fine. Or you can invest in music rights. You can invest in vinyl records themselves. Vinyl is a huge collectible. We love vinyl. I love vinyl. I'm a collector of vinyl. There's signed Beatles records you can get for $25,000 that is incredibly valuable, as if that's it's not going to be worth more than that in 10 years. I mean, the Beatles are— they're always going to be valuable. My point is that you can really invest in what you believe in through alternatives like you never could before. So I don't think that trend is going anywhere. I think that's only going to continue to rise. Another trend I think is rising, and I don't particularly like this one, but I think that the line between investing and gambling is getting very blurry. Um, I don't— again, I, I don't like this, uh, about it. I, I am okay with gambling ethically, that's not the issue, but that's the worst way to invest. You shouldn't be, you know, investing emotionally. You shouldn't be investing in things because they feel good. You should be doing the hard work, and no one wants to do that. Again, that's where we come in. That's what I like. That's why I like what we're bringing to the world, you know. We're, we're basically like, we understand what's happening with that blurred line between gambling and investing, and we're helping people navigate those waters. So, you know, that's another trend. Um, those are, those are two big ones. Yeah, there's others, I think.

But yeah, I love that. So you guys put out a great newsletter. How many people you have on that newsletter right now? It's, it's growing like crazy. I see it every week. You guys keep adding a lot of people. Um, but, you know, talk about the newsletter. Um, I'm a big fan of it, and anyone listening, you know, jump on it, alts.co. And you guys, you know, recently launched a fund, your first fund. To go and invest some of these assets. What's the best way for folks to kind of get access to this newsletter and to learn, just be educated more on these kind of unique alternative asset classes?

Yeah, just sign up at alts.co and set your preferences. You can basically tell us what you're interested in and you'll receive content related to those alternative asset classes. So we got it really dialed in there. And then every week, we also just, we try to bring new investment ideas, new unique investment ideas to people's, you know, minds, bring them top of mind. Like, we'll cover anything, right? Like, that's our whole thing. Like, we don't build tall, we build wide. If it's not a stock, we care about it. That's basically like what it comes down to. And so, I mean, we've covered things like investing in like Hot Wheels. We interviewed like the guy with the most— world's most valuable Hot Wheels collection. It's like valued at over a million dollars. You know, I love this quirky kind of stuff. Um, we looked at like airspace rights a few weeks ago, and just, you know, there's not a liquid market for it. But it's interesting to understand the economics of this stuff. And you start thinking, you know, and realizing that, like, everything can be looked at as an alternative investment, right? You just got to kind of make the moves and make it happen. And so yeah, sign up at alts.co and, you know, you'll, you'll be well on your way.

Awesome. Well, Stephen, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast and giving us a whole new look at the world of alternatives. And really appreciate you coming on.