Wealth Formula by Buck Joffrey

The Wealth Formula Podcast is one of the longest-running personal finance podcasts still standing. For more than a decade, I've shown up every single week to talk about investing, markets, and the forces shaping the economy. What's interesting is how much my own thinking has evolved over that time. Early on, I was more rigid. I was—and still am—a real estate guy. But back then, I didn't give much thought to ideas outside that lane. I was dogmatic, and I didn't always challenge my own beliefs. Time has a way of doing that for you. I've now lived through multiple market cycles. I've watched the stock market melt up to valuations that felt absurd—and then keep going. I've seen gold go from flat for a decade to parabolic over a year. I've seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher at the fastest pace in modern history. And I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that diversification is about survival and that every asset class has its day. One lesson I learned that I am thinking a lot about these days is: ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin. At the time, I dismissed it. I listened to the critics, was convinced it was a scam, and didn't take the time to truly understand it. That was a mistake—not because everyone should have bought Bitcoin, but because I ignored a structural change happening right in front of me. Bitcoin went from a cypherpunk expression of freedom to the largest ETF owned by BlackRock. Today, the dominant story is artificial intelligence. And whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate, or focus exclusively on cash flow, you cannot afford to ignore AI. This isn't a fad. It's a general-purpose technology—on the scale of electricity, the internet, or the industrial revolution itself. That doesn't mean it's easy to invest in. It's hard to look at headline names trading at massive valuations and feel good about buying them today. But investing in AI isn't about chasing a single company. It's about understanding second- and third-order effects: energy demand, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of it. What experience has taught me is this: you don't need to be first to invest—but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, most of the opportunity is already gone. This week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is focused squarely on AI and blockchain—what's real, what's noise, and where the long-term implications may lie. Listen to this episode. You'll come away smarter. And years from now, you may look back and realize this was one of those moments where paying attention really mattered. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast. Coming to you from Montecito, California. Today we wanna start with a reminder. We are in a new year and we are already doing deals, uh, through the Wealth Formula Accredit Investor Club. You can go and sign up for that for free. Uh, wealth formula.com just hit investor club and you just get on there and, and you’ll get onboarded. And from there, all you gotta do is wait for deal flow and webinars coming to your inbox. And, um, you know, if nothing else, you learn something. So go check it out. Uh, go to. Wealth formula.com and sign up for Investor Club now onto today’s show. Uh, the, it is interesting. I don’t know if you are aware it’s a listener, but we are, wealth Formula is, uh, probably I would say one of the, certainly in the one of the top longest running personal finance podcasts still. Standing. Uh, I’ve been around, well, I think the first episode was on like 2014, so it was a long time, but in earnest, you know, at least for over a decade. And, you know, during that time, I’ve shown up every week, every single week. Don’t Ms. Weeks, but none, none. Isn’t that incredible? I’ve shown up, uh, talked about investing and talked about very way markets are working, forces, shaping the economy, all that kind of stuff. But you know, as you can imagine, as a. As a younger individual versus, um, my crusty self. Now, you know, a lot of my own thinking has evolved over that time, you know, back then. And I, you know, I think this appealed to some people, but, um, you know, I was really dogmatic. I’m a real estate guy, right? And I still am a real estate guy, but back then I wouldn’t give anything else the time of day to even think about, you know, and, and, uh, I, I, you know. I was dogmatic and didn’t always challenge my own belief systems. Um, I’m different now, right? I’ve softened And time is a way of, of changing all of that dogmatic stuff for you. You know, I’ve lived through multiple market cycles. I’ve watched, well, I’ve watched the stock market, which I, which I always maligned, you know, melt up to valuations. Uh, that felt absurd. And then keep going higher. I’ve seen gold, which was kind of ridiculous for the longest time. I watched it for like a decade, just pretty much flat, and then it goes parabolic. Over the last year, I’ve seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher. Uh, not even as time, just launch higher at the fastest space in modern history. And I’ve learned sometimes I guess, the hard way that diversification is about survival and that every class, every asset class has its day. Just like every dog has its day. And um, you know, one other lesson that I learned that I’m thinking a lot about these days is ignore major technological shifts at your own peril. So what am I talking about? Well. It’s kind of a, it is a technological shift, whether you think it about not, but Bitcoin. Okay. Back in 2014, I first started hearing people talk seriously about Bitcoin, and at that time I dismissed it. I was, uh, I was listening to critics beater Schiff that constantly called it a scam, said it was going to zero and so on. I didn’t, I didn’t take the time to truly understand it, to try to understand it the way I understand it now, that makes me a believer in Bitcoin. That, of course was a big mistake, not because, you know, everyone should have bought Bitcoin and, uh, back then, well, they, you know, would’ve been nice if they did, but because fundamentally I ignored something that was a structural change happening right in front of me. And since then, Bitcoin went from a cipher punk expression of freedom to the large CTF owned by BlackRock today. The dominant story is actually artificial intelligence. Now, whether you love stocks, hate stocks, prefer real estate focused exclusively on cab, whatever, you cannot afford to ignore ai. It’s not a fad. It’s a general purpose technology and a technology shift, and the scale of electricity. The internet bigger than the internet, bigger than the industrial revolution. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to invest in. I mean, I’m gonna go invest in AI and make a bunch of money because I mean, what does that even mean? It’s hard to look at headline names, trading at massive valuations like Nvidia and all that right now, and saying, oh, I’m gonna go buy that. Who knows? That’s gonna work out. When I talk about investing in AI isn’t really just investing in stocks or any individual company or data centers or whatever. It’s about understanding. The second and third order effects, energy demand. You know, as I mentioned, data centers, productivity gains, labor displacement, capital flows, and how blockchain and decentralized systems intersect with all of that. It is very, very complicated. Um, but it’s really important to start to try to understand, you know, an experience that stop me is this. You don’t need to be the first to invest, but you do need to be early in understanding. If you wait until something feels obvious, usually the opportunity’s gone by then. And you know, the thing about AI is even if you think it’s obvious now. The reality is that most people haven’t really caught on. Maybe they played with chat GPT, but I don’t think they’re understanding what this whole, you know, this thing is gonna do to our world. Um, anyway, so that is what this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, uh, is about. It’s about AI and also, um, a little bit about, you know, bitcoin and blockchain and that kind of thing. Um, we’re gonna talk about what’s noise, uh, you know, where the long, what the long-term, uh, implications are all of this stuff. This is a show that, uh, I really enjoy doing really, really good stuff. Um, so make sure you listen in. We’ll have that interview for you right after these messages. Wealth Formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net. The strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest. On that money, even though you’ve borrowed it, that result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Jim Thorne, chief Market strategist at Wellington. L is private wealth with more than 25 years of experience in capital markets. He’s previously served as chief capital market strategist, senior portfolio manager, chief economist, and CIO. Uh, equities at major investment firms and has also taught economics and finance at the university level. Uh, Jim is known for translating complex economic, political, and market dynamics into clear actionable insights to help investors and advisors navigate long-term capital decisions. Uh, Jim, welcome with the program. Thanks for having me Buck. Well, um, Tim, I, I, I, uh, had been following a little bit of, uh, what you discuss on, uh, on X and, um, one of the things that caught my eye is, you know, your, your narrative on, on ai, a lot of people are tend to be still sort of skeptical of AI and what’s going on, uh, with the markets. Um, uh, but at the same time, uh, there’s this. Sense. I think that ignoring AI altogether as an investor is, is, is downright potentially dangerous. So, uh, at the highest level, why is AI something people simply can’t dismiss? Well, we live in an, uh, uh, you know, many other people have coined this term, but we live, we’re living in an exponential age of, of technological innovation. And, you know, AI and I’ll just add into their, uh, blockchain is just the normal evolutionary process that, you know, for me started when I left graduate school and came into the business in the nineties where everybody had this high degree of skepticism of the computer and the, the, the phone, the, the. And the internet. And so, you know, what we do is we go through these cycles and there are periods of time where the stars align. And we have a period of time where we have what I would call an intense period of innovation where I would suggest to you that. People are skeptical. Skeptical, and yet at the same point in time, they very early on in the, in the, in the trade, call it a bubble when it’s not. And so I think it comes from the position of ignorance. One, I think two, fear, and then three. If you think about if you are an active manager, I in a 40 ACT fund, um, you know, and you’re sitting there with, uh, you know, mi. Uh, Nvidia at, you know, eight or 9% of your index. And that’s a big chunk that you’ve gotta put into your fund, uh, just to be market neutral. So there’s a lot of people that hate this rally. There’s a lot of people that are can, going to continue to hate this rally. But the thing I anchor my hat on are a couple of things. Look at if this is no different than the railroad. Canals, any major technological innovation, will it become a bubble? Yes. Just not now. So, so let’s follow up on that, because a lot of people think, or are talking about the, do you know the.com bubble, uh, comparisons, and you’ve argued that that sort of misses the real story. So, so where are we getting it wrong right now? Are those people getting it wrong? In the nineties buck, you’d walk into a bar and there wouldn’t be ESPN on there’d be CNBC on people were getting their jobs to become day traders. Folks didn’t go to the go to university because they were basically getting their white papers financed. You had companies that were trading off of clicks. So I lived that. Anybody who is of a younger generation has no idea what a bubble is, and it’s specious and pedantic for them to use that term when they have no clue about what they’re talking about. But you did mention that it could become a bubble. How do we know when it does become a bubble? Oh, it’ll become a bubble. Well, when, when, when you know, the, what, what I am looking for is, you know, when we, when the good investment opportunities start to dry up, when liquidity starts to dry up. So what I, it’s not about valuation, to me it’s about liquidity. So in 2000, what, and I’m roughly speaking, what went down was you had all these companies that were trading at Strat catastrophic valuation, this stupid valuations, and you walked in one day and they didn’t get financing. And if you read the prospectus or you followed the company, you knew that they were not going to be free cash flow positive for another two or three rounds of financing. All of a sudden you walked in and everybody goes, oh my God, this thing, you know, trading at 250 times sales. And everybody went, yeah, of course. And so what it was is, was when does liquidity dry up? So I’ll give you a date, um, you know, with Trump’s big beautiful bill act. 100% tax deductibility of CapEx and that goes until Jan 1, 20 31. So to me, that’s a very motivating factor for people to, um, invest. The last thing I would say to you in more of a game theoretic context book is, look, if you are a big tech company and you don’t invest in ai. You are ensuring your death. Yahoo, Hela Packard. I can go through the list of companies that cease to invest, so they’re looking. If it was you and I when we were running this company, I would say, dude, we gotta invest because if we don’t have a poll position in this next platform, whatever it is, we’re done. We’re toast. And I think that’s why you’re seeing all these hyperscalers spending as much money as they are. ’cause they get this, they saw it. So, you know, you framed ai not necessarily as a a tech trade, but as a capital expenditure cycle. Can you explain that to people? Well, what we need to do is we need to build out the infrastructure of ai. Then, and that’s the phase that we’re in right now. So it’s more like we’re building out all of the railroads, the railway tracks and the railway stations across the United States back in the 18 hundreds. And then we’re gonna go through that building phase. And then as that building phase goes, some companies, some towns, are going to basically realize and recognize what’s happening and start to basically take ai. Bring it into their business model, into enhanced margins. Right. So right now we’re building it out. I mean, you know, we all focus on the hyperscalers, but the majority of companies, pardon me, governments. Individuals, they haven’t used AI and, and what is interesting about this is back in the nineties, they were talking about how the internet had to evolve to be much more. You know, uh, have critical thinking in, in, in it. And it was more explained when you went to these conferences, as you know, you know, think about this. You’re hearing this in 99, okay? Not today. You go in and you ask Google or dog pile at the same time, or excite, okay? You would say, I wanna go to Florida in the third week of March and I wanna stay here and I wanna spend this amount of money and I wanna rent a car. Plan it for me. And they would come back and they would tell you that it would come back and it would, it would, everything would be there. And you would have your over here and all you would have to do is drop your money and you had your thing planned. So none of this is as, it’s aspirational, but we’ve heard it before. And in technology, what happens is it’s not like it’s new. We’ve been talking to, I did machine learning in in graduate school. Ai, you know, I did neural networks and I’m a terrible Ian. This isn’t, you know, Claude Shannon wrote about this in 1937, right? But it’s about when does it hit, and so it was chat GBT. Can we argue, was that right? As an investor, it’s stop arguing, start investing. Then what you’ve gotta figure out, which is the question you ask, is when does the music stop? I think it goes until the end of the decade. You know, one of the things that, uh, is interesting about this, uh, AI investment, uh, it’s, it’s unfolding in a higher interest rate environment. Why is that detail so important? Understanding its significance? Well, it’s the cost of capital, right? And so this phase that we have right now. It’s funny you say that, right? ’cause our reference point is zero interest rates, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. That’s right. So, you know, you know, so, so think about this, what it happens right now. Now we’re in the phase where you’ve got these hyperscalers that instead of taking all their free cash flow and buying bonds and buying back stock, are increasing CapEx because there’s a great tax deduction on it. So you get a lot of, so we’re in this phase where, for where, where a lot of the money is, you know, was. Was, let me, let me be clear, was a hundred free cashflow. Now we’re getting these guys, these companies like Oracle and what have you, you know, starting to issue debt and look at debt isn’t bad as long as the rate of return on debt is higher than the interest rates. And so, you know, you know, I, I would say historically speaking, for a lot of these high quality names, the interest rates are not, uh, at levels that will stop them from investing. Right. Right. You know, you’ve written that, um, productivity is ultimately the real story behind ai. So why does productivity matter more than the technology headlines themselves? Well, let me just put it this way, right? So we’ve grown, I grew up, I, I joined, I’m up here in Toronto, right? So I’m gonna give it to you in Canadian dollars, right? So I joined, I joined here. You know, I grew up here, went to the states, came back home. Growing this company I joined when we’re about three and a half billion. We’re getting close to 50 billion, and we’re the fastest growing independent platform in the country. I’m a one man band, right? I use three ai. In the old days, I’d have four research assistants. Where’s the margin in that? And so I, that’s how I see it. And let me be clear, it’s, you know, this isn’t we’re, it’s not perfect. But if I wanted to say, instead of you, but hey, write me a 2000 word essay on the counterfactual of what happened with railroads up until 1894 when the, when the bubble popped, give me a f, you know, a a thousand word essay and, and just a general overview. I can get that in less than five minutes. Michael Sailor is writing product on ai, which, which, which you would take, which you would take. He’s in his presentation, say it would take a hundred lawyers. So it’s gonna be more about those. And it’s, it’s no different than Internet of things or, you know, it was, uh, Kasparov that talked about this. Gary Kasparov talking about the melding of, of technology in humans. He would ran, run this chess tournament called freestyle. You could use a computer, you could use, you know, grand Masters. You could use whatever you wanted to compete. And who won? Well, who won it Was that those teams that were generalists that had a little bit of that, the knowledge of the computer and the knowledge of the test. Uh, o of chess, right? That’s what’s gonna happen. So this isn’t we’re, as far as I’m concerned, we’re not, yes, there’s going to be some d some jobs that are going to be replaced, but that is always the case in technology. I’m not a Luddite, okay? I am not Luddite. But the same point in time. I, I would suggest to you that it, it is just a really, for me, it’s a, helps me. Do research no different than when I was an undergrad and they went from cue cards in the, the library at the university to actually having a dummy terminal and I could ask questions in queue. You know, it stalked me from having to go to the basement of the library and going to microfiche. Right. Have helping that way. Now can it, can, will it do other things? I’m sure it is, and I’ll lead that to Elon Musk and the crew. You know, that’s above my pay grade. But for me, I see it as a very helpful way of, you know, allowing me to process and delineate. Much more information a a and not have me waste so much time trying to figure out what got went on in the past or, you know, QMF. Right. You know, summarize me the talk five, you know, academic papers in this area, what are they saying? And then they gimme the papers. Right. It just speeds the process up. Yeah. You know, um, one of the things that I’ve been sort of talking about and thinking about. Is that it’s hard to not see AI as a very, very strong deflationary force. Um, how do you think about that? Yeah. Technology is deflationary, right? Doubt about it. And so I look at it this way, Ray. Um, so I work at the financial services industry, okay. You know, Mr. Diamond of JP Morgan is talking about how they are starting to embrace blockchain and ai. They are going to cut out the back end of that in the, the margins in that, in that company by the end of the cycle are going to be fantastic. People just do not get in. You know, the financial services industry is built on a platform. Of the 1960s, dude. I mean, they’re still running Fortran, cobalt. So you know what I, how I look at this is much more as a margin type story, and there’s going to be a lot of displacement. But at the same point in time, I look at Tesla and automation and ai. And you know, people look at Tesla as a car company. I look at Tesla as an advanced manufacturing company. Elon Musk could basically go into any industry and disrupt it if it wanted to. Right. So that’s how I look at it. And so, you know, the hard part is going to be, you know. Nothing. If we get back to where we were, it’s not going to be perfect, right? Because here’s, here’s where the counter is, here’s where the counter is. Right? If you, if, if you think about, and we’re, I’m gonna take Trump outta the equation and ent outta the equation right now, but if we just went back to the way things were before COVID, we would have strong deflationary forces. Okay. Just with demographics, just with excessive levels of debt. Just with, you know, pushing on a string in terms of, in terms we couldn’t get the growth up, you know, and, you know, and the overregulation of financial institutions. Trump and descent are basically applying what’s called supply side economics, and they’re deregulating. It’s says law, which is John Batiste, that says basically supply creates his own demand and it’s non-inflationary. But really what they’re going to try to do is they’re going to try to run the economy hot and they’re gonna try to pull this way out of the debt. And if you do that and you deregulate the banks. And allow the banks to get back to where they were before the financial crisis. Okay. You know, and, and the Fed takes its interest rates down to neutral, expands the balance sheet. Then I don’t think we’re gonna go back to the zero bound in deflation. I think this thing’s gonna run hot for a long time. And I think it, the real question is, is, is is 2 75 in the United States the neutral rate? I think it is. Uh, but as, as, as Scott be says, and, and, and, and, and let’s be clear, buck, the guy’s a superstar. Okay. Guy is a legend. Just you sit there, just shut up and listen to him. Okay. They keep up, right? Well, so they’re gonna run it hot, but where we are is, in his words, mine, not mine. We’re still in this detox period, you know what I mean? We still got the Biden era. We still got, you know, a over a decade of excessive ca of Central Bank intermediation. That needs to get, you know, go away. So what I say, and what I’ve been writing about is 26 is going to be the year that the baton is passed back to the private sector. Let’s get rates down to 2 75. That’s, I mean, I’m going off the New York Fed model. That says real fed funds, the real, the real neutral rate is 75 to 78 basis points. I think inflation’s at two. That that gets you 2 75. Get the rates there and then get the balance sheet of the Fed to the level so that overnight lending isn’t loose or tight. It’s just normal. And then step back, go away and let Wall Street and the private sector create credit. Create economic growth and let’s get back to the business cycle. And if we do that, we’re gonna have non-inflationary growth. It’s gonna be strong, but we’re not going back to the zero bound and we’re gonna grow our way out of this. And so that’s where I get really excited about. This is a very unique time in history. A very, very, very unique time in history where, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last because of the compression that we have now because of the, you know, we live in such a digital world, but let’s say it’s five years demographic says it’s to 33, 32 to 33. That’s, you know, that’s how long this run is. And, and to me, uh, AI is a massive play. I, I, to me, blockchain is a massive play and to me it’s to those countries and companies that get it is, whereas investors, we wanna think, start thinking about investing. Yeah. You mentioned, um, non non-inflationary growth. Can you drill down on that a little bit just so people understand a little bit where. Usually you think of an economy running super hot, you, you think automatically there’s an, you know, an inflationary growth. So I want you to think in your mind into your list as think in your mind. Go back to economics 1 0 1 with the demand curve. In the supply curve, okay? And there are an equilibrium. And at that equilibrium we have a price at an equilibrium, and we have an output as an equilibrium. Okay? Now what I want you to do is I want you to keep the demand curves stagnant or, or, or anchored. Then I want you to shift the supply curve out. Prices go down, output goes out. We can talk all this esoteric stuff, you know, you know Ronald Reagan and, and Robert Mandel and supply side economics. But it’s really your shift in the supply curve out, and that’s what, and that’s what BeIN’s doing. I mean, this is a w would just sit down and be quiet. He’s talking about, you know, what is deregulation? He’s pushing the supply provider. Oh, hold on. My phone. My, my thing. And what did, since the two thousands, what did, what was the policy? It was kingian, it was all focused on the demand curve. Everything was focused on demand. And so all we’re doing is we’re, we’re getting the keynesians out. I use 2000 ’cause that’s when Ben Bernanke really came in and was very influential. Let me just say he’s a very smart, I learned so much from reading. Smart, smart, smart, smart guy. But his whole thing was Kasan. He came from MIT, his thesis supervisor was Stanley Fisher, right? We’re going back to, you know, Mario Dragons thesis supervisors, Stanley Fisher, all these guys came from MIT, Larry, M-I-T-M-I-T, Yale, and Princeton. Whereas previously it was the University of Chicago. It was Milton Friedman. It was, it was supply side economics. We’re going back, they’re going back to supply side economics and right now we need it. We need balance. But my god, what did we end off with? We ended off with four years of mono modern monetary theory. Deficits matter. That’s insanity. You had mentioned a little bit, uh, you, you’ve talked about blockchain a few times here. Talk about the significance. I mean, it’s sort of, you know, blockchain was a thing that everybody was, everybody was talking about it, you know, three, four years ago, but now it’s all about ai. But you know, now you’ve got, um, but in, but in the background, blockchain has grown, uh, adoption has grown. Uh, tell us what’s going on there, and if you could tie it into the significance of, of where we’re at today. Yeah. Um, uh, Jeff Bezos gave a wonderful speech, I think in two thou, early two thousands, where he basically talked about the fact that, you know, once this innovation is led out of the genie’s, led out of the bottle, whether or not, you know, buck and Jim, like it as an investment, the innovation continues. And so after the internet bubble pop, right? Really smart guys like Jeff Bezos, uh, Zuckerberg, you, you, the whole cast of characters, right? Basically built it out. Okay. And it wasn’t perfect and everybody knew it wasn’t perfect. I mean, that was the whole thing that was so bizarre. But they knew it wasn’t perfect and they knew that they needed to solve some problems. Right. And you know, it was a double spend problem. I mean, the internet that we were dealing with right now was developed in the 1950s and so on and so forth. And so, you know, that always stuck with me. Right. A couple of things stuck with me because I’ve lived through a couple of these cycles. The first one is Buck. When the, when Wall Street coalesces around something just shut up and buy it, right? I mean, I, I spent too much of my life arguing about whether dog pile and Ask Gees was better than Google. Wall Street said Google was the best. Shut up. Invest, right? And so, so look, blockchain solved the double spend problem. Blockchain solved all the problems that the original iteration of the internet could solve, and everybody knew it was coming along okay. So it’s a decentral, it’s decentralized, right? Uh, does, does not need to be reconciled. So no. Not only do you have another iteration of the internet. You have basically introduced into society the biggest innovation in accounting or recordkeeping since double entry. Bookkeeping accounting was introduced in Florence, Italy centuries ago by the Medicis and, and buck. All this is out there like, so this is a profound, right? So think about you’re in an accounting department and you don’t have to reconcile, right? So look. The first use cakes was Bitcoin. And what was the, what was the beautiful thing about it? Well, first off, it grew up by itself. And secondly, it’s got perfect scarcity, right? And so let’s just full stop. And I mean, yes, gold and silver had the run that they should have had decades. So I had been waiting and listening to people, gold bugs, talking about this type of run since the nineties. Okay. Um, but look, you know, and the problem with fi money, right? I mean, this is, this goes back decades. It’s an old argument. The way you solve it is, is Bitcoin. That’s the solution. I mean, forget about it. I mean, if they’re gonna whip it around and do all this stuff, fine. But the other thing that people miss and Sailor hasn’t, and Sailor is brilliant, is look. Bitcoin is pristine collateral in 2008, in September. What caused the, the system to stop was the counter. We could not identify counterparty risk for near cash. It was a settlement problem. Anybody you talk to Buck that says it was, you know, the subprime this and it, yeah, that was crap. I get that. But when the system shut down is you had a $750 million near cash instrument with X, Y, Z, wall Street firm, and you did this for three extra beeps and it was no longer cash. Guess. And guess what? Your institutional money market fund broke the buck. That’s when the system blew sky high. When the money market broke the buck and it was a settlement problem, blockchain and Bitcoin solved that. Sailor knows that, look where Wall Street’s gonna go. They understand now that. Bitcoin is pristine, collateral and capital that is 100% transparent. Let’s lend against it, and that’s what Sadler’s doing. That’s why Wall Street hates the guy so much, right? Think about that. Think of where is he going after he’s going after all the stranded capital on Wall Street. And, and the whole point is he’s sitting there going, I’m too busy for this. And you’ve got all these other people that are gonna live off of other people’s ignorance. Meanwhile, Jing Diamond knows exactly what he’s talking about. We can identify, if I hear one more person on me in, in the meeting say, I don’t know. You know, you know, uh, micro strategies balance sheet is so complicated. Really. Compared to JP Morgans, I mean, you know what his capital is. It says Bitcoin, like, what are you guys talking about? But hey, fucking in this business, people make generational wealth on ignorance of people who think they know what they don’t know. So, you know, just going back to Jamie Diamond, you know, he spent, I don’t know how long. Throwing every insult, uh, he could towards Bitcoin. And now they’ve really kind of, they haven’t backtracked. I think he’s, he’s, you know, his, his, um, I think the way he phrases is the blockchain’s a real thing. He never seems to really say the word Bitcoin, uh, in this regard. Um, banks in general, where do you think they’re headed with this stuff? I mean, I, you know, right now, again, you can kind of see even. Um, I think, you know, some of the big advisory firms suddenly recommending one to, you know, one to 4% of people’s portfolios in Bitcoin. I mean, this is all, I mean, gosh, I, I’ve, you know, been talking about Bitcoin since 2017. This is in unbelievable transformation in less than a decade. Where do you see this going in the next five to 10 years? It’s called the, it’s called, what is it? It’s called, I’m gonna call it the Evolution of Jim. Me, you know, in my business and, and, and, and you know, the thing I have book is I’ve survived and I’ve gone through a lot of cycles. I’ve done a lot, you know, and you ask yourself, you scratch your head a lot and you’re, and you, but you’re continually doing objective research and you’re this, if you, this is why I love this game so much. Right? So let’s just go stop for a second. Let’s get some context. Right. My first summer job, one of my first summer jobs, I worked in the basement of a bank in the in, in downtown Toronto, right up the street from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And my job was to let guys in with beak, briefcases into the cage, into the big vault, to basically bring in certificates. Okay. And, and what? Stock certificates. And so remember, you know, and I remember my grandfather when we, when he died, look at, we couldn’t sell the house because he didn’t believe in the banks. And we were finding certificates all over the house in the walls. Okay? Right. So in the 1960s it was bare based. The whole industry was bare based. And there was the volume in Wall Street started to pick up to the point where they couldn’t handle the volume. There was a paper crisis where almost a third of the companies went down bankrupt because of the cage. The cage. Okay. So basically what happened was, to make a long story short, they came out with, they came, Hey, why don’t we get two computers At one point in time, they said, okay, crisis. Let’s solve it. Well, why don’t we get these two computers and we can solve, or we can sell trades among, amongst each other. Okay. And then we don’t need to have guys riding around Wall Street with bicycles and big briefcases. Okay. And then what we did was, what we did was we sat there and said, well, why don’t we have a centralized clearing, and we’re gonna call it DTC or CDS, depending on what country you’re in. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna offer paper, we’re gonna, we’re gonna issue paper rights to the underlying stock that was developed in the early 1970s. That’s the system that we’re on right now. There are a lot of faults with that. Let me give you, when you’ve talked about the GameStop a MC situation, when you have a company that’s basically have more shares outstanding short, sorry, more shares short than outstanding, that shows you that the old system doesn’t work. It’s called ation. The paper writes to the underlying assets, it, it doesn’t match up. There have been guys that make a career outta this and write books about this, right? Dole Pineapple. They had a corporate, a corporate event, right? Hostile takeover. 64,000 for 64 million shares, voted, I think, and there was only 3,200 on. We all know this, so this has to be solved. The way you solve it is you tokenize assets, and this was talked about a decade ago, and they know about it and true tofor, they, and if you’re thinking about it, it’s totally logical, right? But if we allow this innovation to go full stream ahead, we’re wiped out, right? So what did they do? They delayed. They delayed. And as you know, you could talk about, it’s called Operation choke 0.2 0.0. Right. You know, the Fed overreached their bounds, they de banked people. I mean, this is why, why Best it’s going after them. They, yet they stepped over their constitutional mandate. Right. The federal, the Fed Act is not, uh, does not supersede the US Constitution. Elizabeth warned the whole thing. They did it. Okay, so let’s not complain about it. So now Atkins is gonna, we’re gonna have the Clarity Act come out and they’re gonna basically deregulate New York Stock Exchange already there. They’re gonna put everything on the blockchain and when you put everything on the blockchain, trade a settlement. There’s no hypo. Immediate settlement. Immediate, which is a benefit if you can get your act together because it, you know, for Wall Street firms you need less capital, right? So it’s a natural evolutionary process. And then you sit there and go back in history, if you and I were writing it, we’d sit there and go, well, should we be surprised that the incumbents right, the status quo pushed back on innovation? No, there was a guy, there was a prophet, um. At, at Harvard, his name was Clay Christensen, and he wrote this wonderful book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. You know, why does, why don’t companies evolve, or why do they go bankrupt? It’s because they cease to evolve and the status quo doesn’t allow the evolution of the companies to take place. Right? Well, that’s what happened in RA. We’re gonna complain about it. No, it, it is what it is. It’s water under the bridge. And so what I think is happening is, you know, Mr. Diamond is basically saying. He’s pragmatic, he’s a realist. And now he’s saying, we gotta evolve. And hey, by the way, now I’ve gotten to the point where I think I can make a tunnel. Think about that. Yeah. Think about his own stable coins, right? So his own stable coins. And, uh, well think about this. If you trade like internal meetings, right? And I’m hyped this hypothetical, right? I go, fuck, don’t screw this up this time. And you’re gonna go, Jim, what are you talking about? I go. We want a nice bread between bid and ask in these financial price. We don’t wanna go down to pennies. Okay? Can we go back to the old days when we were, you know, trading in quarters and sixteenths and so we can make some skin in the game? I think you’ve got the deregulation of the banking industry where the banks are gonna, they’re fit. It’s gonna be baby steps. But what’s gonna happen is they’re gonna basically say, stop taking all that capital that’s sitting at the Fed, making four or fed funds rate overnights wherever it’s four half, 3 75 right now. And you can now trade it. Go back to prop trading, which is what they did. And they’re gonna start off, they will start off with, its only treasuries. Eventually they’ll be able to expand throughout our lifetime. So the old way you gotta look at it is, you know. We’re bringing the ba, you know, we’re putting the band back together, man. Right. And the banks are gonna deregulate, they’re gonna deregulate the banks, they’re going to innovate, they’re gonna be able to use the capital, their earnings profile going out into the end of the decade. It’s, it’s gonna be monstrous, it’s gonna be, you know, it, it’s, it’s, and, and that’s how I get, you know, when people say, where do you think the s and p goes? You know, I say, you know, 14,000, you know, double from here by the end of the decade. And he goes, well, what about ai? I go, well, they’re gonna, that’s important, but it’s the banks. I think the banks are gonna have a renaissance. Yeah. Yeah. Um, one thing just to get your thoughts on, so when you look at the banks, you talked about sort of the inevitability of tokenization. Um, the stock exchange, uh, we talked about stable coins. I mean, another great way for banks to make money. Uh, essentially where does that, how, how does that help or hurt Bitcoin adoption? Because Bitcoin is a sort of a separate, separate, you’re not, you’re not building on Bitcoin as much as you are, say, Ethereum, Mar Solana or, you know, some of the, some of the blockchain things. So, so is it just that. Is it just a, an adoption issue? Because you live in a, in a different world. You live in a world of blockchain and Bitcoin is, its currency. It’s weird, right? Because I, I’m writing this feed like, so Buck, where are you right now? Where, where, where are you located? I’m in Santa Barbara. You’re in California. So, yeah, so I’m in Toronto, right? Uh, you know, I lived in, worked in the States for, you know, a decade, a couple of decades, and I’m back home and it’s like, man, they don’t get it. Right, and, and, and, and what am I talking about? Well, well, this, this is the, the thing that you’ve gotta understand is this, right. Ethereum was invented by Vladi Butrin in this town, Joe Alozo, who’s the head of one of the largest Ethereum groups. Father is a dentist at Bathurst and Spadina. We’re up here and people are saying, oh, you know, president Trump don’t talk about being a 51st state. We act like a colony, duke. We are a, you know, we forget about calling us one. We are. So, look, it, look, there is no doubt in my mind that Ethereum is going to have a place and, and we’re going to use it. Seems like we’re going to use Ethereum and that’s the smart contract, you know? Um. And that’s fine. Um, you know, but going back in time. But, but remember, there’s not per, there’s not perfect scarcity there. So I like Ethereum, don’t get me wrong, but I look at Bitcoin and I look at the, I look at the scarcity, and I also look at the fact of, you know, what sa, what Sailor, if you sailor did a presentation in the middle of next year and all hell broke loose. What he did, and it’s, you know, and of course I’m hypothesizing. He basically went to New York and said, I am going to create fixed income products and I am going to give yields. On those products, and I’m coming after the stranded capital that sits on Wall Street that you guys have been ripping on for years. In the middle of last year, staler went public and declared war. Okay. Are we surprised that Jim Shane Oaks came out and everybody came out basically guns a blazing. Are we surprised? But what he, what Sailor did and put and slammed on the table is it’s pristine capital, it’s transparent capital. And what are you willing to pay for that? And now you GARP banks trading at. We have no idea what their capital structure really is. Honestly, we have an idea, but it’s very opaque, right? You know, the high quality names are trading at two, two to, you know, two times tangible book. You’ve got fintech’s companies trading at four to five times, right book, and you know, what’s Sailor doing right now? Diluting his stock so he can buy as much Bitcoin as he wants because he sees the next game. He says the hell with what you guys think the next game is going to be. Wall Street’s going to realize that Bitcoin is pristine capital and there’s only 21 million of it. What do you and, and what just happened today? What did Morgan Stanley just file a treasury company. So everything you and I are talking about, they know they’re smart guys, right? They’re real, they’re not. That’s, this is the whole point. They’re really, really, really smart. Okay. They see they’ve gone through the history. They know. Okay, so you’re sitting there, you get around the room, you say, so wait a minute. Wait. Whoa, sailor’s over here. And he’s basically saying he’s gonna give you a a pref that’s basically backed by Bitcoin charging 10%. And he’s going after our corporate clients. I mean, and what’s the pitch Buck? You’ve got a hundred million dollars. Okay, you got a hundred million dollars in the kitty. Okay, buck. What happens is you need $10 million a year for working capital, which is in cash, which means you’ve got $90 million sitting there idle. Hey, buck, I can give you 10% on that. You go to Jamie, he’s giving you two. What are you gonna do? Yeah. I think one of the issues right now is I the, the perceived risk profile of that. Right. Uh, you know. I tend to agree with you about the, uh, pristine nature of Bitcoin s collateral, but just in general, the perception. I don’t know that, that that’s. That’s the case. Well, you gotta go back to the fact that, do you think Bitcoin’s going to zero or not? No, of course not. Yeah. ‘ cause the Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero. There’s no, then, then that are, there’s Bitcoin could go to zero. There’s no, I mean, I don’t think, I mean, non-zero probability, of course, right? I don’t think it is. And if that has been, if it has been selected and now you have Wall Street coalescing it, I haven’t even mentioned the president of the United States or his family. Right. Uh, or the Commerce Secretary and his family, right? Or if you go to New York, wall Street, right, they’re all talking about it, right? So, I, I, you know, to me, I, I, the question about micro strategy, to me it’s not. That it’s a treasury company and it’s got a pile of Bitcoin. What does he do with it? Does he become a bank? Like why does it, this is me. I’m pitching him. Right. Hey, Mike, why don’t you just become a FinTech, say you’re like a FinTech company and you’ll get, and you, you’re gonna instantaneously trade it five to six times book. Why don’t you, why are you, you’re talking like you’re attacking them, but you’re still, you’re still a software company with a, with a big whack of Bitcoin that you are writing pres. Right? So, and, and so that’s, that’s how I look at it. I think the wave is too big. We are going to digitize. And the other thing that we didn’t really touch on with respect to AI and blockchain, and I’m gonna paraphrase the president. Right. Um, Mr. Trump is, look, um, it’s a matter of national security, duke, and when I hear that, I go back to the nineties in the eighties when I was in late eighties when I was an undergrad. Right. And it wasn’t China, it was Japan. And, and you know, what happened was, you know, it, it’s funny, Al Gore did deregulate so that. The internet could become for-profit. We all stood around and said, you know what the hell could, how do we make money on this? That’s, you know, what do we do? And then what did we do? We, we, we threw a ton of money at it and the United States controlled it. And what did we get out of it? We got out, we got, you know, all those companies. Right. The last thing I would say to you, and this is much more of a personal story, is I, when I was younger, I was in New York and it was 2000 and I was at the Grand Hyatt, and it was a tech, it was a tech conference and, uh, Larry Ellison Oracle was there and he gave a, he gave a, he gave a a, a fireside chat. Then, um, we go to a breakout room and, you know, in a break, I don’t know about if you’ve been to one, but you go to a breakout room, it’s a smaller room at the hotel, and you know, sometimes you got 25 people, sometimes you got 50 people, right. And, you know, I went to the, I went to the breakout with Mr. Allison ’cause of Oracle and I went in there and it was absolutely jammed and I was sweating and he just looked at us and he just ripped us. He AP Soly, just, I still have the scars today. I’m talking to you about it. Okay. He called it a bubble. He called it a bubble. He, he was early in calling it a bubble. I never forgot that. And then you sit there and see what he’s doing right now. Where he’s levering up the balance sheet. Now, to me, having survived in this game for such a long period of time, and I call it a game, it’s a game of strategy, whatever, you know, how does that not, you know, I would say to you, we were, your office was next to mine. Fuck. I remember New York, he’s loading the goose loaded in. He go in, he’s borrowing money from his grandmother. He’s, you know, what is going on. And he’s really stinking smart. You know, he’s, he, Larry Allenson just doesn’t do, and people, oh, he’s in, you know, he’s, no, he’s not, he’s, he’s like the mentor of all of these guys. You know what I mean? So there’s a, to me, there’s a discontinuity that these need to believe that we’re still early on because you know, what, if Larry’s, what do we take when Larry or Mr. Ellison is leveraging up to me, it’s profound because I’m anchoring off of my bias to the New York, the New York high at, at the Tech Co. I think it was, I think it was at Bear Stearn. I couldn’t remember Bear Stearns or Lehman. But you know, one of those I carry that experience on with the rest of my life. I do. It’s like, what is Larry thinking? Right? So he’s leveraging up buck. That’s all I know. He’s a priest or guy. Well, that’s probably a good place for us to stop, Jim, uh, chief, uh, market strategist at Wellington Elta Private Wealth. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much and be safe. You make a lot of money but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. Uh, and, uh, as I said before, do not ignore ai. This is something that you need to start using. Have your kids start using it. Uh, make sure that they, you know. They use it every day because this whole world is turning AI and it’s gonna happen. You know, it’s gonna happen in, in a blink of an, uh, blink of an eye. And the world is gonna change and there are gonna be real winners out there. And the winners are gonna be people who knew where there was, was going and kind of used it in their mind’s eye as they looked on navigating how. You know how to allocate their money. Anyway, that is it for me. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast. This is Buck JJoffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealth formula roadmap.com.

We all love winners. We love hearing about the big wins and the perfect track records. It feels good. It feels safe. It instills us with a sense of trust. But I've been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are long-term winners have had profound moments of failure from which they learned invaluable lessons. Those are the people I really want to hear from. They have the kind of knowledge we all need as we navigate through life. It's called wisdom. Surgeons have a saying: “If you've never had a complication, you haven't done enough surgery.” In my surgeon days, I had a handful of complications. Let me tell you—they are no fun. You stay up at night replaying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently—how you could have had a better outcome. Even when unavoidable, those complications teach you something you'll never get from textbooks. It's been no different for me when it comes to business and investing. But I take comfort in knowing that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and rose from the ashes stronger and wiser. Warren Buffett. Ray Dalio. Every big winner has a story of failure. And while it may be cliché to say that we learn best from mistakes, I truly believe it. The good news is that those mistakes don't have to be our own. Learning from other people's mistakes can be just as effective. This week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is with Russell Gray—a guy many of you already know from his podcasting and radio career. Russ lived through 2008 up close. He took a beating, and he talks openly about what went wrong. But that period also changed the way he sees the world—in a good way. It changed how he thinks about risk, leverage, and what actually matters when things stop going up. That mindset is a big reason he's been successful since then. It's a conversation worth your time. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  If you let the debt run, at some point you fall into a debt trap where the interest on the outstanding debt consumes all of the available discretionary income, and then you’re borrowing just to service the debt. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast coming to you from Montecito, California. Before we begin today, I wanna remind you there’s website associated with this. Podcast called wealthformula.com. It’s where you will go if you would like to, uh, become more, uh, ingrained with the community, including getting on some of our lists such as the Accredit Investor Club. Of course, it is a new year and there are new deal flows coming through. Lots of opportunities that you won’t see anywhere else if you are a, an accredit investor, which means you. Make at least $200,000 per year for the last couple years with a reasonable expectation of doing so in the future. That’s 300,000 if you’re filing jointly or you have a million dollars of net worth outside of your personal residence. If you, uh, meet those criteria, you are an accredited investor. Congratulations. You don’t have to apply for anything, whatever, but you do need to go to wealthformula.com. Sign up for the Accredited Investor Club, get onboarded. And all you do at that point is look at deal flow, and if nothing else, you’ll learn something. So check it out. And who doesn’t want to be part of a club? Now let’s talk, uh, a little bit about today’s show. You know, um, we all love winners, right? We love hearing about big wins, the perfect track record. It feels good. It feels safe, gives us a sense of trust. But the thing is, I’ve been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are, what you would call long-term winners, have had profound moments of failure from which they learned, um, invaluable lessons. So those are the people that I really like to hear from. You know, they have the kind of knowledge we all need that as we navigate through all of life, and it’s called wisdom. Um, surgeons, as you know, I’m an ex surgeon. Have a saying, if you’ve never had a complication, you haven’t done enough surgery. Uh, in my surgery days, I certainly, you know, had a handful of complications just like anyone else who did a lot of surgery. And, and lemme tell you, there, there are no fun, right? So you stay up at night replying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently, how you could have had a better outcome. And sometimes you realize that those mistakes were unavoidable, but. You still learn something from them. And in these cases, you always learn something that you’re not gonna get from the textbooks, just from reading something. And you know what, it’s been no different for me when it comes to business and, and investing, but I, I take comfort in the fact, uh, that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and arose from the ashes stronger and wiser. All you have to do is look up stories of Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio. And Ray Dalio basically lost everything at one point, uh, because he, you know, he had a macro prediction that went completely south. But listen, uh, the, the point I’m trying to make here is that every big winner, every big winner I know of as a story of failure. And while it may be cliche to say, you know what we learned best from our mistakes, I, I truly believe that. But the good news is that those mistakes don’t have to be our own, right? So you can learn from other people’s mistakes as well, and that can be just as effective. Uh, so this week’s episode of Well, formula Podcast is featuring a guy that you may know. His name is Russell Gray. Russ, uh, has been around a long time, uh, in the podcasting world. And radio. You know, he talks a lot. He’s talked many times to me at least about living through 2008. And you know what that was like, the beating he took and, you know, what went wrong? Uh, you know, it’s, it’s something that he talks about because, you know, he’s a successful guy and that period in time changed. You know, the way he sees the world, the way in which he behaves in that world. How he thinks about things like risk and leverage and you know, what actually matters when things stop going up. Uh, it’s a mindset thing and it’s important. Um, and we also obviously talk about other things as well, such as, uh, Russ’s current take on the economy. Uh, so anyway, it’s a, a good conversation and it’s one that you’re gonna wanna listen to, and we’ll have that for you right after these messages. 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Welcome back to Show Everyone. Today my guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Russell Gray. He’s a second generation financial strategist and, uh, you may know him from being a, the former co-host of the Real Estate Guy Radio Show, which is one of the longest running, uh, uh, radio shows of its time, uh, in the United States. He’s, he’s a founder of. Raising Capitalist project, which is an initiative focused on helping aspiring investors and entrepreneurs how to better understand how wealth is actually created and how uh, economic systems really work. Uh, he’s best known for his emphasis on real assets, cash flow, economic cycles, and preserving wealth and what he views as an increasingly fragile financial system. Welcome, Ross. How are you? Good buck, happy to be here. And, uh, proud of your success on your show. I remember way back at the beginning you were like, Hey, I wanna start a podcast. Yeah. Yep. You’ve done a great job. Yeah, it was an idea. I was like, here’s the idea. Start a podcast, build a community, all that kind of stuff. But it’s interesting. Uh, well, and let’s talk about what’s going on now. You’ve spent decades teaching people about, you know, real assets and cash flow. But lately your writings feel more focused on systems and and macro forces. So what’s changed? Has something finally become too big to ignore? Well, I think there’s two things you know personally, uh, most people who have heard of me or followed me know that 2008 wasn’t kind to me. I was in the mortgage business. I was very leveraged into real estate all over the place. Had my businesses for cash flow, had the real estate for equity growth. Believed that real estate was hyper resilient and gonna be the beneficiary of inflation. Didn’t understand the dependency on credit markets in both my business and my portfolio. And so that was a big mess, not doing, uh, a real SWOT analysis and understanding. And the third part of that, that was tough, is that I operated the business primarily on credit lines as well. So I had virtually no cash. And so when the credit markets seized up. Canceled my income, it canceled my credit lines and it evaporated my equity. And now all I had was negative cash flow on debt, on real estate. I couldn’t control. And so I looked at that and I said to myself, you know, I’m a pretty smart guy. I. Pride myself on paying attention. So obviously I’m not paying attention to the right thing. So I became obsessed with the macro, uh, picture and, and the financial system, which, you know, to me it’s, it’s the macro economy is what’s going on with, uh. Geopolitics and the energy and, you know, even policy, uh, that affects, uh, how well money can flow through the system. Both monetary policy from the Federal Reserve and fiscal policy from the government now today in the Trump administration trade policy. And so I began to pay attention to all those things, but from the standpoint of not how it was gonna affect the stock market, but how it was gonna affect the bond market and interest rates and the availability of credit, and how it was gonna affect Main Street. Directly and specifically now in terms of jobs and job creation are real wages. And so when I started really looking at all that, um, I, I, I realized that there were some things happening that were gonna be really good, and there were also some things that we needed to pay attention to. And these things move very slowly. So in 2010. I saw that coming outta the financial crisis, the Chinese were very upset with the United States about how much the Fed Balance sheet was expanding, and they were concerned about their very large investment in US dollar denominated. Bonds, and so they began creating bilateral trade agreements with Russia and many other countries to where they could begin this large process of de Dollarizing. Well, that was the first time I’d seen that movie, because it was the same thing that the Europeans did after they saw the Nixon default. Right? They began working on the Euro, which took ’em from 71, 72 when they started, maybe 74 when they started, but it took ’em till 99 to get it done. But you know, once they got it in place, over time, the Euro, the Euro has taken over 20% of global trade. You know, that’s market share from the US dollar. And so I saw this BrickX thing beginning to form. Uh, and then I saw the other thing on the macro that I thought was gonna be really good was in the jobs act, something you’ve benefited from as a syndicator, we. I wrote that report, new law breaks Wall Street Monopoly. And so, uh, even though I, I can’t tell you I was a big fan of Barack Obama, but he signed that legislation that happened on his watch. And I think it was fantastic because now it allowed Main Street syndicators, main Street Capital raisers to advertise for accredited investors and began to really, uh, level that playing field and open up Main Street, uh, to invest directly in Main Street. And so I met you in the syndication program that we put together with the real estate guys to coach real estate investors on how to become capital raisers to, to capitalize on that trend. So that’s, you know, kind of how I kind of became doing what I’m doing. And then when I decided, uh, just about 20 months ago to depart the real estate guys, I wanted to take some of the things that I originally set out to do when I first met Robert Helms way back in the day. And, you know, as relationships go, you know, he has his interest in the things that he wants to do, and I had my interest in things I came to do. And for a long time we were aligned well enough to continue to work together. But it got to a point where, for me, I, I wanted to go off in a different direction, and part of that was driven. By the, the death of my late wife. Uh, you had me on the show right after that happened to me, and I was going through this like, who am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do next? What do I really want to get done before I die? And so all of those things kind of informed my personal decisions to, to make a switch. And then of course, what’s going on in the macro. Um, what I saw with Trump 1.0, what I saw in the Biden administration and those policies, and then what I thought would happen in Trump 2.0. And I did a presentation on this at the best ever conference in March of 2025, right after he’d been inaugurated. And, and so, uh, that, that’s kind of has me where I feel like there’s some real opportunity coming. Uh, there’s also some things we need to be aware of on Main Street. Yeah. So you’re bullish on Main Street in general, but you’ve been pretty cautious about the broader financial system. So, uh, what are the things that you’re worried about? Well, I, I think if you understand the way the financial system works, uh, it has a shelf life and that. It’s because it’s, it’s a system that is, depends upon ever increasing debt. Um, people say, I wanna pay the debt off, but if they, if they really understood the system, at least the way I think I understand it, uh, and I’m not alone in this, so it’s not something I just figured out on my own. But, um, you know. I, I don’t want to sit here and pretend like I’m the world’s foremost expert, but the way I understand the way the system works is that it, it requires ever increasing debt, and if we were to pay the debt off, it would collapse the system. So I think you waste a lot of time and energy and from a policy perspective, trying to argue about doing that. And I think that’s why it’s never, ever, no matter what administration, what politician, what mix of congress, what. Pressure there is everywhere globally. The system, the central banking system, the way it works globally, is designed to create ever increasing debt. So the, the flip side of that then is to let the debt run. And if you let the debt run, at some point you fall into a debt trap where the interest on the outstanding debt consumes all of the available discretionary income. And then you’re borrowing just to service the debt. Yeah, that’s about $1 trillion right now, by the way. Which is. Which is, uh, about the, the, the defense, uh, budget. Well, and I think that the bigger thing is when you look at, at the interest on the debt and mandatory spending, there’s virtually no room left after that. So if you’ve got, you’ve got the mandatory spending and you’ve got, um, debt service, you, you have very little room. So it’s not. Feasible either for two reasons. One is there’s just not enough discretionary room to be able to cut expenses enough to, to ever manage the debt. Number two, as I previously mentioned, if we were ever to effectively try to pay down the debt in any appreciable way, it would crash the the system. So the, the way I look at it is it’s, it’s, it’s got to be replaced. There’s going to be a great reset. I think the World Economic Forum was trying to set that up for the world, and they had an agenda. I’m, I’m not particularly fond of. Um, there’s been talk about creating a central bank digital currency, which I think is what, you know, the Federal Reserve and the, what I all call the wizards, uh, or the powers of B would prefer. Uh, but I think if you care about privacy and, and, you know, individual sovereignty, uh, and, and just personal freedom, um, I have a lot of concerns about a central bank digital currency. Um, I think the popularity of Bitcoin, uh, if it was, you know, and who knows what the. True origins were, but let’s just take it at face value. I think a lot of the people, at least that were the early adopters before it had the big price run up, was just a way to escape, uh, the system before it failed. And so you’ve got that. And then you’ve got, again, as I mentioned, the bricks and this global effort to de dollarize, which was I think really kicked off. After the great financial crisis and the massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. And then I think picked up a little steam when we froze Russian assets and people began to see that the US might use the dollar and the dollar system, uh, for political instead of being neutral. And I think that picked up some steam. And, and so there’s, there’s both a geopolitical drive to. Uh, come up with a new system. There is, I think we’re at the end of a shelf life that some type of a new system is gonna have to be, uh, created. Uh, and, and then you look at what Donald Trump is doing and what he’s espousing. You know, let’s get rid of income taxes. Let’s get back to pulling in, uh, revenue from tariffs the way the country was originally founded. Uh, he’s talked about eliminating the IRS and going with an ERS, an external revenue service. There’s people that think that he might beat. Wanting to try to get back on some form of sound money, you know, coming out of, Hey, let’s audit the Fed, let’s audit the gold. I mean, let’s audit the gold. And, um, so, you know, we, you, you never know what what’s really gonna happen, but, but I think what we have to pay attention to are the signs that the system is beginning to break down. And one of those signs that I pay a lot of attention to is monetary, metals, gold and silver. I make a distinction between precious metals, which would also include platinum and palladium, and of course they’re strategic metals, but I just focus on monetary metals, which would be gold and silver, and gold and silver. We’re telling you that people would prefer to be the, the, the safe ha haven asset is no longer us treasuries, but, um, but, but gold and central banks have been driving a lot of it. This isn’t the retail market driving it yet. It, it’s really central banks have been accumulating. And so those are the ultimate insiders when it comes to currency. And if the insiders in the currency markets are repositioning into gold, uh, I’d, I’d call that a clue. Yeah, absolutely. Um. Yeah. You recently commented on the public criticism, president Donald Trump made toward, uh, uh, Peter Schiff. What stood out to you about that exchange? Maybe give us some background people. Not everybody knows who Peter is and, and, uh. And all that. So, yeah. Well, I mean, as you know, I’ve known Peter for 12 or 13 years and, uh, I had read his father’s work way back in the day. He is a very famous in the tax protestor world as somebody who just believed that income taxes were unconstitutional. And he resisted that and ended up going to jail for, died in jail as a matter of fact. And so that was, uh, I think sad. Um. But, but to me it felt like a little bit of being a political prisoner, but be that as it may, that’s how I got to know Peter. And so Peter is a guy that comes from the Austrian School of Economics and he believes in sound money. He believes in gold. He does not like Bitcoin. I’ve sat on panels the last two years with Peter, uh, in between him and Larry Lepard. And you know, Larry is a, a former gold guy. He’s still not opposed to gold, but he’s a hardcore sound money guy. But he likes Bitcoin. Peter hates Bitcoin and they get into it, and I usually sit in between ’em and try to keep things calm. Well, you know, so Peter ended up going on Fox and Friends, uh, I think on whatever it was, Friday the eighth I think it was, or whatever, whatever day that was. And he, he criticized Donald Trump’s spending. And, um, budget deficits and said that it would lead to inflation, and that’s a hot button for Trump. And so Trump, yeah. Uh, responded to him, uh, I think like four 30 in the morning on Saturday morning and called Peter, uh, a. Jerk and a total loser. Well, actually I saw it before Peter did, and so I took a screenshot and I texted it to him. I said, Hey, have you seen this? You know, maybe I’ll press is good press. And I think to a degree, maybe it has been me from, I understand Peter ended up on Tucker Carlson’s show as a result of that. So, but I made a video right after that because I, you know, there was a time when. I’m friends with Peter Schiff and I’m friends with Robert Kiyosaki. As you know, I, we introduced you to both those guys and, and at one point they didn’t like each other very much. They got into it ’cause, you know, and, and so we introduced ’em to each other and found that they had more in common than they, they didn’t. And I, I think that that would be true. Not that I’m in a position to introduce Peter to, to Donald Trump, but I think the way Peter is looking at it is true. Um, but there’s context and I think the context is super important. Now I’ve been studying Donald Trump as a businessman way before he was a presidential candidate or a politician, you know, before he was a polarizing guy, a pariah for some people. He, he was just this real estate guy. He’s good at marketing, he’s a real estate guy, and as you know. We got to know his longtime attorney, George Ross. And so I’ve had a chance to have conversations about what it was like working with Donald Trump, the real estate guy, and when he became a politician, I asked George, is he a crazy man? Does he shoot from the hip? And you know, I got a lot of reassurances that he is a sober sound. Methodical, self-disciplined guy and, and I think he uses the eroticism to keep people off balance as a negotiating tactic. And he writes about that in the art of the deal. So the context that I think that people need to have, and I’m not here to defend Donald Trump, the man. I’m not here to defend Donald Trump, the politician, but I look at the policies and what I think he’s up to in the context of realizing that we have a system that is fundamentally flawed and has to be remodeled. So to use a real estate, uh, metaphor, it would be like we have a hotel building that is very tired. It’s at the end of its life, it’s got to be remodeled, and so you can’t. Completely shut it down because it’s an operating business, so it’s gotta operate during the remodel. And so you begin to, um, reposition things and. You, you, you’re not gonna run optimally, so you’re gonna run some deficits while you’re doing the remodel. You’re gonna go into debt because you got a lot of CapEx to do, and during that period of time, your debt and deficits are gonna be a problem. But real estate guys look at debt and deficits not as a permanent condition. I think Peter is saying, Hey, you’re just running up debt and deficits. Well, in the short term he is. Honestly, I don’t think Trump is concerned about that. I think he’s focused on getting this remodel done, and part of that remodel was showed up in the last jobs report, right? We lost jobs to a degree, but they were government jobs, and what we got was a lot of gains in private sector jobs. Scott descent, his treasury secretary, has come out and overtly said, we are an administration for Main Street, not for Wall Street. So if you’re going to de financialize this economy and turn it back into a productive economy. You’re going to have to have policies that are gonna stimulate Main Street, and that’s, that’s the, the, the new units that you’ve rehabbed in your hotel that you wanna move people into. At the same time, you gotta move them outta the old units, which is people making money, trading claims on wealth instead of producing real goods and services, which is the financial ice economy. So it’s not about banking, it’s not about stocks, it’s not about Wall Street. You know, you need the stock market to stay up. But really what you need to do is you need to create production. And, and, and I think that’s fundamental. I think he understands we’re never gonna pay the debt off by cutting. We’ve got to keep the system running until we can get to some form of sound money. We’re actually paying the debt off as realistic, and then we have to earn so much money that the debt relative to our earnings shrinks. So it’s not paying down the debt, it’s paying down the percentage of GDP by growing GDP. And the presentation I did at best ever in March of 2025 was me explaining why I thought. His policies, were going to allow him to increase velocity and increase wages by cutting taxes, interest regulation, transportation costs, and, and again, that was six weeks into administration. That was theory. I’m gonna do a follow up in March of this year to say, okay, looking back when I gave the speech a year ago, what’s transpired, but I can already tell you a lot of the stuff that I thought he would do. He’s done. And I think that’s muting some of the inflation that his spending and deficits to Peter’s point are causing. And that’s why when this last CPI report came out, it wasn’t as ugly as everybody thought it would be. And, and this is when you don’t look at, when you look at it in the mono, you just look at one thing and Peter’s very fixated on this quantity of money theory. Then the expectation is that you print a bunch of money, you run a bunch of deficits, you’re gonna get inflation. And it’s just a. Equals B or A leads to B. But there are other nuances and I think Trump is looking at more like a real estate developer, which makes sense. ’cause that’s his background. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s, I mean, and then the other just point to, to make there is that there is probably, um, now inflation’s a tricky thing, right? Like on the one hand you don’t want this riding up, but on the other hand, it actually helps with that debt. You’re, you’re basically eroding the debt by letting inflation ride a little bit higher at the same time. And I think the Trump administration knows that it’s a tricky thing to balance, but the goal is to, you know, get GDP pumping at, you know, four or 5%, but it’s gotta be real production buck. And that’s the difference, right? The old way of dealing with the debt was inflation. And, and I think people think that he’s using the old formula, but I don’t think he is. Well, I think it’s, I think, I think it’s definitely geared towards increasing real GDP, but I think in the process there’s probably, they probably care less a little bit. Of inflation riding up a little bit in the meantime. ’cause you’re still gonna have, I think he thinks he can mute it. I think he can mute it with lower taxes, lower interest expense, lower energy costs. And the energy is the economy. And from day one, that was the first policy. He’s, he’s aggressively gone after lowering energy costs because that has a, a, a ripple through, it just affects every area of the economy. And then the regulations in, in the last cabinet meeting. It was reported, the way I understood it, that for every regulation his administration passes, they’ve eliminated 48. So it’s actually, he’s removing the friction. And I think the bigger thing is, and I, and I was on a panel at Limitless, uh, this last summer, and TaRL, Yarborough was moderating the panel, asked the panelists what we were looking at that maybe other people weren’t looking at that. Um. You know, is, is a signal about maybe the direction it was. We, I, I can’t remember. This was a prediction panel and what I said was trade policy because everybody in finance spends all their time looking at the flow of money and trying to get in front of the flow of money. And we’re so used to the money coming from the Fed or coming from the treasury. So they’re gonna come from monetary policy or fiscal policy. And that’s what Peter’s doing. He’s looking at the Fed and he is looking at the treasury. And so what I’m looking at is not just the tariff income, which is relatively minor, but I’m looking at the trade deals, and those are published at the White House and there’s a couple trillion dollars of money that’s FDI, foreign Direct Investments coming right into Main Street. And it’s gonna build infrastructure. It’s gonna build factories. It’s good. And they tell you where it’s gonna be because they, they came back with the opportunity zones, which I thought they would do. Makes sense. It’s the way he thinks. And then taking those opportunity zones, the governors can say where in their state they want that money to go. Well, people on Wall Street don’t think geography ’cause they operate in a commodity world that trades on global exchanges. But real estate people. Geography matters a lot. So if I’m a Main Street person, I live on Main Street and I’m looking for Main Street opportunities, I wanna look where that money is going to be flowing in geographically. And then there may be opportunities in real estate or small businesses in those economies, and you can see it coming, but nobody talks about it. So I created Main Street Capitalist as a show to begin to talk about it. I still do the investor mentoring club, which is, you know. A premium thing where we get together every month and we talk about these things. And the point is, is that if you understand, I think what he’s doing, then you can, you can begin to paddle into position. And I think, again, I am really bullish if he loses inflation. If he loses to inflation, he’s cooked. He knows it. I think that that even the suggestion that Peter made that he was losing to inflation is what flared him up. And so I wasn’t trying to necessarily defend. Peter and I wasn’t trying to defend Trump, I was just trying to reconcile that it is possible that both guys could be right at the same time from their perspective. And so I, you know, I, I had one guy take exception because he felt like I was defending Trump, but for the most part, I got positive feedback on the video. I, I, I, you saw it. So you tell me. Did it make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So when you look at today’s environment, everything going on, where do you think investors are most vulnerable? Um, I, I think that if you are very dependent upon, um, healthy credit markets, we could have a disruption. And that’s what happened to me. If Trump loses the inflation battle even for a little while, little be reflected in interest rates. And the challenge is right now that he is asked the Fed to quote unquote lower rates, but the Fed actually doesn’t like. Set rates, what they do is they set a target and then they manipulate markets to achieve those rates. And if, if people believe the fed, there’s a little bit of front running. So what’ll happen is the Fed will come out and go, oh, we’re gonna lower rates, which means bond prices are gonna go up. So they’re like, that’s great, let’s go buy a bunch of bonds, which drives rates down. So the Fed just by talking. Begins to move the market and then they hope that later on the Fed will buy those bonds from them at a profit to push rates down. Does that make sense? So, so when the last two times the Fed has raised rates in their target, the 10 year has responded in the opposite direction. Which means that the market is like not buying in, and the Fed is gonna have to step in. And when the Fed steps in, they do it by printing money out out of thin air. Now, the concern about that is that when they print the money out of thin air. If they’re replacing bonds on their own balance sheet, that’s kind of a circle and it doesn’t leak out into the economy. If they’re buying new issuance from the the treasury, then that money is gonna work its way through the government to to to main street. Now, the Trump administration can prevent some of that by keeping the money in the Treasury, for example, uh, Trump 1.0 left. The Biden administration with, I think over a trillion dollars in, in the treasury checking account, and Janet Yellen put that into the economy right away during the lockdowns, which immediately created extreme inflation because you muted production at the same time you goose. Uh. Purchasing power, you know? So anybody with like three ounces of economic understanding could have told you that that inflation was gonna come, it was gonna come hard, it was gonna come fast, and it was gonna be stickier than than you thought. ’cause once you let that money out in the economy, it’s out. It’s out and the only way to mute it is either to suck it back, which is very, very difficult, or to outproduce it, and it’s very hard to produce anything when everything’s in lockdown. So I think that, you know, those days are behind us. I think the policies that we’re embracing now are more. Pro productivity. And I think that even if the Fed does have to step in, as long as that money doesn’t leak out into the economy, and part of it is the treasury being able to throttle some of that, and the money that does go into the economy doesn’t go into stimulus, but goes into CapEx and infrastructure, that’ll actually, uh, create. Production. Then I think that, you know, this, this game plan that I think they’re trying to execute has a chance. And so I, I’m, I’m watching for it. And of course, to answer your question, what do we have to worry about that it doesn’t work? Right? If it doesn’t work, then inflation will show up. Interest rates will rise, credit markets will crash, it will take real estate values with it. And the hedge is really gonna be, what I’ve always talked about is gold. I started talking back in 2018 when we were the zero bound with interest rates. Hey, there’s only one way interest rates can go and that’s up. And if they go up fast, then that’s gonna crash bonds. So it would be smart, and that’s gonna take real estate equity with it. So it’d be smart when you have real estate equity and low rates to pull some of that equity out and move it into gold. And I called that my precious equity strategy. If I have a video I did at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in January of 2022, explaining that when you could still really execute on that, and I’m not saying that you couldn’t do it today, but it’s harder, but the people who did it back then, I mean, you know, they’ve, they’ve seen their gold almost triple. And at the same time, they were able to lock in interest rates that are, you know, a half what they are today. So when you see those mega trends and you can begin, and that’s the stuff I didn’t know how to do in 2006, 2007. I didn’t understand any of this stuff. The, the, you know, losing everything in 2008 forced me to become a hardcore student and then try to apply that to Main Street strategy. And so I think gold and real estate and debt, they all work really well together depending on where you are in the cycle. Do you think that Main Street investors may actually have some advantages in periods like this? Yes, a ton because I think what’s gonna happen is if we have a, um, a, a, a restructure of the financial system into something more responsible, which I think is either gonna be forced upon us or it’s gonna be done by design, and I hope we do it by design. But when that happens, then the days of just buying low and selling high and riding the inflation wave that goes away. And so now it’s gonna be very, very important to understand how to invest for. Productivity. So I call it, you know, buy low sell high trading as an acronym, B-L-S-H-T you. You can sound it out for yourself phonetically. And then the other one is poo, which is productivity of others. And I think that if people focus on investing in the productivity of others, which is what Main street investors, especially real estate investors, focus on, I think cash flow, real profits on small businesses, not speculating on. Uh, exit price or a company that’s gonna take a company public, everybody trying to tap into this giant flood of money that gets pre created from thin air in the banking system and in Wall Street. If, if, if people on Main Street will just start investing. Kind of what Kenny McElroy was doing going through 2008, just focusing on sound assets and good markets with good fundamentals. That cash flow and, and are run by good managers, whether it’s a business, an apartment building, a mobile home park, a self storage, residential assisted living doesn’t really matter. Invest in real businesses that produce real profits where you’re not overpaying for that production of income and especially where there’s some upside. Not to flipping out of the stock, but to actually growing the market share and growing the income. That’s what investing really should be. Wall Street has perverted it into just placing bets and riding a wave and trying to figure out where the money is gonna flow from the Treasury or for from Fed stimulus. And I think Main Street is gonna pick up on the new game sooner. And the good news is if you get good at playing that game, even if the system stays the same, you’re probably gonna do better off anyway. When you talk about buying, buying or investing into productive businesses, I mean, what, what’s the difference in your mind between investing in a private business versus investing in a, you know, a publicly traded business that’s run off, you know, dividends? Yeah, so I, I, I think that it could be okay if the dividend yield makes sense, but anytime you have a publicly traded security, it’s a highly liquid market, which means it’s gonna be volatile and the stocks become chips in the casinos where professional traders are just gambling all day long. And some of that gambling can create an impact on the stock, and it doesn’t matter to you if you’ve only bought it for production of income. Um. And so, uh, you know, I, I don’t think it’s bad. I’ve, you know, Peter’s always been an advocate of, uh, dividend paying stocks, and I think if you’re gonna be in the stock market, that’s what you want to do. I think the opportunity in a private placement in a small business is the opportunity not to have to pay the high multiples because it’s not a perfect market. It’s, it’s the same reason there’s so much more opportunity in real estate. If real estate could trade on an electronic exchange where. You know, millions of buyers could find it, and you could have perfect price discovery. It’s very difficult to find a deal, right? It’s very difficult. But we, if you buy a private business, you know there’s gonna be considerations. You, you deal with a, a owner. Who cares about his customers, who cares about his team, maybe would be willing to carry back the way you would if you were buying a, a, a piece of property from somebody that cares about their neighbors or whatever. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot more humanity in it. There’s a lot more room for negotiation in it. And a lot of times there’s a lot more room to have control. So, you know, one of the adages with real estate that real estate investors like is, I’m gonna buy an asset, one that I understand, two that I can control. And so when you buy a stock, like a dividend paying stock, you, you might understand the business, you may not understand completely the. Uh, market dynamics that drive the stock price. But as long as the dividends are there, that can be okay, but you don’t have any control. When you actually go buy a small business, you have a, a degree of control. Now, if you’re a passive investor buying into a syndication, then you still have a little bit more, um. Relationship, you have a little bit more insight. You maybe have a voice. You may know the people that are making the decision and running the company personally. So it’s the same thing. You know, you Buck is a syndicator. When you go do a deal, your investors know you. They have a personal relationship with you. Go buy stuff in the stock market and mutual fund managers and investor. You don’t have a relationship with that fund manager and I think that’s worth something if you have a voice right. So we’ve, we’re talking a little bit about credit markets, um, volatility, you know, interest rates. Are they gonna go down like, you know, Donald Trump would like to see, and you know, we’ve got a new fed share coming, all that kind of thing. How should investors be thinking about leverage and risk right now? I, I think the adage with real estate, uh, I mean, sorry, with leverage is always the same, is, um, you know, manage cash flow. I, if, if you use leverage to speculate, that could be a real problem. And whether you did it. Do it for real estate like I did by having very thin or negative cash flow and making that up someplace else and believing that somehow, you know, rents or appreciation are gonna do it. Or buying a non-income producing asset with borrowed funds hoping it’s gonna go higher. I think that would be dangerous, but I think if you fundamentally use debt as a tool. Based on cash flows and you use conservative cash flows, you know, so the debt service coverage ratio, you know, if you have $10,000 a month going out in debt service, make sure you have at least, you know, $12,000 a month coming in on income or above. Then that’s how you begin to build resiliency into your portfolio. And the other thing is don’t borrow long to invest short, right? So your duration matters a lot. We were talking about this before we hit the record button, and I think what happens is people. Uh, make a mistake when they try to operate like a bank. ’cause banks lend short and invest long. And the only reason they get away with it is because they have the Federal Reserve Bank system backstopping them. But you don’t have that as an individual, so you better to do the opposite. Um, if you can match the durations, that’s perfect, right? ’cause then you know what your interest expense is for the, for the duration of the investment. And once you lock in the spread, then you just have the counterparty risk of the, whoever is responsible for creating that income stream that’s gonna service the debt you use to control the asset. And then it just comes down to underwriting and then recourse. And if you feel comfortable with the underwriting and you feel comfortable with the recourse, and you’ve got spread and you’ve locked in a, a duration. Um, that, that is compatible, then that can be a, a, a fairly safe way to use debt. And if interest rates work against you, then you’re okay. And if interest rates work for you, you might be able to refinance your debt and actually increase your spread, but you don’t need it to happen to be successful. Let’s talk a little bit more about what you’re doing right now. So in the past year, you’ve launched, um, several new initiatives. You had masterminds via platforms. Tell us a little bit about this and, and a little bit more what, what you’re trying to accomplish. Well, you know, after losing my wife, um, you, you go through this. Period of time of like figuring out, okay, life is short. What do I want to get done before I left die myself. And so, um, after thinking about that, I went back to really what I came to do when I first met Robert Helms and got involved in the real estate guys. And so I just kinda went back to home base and. Then the other thing is now I’ve got 17 grandchildren, and so I’m thinking a lot less like a father, more like a, a grandfather, a founding father. And, um, and so I’m thinking about what the world is gonna be like in 40, 50, 60 years, and what can I do to plant a seed that will make that world better for my grandchildren? And so I, I did a couple things. One is, um, after I left the real estate guys, we were going through a merger with Ken McElroy, George Gammon and Jason Hartman to create, um, a mastermind group, which we did. And I, I was CEO of that for the. The year during the merger. And that took up some time. And the second thing I decided to do, uh, ironically, it was after a conversation I had with Charlie Kirk. I had a conversation with Charlie Kirk. I said, Hey, I’ve got this idea to help, uh, K through 12 get involved in, in capitalism by starting businesses or working with businesses. Their parents start, and I explained to him the model. He goes, I love it. I want to help you. And so that encouraged me. And then I had a follow up meeting in January of 20. 24 with Mark Victor Hansen, and he really encouraged me. And so with the strength of those two endorsements, I go, you know, I’m gonna do this. And so, uh, I left the real estate guys in, um. March, late March of 2024, and in the summer of 2024, I, I launched the Raising Capitalists Foundation, and people can learn more about that by going to raising capitalists plural.org. And I, I literally launched it at Freedom Fest on July 13th, 2024 and five minutes before I took the stage, Donald Trump got shot. Always remember where I was and how distracting it was, but I did record that presentation and it’s on the website, and so it explains the model. But in, in short, it’s pairing, um, or it’s, it’s putting parents who are in what Kiyosaki, uh, rich Dad would call the E-Class employees. And, uh. Put them under a mentorship program with experienced entrepreneurs and investors to help them start a business, a side hustle. They need the money and they need a mentor. And so then they, um, it can create a situation where their children can come to work for them in the business. And today, information Society, you know, there’s a lot of things kids can do where they learn real life skills, um, working with their parents. So that’s what the Raising Capitalist Foundation is all about. Then I launched two shows. Uh, in 2025, uh, one is I literally just launched like a week ago, and that’s. That Donald Trump video was really the first one that I put out, the Donald Trump versus Peter Schiff video on YouTube. I haven’t even started the podcast side of it. Um, and in on September 27th, uh, on pray.com, I started, uh, another show that, that one’s called the Main Street Capitalist. So if you go to YouTube and look at the Main Street capitalist, you’ll, you can find me there. And then the other one I created was the Christian capitalist. And I kind of went back to, you know, my, my core roots of realizing when I started looking at. Where the country was at, John Adams said that, um. Our Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people and is really wholly inadequate for any other, and so I thought, you know what? I’m I, I’m going to do that because my experience as a, as a Christian businessman is that I find that sometimes the stuff I get in church is more consumer oriented, and it doesn’t, it’s more employee oriented. I, I don’t. And, and then the other part of that is I created a, a ministry called Fellowship, a Christian capitalist, which is really about helping people put purpose into their business and then, you know, express their faith. Love your neighbor. Through their business. And so I’ve got all these different initiatives going and then I created the Main Street Media Network because I wanting to reach youth. I hired a YouTube coach and I said, look, I want to create content to encourage youth. He goes, that’s great. You can’t do it. You’re too old, he said, so what you need to do is find young people you can mentor and teach them the things that you’ve learned and let them teach it in their own words and they’ll reach their generation better than you. So with Main Street Media Network, I’m I, I’ve got. Two guys that I’m apprenticing right now, but I’m gonna be adding a lot more. Um, one, one young man is 20 years old, the other one is 26 years old. And, uh, I just came back from the Turning Point USA event where we had a broadcast booth and they were conducting interviews and I did the New Orleans Investment Conference. And so these guys are sitting down with Peter Schiff, Robert Kiyosaki, Mike Maloney, Ken McElroy, you know, you, you know what that did for you, buck with your show. You know, you, you met all these people through us and then you. We’re able to build upon that and create a very credible show. So I’m doing that for these guys that are in their twenties with the idea that they will be able to reach a generation of people. Uh, I call it putting Boomer Wisdom in Gen Z mounts. I mean, they get to process it and it gets to be their own. And I’m helping them build financial podcasts that actually make the money and is the foundation of, in this case, they’re both capital raisers of their capital raising business. I got all these different things going, but I’m doing it through leaders, so I’m not trying to do all things myself. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I’m building out an ecosystem to accomplish all these goals and so far so good. It’s a lot. Sounds working like a young man, man, man. I’ll tell you that. I know, I know. Wow. I I thought you were gonna slow down after you. No, I’ve actually, I put my, I put, I put my foot on the gas. I, I’ve probably never worked, uh, harder. Um, but I, I think I’m working smart, you know, so I’m hiring coaches and I’m bringing in, um, leaders and going through all that EOS and organizing to scale stuff. Sounds good. Well, always a pleasure, Russ. Um, make sure not to be a stranger to have you on again, um, you know, in a few months and figure out where you’re going with all this stuff. All the new things that you’ve accomplished, but it’s, uh, it’s great to see you. Well, happy to be here, proud of you. Uh, keep up the good work and keep educating people. Thank you. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens to you. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealthformulabanking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. As always, Russ, uh, is, uh, you know, he’s, he’s got a lot of wisdom. He is the guy you really wanna listen to. And I would encourage you to follow his work anyway. Uh, just pivoting back, you know, to where this economy is and all that. I think for me personally, it’s about allocating capital in a market that is a, uh, is certainly losing value in its dollars. And, um, and I think that we’re gonna continue to see that. Speaking of that, make sure if you haven’t, as I mentioned before, sign up for the Accredited Investor Club. Go to wealthformula.com, go to investor club, as we have plenty of those types of things that are hedging against inflation, um, saving taxes in terms of tax mitigation strategies, that kind of thing. Check it out. That’s it for me This week on Well Formula Podcast. This is Buck Joffrey signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealthformularoadmap.com.

First off — Happy New Year. To kick off the year, this week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is a solo one from me. I spend the episode walking through my outlook for 2026 and sharing a few predictions for how I think this cycle is going to play out. Lately, I keep hearing the same question phrased in different ways. The economy feels tight, but markets are holding up. Growth is coming in stronger than expected, inflation is easing, and yet a lot of the signals people usually rely on just don't seem to be lining up. That disconnect is really the starting point for this episode. Rather than reacting to headlines or making short-term calls, I wanted to step back and talk through the mechanics of what's actually driving this environment — and why it looks so different from the cycles most of us learned about. A lot of it comes down to debt, policy constraints, how capital moves today, and the growing influence of technology. When you start looking at those pieces together, some of the things that feel confusing begin to make a lot more sense. This isn't meant to be alarmist or overly optimistic. It's simply an attempt to frame the environment clearly so you can think about it more intelligently — especially if you're deploying capital or deciding whether it makes sense to sit on the sidelines. If you've felt like the economy and the markets aren't really speaking the same language right now, I think you'll find this episode useful. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  You need to be out of the dollar and into the investor class because that that widening gap between those who have, who own things, who own assets and those who do not is gonna continue to widen. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast, and today I am going to do something a little bit different. I’m gonna kind of give you. My perspective, maybe predictions I dare say about, uh, the upcoming year in 2026, how I look at it, what I think, uh, uh, is likely outcome and why. Not that I am any smarter than any of you on this stuff, but I’ve actually kind of sat down and, and thought about, you know, the things that are going on in the macroeconomic. Side of things and, um, put some stuff together and, uh, hopefully you’ll enjoy it. We’ll have, uh, that right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from. Your own bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it at result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your invest. Get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealthformulabanking.com. Again, that’s wealthformulabanking.com. Welcome back everyone, and, uh, happy New Year to you. I forgot to even say that in the intro. How rude of me. Hopefully you had a great holiday, you had a great Christmas, and you’re bringing in the new year with a vision of health and wealth and PO prosperity and all that stuff. So anyway, let’s talk a little bit about, uh, you know what I am. Kinda looking at for 2026. Now, when you think about, well, what are these predictions and what could they be and all that, um, interest rates, inflation markets, you know, uh, let’s set the foundation for how I’m thinking about it, because everything else really kind of builds on it. And the most important thing to understand is that debt. Is really now I think the main character in the economy. I know we, people have been talking about this for a very long time, but I think, I think the debt issue is really, really becoming something that cannot be ignored, and I’ll get into that in a while. Obviously, I’m not saying that inflation and interest rates don’t matter. They matter enormously. Uh, those are the things that people actually feel, right? Higher prices, higher mortgage rates, higher insurance costs. What I’m saying is that the level of debt now determines really how decisions on those things are made from policy makers. You know, how do they respond to inflation and interest rates, recessions market stress. What debt does is it actually kinda limits the range of choices around how policy makers react to all these things. So once you see that, the behavior of the economy starts to, I think, make a lot more sense. So let’s start with. Sovereign debt, and I’m gonna start really basic here because the question is, you know, what exactly is sovereign debt? Okay. And sovereign debt is the money a government owes, okay? In the US it exists because the government consistently spends more than it collects in taxes, and that gap is called the deficit. When that happens year after year, you have an accumulation of debt. Now, when debt is low, it’s, it’s pretty manageable, right? But when debt gets very large, it starts to influence policy decisions, and that’s where we are right now. Uh, here’s the key mechanic that I think most people don’t really think about, right? Governments don’t pay off debt the way you and I, you know, pay off our debt, like mortgage or whatever. They always refinance it, right? So when the US government borrows money, it issues bonds. That’s how it does, those bonds have maturity dates, and when you buy a bond, you’re, you know, you’re loaning the government money. So when a bond matures, the government owes that principle back to you. Right? So that’s, that’s kind of how well we talk about, we talk about debt, but the government doesn’t save money over time to pay off that bond. Like, I mean, that’s the way you would think about it for you and me, right? I mean, at some point you’re like, ah, I really need to pay off this debt. I’m just gonna pay it off with this money that I saved. Instead, what they do is when a bond comes due, it issues a new bond and uses the money from that new bond to pay back the old one. Okay. Now, if that sounds familiar, uh, to you, it’s because it’s pretty much what we would call in plain English refinancing, right? Now imagine though, the government issued a bond a few years ago when interest rates were near zero. That bond matures today, interest rates are much higher, right to pay off the old bond. The government issues a new one at today’s higher rates. So the debt doesn’t disappear, it just becomes more expensive to carry, right? I mean, it’s just like you got a mortgage, you know you had a, a great rate, but you only got it for seven years and all of sudden you gotta refinance it. Gosh, all of a sudden that rate went really higher and your payments are much higher, and the debt payments going up, you know, for the government, what adds to that deficit? It’s a really, really vicious cycle. Now, take that process and multiply it across trillions of dollars of debt. Now you can start seeing why interest rates matter so much in a high debt system. Now, what makes this especially important right now is that for over the last several years, the US issued a very large amount of short-term debt. Short-term debt matures quickly, and that means large portions of government debt. Come due every year and have to be refinanced at whatever the interest rate exists at the time. So even if deficit stock growing tomorrow, which they won’t, the government would still need smooth functioning financial markets just to keep refinancing what it al what already exists now. This is why the economy has become so sensitive to interest rates, liquidity and confidence. Higher interest rates increase the cost of refinancing, right? We’ve mentioned that already. And that pushes deficits higher and forces even more borrowing. So I mentioned liquidity. What is that? Well, liquidity is about how easily money moves through the system. When liquidity is good, bonds are easily absorbed. Banks lend markets function normally, and when liquidity dries up, refinancing becomes fragile. That stress. Stress in the market spreads quickly. And then finally, confidence I mentioned too. Why does confidence matter? Well, confidence matters because investors need to believe that the system is gonna hold together. When confidence weakens, guess what happens? Well, what would happen if you think about it with a loan, a higher risk loan? While investors demand higher yields like refinance, it becomes even more expensive. And problems compound fast. Now, this is why Pol policymakers are extremely uncomfortable with high borrowing costs, reduced lending, falling asset values, and deep recessions. Recessions, by the way, don’t make debt easier to manage. They make it harder by reducing tax revenue and worsening debt ratios. Now that brings me to a, something that I am feeling sort of back and forth with. Um. You know, a listener who sent me some commentary about, you know, the fear of going back to 1970s, eighties style interest rates. But the thing is that I just don’t think that comparison works, and here’s why. Okay, so in the 1970s, the US had far less debt. Interest rates could go very high without threatening the government’s ability to refinance itself. Now today, with debt much larger relative to the economy, very high rates don’t just fight inflation. They stress the entire financial structure, right? You can’t just say, oh, we’re gonna make super high rates because the cost of all that debt the government has is gonna be extraordinarily expensive. Now, that doesn’t mean that rates can’t rise. It means policymakers have far less tolerance for how high and how long rates can stay elevated. It’s a completely different system from the 1970s and eighties. So I think trying to put things into that context is probably not, um, not a, a good way to think about it. So why am I fo focusing on this right now? Uh, instead of a few years ago, because again, we stu we didn’t suddenly become a high debt economy this year. So what changed? Well timing a massive amount of debt that was issued at very low interest rates, as I mentioned before, is now maturing and being refinanced at much higher rates, and that shift is no longer theoretical. It’s happening in real time. Last year, much of that low uh, rate, debt was still in place. Interest costs hadn’t fully reset, but going into 2026, they have no, I, I keep talking about, you know, how much we’re paying an interest, right? Because again, that’s a big difference between now and the 1970s when you could have, you know, you didn’t have as much debt so you could pay more interest on it. Right now, the US is now spending roughly a trillion dollars a year just on interest. Her perspective, right? I mean, what’s a trillion dollars? Uh, what does that even mean for the normal person? Well, for Perce perspective, that’s the defense budget. $1 trillion. It’s more than Medicare, more than most major federal programs. And the thing is that money doesn’t do anything, right. It doesn’t create growth. It just services past borrowing. And this is the point where debt stops being background noise, kind of an annoyance that people just say, well, we’ll kick it to the next generation. It start starts actively shaping, uh, policy decisions because it’s, it’s a thing that you gotta pay for. You gotta keep paying for it. So the takeaway I want you to carry forward is simple. We now live in a system where policymakers don’t have the luxury of letting things break when debt is low. Governments can tolerate deep recessions like you saw in the seventies and eighties and long recoveries. When debt is high, they can’t because even small shocks can just really get outta control quickly. And that’s the framework I think, uh, that I’m using as we move into interest rates, inflation, and what all this means for markets going into 2026. So let’s talk about interest rates. You’ve heard me say that I think that interest rates are gonna come down. Um, they’re gonna continue to tick down a little bit. I don’t think a lot, but I do think there’ll probably be at least one more rate cut. I think, you know, you’re probably gonna have some, um, uh, some lowering in the 10 year and, and the bond market in general. Uh, but interest rates are not gonna go back to 2010, right? They just aren’t. And. The 2010s were not normal. There were a very specific period created by very specific conditions, right? Inflation was persistently low, uh, but just wouldn’t go up. Globalization, uh, push prices down. Capital was abundant. Debt levels, well, they were high, but they’re rising, but they hadn’t become what they are now. And because of that, central banks could hold rates near zero without much consequence. That environment, unfortunately, does not exist now. So today, debt is much higher. Inflation risk is real again, and investors expect to be compensated for lending money long term. So even when rates decline from current levels, they do not return, uh, they will not return to where people, uh, anchor them psychologically. If they’re thinking about the 2000 tens, they’re gonna settle higher. Within the 2000 tens baseline, you see policymakers are kind of stuck if rates, uh, say too high for too long. We mentioned this before. Refinancing government debt becomes increasingly expensive. Interest costs rise, deficits, widen, and then you get that financial stress that’s spreads through the credit markets. But if rates are pushed too low for too long, borrowing accelerates. And that’s. When inflation resurfaces and confidence in the currency weakens, so then that’s the tug of war. So policymakers, uh, you know, they, they can no longer choose between high rates and low rates. They’re gonna be choosing how to manage, uh, the trade-offs, right? So what’s gonna happen is that you’re gonna see that rates are gonna move within a range. Uh, they come down when something breaks, they move back up when inflation pressures recurrent. Um, that’s why volatility matters more than the exact. Level of rates going forward, in my opinion. So we’re, we’re not returning to free money. We are also not headed to a permanent 1970 style high rate world. What we are doing is entering a time where borrowing costs matter. Again, refinancing is not guaranteed, and rate swings are part of the system, and that naturally leads to the question of inflation. So once you understand why rates. You know, don’t go back to the 2010. The next question becomes, uh, well, if policymakers can’t keep rates high for long and they can’t push them back to zero either, then what are they actually trying to ac accomplish? Well, the answer is that, that the goal is kind of shifted for decades. Economic policy was focused on disinflation, um, you know, pushing inflation lower and lower. Over time, uh, and inflation was actually treated as a failure, and that made sense. In a world with lower debt in a high debt world, that logic sort of breaks down, right? Deflation, which is actually falling prices, increases the real value of debt. Think about that for a moment. Like just in terms of. You know, you have a mortgage and you know, sometime, you know, your parents might have like a 30 year mortgage or something like that, that they’ve had for 25 years. They’ve been paying it off and it’s great. But the bigger thing to notice is the amount of money that they borrowed is actually very small in real world dollars because it’s, you know, 25 years later. See, inflation is bad when it’s, you know, you’re dealing with it, but inflation is. Good at one other thing, which is it’s good at eroding debt. It will make, uh, the amount of the value of the, you know, the actual money that you owe on debt lower over time. So that’s why you can’t have deflation, right? You can’t have deflation because that increases the real value of the debt. It discourages spending, slows growth and makes refinancing harder. So in today’s system, deflation is way, way more dangerous than moderate inflation. And so because of that inflation really isn’t something that I think is quite as important that has to be eliminated at all costs. That, you know, you have to be right at 2%, which is, you know, kind of what the, the fed his, his target is, right? Instead, what you gotta do is you gotta manage it. Of course, that doesn’t mean you want runaway inflation. What they wanna do is have enough inflation to keep nominal growth positive and prevent debt burdens from become heavier again. Why? What do I mean by that? You gotta have enough inflation to erode the debt that we have, right? So this is why that 2% inflation target should be understood. As, you know, kind of aspirational, but not absolute because having a little higher inflation, yeah, it hurts people. It’s, uh, it hurts people on a day-to-day basis, but actually helps with that. So even at, uh, you know, inflation sell a bit higher than, than, than the, you know, 2% fed target say it’s 4%, it’s actually eroding, uh, you know, it is eroding purchasing power, but it’s also eroding debt. It’s, it’s stabilizing debt dynamics. From the system’s perspective, of course that’s helpful. But for us, we’re paying for things on a day-to-day basis to see the cost of eggs and all that. It’s, it’s frustrating, right? And that tension between system stability and personal cost, it’s one of the defining features of the economy heading into 2026. So when you see policymakers tolerate inflation, uh, longer. Then you think they should or step in quickly When markets kind of wobble, it’s not confusion or incompetence, it’s actually constraint because debt limits the available choices. Rates are managed within a range. Inflation is guided and not eliminated. Now put those together and you get the environment we’re moving into, which is an economy where markets can look. Resilient, even while people feel stretched, right? I mean, that’s kinda what we’re feeling. Everybody’s like, oh, these markets are doing fantastic, you know? But then, you know, you look at consumer confidence, it goes down. It’s been going down every month. This is an environment where asset prices recover faster than wages, and we’re understanding how policy reacts becomes a real advantage. So that’s kind of my macro setup for 2026. Um, you know, with that framework, we can start looking into the first prediction I’ll make. And again, these are not, you know, crazy predictions. Uh, they are just generalized things that I think you’re gonna see. So, like the first one is that the markets will stop being reliable proxy for the economy. You could argue that’s already happened, right? Markets in the economy kind of stopped correlating. We saw it after the financial crisis, right? We saw it very clearly even during COVID. The decoupling itself is not new. What’s new is that that decoupling is no longer temporary. It’s become the baseline that’s become the new normal. Uh, for most of modern history people had a fairly reliable mental model, right? You probably do. If you grew up in the eighties and nineties, uh, as a kid or whatever, when the economy felt bad, layoffs, we growth falling in con incomes, markets usually reflected the pain. Right. Sometimes there was a gap. Sometimes markets recovered a little earlier, but eventually things kinda re converged. The economy healed. We just caught up in the markets and lived experience kinda lined up. Now that’s the model that most people still have in their heads, and that’s why so many people feel so confused right now. I mean, I feel confused by it. So what’s changed going into 2026? You know, it, it is, it’s structural Now. We’re no longer living in a system where policy intervenes only during emergencies. We are, uh, in a system where policy is always on, debt is permanently high, rates are actively managed, inflation is tolerated rather than eliminated. And as a result of that, markets aren’t really necessarily responding primarily to how. The economy feels to people they’re responding. Uh, you know, it’s responding to refinancing needs. Liquidity management. Uh, confidence preservation. That’s a very different signal. COVID is the clearest example of that ship, but it’s, it’s important to understand it correctly. So in 2020, the economy was literally shut down, right? Unemployment exploded. Uh, small businesses were collapsing, right? Like, this is COVID and yet markets bottom quickly. We saw that and then bam. All time highs, even though life kind of felt terrible for a lot of people. And that wasn’t because the economy was healthy, it was because policy overwhelmed fundamentals. And at the time that felt extraordinary. It felt very different. Like this doesn’t make any sense. What’s different now is that we’re still using the same playbook but with out in obvious crisis. So intervention is no longer reactive. It’s, you know, uh, it’s preventative. So what do I predict for 2026? Well, markets are gonna stop being a reliable proxy for economic health. Uh, you, you people can just stop talking about that. Like it, like it, it means anything anymore. Markets going to increasingly reflect how constrained policymakers are and how much liquidity is in the system, and how aggressively risk is being managed. They’re not gonna, the markets are not gonna tell you. About affordability, wage pressure, or whether life feels easier or harder for people. Right. Those are completely gonna, those are, it’s just a standard thing now that those are uncorrelated and the gap is not, uh, abnormal anymore. It’s. The operating environment. So what do you do with that information? Well, for an individual investor, this environment requires a real mindset shift, right? You can’t rely on your gut anymore. You can’t say, man, I feel like this economy doesn’t feel good. So the market’s gonna look at the, I mean, you, you, you know, a lot of people feel like the economy doesn’t feel good to them because of inflation, because of what happened with interest rates and all that stuff, right? But look it, you’ve got. Record breaking, uh, stock market numbers. You can’t rely on your gut anymore. Your gut is telling you the economy feels bad. For many people, that’s absolutely true. Costs are high. Again, things feel tight, and the instinct is to wait to sit in cash. To assume markets would reflect that pain, but that instinct used to work. And in this system it doesn’t because markets are no longer pricing in how the economy feels. They’re pricing policy response. Liquidity and constraints. So if you wait for the economy to feel good before you act, it’s gonna be way too late. So instead of asking, does the economy feel weak, you need to start asking different questions. You need to ask how constrained policymakers are, how quickly liquidity will return if markets wob on it, and where capital tends to flow first when policy steps sit. In other words. You gotta start really thinking about investing, right? Like you gotta, like right now. Now I’ve talked, I’ve beat this over many times before, but you know, you have, if you’re, if you’re saving money right now and you’re looking and you are wondering what to do, look for things that are on sale now. I spent real estate’s on sale right now. Right? Get your money into the markets one way or another. That’s what I would say. Whatever it is that you want to invest in. Don’t let your money just erode because this lack of correlation is, it’s a really, really important thing and it’s, it’s gonna continue to happen and you know what else is gonna happen Because of that, you’re gonna see an increasing widening up the wealth gap. People whose income is tied primarily to wages are, are gonna experience that inflation directly, right? Their money’s trapped in the real economy where costs rise faster than income. But investors on the other hand, have an opportunity to participate in the markets that are supported by this sort of unnatural infrastructure that I just mentioned, right? As asset prices are gonna continue going up. Now, I’m not here to judge whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m just telling you how it’s functions. So the investor class increasingly benefits from asset appreciation, right? Early access to liquidity. While lower income groups often can participate in that upside. Even as their cost of living rise, because they’re not in the markets, they’re not, they don’t own assets. So again, you have to stop, you know, using how the economy feels is your primary investing signal. If you wanna protect and grow your wealth in this environment, you need to understand how policy reacts, how you know liquidity moves, how assets behave when the system is under constraint. And in other words, uh, you know. Frankly, you just need to be part of the winning class, which is the investor class. Alright, so that’s kind of, uh, hopefully that made sense to you. Here’s another prediction for you, and this is probably more related to some of the things that we talk about usually, but I’ll say that multifamily and commercial real estate are going to finish their washout, and the window is gonna start to really close again. I’ve talked about this. Before, you’ve probably heard me say this, but let’s talk about multifamily and commercial real estate again, because you know, this audience doesn’t need just theory. You’ve already lived through the pain or the past two years you’ve seen deals blow up, capital calls go out, refinancings fail. So the real question going on in 2026 is not whether real estate breaks. It’s already, it already did. It already did. The real question is how much longer this phase lasts and what replaces it. My view is that 2025 into early 2026, um, represents the final phase of this unwind in the beginning of stabilization. I’m not predicting an immediate boom, not a return to 2021 by any means, but the end of obvious distress. So what’s happened already from 2022 to 2024? Multifamily and commercial real estate absorbed the fastest rate shock in modern history. Many of you lived through that. I lived through that. It’s painful. Debt costs doubled or tripled. Cap rates moved hundreds of basis points. You know, bridge debt structures broke, uh, refinancing assumptions collapsed. Now, a lot of the deals, I mean, I would say most of the deals, uh, uh, that, you know, kind of imploded, uh, shared the same DNA, you know, peaking price, uh, purchases, uh, during peak prices in 2021, early 2022. Uh, you know. Floating rate thin or negative cash flow based on, you know, the rates at the time. Maybe it was positive business plans that were really dependent on refi and rent growth. Um, those deals though, have largely already defaulted, recapitalize, or, you know, they’re being quietly handed back. And that matters because markets don’t keep breaking the same wave forever. If, if you’re seeing right now and if you’re in our investor club, you are. 30% discounts on a regular basis. Right? On a regular basis compared to the peak. Don’t assume that’s gonna last. That this is the key point I wanna make very clearly. If you’re looking at multifamily or commercial deals today that are trade trading at that 30% below where they were a couple years ago, you should not assume that window stays opening. Definitely because the level of discount there, uh, the level of discount exists because. Dried up liquidity, uh, because of that violent rate reset, uh, uncertainty. But here’s the thing, markets don’t stay frozen forever and as soon as pricing stabilizes, even at higher cap rates, which are going to be higher than they were, because you’re not gonna see interest rates down at zero, capital is gonna start to move again. And stabilization doesn’t require rates to go back to zero. It just requires some level of predictability. So here’s the sequence of what happens first, you know, the distress slows, uh, you see less and less defaults, and then slowly but surely cap rates stop expanding, right? That alone brings back buyers. Then as rates drift mo lower and volatility declines, lenders reenter selectively, debt becomes a billable again. It’s not cheap. It’s definitely usable and that brings more liquidity. When I say liquidity, in this context, I’m talking about just more deals getting done. And once liquidity returns, cap rates don’t stay wide forever. They compress, right? It’s competition. And again, when they compress, they’re not gonna go back to 2021 levels, but enough to meaningfully lift asset values from distressed pricing. This can happen faster than people expect, right? People underestimate the fact that there is an enormous amount of capital sitting on the sidelines right now in money market funds, short term treasuries, private capital, waiting for clarity. That capital isn’t, you know, permanent. The moment investors believe that rates of peak, that prices of stabilized downside risks is contained, that money starts to chase yield. When it does the transition from, nobody wants this, everyone wants exposure again, can happen surprisingly fast. In other words, I’m not saying I think this will happen in 26, but the shift from a market that is on sale, which I’ve described it as to a market that is starting to look a little frothy, can really be just a couple of years. And in that situation, I’d rather be a net seller, right? You wanna be accumulating. During this phase of for sale so that you can sell in froth. So what this means is that the market is, you know, uh, is not a market to wait for everything to feel perfect, because by the time it does, the obvious discounts are gonna be gone. And if you wait for perfect clarity, you’re gonna be competing, you competing with institutional capital, with large private funds and, and, and yield hungry money coming outta cash. The opportunity is not assuming distress lasts forever. It is. It’s in recognizing when the market is transitioning from forced selling, which is what is happening even now to price discovery. So ultimately, the prediction is this multifamily and commercial real estate, that that washout is completed in 2026 and the window created by distress really starts to close. Deep discounts don’t persist. Once market stabilized, which I think is what’s gonna happen, and then I think you’re gonna start to see a shift. You’re gonna start to see more deals, more liquidity, and that’s gonna return faster than people expect. In other words, this is gonna be the end of, you know, sort of this bargain basement, you know, panic pricing. And once real assets stabilize and liquidity returns, attention inevitably turns, uh, to the currency, those assets are priced in. Which brings us to the prediction number three. That dollar, okay, the dollar doesn’t collapse, but it does continue to erode. It slowly leak, right? Let’s talk about the dollar, ’cause you hear about this all the time, right? A nausea, you hear the, the weakening of the dollar. Um, this is one of those topics that where people tend to jump to extremes. You know, on one side you hear the dollar is about to collapse. On the other side you hear the dollar’s strong and everything’s fine. I think, um, the truth is somewhere in, in the middle. And my prediction for 2026 is simple. Um, again, the dollar doesn’t really explode. It doesn’t get replaced. It can just continues to erode slowly but surely. And that’s how reserve currencies actually behave when debt gets high. Right. So why no collapse, right? Because you got like people out there, uh, worried about the collapse of the US dollar. The US dollar is gonna remain dominant, not because it’s perfect, but because there’s no real alternative at scale. There just isn’t. Okay? There’s no other currency with markets as deep, as liquid and as widely used for trade debt and collateral. So, you know, reserve currencies, you know, you hear about the, the worry about us being the reserve currency. Well, reserve currencies don’t disappear overnight. They erode gradually, but they don’t disappear overnight. And that erosion shows up not as a crash, but again as persistent inflation, right? It’s rising, you know, real asset prices, which is again, where you wanna be, and a slow loss of purchasing power over time. Again, that brings us back to the whole issue of debt we were talking about, right? So in a highly indebted system, policymakers are not incentivized to aggressively defend the currency at all costs, right? So very high interest rates might strengthen the dollar in the short term, but they also make debt harder to service and financial stress worse, right? So instead of choosing strength or collapse. Um, you know, policy drifts towards tolerance, right? Inflation is allowed to run a little hotter than people expect, because again, it’s gonna erode that debt. The currency weakens slowly, therefore, rather than violently, right? Again, currency weakening. It’s that, it, it’s so entwined with this idea of inflation because debt becomes easier to manage in real terms. And one of the things I hear, and I’ve been sort of in these conversations back and forth with, um. At least one of you out there, uh, in, in emails is that, you know, I hear, uh, that, that, that there’s a, a serious problem for interest rates because of, you know, China, uh, selling US treasuries. And because of that you might get the collapse of the dollar. In fact, in this conversation, it was not only about China, but also Europe. Which, you know, I hadn’t actually heard anybody mention that before, but I guess that’s out there in the ecosystem and some of the newsletters. Now, all that sounds scary, but it really misunderstands how the system actually works. What exactly happens when someone or a country sells treasuries? Well, they don’t dis, they, they don’t just destroy the dollars. What they’re doing is they just swap $1 asset for another, right? The dollars don’t even lead the system. They change hands. So this idea of China selling off all it t trade, well, China’s been, uh, reducing its treasury holdings for years and the dollar hasn’t collapsed. The market absorbed it because treasuries are the deepest, most liquid market in the world. And then this idea of Europe, of of Europe actually dumping treasuries because, you know, they’re not happy with Donald Trump and what he’s doing in Ukraine and all that, that would be an absolute nightmare for, for Europe. That would hurt their own economy. That’s the last thing that an indebted government wants. So foreign selling, yeah, sure it’s gonna move yields, but it, it’s not gonna implode the dollar. But the reality of the, uh, erosion of the dollar is real. I don’t think anybody questions that anymore, and I think that is another reason that you need to be buying. Real assets. You need to be buying equity. You need to be on the side of the investor class. Okay? That’s, that’s how you combat all of this. So the real takeaway here ultimately is that, you know, it isn’t, uh, to abandon the dollar, right? It isn’t. It’s, it’s just to stop pretending that holding cash is neutral. It’s not, it, most of your wall suits and assets that, that can’t adjust. You know, they can’t grow as, you know, as, as asset prices grow, then you’re making a bet on currency stability that literally no one believes is, is going to be the base standard anymore. Everybody knows, every economist, every country, every everywhere knows that these currencies are eroding. You don’t freak out about the dollar, but don’t, don’t, don’t be like heavily in dollars. Start getting into the markets. Alright, well, you know, I’m talking a lot about esoteric macro stuff, but let’s kind of get into some stuff that you might think is fun, more fun maybe. Okay. You, a lot of you are into Bitcoin. Well, I think that, you know, Bitcoin is gonna continue to mature. And the next look, leg up looks like, you know, because of more adoption, not because of hype, which isn’t maybe not as, as, as fast and violent, but it’s, it’s, it’s a lot more predictable. For those of you who are still unfortunately listening to the likes of Peter Schiff about Bitcoin, you gotta stop doing that because Bitcoin is not tulips. Right? A lot of people still talk about it like it’s a fad that could just vanish. We’re long past that phase. Bitcoin is, is, is a $2 trillion asset and in the history of the world, there has never been a $2 trillion asset that went to zero. Is it volatile? Yeah, it is. It can absolutely continue to be wildly volatile, but you’re not going to zero. And my prediction is not overly crazy. It’s just that. Bitcoin is going to continue to increase in price, but it’s not become, not because of speculative, uh, you know, because it’s a speculative trade anymore, right? I think it’s because of adoption. Uh, adoption is going to become the real meaningful driver of market capitalization. So what do I mean by that? It just means more people are seeing it as a real asset, and it has to become, when it becomes a real asset class, everyone has to have some of it. Every major institution has to have some of it because it’s an its own asset class. And when they do that, it just drives up the entire market capitalization of that asset. And when you have an asset that has a finite amount, which in the case of Bitcoin, there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. You have constant adoption, constant slow, but persistent growth in market capitalization, the asset has to become more expensive. Now, what do I mean by this adoption? Well, places that you would never think in a million years, a few years ago, that that would be buying Bitcoin or you know, ETFs, B to Bitcoin ETFs are doing. So Harvard. Harvard is a great example. Because it’s not, it’s not crypto influencer, right? It’s actually one of the most conservative, brand sensitive pools of capital in the world. But their endowment management, uh, disclosed roughly 443, uh, million dollars in its position in BlackRock, uh, BlackRock, iShares Bitcoin, Bitcoin Trust, which is ibi for those of you who, who, uh, don’t know, that’s how you can just go to your New York Stock Exchange and, and buy. Bitcoin ETFs with ibit. Now, whether you love this whole Bitcoin idea or hate it or whatever, that’s a signal that is increasingly treated like a portfolio asset. It’s not a fringe experiment, and it’s not only universities. Uh, institutional comfort is it’s just there, right? Um, custody, uh, custody regulated vehicles, positioning, size, risk controls, those kinds of things are all become part of the Bitcoin uh, environment. Many countries are already holding meaningful amounts of Bitcoin. Uh, even the US has, there’s a, there is a formalized Bitcoin reserve. Now we aren’t actively buying it, but here’s an interesting thing with Bitcoin, you can, when it is, uh, the way that the US is accumulating Bitcoin is through seizures. Alright? Bad guy gets caught. His boats, his house and his Bitcoin get, uh, confiscated. So the US will sell the house, they will sell the gold, they will sell the boats, but they will keep the Bitcoin. What does that tell you? You know? And, and there’s a lot of nations that are actually openly holding and, and buying Bitcoin. I mentioned the US China. This always seems to be, uh, you know, anti Bitcoin. Well, they actually own quite a bit the UK, Ukraine, Bhutan, El Salvador. Bottom line is there’s a big change in narrative, right? That this is a real asset. So this is something that, you know, even if it’s 1% of a major, uh, institution’s assets or less than that, or whatever, it’s part of it. And that adoption alone can move prices from, from here. And that’s what I think a lot of people miss because they’re like, well, you already had a big move and you know, instead a hundred, it’s 80 or 90 or a hundred, whatever. It’s, it’s not going much better, bigger than that. Well, Bitcoin is, is actually really small relative to global pools of capital. So at this stage, adoption alone. Not even the crazy mania of the past can make a non-trivial increase in market capitalization and therefore a mark, you know, a non-trivial increase in the actual price of Bitcoin. All it’s gonna take, and you’re gonna see this, you’re gonna see more endowments, you’re gonna see more sovereign wealth pool, pensions, mod model portfolios, all they guys daisy side, when you know, even with a small allocation. It doesn’t take too much to overwhelm the available float because Bitcoin is scarce and a lot of it’s held tightly. So as far as Bitcoin goes, what do I think is gonna happen? I believe all time highs are gonna get challenged. They’re gonna get broken again in 2026, not because again, everyone’s suddenly becoming a crypto maximas, but because adoptions could just gonna continue to grow. The wild card, I should say, is that the US moving from, we hold. What we seized in terms of Bitcoin to actively acquiring reserves could be enormous catalyst. And there is a lot of talk about this right now. Um, if the market ever believes that the US is a consistent buyer, even in a constrained budget neutral way, that changes the psychology fast. And in that scenario, I think 200,000 plus, uh, $200,000 plus Bitcoin by the end of 2026 becomes very plausible. Zooming out. I’ve said this before, you may think I’m crazy, but again, because of adoption, I think that Bitcoin is at a million dollars five to seven years from now. So what does that mean for you? Well, I mean, I think at the end of the day, if you don’t own some, you might want to, I’m not gonna give you financial advice, but again, just like Harvard’s doing it, you know, major, major endowments are saying, well. You know, maybe we’ll just buy, like, you know, 2% of that, 2% of our, our, uh, endowment will be made of something like that, right? Uh, you know, it’s just even a very small amount, but exposure to it makes a lot of sense. So I think that is something to highly consider if you are still on zero when it comes to Bitcoin. All right, now here’s my last, uh, prediction. You may have heard me talking about this before as well, that AI becomes a deflationary force that policy makers finally wake up to. And I think this is actually one of the most important and misunderstood economic developments, um, that is currently already out there. But I think it’s, it’s gonna be really recognized. By the end of 2026. Okay. Artificial intelligence is gonna stop being just a tech story, and it’s gonna become a macroeconomic story. I think that by the end of 2026, artificial intelligence is clearly, uh, you know, it’s clearly, um, going to be boosting corporate earnings while beginning to materially reshape the labor force. Um, and what’s gonna happen is that central banks and policymakers are gonna start treating it. Is a genuinely deflationary force over the next several years, and they’re gonna try to have to figure out what to do about it. And again, going back to our earlier conversation, because deflation is really a real problem for a country with an enormous amount of debt. So let’s get a little bit into the whole deflationary uh, conversation. So artificial intelligence at its core is a productivity machine, right? It allows companies to produce more. Without, with fewer inputs, fewer hours, fewer people, fewer stakes and productivity always shows up in profits before it shows up in everyday life. Right now, lower cost per transaction, faster execution, fewer people doing the same amount of work, widening margins without price increases. That’s the tell. That’s when profits rise without raising prices, something deflationary is happening underneath the surface. The biggest impact there is the labor market, right? It’s gonna be impossible to ignore. And this is where the conversation really shifts because artificial intelligence doesn’t need to eliminate jobs outright to matter. It only needs to reduce the number of people required to do it, right? So you’re thinking the labor markets, you’re gonna see a lot of this. You’re gonna see more slowing in hiring. Um, even while productivity expectations rise, and I think by late 2026, the public conversation is gonna change from will artificial intelligence affects jobs someday to why aren’t companies hiring the way they used to? And of course, that’s when people are gonna start paying attention and they’re gonna notice it’s deflationary because it’s going to be because artificial intelligence is gonna push down the cost. Of services, administration, customer support, research, and eventually decision making itself. That’s why it’s, it’s deflationary, it’s structural, right? Just think of all those things you can do for so much cheaper. That is what deflation is, right? And again, we mentioned before deflation is not something central banks are comfortable with because of debt and because debt heavy systems rely on nominal growth. Deflation makes debt heavier in real terms as opposed to what we said before, which is that inflation actually erodes debt. And that is a, a very, very challenging problem. And by 2026, I think you’re gonna hear a lot about this, you know, policy problem that we have. Which is innovation versus, you know, deflation. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide finance. Financial protection to your family if something happens to you. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealthformulabanking.com. Alright, well, so that’s basically it for my, uh, predictions. And I know I’ve kind of. Off on many different tangents, so hopefully it’s useful to you at least to start thinking and doing some of your own research. Bottom line is this, I mean, as, as a investor, what can you do? I think the big story here is understanding that, um, you need to be out of the dollar and into the investor class because that that widening gap between those who have. Who own things, who own assets, and those who do not is gonna continue to widen. And so, you know, my best, uh, won’t call it advice, but my own belief is that it is a, it is a very good time to look around and look for assets that are underpriced because I think everything is going to expand and it’s gonna ex expand. Uh, and you don’t wanna be caught, you know, on the, uh, dollar side of that equation. So. That’s it for me this week on Wealth Formula Podcast. Happy New Year. I’ll see you next week. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealthformularoadmap.com.

It's been another interesting year in the world of personal finance and macroeconomics. As we look ahead to 2026… well, who really knows what's coming? I'll be sharing my own take—and making a few predictions—in an upcoming episode. What's hard to ignore is just how unusual this moment in history is. We're coming off COVID. We went through a rapid rise in interest rates, and now a pullback. Tariffs are back in the conversation. There are a lot of moving parts, and as usual, the consensus hasn't exactly nailed it. Almost every expert was convinced tariffs would push inflation higher. I expected at least a temporary bump—some transient inflation while markets adjusted. Then the CPI report came out at 2.7%. That's a lot closer to the Fed's 2% target, and nearly half a percentage point lower than expectations. Clearly, something else is going on. At the same time, GDP came in at around 4.3% growth. That's real strength. Inflation is coming down, growth is strong, and while the labor market is still a little murky, there's no question there's underlying momentum in the system. Investors haven't quite felt it yet. It's been a sticky environment. But my sense is that we're getting closer to a shift—more liquidity, more money in the system, and markets that may start moving meaningfully again. Of course, we'll see how it all plays out. For this episode, my producer Phil pulled together some of the highlights from the show in 2025—a look back at the conversations and ideas that stood out in a year when the data kept surprising just about everyone. I hope you enjoy it. And again, happy holidays. Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with D Wealth Formula Podcast, coming to you from Montecito, California and, uh, want to wish you, first of all, a happy holidays. Merry Christmas, happy new Year, all that. And, uh, yeah, it’s been, uh, it’s been another, uh, another interesting year in the world of personal finance and macroeconomics is what, what we talk about on the show. And as we look forward to 2026, gosh, who knows what’s gonna happen, right? Uh, well I’ll give you my take in, uh, show coming up where I’m gonna make some predictions. However, you know, it’s just, it, it, it’s just such an unusual time in, in history. Um, as we kind of look at. Coming off of COVID and having those high interest rates and then coming, uh, coming down and then having Trump elected and now the tariffs and well, gosh, who knows? Right? I mean, just for example, you know, almost every expert was pretty much guaranteeing that inflation would go up because of the tariffs. I mean, even if it was transient, which frankly I thought it was gonna be transient, meaning that there was gonna be a bump in inflation. For a period of time until there was a readjustment after tariffs. Well, TPI comes up most recent CPI is actually 2.7. You know, that’s much closer to the fed target of 2%. And, um, 2.7 was, you know, I think, uh, almost a half, half percentage point less than the expected, uh, CPI, uh, report. So that, that’s obviously something else is going on there. And then. GDP numbers came out and we had a four handle. It was like 4.3, I believe, GDP. So we’ve got incredible growth. We’ve got decreasing inflation. The labor market is still, I know, a little unclear, but it seems like there’s a lot of strength in this market. Of course, it’s really sticky investors. We haven’t quite felt that strength yet, but I do think you need to start anticipating. That markets are gonna come back pretty heavy, uh, with increased liquidity, uh, and a lot of money in the system. But we shall see, uh, this show. What we’re gonna do here is, uh, my, uh, producer Phil put this together, but it’s basically some of the highlights of, uh, the show in, in 2025. So hopefully you enjoy it. Uh, and again, happy holidays. Merry Christmas, new Year. And we’ll be back right after these messages. Wealth Formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying. You compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it at result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique, it’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its back. Turbocharge your investments. Visit wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. How do you approach the process of identifying stocks that are maybe best suited for consis consistent cash flow? Or do you just pick the stocks that you like and, and create the cash flow? Or are, you know, fundamental metrics that maybe you prioritize? Yeah, the, the, the first thing to determine. I think real estate investors understand this is if I were to invest in real estate, I’m gonna determine whether I’m gonna be a flipper, or I’m gonna try and buy low forced depreciation, sell high. Or if I’m gonna be a cashflow investor where I might invest in syndication, or I am, I’m gonna have tenants in property management. And the same is true with stocks. Most people start off by thinking about price rather than cash flow. They think about buy low, sell high, like a house slipper, and that’s, that’s less tenable in stocks because in real estate, if I buy low and sell high, I can do things to force appreciation. I can renovate, I can get new management, I can put in new appliances. I, there’s things I can do to force appreciation. But once a person buys a stock, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make the stock price go up. But if you take a a, if you think of it like a real estate investor. You think about it like owning a business where the priority, as you mentioned these metrics, the priority is, Hey, what kind of cashflow will this produce be in terms of dividends and in my case, option premiums. And so some of the key metrics is, you know, if I, I’m basically buying a financial statement, same as real estate. You know, I, I, I, it is just a little different numbers in real estate. I wanna know what the net operating income is. In stocks, I might wanna know what the EBITDA is ’cause they’re essentially looking at the same types of things in real estate. I wanna know what the cap rate is in stocks. I wanna know what the PE ratio is, which is just the same number inverted. They just put the price on the top instead of the bottom. To me, I don’t see a difference between real estate and stocks, uh, in that they’re both a business or they charge someone for a good or a service. And there’s either cashflow there at the end of it or not. If people take a cash flow approach, they can begin to build on their passive income. And that contributes to that blueprint we mentioned earlier to get ’em outta the route race. So if you take a Warren Buffet approach, the most important number in that business is operational cash flow or earnings. Meaning does what they do, their operation. You know, you walk in there, a nice operation you got going here, you know, trucks are moving and you know, products are being built and shipped and, and nice operation. If they’re earning money, that means that’s the life flood of the business. That means it’s got a good moat. That means it’s pretty protected and that allows them to do two things for me. Number one is a dividend, which is exactly the same thing as a distribution in real estate. Uh, there is no difference, uh, in a syndication. I have a whole bunch of investors I’ve joined with where you have a share of this project and when the earnings come out, they distribute the, the distributions among the share shareholders. Same is true with stocks. They take the earnings, uh, we call it a payout ratio, and they take a, a, a significant amount of that money and they pay it in a dividend, same as a distribution. But what I do that’s a little bit unique buck is, uh, is I also have the options market on my side. Where I can use options to control risk, uh, to get guarantees where I can buy and sell, but even more importantly, I can offer, uh, and get paid for making promises to people. This is very much a Warren Buffet deal where it, it brings a significant increase to my monthly cash flow beyond the dividend, up to three, two and three times. Uh, the amount of money, two to 300% more cash flow. By being involved in the options market and that’s, that’s a nice secret sauce. The yield max Tesla option income, ETF, which is TSLY. And basically what it does is. Is it just does a series of longs and shorts and, and then generates what looks like to be kind of a, a ridiculous amount of, uh, dividend, uh, per, per month. So what are we missing here? What, what’s, well, you’re, you’re basically hiring those guys to mow your grass. It’s just like any other mutual fund or any other. They’re doing something you could absolutely do by yourself and not pay them a fee. There’s two cultures. There’s the advice culture and there’s the education culture and the advice culture. People say, look, I don’t wanna learn anything. Just gimme the advice. Well, you’ll pay for that in fees. And the problem with doing that is if you really listen to Warren Buffett, which 1% is enormous. Because in the wealth blueprint that we do for people, we use compounding. We use the compounding calculator to see what we’re gonna need. You drop that 1%, you give up 1% of your compounding powers as an investor over your life, it, it wouldn’t seem like 1%, but Buffet knows the truth. It’s enormous. So yeah, absolutely there are ETFs and there are funds that will do exactly what I do or what I teach people to do, but we have some advantages in doing it yourself because risk is about control. I trust myself more than I trust those guys any day of the week. And like I say, I’m doing this by month, so yeah. But it’s legit. How do you even make predictions? And second of all, I mean presumably you still have some forecasts over the next, uh, 12 to 24 months, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Our methodology lends itself to times of uncertainty like this, and that’s the benefit of really relying on the leading indicators that we have. Now. We do have to take a little bit of a different approach. We have to look at data in a lot higher frequency today. You know, a lot of the data you get from government sources or quarterly data, monthly data, but we’re having to track weekly trends with the ever-changing environment that we find ourselves in. So we’re not surprised by the time any monthly or quarterly data comes out. The level of uncertainty that we’re dealing with is certainly unprecedented. I share an index each day, um, and we are three times more uncertain today than we were at the height of the pandemic. You know, put that in perspective, right? Yeah. So we do have to adjust, um. The, the way that we’re looking at data with higher frequencies, we also have to rerun a lot of these correlation analysis. Every single time we get a new data point to see are these lead times becoming more condensed? Do we have to make adjustments in our models as a result to maybe data reacting quicker than it might have in the past? So those are some of the ways that we’re, we’re continuing to evolve in these interesting times we live in. This relates to our forecast. Our team expected some weakness in the first part of this year, and, and we knew that coming in with the, with the tariffs that were proposed during President Trump’s campaign, we did have a weak first quarter GDP number forecast. Our team was 0.1% off of nailing that first quarter GDP number, so they were right on the money there. Uh, we were very impressed with that, but we do expect a sluggish first half of the year. We call it the recovery phase of the cycle. What we mean by that is our growth rates are still building momentum, but are still negative year over year. You know, ITR. Really known for its emphasis on leading indicators. So which of the leading indicators you guys rely on the most when and, and I guess which are flashing red or green right now? I’ll give you one of each. Uh, yeah. The one we’re in right now, we look at the purchasing managers, index isms, purchasing managers index. Now we look at at on a one 12 basis. What I mean by that is we compare the most recent month, the same month one year ago. The reason we look at it on that basis is it gives us 12 month lead time into the future when you correlate it to the economy. That index was recently rising until we got the most recent month of data, and then it dropped back down. So that is giving us the mixed signal of, hey, we need to be a little bit more concerned about the prospect for growth moving forward. Now the opposite is true when we look at an indicator called capacity utilization. What Capacity utilization measures, it’s about an eight month lead time to the economy. So still a nice view into the future, but what it measures is output over capacity, and that actually continues to improve meaning. And again, really all that means on a simple level is we’re utilizing more of our existing capacity, so we’re getting busier. If we look at the consumer side of inflation that the Fed’s more concerned about in terms of setting policy, we have inflation essentially flat this year from where we are today. Now, if you look at the CPI, it’s at 2.8%. Our projection for the end of the year is 2.8%. We don’t see inflation coming down much at all. As a result of that, that’s why you’re seeing Chairman Powell back off being able to cut rates and is holding these rates steady because he sees these higher inflation risks as well. And so from our perspective, it’s very unlikely you see any meaningful interest rate decline this year. Yeah. Now again, the second quarter, GDP number can have an impact on that. We do see a very weak second quarter chairman Powell alluded just a couple of days ago to some slack in the labor market. Maybe you can get a quarter point if we have a really weak second quarter, quarter point cut, but it just seems very unlikely given how persistent inflation has been. And so we tell all of our clients, prepare for interest rates to be relatively flat this year, and prepare for interest rates to rise through the balance of the second half of the decade. It’s not just tariffs, it’s employment costs, it’s electricity costs, it’s material costs. There’s a lot more driving higher inflation than just tariffs. What macroeconomic trends are you watching right now with regards to how they’re shaping the markets today? I think there’s really three things right over the long run. They’re gonna debase the currency, that’s gonna be a persistent tailwind for all liquid, uh, assets, including stocks. Bitcoin gold and bonds. And then I think that you also are going to have a, uh, very interesting dynamic around all these tariffs, uh, and kind of the administration’s economic policies. And then the third thing is that there is a whole technology, uh, trend to, uh, pay attention to. Uh, obviously innovation is very deflationary. Uh, we’ve got, you know, things from humanoid robots to rockets to gene editing, to uh, to crypto and everything in between. And so I think those three things really tell the story of where, uh, markets potentially go in the future. When I grew up, um. S and P 500 was the benchmark. There’s a risk-free rate in bonds. I believe that my generation and younger sees Bitcoin as the benchmark. And so, uh, it’s very simple. If you can’t beat it, you gotta buy it. And I think that there’s institutions around the country who are realizing they can’t beat the benchmark and therefore they will end up buying it. And really, to me, that is, uh, maybe the most interesting. Part of the entire conversation is that Bitcoin obviously has risen significantly on a percentage basis in appreciation. Bitcoin has kind of infiltrated every corner of finance, but most importantly is it has transitioned from a high risk, you know, kind of asymmetric type asset to now it’s becoming the hurdle rate uhhuh. And if you’re the hurdle rate, you suck up a lot of capital. Yeah. Because there’s not a lot of people who can beat you. And I think that that is a very powerful position for Bitcoin to be in. And that’s how you infiltrate into, uh, the institutional portfolios. Bitcoin will stop going up. When they stop printing money. I don’t think they’re gonna stop printing money, so I don’t think Bitcoin’s gonna stop going up. That’s kind of one huge component of this. The second thing is that Bitcoin is very unique in that the higher the price goes, the less risky it is deemed by the largest pools of capital. Mm-hmm. And so usually, you know, if NVIDIA’s at a $4 trillion market cap, people like, oh, it might be overvalued there. A lot of debate. Right. Bitcoin if it was at a $4 trillion market cap would be way less risky than it when’s at 2 trillion. And so there is a lot of structural advantages, both from the legacy world but also from the Bitcoin market that I think will continue to lead to these large institutional capital pools. Uh, allocating some percentage. And the beauty is right now we have very small adoption in that world. Uh, it’s only gonna get bigger. It’s only gonna get more normalized. And I think that one of the parts people really underestimate when it comes to Bitcoin is how important time passing is. You know, if you think back, uh, there is not anyone under the age of 16 that has lived their life without Bitcoin existing. If you’re keeping large chunks of money in savings account, paying less than 1% or any percent less than inflation, you’re bleeding wealth every single day. It feels safe. It looks safe, right? ’cause the numbers may not be moving nominally but it, but it’s not safe. It’s a bucket with a hole in the bottom and you don’t even notice until it’s almost empty. That’s why the wealthy don’t hoard cash. They own assets. They own assets that inflate with inflation. If you can’t beat ’em, join them. They buy things that grow in value as dollars shrink because they understand the system. They don’t fight it, they ride it. So you’ve said many times that the current monetary system is broken and headed for reckoning. So from your perspective, what are the core flaws in the system right now and how do we get here? Well, probably the largest and most obvious underlying flaw in the monetary system is the fact that the federal government just can’t balance its budget. And so they have to take on debt to cover the deficit that they run and that deficit. Well, you know, over the course of the last 20 years, it’s gone up and down. More recently, it’s gone mostly up and, uh. We just came through a period where, you know, it was reemphasized to everybody. Just what a problem this is. Because as you’ll recall, when Trump was first elected, they were talking about those, the Department of Government Efficiency and cutting expenses and you know, maybe 2 trillion or 1 trillion. Of course, then Elon got frustrated and left and the numbers have come down and you know, Trump and the Freedom Caucus was saying they were gonna try and balance the budget or at least cut expenses. And of course, what we know is that they just passed this big beautiful bill. Which really increases the deficits and they bump the debt, uh, ceiling up by another $5 trillion. So sadly, what do many of us have seen and been saying, which is to say they just can’t stop, kind of continue. Seems to be continuing. And, um, you know, the reason why that, just to close the full circle, the reason why that matters is they, they do this debt, they issue debt to cover these deficits, and then the debt requires interest payments and, you know, there’s not enough money to make the interest payments. And so. They more or less have to print the money, you know, and inflate the money supply to keep the system going. And that’s why it’s so important to hard assets. You know, we need to grow the economy at, you know, 4, 5, 6, 7% a year, which, which we’ve never really done on real terms. Well, I think that is kind of what they’re projecting it might be, but it, it’s gonna be harder than hell to achieve. I mean, it just, where you can’t just snap your fingers and create that growth. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you start to, if you ramp up inflation. If you have 10% inflation, well then the GDP number’s gonna get bigger, fast. And so really the model they’ve used, they call it the R Star model, is that they’ve got to have faster growth. Growth rate has to be higher than interest rates, or else you’re in a debt spiral. And so what’s been happening is, by the way, that’s why Trump wants to take interest rates down so much. You know, he is called for a 300 basis point cut. Imagine right now with inflation running at three plus percent, if they cut rates to one point a half percent or one point a quarter percent, I mean, it would be good for the economy. People would refi their houses. You know, there were all kinds of, you know, growth, right? Huge. But in turn it would be inflationary, very inflationary. That’s the trap. They’re really kind of caught in. It’s a seventies kind of stagflation sort of environment. You know, if they don’t keep rates low, they’re not gonna have any growth. If they want to get growth, they’ve gotta keep rates low. That’s gonna lead to monetary creation, which is gonna lead to inflation. Look how it all resolves is very complicated and none of us know. Yeah, sure. But what I do know with very high certainty, with a lot of confidence is this is going to be an inflationary decade. It’s already been an inflationary decade, and because of the way the math is today is very highly likely to continue to be an inflationary decade until we fix this monetary system. Well, we have less than 3% adoption. Three goes to six fairly easily. You know, human beings underestimate how long change really requires, and then we really underestimate how much change actually occurs. Think the internet like we are moving into a digital planet, right? Robots are not going to use credit cards, man. They’re not gonna use, they don’t need visa. We don’t need middlemen. The cool thing about Bitcoin, unlike the Rolls Royce, is you don’t have to buy the whole Rolls Royce. You can buy a fraction of it. You know, you don’t, maybe you guys partner with each other to do apartment buildings. Well, you’re already doing fractured deals on apartment buildings, so Sure. It’s not really that different. 2%, 3% goes to six. I mean, it does go to six. You have the largest ETF in the history of ETFs, okay? This supersedes the goal. ETF by orders of magnitude. I study markets very, very well, price. Really gets people’s attention. I think price is, uh, 90% of Bitcoin. Like I am truly a supply and demand guy. Oh wow. 21 million. And you guys have lost four. You lost 4 million coins. Oh, how’d you lose the 4 million? You lost the 4 million. I know how you lost it. You mispriced it. Bitcoin has been mispriced every day. Its entire history. Dude. 19 million coins have been issued. The addressable market is 8 billion people. You don’t need ’em all. Yep. You just need a small function of those 8 billion to go, Ooh. 21 million units and and four have been lost. It’s already mispriced. Okay. They’re pricing Bitcoin at one 15 Today, assuming there’s 21 million units, we know there’s not. There’s 17, so the supply shrunk. The market caps at 2 trillion. Hello. The standard deduction for a household is now, uh, what in a low 32,000 range. And it turns out that 60% of the households in the United States cannot take advantage of itemized deductions. That is when they take their mortgage interest, property taxes, charitable deductions, they don’t get that number. And so there’s not as much benefit to home ownership as there used to be in the United States. With our big institutional players, nobody wants their appraised values to be quickly marked down to market, because if your competitors don’t do the same thing and they’re part of the index and benchmark that you compete against, you’re going to underperform. And so we’ve traditionally had a lot. Appraised values for real estate among the institutional players, especially. You don’t get this out of the private market, but you get this from the nare players, the institutional type players, and, um, and everybody’s, uh, uh, fearful of underperforming that index. I would prefer as a private investor just to go ahead, bite the bullet and mark it down. Now take the pain if in fact you’ve seen it go down. Some markets have seen property values go down 30, 35% even in multifamily, but they’ve bottomed out in the transaction market and, and absolutely the, uh, the appraisers are gonna have to bring it down and the owners are gonna have to ease up that pressure and say, yes, I want a realistic appraisal. But, um, but there is that fear of underperforming the index and that’s. What’s holding up the American appraisal firms in 2008, 9, 10, 11, we saw a lot of deep distress. The the smart money was ready for it. Now, there’s a lot of people with dry powder, as we say. Ready to p on the market hoping for some distress from those who cannot refinance now, whose, whose CMBS loan or other money is, is rolling. A couple points there. One is, I think you’re going to see more loan modifications this cycle than last time because they realize it’s temporary and they realize that not all properties are in trouble. And these tend to be the higher leverage properties. The smart private wealth investors tended to use conservative leverage over the last several years knowing we’d hit a cycle and, and they probably are 65% or less. Leverage some of the, um, greener newer investment managers might have gone up to 80% and might have even used variable rate debt when they shouldn’t have. They’re the ones getting nailed. They’re losing all their equity and that property is distressed. So there’s not that much of it out there. But there’s a little bit, and I would certainly pounce on it if you can find it. There are often a lot of sort of hidden costs associated with buying versus renting. Can you talk about trying to weed through some of that? Sure some of the highest costs that we don’t think about when we own, although we do take cut down on risk. And also I think that’s come back to consumption. I, I is the fact that there’s the opportunity cost. So think about having 50%, a hundred percent of your home paid for. This, it’s the opportunity cost. You’ve actually taken capital out of play at higher returns to put it into something that perhaps, yes, you see it as a form of an investment, but it’s also partly consumption. And I think that’s why many people end up paying for their homes when they can, because there’s an old saying, and that is, you can’t go broke if you don’t owe money on it. Right? So if you, it’s hard for the lender to come get your home and you don’t really care, right? You wanna be able to. Have no debt on your home. It doesn’t make the typical financial sense if we argue at it from leverage and returns and maximization of returns. I think most people this high end level are looking at, you know, I, I, I, I have high net worth. I’m looking at both consumption and the investment side of the component. But very often the consumption wins and the investment is I can be safe and I can own this house. Outright in many states too. Your homeowner, the home that you live in, you are actually, if you’ve homesteaded the home, you’re actually protected against lawsuits and other things that are out there. Divorce cases will protect your position in, in terms of a homestead, so you can protect a significant portion of wealth by having a paid for home. What are some of those markets that are really overpriced versus. I guess underpriced right now. So when we look at the top 10 most overpriced markets in America right now, we look at their prices, where they are and compare them to where they should be statistically modeling them. We’re seeing the most overpriced markets are Detroit at 33.5% and then falling, falling, descending. Order of Cleveland, Ohio. New Haven, Connecticut, Akron, Ohio, Worcester, Massachusetts, Las Vegas, Nevada, Hartford, Connecticut. Rochester, New York, Knoxville, Tennessee, Toledo, Ohio. You’ll notice. And these are overpriced. These are overpriced. These, the overpriced mark. That’s so, that’s sort of counterintuitive, isn’t it? Ab absolutely. But yes. Wow. Okay. And then h how about the, uh, underpriced markets? I’m curious on that too. Sure. So when we then go to the opposite end of the spectrum, and usually now with underpriced comes risk and there’s risk in both of these markets, what you wanna do, both overpriced and underpriced, what you wanna be long term in a housing market. Uh, ’cause you want to be really close to that trend and not have these dramatic swings. It’s just like stock price. We don’t like volatility. Housing, it’s, it’s dangerous for performance. The most underpriced markets. We only have four markets in America right now that are trading at a discount relative to their long-term pricing trend. In other words, statistically, where they historically prices say prices should be today only four cities are underperforming. That that’s Austin, Texas at 3.1% below where they should be, or a discount of 3.1%. San Francisco at a discount of 6.5%. Wow. New Orleans, Louisiana at a discount of 8.7 and Honolulu, Hawaii at a discount of 10.3. Notice I’m not saying these markets are inexpensive. They’re just below where they’ve historically been. These are the best buys right now because they’re below their long-term trend. One of our other indices, we call it our price to rent ratio. It’s really a PE ratio for rents versus home ownership. And then so we can look at that. So if you’re in our a hundred markets, we know the average price, right? So it’s gonna be priced, divided by the annual average rent. So it’s gonna be how many dollars in price do you pay for every $1 and annual rent? And that gives us the relative difference between owning and renting. The higher that ratio. The, the more you should on in general be leaning towards renting, the lower that ratio, the more you should be leaning towards owning. And we used to do an old buy versus rent index for 23 cities. We now do it for 100 cities. And this price to rent ratio produces almost the same exact answer. So when we look at the average price to rent ratio in an area and we just compare, are they above or currently are you above the price to rent ratio? Uh, for Los Angeles, California. Are you below it? If you’re above that average for say the last 10 years, you’re gonna be rent friendly. If you’re below it, you’re gonna be bio friendly. I can do this very quickly. Pick a California market you’d like to know about. Why don’t we try Dallas, Texas. Okay. Dallas, Texas. That one’s in the top 100 in terms of population. So Dallas, Texas, uh, their price to rent ratio is at about a, just below a 6% premium. In other words, that trade off between renting and owning is about 6% above where it should be, so it slightly favors renting. I’ll jump to the next index. If we look at actual prices in Dallas, there’s a slight premium. So it’s, it’s, it’s telling me, Hey, that my price to rent ratio’s high, slightly favoring ownership, but it’s probably because prices are a little high and they might change. Uh, Dallas has had a bit of a. Premium right now. So I will now go look at Dallas rents. My gut feeling is they’re gonna be below average and they are. They’re at about a 4.5% discount. So that’s just market dynamics in motion right there. And we can do that for a hundred cities pretty quickly. Mm-hmm. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties, now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Good news. If you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program. M put off by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens to you. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it and uh, once again. Thanks again for listening. Uh, I truly appreciate your support. I hope, uh, I hope it’s been entertaining for you and that you’ll learn something along the way and, um, you know, always appreciate your feedback. Shoot me an email, bucket wealth formula.com. Let me know if there’s things that you want me to do. Let me know if there’s things you wanna hear more about. Uh, but hopefully it’s gonna be a good year and we’re gonna keep plugging away talking about the, you know, try to get educated myself and pass along information to you on Wealth Formula Podcast. That’s it for me this week on Wealth Formula Podcast. This is Buck Joffrey. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit well formula roadmap.com.

For years, gold was the asset nobody wanted to talk about. It sat there quietly while stocks and real estate continued to rip. Gold was for pessimists. For doomsayers and perma-bears.And then suddenly… gold didn't just wake up. It launched. As of mid-December 2025, spot gold is trading around $4,300–$4,400 an ounce, depending on the market, marking a gain of roughly 60% over the past year and pushing decisively into record territory. The obvious question is: why now? The short answer is that gold isn't reacting to one thing. It's responding to a stacking of pressures that have been quietly building for years and are now impossible to ignore.Start with central banks. For the better part of the last decade, central banks were net sellers or indifferent holders of gold. That changed dramatically after 2022. According to the World Gold Council, central banks have been buying gold at more than double the pace of the pre-COVID years, and 2025 continues that trend, with hundreds of tonnes added to reserves year-to-date. These aren't hedge funds chasing momentum. These are monetary authorities making deliberate, strategic decisions about what they trust to hold value. Why would central banks suddenly want more gold? Because geopolitics has re-entered the chat. We now live in a world where reserves can be frozen, payment systems can be weaponized, and “risk-free” assets depend heavily on political alignment. The World Bank has been explicit that rising geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty are key drivers of gold's surge this year. When trust in the global order erodes, gold benefits. At the same time, the U.S. dollar devaluation thesis is no longer fringe thinking. It is reality.Gold is priced in dollars, and when real yields fall and the dollar weakens, gold historically performs well. That dynamic is playing out again. Reuters has repeatedly pointed to a softer dollar and declining Treasury yields as near-term tailwinds for gold's rally . Bank of America's research echoes this relationship, emphasizing gold's inverse correlation to the dollar and the growing desire among nations to diversify away from dollar-centric reserves . In other words, gold isn't just going up because people are scared. It's going up because confidence in fiat discipline is eroding, slowly but persistently. So…Is gold still a buy or did we miss it? The truth is, both answers can be correct. Yes, gold is expensive relative to where it was a year ago. You don't go up 60% without pulling future returns forward. But what makes this cycle different is that many of the buyers driving demand are price-insensitive. Central banks don't care if gold is up 20% or down 10% in a quarter. They care about long-term reserve integrity. That's why major institutions aren't dismissing the move as a blow-off. Goldman Sachs has cited sustained central-bank demand and the potential for further ETF inflows as supportive of higher prices. J.P. Morgan continues to frame gold as a beneficiary of geopolitical instability and monetary uncertainty, and Bank of America is projecting prices as high as $5,000 an ounce into 2026. Of course, nothing goes up in a straight line. A shift toward tighter monetary policy or a sudden easing of global tensions could cool enthusiasm. Understand though, that gold's breakout isn't just about gold. There is a larger message that should be taken away from all of this. Hard money has come back into favor. Gold is the original hard asset. It's scarce, politically neutral, and has thousands of years of monetary credibility. But it's also heavy, difficult to move, and awkward in a digital world. Bitcoin exists on the same philosophical axis. Both gold and Bitcoin are reactions to the same problem: expanding debt, monetary dilution, and declining confidence in centralized control. Gold is the conservative expression of that view. Bitcoin is the aggressive one. Today, Bitcoin trades around $86,000, still volatile, still controversial, still misunderstood. But if gold's surge is signaling a regime shift toward hard assets, then Bitcoin may simply be earlier in that adoption curve. In other words, gold may be leading the parade. And if history is any guide, when institutions start moving into the oldest form of sound money, they eventually begin exploring the newest. That's the signal worth paying attention to. So this week, I interview Dana Samuelson, an old friend of the show and an expert in everything gold and hard money. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Gold isn’t reacting to one thing, it’s actually responding to a stacking, uh, pressures, uh, that have been quietly building for years and, and really right now are impossible to ignore. Welcome, everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast coming to you. From Montecito, California and today. Uh, before we begin, just a quick reminder. Uh, there is a, uh, website associated with this podcast called wealth formula.com. And, uh, that’s where you go to get deeply more deeply integrated into this community, including our accredited investor club, AKA investor club for you to join. And, uh, once you get onboarded, all you do is you, you have an opportunity to see private deal flow, uh, that, uh, is not available to the general public. If you are an accredited investor, meaning that you have, uh, make $200,000 per year or $300,000 per year, uh, for the last two years with the reasonable expectation of continuing to do so, or you have a million dollars outside of your personal residence, a net worth, then you are an accredited investor and. All you need to do is sign up and join the club. Just go to wealth formula.com and sign up and get onboarded. Now, let’s talk a little bit about something that has been extraordinary this year. It’s gold. You know, for years, gold was the asset that nobody wanted to talk about. I mean, it sat there quietly. Well, stocks and real estate continue to rip. Um. Gold really is really, you know, was for the pessimists. For the doomsayers and the perma bears. I mean, I, I gotta tell you, I kind of am was one of those people, right? And then suddenly gold didn’t just wake up. It, it totally launched, exploded in his mid-December 2025. Spot Gold is trading around, I know, 4300, 4400 an ounce, depending on the market, gaining roughly 60% over the past year. Pushing decisively into record territory. Now the obvious question is why now? Well, the short answer is that gold isn’t reacting to one thing. It’s actually responding to a stacking, uh, pressures, uh, that have been quietly building for years and, and really right now are impossible to ignore. And this is an interesting shift because. The thing is that in the old days, and I’m even talking about 15, 20 years ago, uh, you would look at gold as something that didn’t really go up when the stock market was doing well, right? It was kind of a reaction. It was a fear-based thing. It still is sort of a fear-based thing, but now it’s not just fear of, you know, whether the stock market’s gonna crash. It’s fear of geopolitical concerns. That’s where the central banks come in, right? So for the better part of the last decade, central banks were net sellers. Or really indifferent of holders of, of gold, and that changed dramatically after 2022. So according to World Gold Council, central banks have been buying gold at more than double the pace of the pre COVID years. And 2025 continued that trend with hundreds of tons, uh, added to reserves year to date Now. These are central banks. They’re not hedge funds chasing momentum, right? They’re monetary authorities and they’re making deliberate strategic decisions about what they trust to hold value. And why would central banks suddenly want more gold? Well, because again, geopolitics has reentered that chat. We live in a world now where reserves can be frozen, right? Payment systems can be weaponized. Risk-free assets depend heavily on political alignment. Now of course, I’m talking about the United States when I’m mentioning all those things, right? Uh, how we can kind of just freeze assets of Russia and that kind of thing. I’m not, uh, pro-Russia, I’m just pointing out the fact that. Countries don’t like it when you freeze their assets. Right? The World Bank, uh, has been explicit that rising geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty are the key drivers of gold surges this year. And when trust in the global Ory roads, of course that is now when gold benefits and at the same time, the US dollar devaluation thesis is no longer just kind of fringe thinking. It’s reality. No one, no one even bothers to pretend that that’s not happening. So gold is, uh, of course, priced in dollars and when real yields fall, uh, and the dollar weakens gold historically performs well so that that dynamic is playing out again as well. In fact, Reuters has repeatedly pointed to a softer dollar and declining treasury yields as near term tailwinds for Gold’s Rally Bank of America. Uh, their research shows, uh, this relationship emphasizing gold’s inverse correlation to the dollar and the growing desire among nations to diversify away from the dollar centric reserves. In other words, gold isn’t just going up because people are scared. It’s going up because confidence in the fiat discipline is eroding altogether slowly. Persistently. So the question is, is gold still a buyer? Did we miss it? I mean, I just mentioned that it just went up by like 60%, right? So that’s a tricky question. It really is. I could certainly see some volatility there. But here’s the thing. I mentioned that central banks were big buyer, right? Central banks don’t care if gold is up 20% or down 10% in a quarter. They care about long-term reserve integrity. So they’re a price insensitive buyer. Um, and that’s why major, major institutions aren’t dismissing the move, as you know, just a big blow off. Uh, Goldman Sachs cited sustain central bank demand, and the potential for further ETF inflows is supportive of higher prices. Banks, uh, like JP Morgan and um, and, and Bank of America. I mean, they’re continuously talking about how gold is a beneficiary of this geopolitical instability. Bank of America is projecting prices high as $5,000 a ounce in 2026. So that’s still a big move, right? Of course, nothing goes up in a straight line. So shift toward tighter monetary policy or sudden easing of global tensions. Well, I, I could, they could cool enthusiasm, right? The less fear in the world. Well, that isn’t. That’s not good for gold. I understand though that gold’s breakout isn’t just about gold. There’s a larger message that should be taken away from all of this, and that is that hard money, real assets have come back into favoring, and gold is the original hard asset. It’s scarce, it’s politically neutral, tens of thousands of years of monetary credibility, but it’s also heavy, difficult to move and awkward in a digital world. Now, of course you know where I’m going with that. I don’t wanna make every gold conversation conversation about Bitcoin, but just as a reminder, Bitcoin exists on that same philosophical access, right? Both gold and Bitcoin are reactions to the same problem. Expanding debt, monetary dilution, declining confidence and centralized control. Gold is the conservative, you know, version of that, the expression of that Bitcoin is the crazy youngster, the aggressive one. They’re, they’re following the same rails. And today Bitcoin trades around $86,000. It’s still volatile, still controversial, still misunderstood, and really, listen, the market cap is 2 trillion bucks. Um, you know, no asset that has ever reached $2 trillion. Market cap has ever gotten to zero. But on the other hand, there’s it, it’s pretty small, and you could still move those markets really quickly, and that’s why you’ve got volatility. But if gold surge is signaling a, a, a shift towards hard assets, it’s really hard to not see that. Uh, Bitcoin may simply be, uh, you know, early in that adoption curve. In other words, gold may be leading the parade. And if history is any guide, uh, when institutions start moving into that, you know, oldest form of sound money, they eventually begin exploring the newest. And that’s, that’s a signal. Worth paying attention to. Anyway, this week what we’re gonna really focus on though is gold and hard money. We’ll talk a little bit about Bitcoin as well. My guest is Dana Samuelson, who is. An old friend of the show, and we will have that conversation right after these messages. Wealth Formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying. You compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it at result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique, it’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its back. Turbo charge your investments. Visit wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Today my guest on Wealth Formula podcast ad Samuelson. He is been on the show before. He’s friend of the show. He is a professional. How do we see this numismatist since, uh, 1980. Working with some of the most influential, precious metals trading companies in the country. Before founding his own American Gold Exchange Incorporated in 1998. Uh, for nearly a decade, he was a personal protege of James U. Blanchard ii, one of the true giants of the industry, and the individual most responsible for re legalizing the private ownership of gold in the us. American Gold Exchange Inc. Is a national mail order, precious metals and rare coin dealership that makes competitive buy and sell markets in mainstream, modern, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, bullion coins and bars and classic pre 1933 US Gold and silver coins and World War ii European Gold coins. I don’t know if I left anything out, but welcome Dana. How are you doing? I’m doing great, buck. Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. Well, it was funny, we had a little conversation, uh, just before we started and I said, well, gosh, you know, uh, we’ve had you on the show before, maybe once, maybe twice. And, you know, and, and you, um, I think Apley described the gold market as watching paint dry. And I, I think that’s, I think that’s pretty adequate. Um, I mean, for, I mean, the last decade or so before this all happened. So, so let’s start talking about it. So, gold gold’s moved into price territory that, you know, very few people would’ve predicted even a couple years ago. So what, from your perspective, having lived lived through multiple gold cycles, what feels fundamentally different about this move? Uh, this market is a globally driven market and it’s focused on physical. There’s been a move into gold this year, and silver now platinum two. To a degree palladium, uh, in a physical level that we haven’t seen since the late seventies when we had the last really, you know, red hot market driven by fears over debt inflation. Geopolitics. Uh, you’ve got the bricks, nations that are trying to divorce themselves of the dollar, but they really can’t do it easily because there’s not a good viable alternative except for gold. And that’s been one of the leading drivers of this gold price surge that has really, you know, almost doubled in price since, uh, two years ago. A lot of it is, you know, underpinned by Central Bank Gold buying, you know, between 1950 and 2010, after the dollar became the world’s reserve currency backed by gold. And even after we un pegged the dollar to gold in the 1970s, 1971, central bankers had had gold on their, physically in their vaults from pre-World War ii when gold was money, uh, they shed that. From the 1950 all the way to 2010, they became net buyers after the great financial crisis due to the global debt explosion and primarily quantitative easing printing money outta thin air. But they were buy, they were modest buyers, you know, 500 tons a year until Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022. And we sanctioned Russia and weaponized the dollar. The last four years, they bought, you know, almost a thousand tons of gold year or double. That really became material last year in price as the cumulative effects of their continually buying about a fifth of what the mines make every year started to really impact supplies and price movement. And now we’ve got President Trump this year, you know, throwing a monkey wrench into the World Trade order with his tariffs. And I think that that’s created a lot of uncertainty, some fear. And of course the debt just continues to go higher and higher. And now interest payments on our debt are over a trillion dollars for the first time ever. So debt servicing is starting to become problematic. The cumulative effects of all this have caused the, the people around the world, including central governments to buy gold at record rates. Um, but it’s not the phenomenon that’s happening in the United States. ’cause we don’t have a gold culture in our country, like almost every other country does. It’s interesting. Um, so what, you know, you’ve been talking about really is central banks around the world have it really been accumulating gold at levels we haven’t really seen in modern times. Right. And, and, uh, why do you think the US Central Bank. It doesn’t do the same because is it an admission of the debasement of the dollar? Because really the gold, gold is the anti dollar. I’ve always viewed it as the anti dollar maybe. Maybe that’s not the, you know, you may not agree with that a hundred percent, but I’ve always viewed it that way, and so why wouldn’t the US hedge and accumulate more? Well, we’re the world’s reserve currency. That Right. That’s, that’s created a paper culture in our, in our world. It’s now three generations old, right? Since 1945, when the dollar became the world’s reserve currency and we, the world went to a paper money standard instead of a gold money standard, which was the world’s standard from ancient times all the way till the 1930s. You know, the, our monetary system when the country was founded in 1793 was based on gold and silver coins. A copper penny was the size of a half dollar because that’s what one penny’s worth of copper was worth in 1793. Right. Um, you know, after World War ii, we had a couple things that the rest of the world didn’t have. We had a manufacturing, uh, industries that were, uh, unaffected by the, physically by the war. And we had, you know, the ability for markets to work properly, which should allow the dollar to become the world’s reserve currency. Backed by, you know, 8,200 some odd tons of gold, the biggest pile of gold that any country had. Actually, at that time it was more like 20,000 tons of gold. Uh, but by the time we got to the seventies and we un pegged from gold, we were down to about 8,000 tons. That’s still more than anybody else is supposed to have. I do think China could have more gold than that. Now they’re just not telling us they do. You know, officially they’ve got about 2,400 tons of gold, uh, and the second and third are, you know, 3000 tons of gold. So we, we still have a lot of gold. And there’s talk about auditing Fort Knox and monetizing it, but it only gets us about a trillion dollars. It’s not enough to really, you affect the 38 trillion, maybe pay the debt off for a year, or, you know, for six months. Six months, yeah. Something like that. Our, our debt is starting to matter too. You know, it’s doubled twice in the last 20 years. It gonna double again in the next 10 to 70 trillion, 78 trillion. People hear about the, the whole, uh, the bricks phenomena, right? And part of, part of what you were just discussing in the, uh, accumulation of gold. Explain that, explain what’s going on over there for people who aren’t paying attention, and you know how that is, how that is playing into all of this. Well, when we sanctioned Russia after they invaded the Ukraine. And seized their assets and threw them off of the Swift International Bank Transfer Payment System. We forced countries that were concerned that if they ran politically afoul of us, we could do the same to them. They forced them into thinking, oh, how do we get some independence from that vulnerability? Potential vulnerability? It’s not easy to replace the dollar. What they’ve, what they’ve been doing is replacing the Swift Bank transfer payment system with a payment transfer system of their own right so they can move money amongst themselves outside of the SWIFT system, number one. And since there isn’t a good viable alternative to the dollar, really the only other asset that makes sense is gold. Gold is a neutral asset. It’s not like you need it for oil or grain or steel. Nobody really needs gold, right? But it’s universally trusted. It’s immediately liquid, and it’s got a couple other things going for it that are unique. Number one, it has no counterparty risk. It’s one of the only assets. It isn’t simultaneously someone else’s liability. And number two, uh, gold in a vault can’t be seized or sanctioned. Right, so they’ve been going to gold, like they’ve been going to gold for, for centuries. It’s just, it hasn’t been that way since after World War ii. It’s a, it’s kinda like a back to the past kind of a situation. It’s sort of back to the future. It’s back to the past. That’s the allure for gold and the reason why they’re accumulating. In fact, they just launched their own currency unit called the unit. 40% backed by gold. The bricks nations have now it’s in its infancy and it’ll take a while for it to really, you know, work. But they’ve been building the components and the infrastructure to get to this point, creating the transfer of payment systems and all the components to go along with that so that they could announce something that they could use as a, as a settlement vehicle for trade, which is really what this is all about. And they’re backing at 40% by gold. Which is material and it’ll become bigger as time passes. Let’s, let’s try talk a little bit about that price movement. Huge. Um, is 60% in the last couple years, is that about right? This year alone, gold’s up 67% on a 12 month rolling basis, 67%. I mean, those are like bitcoin num, you know, type movements in the past. Right. They’re kind of crazy. So a lot of people are looking at those prices today and they’re thinking, well, I’m late to the party. Uh, are they late to the party? How do you, uh, what, what do you think’s going on there? I think the party’s about halfway through. We haven’t got to the late innings yet. I, I really do think this, and this is why this is the fourth major bull run in gold we’ve seen since we went off the gold standard in 1971. We had a a 20 to one run for gold in the seventies that was built on two oil shocks. 18% inflation and a crisis of confidence in the US then for the next 30 years. You know, 25 years a good part of my career. You know, watching gold was like watching paint dry. It traded routinely between three and $500 an ounce until we got into war, uh, following the nine 11 attacks, Iraq and I, Afghanistan, and we went into deficit spending. Then we had a second financial crisis when the great financial crisis hit another bull bull market in gold. Then we had COVID economic closures, another bull market in gold. Now we’ve got a fourth, but it’s lacking what the first three had, which was fear in the US over either economics or geopolitical events. So this gold price has essentially doubled since March or April of 2024. With no fear and a lot of complacency in the US markets. So my, my thinking is what happens if the economy slows down and, you know, the Fed’s gonna lower rates anyway. We know that’s coming with a new Fed chairman in the next five months, six months, number one, that’s good for gold. What happens if we go into a real economic slowdown and the Fed really has to drop rates, or God forbid, go to QE again, right? Or inflation rears its ugly head because the fed’s too accommodative in it. Situation where, you know, supplies are kind of tight still because of the monkey wrench, president Trump has thrown into the World Trade Order. You know, if we get fear in the US that’s when gold could go from 4,000 to, you know, 8,000. And I’m not saying that’s gonna happen, but I do think the trends have driven gold higher are not gonna change anytime soon. One of the things that you’re mentioning is those trends and like even. You know, in the last 15 years ago when I’ve been sort of involved in the investor world, the, the things that we talk about with trends with with gold have changed. I mean, usually you don’t see AI stocks going up with gold, right? Like, I mean, not that AI was around, but the point is tech stocks, that kind of thing. How is that thesis fundamentally changed? Um, I’m not quite sure I understand your question. Well, what I mean is like if gold was, gold used to be, I think it’s, you know, something again that people would buy when they were afraid of, of what’s going on in the equity markets. Right. Uh, that’s clearly not the case now. No, no, not at all. Right. Talk about that change. When did that change happen? How did it happen? This is a globally driven market. It’s not a US-centric market. This is fear around the world. You know, central banks started to underpin this market in 2022 when they stepped up their buying and doubled it. But this year, because of the uncertainty, uh, and some of the fear that President Trump’s tariffs and the way they’ve been deployed, kind of knee jerky, um, and inconsistently. Certainly not diplomatically, right? You know, it’s caused a lot of concern around the world. And for example, in April when President Trump announced the reciprocal tariffs on April 2nd, what happened? The bond market went into the complete dislocation, yields spiked from 4% to 4.5% in a week. The bond values tumble because investors started pulling money out of the, and taking it back home. Money that’d come in from Europe and Asia started to go back. So what did President Trump do? He pulled back the reciprocal tariffs on every country, but China and China said, well, we’re not gonna drop tariffs on you. And he said, well, we’ll ramp ’em up on you. So we went toe to toe with him. Until a week later, we were at 145% tariffs on China, and they were 125% on us. Well, if you’re a Chinese investor and you have real estate or stocks to invest in, and both of which have done badly since COVID or gold, what are you gonna do when your best customer suddenly says, Hey, we really don’t want your products, because that’s what 145% tariffs say to the Chinese. We don’t want your products. You can’t sell ’em here. You gotta go sell ’em somewhere else, but we’re their best customer. So they bought gold. They bought gold handover fist, and they drove the gold price up $500 by themselves during that month. That’s what I mean by fear outside of the us. Yeah. We don’t get it inside. Well, and and that’s fear outside of the markets too, right? I think that’s, that’s the fundamental shift I was trying to get at is true. It used to be that gold was, uh, gold would react on fear of the markets, but now there’s another level of fear, which is geopolitical. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any time soon that that’s gonna end. No, no. I, I, I’ve called it like a run on the bank only. It’s not a run on the bank of like George Bailey’s run on the bank and it’s a wonderful life. This is a run on the gold market, the physical gold and silver and platinum markets. That’s really what this is, and it’s a global rush to buy. And it’s not just central banks, it’s the public as well. Due to uncertainty, part of it’s fear of missing out now that we’ve had a big run in prices too. That’s FOMO in there too. That’s what I’m trying to, that’s part of what I was wondering too though, is like, you know, again, there’s people out there now who, um, are, are looking at this and they might even be listening to us going, gosh, yeah, it really makes sense and I happen to have no gold. What do I do? You know, what do I do now? Do I buy now? And, and I’ll, you know, and, and the next thing you know. I find out this was a frothy market and, and I’m down 20% for the next three years. I mean, that kind of thing. So I, I think it’s a, it is a tricky time, but, so that sort of, I guess, brings up when you think of gold, um, in a portfolio. I mean, you say, you’ve said in the past, it’s not about getting rich. Well, some people really did get rich this time. Uh, you said it’s about preserving wealth, right? So how should investors think about Gold’s role alongside stocks, real estate, and other assets right now? Well, even I think JP Morgan Chase has said this year, you know, instead of a 60 40 portfolio, you should have a 60 20 20 portfolio with 20% bonds and 20% precious metals. Gold in particular, because of what’s been happening. And now we don’t have a gold culture in our country, like most every other country does. So most Americans don’t get it. And that’s part of. We’ve ingrained because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and it insulates us from currency shocks in commodity pricing primarily. Uh, without that insulation, you know, they might think things a little bit differently, but you know, any good financial planner will say you should have a little bit of precious metals as part of your portfolio, uh, as a hedge against financial uncertainty. And it certainly worked perfectly well during the great financial crisis. And when COVID hit because. Gold tends to counter cyclically, perform in price against stocks and bonds, and it’s always liquid. Now, you’re a real estate investor, you understand real estate. What couldn’t you get in 2009 alone? Right? Bankers wouldn’t give anybody money, right? But if you had gold, you could get liquidity, right? And gold, you know, almost doubled between 2008 and 2011 at the same time when most assets were dropping 50%. That’s an insurance policy for the rest of your money. That’s why I said, look, it’s a way to preserve wealth and have a hedge against financial uncertainty. But in the market that we’re in now, you know, having more than just the, the minimum, which is five to 10% of assets as a, you know, potentially an investment instead of just an insurance policy. That makes sense. But you’re right, you could buy and you could, you know, tie up money that won’t produce anything for a couple years, maybe longer. You also have an insurance policy in case the wheels do come off like they did during the great financial crisis or during COVID. Yeah. Yeah. I was listening to, uh, another podcast. I listened to the, these, uh, guys, the All In podcast, and, uh, Tucker Carlson was on there, and apparently he’s a, you know, huge, uh, physical gold guy. And, and he said, and I, I think he was serious. He said he buries it in his backyard and then he spreads a bunch of, um. Uh, a bunch of, you know, silver beads, uh, out there too, like, just in case no one can like, use a medical metal detector and find it is gold. Uh, let’s talk about that nuance of, of physical gold versus, you know, buying ETFs and all that stuff. What’s your take? I mean, what, what do you tell people when they say, well, gosh, you know, uh, it might be hard for me to store that gold and, and why shouldn’t I just get an ETF and, and talk a little bit about that? Well, I trade ETFs in my IRA account. When I think the, when I think I can harness price movement, that’s what I use ETFs for. You know, they’re a paper representation of gold, uh, that you can trade at the click of a button, physical gold. Is valuable. It’s, you have to find a place to store it. It’s pretty inert, so you can, you can bury it in your backyard, keep the elements out of it, but then there’s some risk there because it could be found, it could be stolen, so you do have to store it somewhere. You can put it in a bank safe deposit box, but I don’t really recommend that because what happens if there’s a banking holiday and you can’t get to it? So having a home safe or maybe, you know, maybe bearing it in the backyard. Is an option if that’s what you wanna do. Or there are independent professionally run storage facilities. There’s a few of ’em around the country that are run by precious metals dealers that are, you know, big entities. Uh uh. So I think they’re trustworthy and they certainly have the ability to service and aren’t properly insured. So that if something happens, you know your value is protected. And that’s primarily what you pay for as a storage fee is a percentage of value. Not so much number ounces that you have there, but the value percentage, because it is an insurance, uh, related value, right? The value goes up, they’ve gotta get more insurance so they get a higher storage fee for that same amount of metal if the value increases, which is unlike other assets. So I do have a couple of those I recommend that are run by professional. Companies that have been in business for years that we know would trust and have performed perfectly. If you wanna store, um, physical metal now gold is compact. You know, a hundred ounces is smaller than a paperback novel and it’s $450,000 worth of value today. You could, I could literally have one bar in each one of my coat pockets and be walking around with almost a million bucks in my pockets, and no one would know. Silver. You know, silver creates a bigger problem because it takes 70 ounces of silver to equal an ounce of gold. So there’s a lot more volume involved and a lot more weight, which is why sometimes these facilities make more sense if you wanna store something that’s more bulky like silver. But if you’re gonna store gold somewhere, that’s not easy to find. You wanna make sure somebody you trust behind you knows where it’s just in case something happens to you. Right? Yeah. Um. What, um, how difficult is it, uh, Dana, for someone to, I guess, say they wanna sell, say maybe they need to sell one of those bricks in your pocket there? Uh, and, and, um, is that a, um, a process that, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not as easy as clicking a button at that point, right? But to make sure that you get the best possible price for your gold and all that, I mean, you’re not gonna go to a pawn shop and. Oh, that, so like, I, I’m just curious on the mechanics of that. ’cause I’ve, you know, I’ve, I’ve never sold, you know, physical gold for anything. So, so our, our company’s a physical dealer. We’re a hybrid between Amazon and a financial institution. And that, uh, we sell something online or over the telephone. The price is always changing on a minute by minute basis, but it’s like you’re buying shoes. It’s just, you know, you don’t quite know what the price is gonna be. So we physically, you know, figure out which product you should purchase, what’s best for you, and then we ship it to you if you want to sell it, it’s just the reverse of the transaction. You have to present it for delivery, which means you have to ship it back to, uh, your dealer, or, you know, physically deliver to them, and you get paid immediately upon delivery. So, um, you know, we, we do business like a financial institution. You can call us up, place a transaction over the phone. Uh, if it’s a smaller transaction, we’ll do that without deposit funds. If it’s a bigger transaction, we don’t know, you will want funds first, but once we lock in, that’s the price. Just like when you buy stock and then you pay the balance or, or we ship you the merchandise, whichever comes first. Um. You get it, inspect it, make sure you, you got what you’re supposed to get. In fact, it, you know, in the last two years with this gold price just climbing higher and higher, we’ve got a lot of clients that are complacent. They like the stock market that’s been hitting record highs, uh, and they’ve been shedding gold. We’ve actually bought more gold as an industry, not just our company, but as an industry in the last year than we’ve bought in a single year in 20 years. So it’s very easy to reverse the transaction. But what I would tell you. For your listeners is, and this is important, you should buy sovereign minted products, gold ounces, silver ounces, one ounce gold coins. They’re really just round bars made by the US Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, the British Royal Mint. The Austrian Mint instead of refinery made. One ounce bars or 10 ounce bars or kilo bars of gold because we have a modest but growing problem with Chinese counterfeits. The Chinese can take tungsten and plate it with gold and pass it off as reel, and they can do that much better with refinery made bars that have plain design pictures stamped onto them. They can replicate those very well, but they cannot replicate the intricate pictures. The US Mint or the Canadian Mint, or the Austrian mint, British royal mint stamp onto that one ounce gold coin. We call it a coin. It’s just a round bar made by a mint that struck with dyes like a coin. And all of the mints around the world have introduced minute anti-counterfeiting design elements into the picture that they stamp on their coins to deter Chinese counterfeits. And it’s working. So the most important thing is, you know, do business with a reputable dealer that’s been around a long time, that has a good reputation, not a, not some new entity, right? You wanna find a, a trusted member of the community and develop a relationship that makes buying again or selling very easy. Once you have a relationship with a dealer, and we know the product you’ve purchased, we’ll take it back very easily. Uh, silver is, you know, people talk a lot about it in the context of, you know, the lump it with gold but has very different characteristics. Um, how do you think about silver today? I love silver today. Uh, it’s, it’s a metal at times as hard to love because every time it makes a big gain, it can give it up pretty easily. It’s more volatile than gold, but gold’s about 90% monetary metal in 10%. Commodity metal silver’s about 50 50, but what silver has going for it is, uh, a couple of unique characteristics that virtually no other metal comes, uh, as close to, which is conductivity of heat and electricity. Silver is amazing in that it’s the best at conducting both heat and electricity. I’ve got a one ounce silver coin on my desk here, and if you take this coin and hold it between your fingers and take an ice cube. You can literally cut that ice cube in half in about 6, 7, 8 seconds with a pure silver coin because the heat from your fingers gets transmitted to the coin and goes right through the ice cube. That’s just a simple example of how conductive silver is for temperature, and we have a structural supply deficit in the silver market that we’ve had for about five years now, where the industry. Is consuming more silver than comes out of the ground on an annual basis. So we’re eating into the above ground supply. Uh, so fundamentally that’s the supply and demand equation favor silver. Uh, plus because gold is moved up so much in price, silver is getting a rotation into it because it’s underperformed relative to gold until just recently where it’s played catch pretty sharply in just the last three or four months. If you measure. How many ounces of gold, uh, how many ounces of silver it takes to equal an ounce of gold, the gold to silver ratio back in April. That was a hundred to one, you know, which was an extreme. Today that ratio is a, is a little under 70 to one. It’s 67, 68 to one. So silver has played up in ketchup in price. Where is that historically? Uh, well. Normally it’s between about 40 to one and 80 to one with about 60 to one as the, as the pivot point where it’s in, they’re in equilibrium. But in the last four or five years with gold leading and silver lagging, we’ve routinely been in the 85 to 90 to one range. Uh, and we actually hit a hundred to one in April of this year, uh, which was the highest it’s been, um, except for when we had a kind of a knee jerk in the medals during COVID, which was an anomaly. Uh, didn’t last. So, but anyway. Silver is playing ketchup because it’s been undervalued relative to gold. Um, and we’ve seen, you know, people that wanna be in the metals, but think gold’s a little expensive. They’ve rotated out of gold, and we’ve seen some of that money move into silver and also into platinum. Now, platinum was under a thousand dollars this time of year ago, and it’s almost $1,900 announced today. So it’s almost platinum’s up, uh, almost a hundred percent now. This year where silver’s up 120% this year and a lot of this demand is driven globally. We’ve seen huge demand in silver in India this year because gold is so, has become so expensive, and that’s what I mean by a global run on the, on the bank. It’s not just China, Japan, it’s India too, and Europe as well. Physical buying and et f buying ETFs are available around the world in precious metals now that really haven’t been very impactful until this year. Um, but that’s what the world’s doing, you know? No discussion these days on gold is complete without at least mentioning Bitcoin. Uh, you know, and, and it’s, it’s interesting because, um, you know, even within the, uh, uh, gold world, I mean, there’s, there’s some prominent people who are really bought in to Bitcoin. Like I, Lawrence Lepert has been on the show multiple times now, and Larry’s all in. Um, just curious as a, you know, as a gold person, what do you see where, what do you see the role or do you not believe in this thing? Do you believe it is a, a parallel? Um, I, there’s so many things that you say about gold. That I’m like, yeah, you can say that about Bitcoin too and carry, you know, millions of dollars in your pocket. You can, you know, it’s, uh, there’s a very little amount of it. Um, obviously it’s new, right? Gold has been around for, since the beginning of time and, and now we’ve got 2009 for Bitcoin. What is your view? How are you seeing it? May, how are your colleagues seeing it in the gold space? Well, a couple different points to make here. Um, you know, when, when Bitcoin came out in 20 10, 20 11, you know, one of my friends in the, in the precious metals business told me I should buy it when it was 20 bucks and I didn’t get it. So I didn’t do it, and that was a big mistake on my part. But Bitcoin has one advantage that no other currency or gold has, which you can move serious money over borders easily. You’re right, you can carry it around in your pocket, in your wallet and, um, you know, you carry a lot of value around and transfer it at the, you know, click of a button. And no co counterparty risk, just like you said with gold, right? Yeah. Well, there’s some modest counterparty risk with, with bitcoin that you, you have counterparty risk with gold and theft as well. Um. Bitcoin is volatile. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s very volatile. It’s still the speculative investment. I mean, it was 124,000, you know, four months ago, and now it’s about 85,000, 90,000. So there’s volatility there that gold doesn’t have. But more importantly, what I’ve seen in my career is a generational divide. The older, older people, you know, 45 and older, like gold and silver. Younger people that grew up with phones in their hands like Bitcoin. The volatility in Bitcoin that we’ve seen in these two big selloff cycles in Bitcoin have not the first one, but the second one have helped to bring some of those younger people into the stability of gold, especially in the year when gold is doing pretty well. ’cause it then it kind of has a little bit of that Bitcoin allure, which is, you know, get rich quick. But, um. Bitcoin’s volatile, but it’s here to stay and it is now the most respected cryptocurrency. Like I almost bought Ethereum, you know, 10 years ago when one of my friends was explaining both to me and said that Ethereum basically had better fundamentals. But you know, it’s kind of inventing, it’s kinda like investing in a. What, uh, beta, beta max instead of VHS back in the day. Some of the older people remember that. You bet on the wrong horse, you know? Yeah, exactly. Well, you’ve, uh, you know, you built this, uh, firm on transparency, integrity, uh, in an industry that doesn’t always have the best reputation. Right? So for investors who decide that precious metals belong in their portfolio. Uh, how can they get a hold of you? Well, our website is, uh, A-M-E-R-G-O-L d.com. Uh, we don’t have, you know, 10,000 items on our website. We have a, we have a small listing of what available products are because we stick with mainstream items, products that are primarily easy to sell, uh, competitively priced, widely traded, and easily understood. Um, uh. Uh, email address is info I nfo@amggold.com. Uh, we have a toll, toll free number 806 1 3 9 3 2 3. Uh, we’re consultative in nature. We’ll, we’ll answer any questions. Happily, gladly, uh, no transactions too small or too large. What we really wanna do, uh, is help people because if we do that, we help ourselves. And when you treat people right, it, it comes back. And our industry does have a chair of bad actors. And, um, you, you wanna make sure that you do business with someone reputable that’s been in the industry a long time. And I understand some people may wanna do this locally where they can actually walk into a place of business. Do this instead of over the phone. So look for dealers that have, you know, longstanding, uh, businesses and good reputations. If you see a reputation that, uh, has some complaints, you know, there are other choices for you. But, um, we just try and help people buck. That’s really what we try and do. We certainly have the reputation for it. Dana. So thank you so much for being on Wellfor podcast. Well, thanks for having me. It’s great to see you again, and I wish you a great success in 2026 and a happy holiday season. You too. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens to you. The concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to Show England. Hope you enjoyed it and, uh, I will. Uh, I should admit though, that if you go back and you listen on my, uh, past shows, this is one that I was wrong on. I, I’ve never been a gold bug. My biggest issue with gold. Um, has always been, you know, from an investment thesis that it doesn’t really do anything, doesn’t yield anything, and what’s the point of owning it rather than owning, uh, real estate. And actually, if you just look at what I said, it’s, it’s still, it’s still, it’s still kind of true, right? I mean, you can argue, well, yeah, the real estate markets really did, uh, did struggle over the last couple years. But listen, at the end of the day. The real estate market struggled because of leverage, right? Gold. There’s no leverage, no one’s borrowing, buying gold on leverage, and so it can go up and down and it doesn’t really hurt anybody. If you take the last couple decades and you know how much people made from, uh, real estate versus Bitcoin, even though there’s this huge, uh, huge uptick in Bitcoin now it’s, it’s probably the case that they come out pretty close. If not, uh, you know, real estate still being the winner. But anyway, uh, I do want to say and admit that I was wrong. That, uh, that the gold wasn’t really worth, uh, owning. I think, uh, you know, I wish I had owned some, just like a lot of people wish they’d own Bitcoin at $6,000, right? Um, in fact, I will say that one of the things in hindsight that I think of is gold in many ways for the last several years was on sale. And I haven’t really been talking about this as much, but I’ve been reflecting on this a great deal about making sure that as an investor you wake yourself up once in a while and ask, okay, well, what’s on sale? Well, gold was on sale for a while. Silver was definitely on sale. Right? Um, doesn’t mean you have to go in, have, you know, 50% of your portfolio in something like that, but when something’s on sale, it’s not a bad idea to look around. And maybe get, you know, get a little bit of exposure. I do think that real estate is there right now. I think real estate, you know, if you’re in the credit investor group, you’re seeing on a routine basis 30%, uh, discounted offerings from just a couple years ago. And I do think that’s on sale right now. But there are other things as well, arguably. I mean, I, I actually think that Bitcoin is, uh, uh, sort of on sale right now. I mean, sitting at 86,000, anybody who thinks it’s not gonna go to a hundred thousand at some point in the next, you know, 12 months is, I mean, I think it’s highly unlikely that it doesn’t go to a hundred thousand, right? So think about that right now. That’s like a 14% gain right then and there. Anyway, sometimes it’s good to just look around and see what’s on sale. Uh, that’s my message for this week. Uh, this is Buck Joffrey with Wealth Formula Podcast signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealthformularoadmap.com.

You know, the longer I've been an investor, the more I realize this simple truth: the biggest threat to your wealth isn't the market… it's your own brain. We're all wired the same way—with instincts that were fantastic for avoiding saber-toothed tigers but are absolutely terrible for making good financial decisions. Take something simple like a marathon. If I asked you to predict next year's top finishers, you'd look at last year's results. That works. Human performance doesn't flip upside down in twelve months. The best runners tend to stay the best runners. There aren't that many variables to consider. When we try to apply that same logic to investing, it often blows up in our faces. There are way too many variables to consider when it comes to market behavior to make simple assumptions. Entire sectors rotate from darling to disaster in a heartbeat. Yet our brains keep telling us, “Hey, this worked last year, surely it'll work again.” In my view, nowhere is that psychological mismatch more obvious than in real estate right now. A few years ago, when real estate was on fire—cheap debt, rising rents, deals getting snapped up before lunch—everybody wanted in. Fast-forward to today. We've had a rate shock. Values have reset. Properties are selling at steep discounts. And Construction starts have fallen off a cliff. Real estate got slaughtered. But look around now. The market has reset. Assets are selling 30 percent below where they did just after Covid. Jobs and population growth in places like the Carolinas, Texas, and Arizona look fantastic, and interest rates are falling quickly. Every macro indicator you can name is pointing to a major buying opportunity—one of the best in the last 15 years. So naturally… few people are paying attention. Markets that are bottomed out are not sexy. If it's not frothy, it's not newsworthy. This is human nature in a nutshell. When assets are expensive and risk is quietly rising, people feel brave. When assets are attractively priced, and future returns look great, people get scared. It's recency bias: assuming whatever just happened will keep happening. It's loss aversion: we fear losing a buck more than we enjoy making one. It's herd behavior: we'd rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. And of course, it's confirmation bias—where people seek out whatever headlines validate the emotions they're already feeling. It's not logical. It's not strategic. But it is human. And that's why this week's guest on Wealth Formula Podcast is of value to listen to. He's one of the leading experts in the world on investor psychology—someone who can explain, with real data, why even intelligent investors consistently jump into markets late, bail out early, misread risk, and miss the best opportunities… especially the ones sitting right in front of them. If you've ever wondered why you sometimes make brilliant decisions and other times do the financial equivalent of touching a hot stove twice, this conversation is going to hit home.

Homeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: “Buy a house as soon as you can. It's your biggest asset.” But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I'm not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain. Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you're a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible. But here's the part most people forget: your primary home is not an asset. As Robert Kiyosaki puts it, if something takes money out of your pocket, it's not an asset—it's a liability. According to Bankrate and the Census Bureau, U.S. homeowners spend around $17,000 per year just to maintain and operate their homes—and that's before you make a single mortgage payment. That's property taxes, insurance, utilities, landscaping, repair bills, HOA fees… the list goes on. If your house is worth $1.5M, even the bare-minimum 1% annual maintenance rule hits you with $15,000 a year just to keep the place from deteriorating. Add insurance, taxes, utilities, and everything else, and you're looking at $30,000–$40,000 per year in unavoidable, non-negotiable carrying costs. And that still doesn't cover the roof that fails, the appliances that die, or the curveballs Mother Nature throws at you. None of that feels like an “asset” to me. Now, to be fair, people don't usually buy homes as investments. They buy them for stability, a place to raise kids, a sense of being “settled.” It's emotional. It's psychological. And it's real. But if you're young—and especially if you haven't hit your first million—it's worth asking yourself a tough question: Is buying a home right now the best financial move… or just the most familiar one? Because historically, U.S. home prices appreciate around 4.3% a year (Case-Shiller). Meanwhile, the S&P 500 averages closer to 10%. And if you’re in real estate investing? A solid multifamily value-add deal often targets 16–20% IRR—plus tax advantages your primary home will never give you. So if you're just getting started, it might make sense to delay that home purchase. Invest first. Build your passive income. Let your assets—not your salary—pay for your lifestyle. Then when you do buy a home, you'll be doing it from a position of strength, not strain. The irony is this: waiting often gets you to the dream home faster because your capital compounds instead of being trapped in drywall, windows, and a backyard you barely have time to enjoy. This Week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I interview expert Dr. Ken Johnson, who digs even deeper into this question—and lays out why homeownership isn't the golden ticket people think it is, especially for high earners early in their wealth-building years. Linked mentioned: Beracha and Johnson Housing Ranking Index: https://www.ares.org/page/beracha-johnson-housing-ranking-index Waller, Weeks and Johnson Rental Index: https://www.ares.org/page/waller-weeks-johnson-rental-index Price-to-Rent Ratio Report: https://therealestateinitiative.com/price-to-rent-ratios/ Top 100 Housing Markets – Inflation Adjusted: https://therealestateinitiative.com/housing-top-100/ Learn more about Dr. Ken Johnson: https://olemiss.edu/profiles/khjohns3

It's that time of the year again—Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everyone loves a deal. If you've been investing long enough, you know one important fact: there is always something on sale. The problem is the herd never sees it. They're too busy chasing whatever feels safe because it's setting new records. And right now? That's the stock market. That's gold. Everyone's piling into the most expensive things they can find and patting themselves on the back for being “prudent.” But smart investors don't chase what's already expensive.They look for the thing sitting quietly on the clearance rack, the thing nobody wants yet. And today, that thing is real estate—particularly apartments. We've seen this movie before. Think back to the early 2000s. After the dot-com crash, everybody ran to gold and Treasuries. Meanwhile, the very companies that would define the next two decades—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft—were sitting there marked down 75%. You didn't need to be a genius to buy them. You just needed the stomach. Then there was 2009–2011. Real estate was radioactive. The media made it sound like apartment buildings were going to fall into sinkholes. But if you bought during that window? Values didn't take ten years to recover. They snapped back within three. And then they kept running for another decade. And remember 2020—oil going negative? That's the kind of insanity that only happens once in a generation. People were literally joking that Exxon would pay you to take barrels off their hands. It was absurd… and it was the greatest energy buying opportunity in modern history. But most people sat on the sidelines in fear. Different cycles, different assets, same principle:If you want outsized returns, you have to be willing to buy what everyone else is mispricing. And right now, the only major asset class not making all-time highs is real estate. In fact, our Investor Club is still finding deals discounted 30–40 percent from just a few years ago. Apartments, specifically, are in this bizarre sweet spot where pricing is still beaten up from the rate shock, yet the fundamentals underneath are quietly strengthening. Sellers who bought with floating debt are fatigued.Buyers with dry powder are getting real discounts.Construction has collapsed—meaning supply will be razor-thin in 18–24 months. And the interest-rate environment is shifting in exactly the direction apartments benefit from. This is why rates matter.This is why liquidity matters.This is why cycles matter. When financing costs come down and supply is constrained, prices don't grind higher—they launch. This Is Exactly What the Bottom Feels Like Bottoms never feel like bottoms. They feel confusing. Uneasy. Contradictory. And that is precisely why it's the opportunity. Every big wealth-building moment looks like this in real time. Everyone's distracted by what's hot while the discount sits in plain sight. Make no mistake—if the Fed keeps cutting and liquidity continues loosening, apartments aren't going to stay discounted. They'll do what they did after 2009. They'll do what oil did after 2020. They'll do what tech did after the dot-com crash. They'll reprice fast. And years from now, people will look back at this exact moment and say the thing they always say after missing the obvious: “It was right there. Why didn't I buy more?” Well… it is right here. Apartments are on sale. No one has been beating the drum more on this than my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week.

This week's Wealth Formula Podcast is about the economics of sports—if you are a sports fan like me, you will love it. But before we get to that, I want to give you my two cents on one of the most important elements to financial success in anything: conviction. As I write this, Bitcoin sold off from a high of $126K to under $90K. Other cryptos have lost 50-90 percent of their value in the same time. It's been called a blood bath. Some are even saying it’s over for Bitcoin. I might even believe them if I hadn't seen the same story at least 5 times before over the past decade. True bitcoiners have tremendous belief in what bitcoin means to the world. Someone who bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010 and simply refused to sell would now be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the reward for true conviction. The irony of this bitcoin cycle is that many of those individuals with high conviction are finally cashing in on the fruit of their patience. Almost every day, another wallet that hasn't been active since 2011 is selling off a billion dollars into the market into the hands of Wall Street and governments. That's why prices are tumbling. But don't be fooled into thinking that these buyers are the dumb money holding the bag. The story does not end here. Nor is the Bitcoin story a one-off either. History repeats itself as the story of investments unfolds over time. In December 1999, Amazon stock traded at $106. After the dot-com crash, it fell to $5.97. Every talking head had a eulogy written for the company. But if you were crazy enough to hold through the storm, your conviction paid off spectacularly: $10,000 invested in Amazon in 2001 is worth over $20 million today. Now, moving on to the topics of sports. One of my favorite examples of conviction is from 1920, when George Halas bought the Chicago Bears franchise for $100. The Halas family could've “taken profits” countless times. They lived through multiple depressions, a world war, a dozen recessions, five or six league restructurings, labor disputes, player strikes, and decades of bad seasons. Anybody else would've bailed. But they didn't, and today, the Chicago Bears are valued at over $6.3 billion. These stories have different time periods and different industries, but they all teach the same lesson: Conviction is one of the most profitable assets you can own. That's the message I want to leave you before we move into a perhaps more entertaining topic: the economics of professional sports. Most people think of sports in terms of touchdowns, rivalries, and Super Bowl rings. But the truth is… professional sports is one of the greatest wealth-creation machines in American history. Few people understand those engines better than our guest this week. He's one of the clearest, most respected voices in sports economics today, and he's going to break it all down for us: salary caps, streaming deals, and team valuations. If you are a sports fan, you are going to love this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast! Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  Donald Trump pretty much bankrupted the USFL by saying we’re gonna go head to head, uh, with the NFL instead of trying to build a a Spring Sports League. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula podcast. Happy, uh, Thanksgiving week, uh, and uh, this week because it is a holiday week in, you know, football and all that kind of stuff that goes along with it. We’re gonna talk. About the economics of sports. And if you’re a sports fan like me, you’re gonna really like this. I really had fun with this interview actually. It was just like me asking a bunch of questions I always had. But anyway, before we get to that, I want to give you my 2 cents. One of the most important elements that I think there is give financial success in anything, and that is conviction. And I bring this up to you in part because Bitcoin sold off. Um, and well at least all the time, I’m recording this from a high of 126,000 and then it, it plunged actually below 90,000. And then of course, there were other cryptos that lost 50 to 90% of their value in the same time. Uh, yeah, it was a bit of a bloodbath. It’s been called a bloodbath and it is a blood bath. And of course, there are some who are declaring Bitcoin dead Again. Um, and you know what? I might even believe them if I hadn’t seen, uh, the same story, at least I’d say, I don’t know, maybe four or five times over the past I, eight years, nine years, whatever. True Bitcoiners though, have a tremendous belief in what Bitcoin means to the world and where this is headed. And some of them, well before I ever got in, right? I mean. That serious conviction because, you know, the people who were buying, you know, back in 2012, 13, I mean, this was completely outta nowhere, had no one’s, uh, no one’s support, nothing. In fact, in 2010, uh, you know, if, if you bought Bitcoin back then simply refuse to sell up until now, um, say you bought a thousand dollars of Bitcoin. You’d be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, right? That’s the reward for true conviction. And those people, frankly deserve it. Because can you imagine if you just bought a thousand bucks or something and it was already up to a million, it was already up to 10 million and all the way up to 20 million, you still didn’t sell. I mean, I don’t even know if I could, I don’t know if I could do that. I don’t think I could. I mean, at some point I would be like, take the money and run. Right. Um. You know, it’s a funny thing though. The irony of this Bitcoin cycle that we have right now is that many of those individuals with, you know, super high conviction, um, the ones that were in way before any of us and before me, well, they’re actually, a lot of them are actually cashing out sort of the fruit of their patients. Right. Almost every day right now, you’re seeing a another wallet that’s been dormant since like 2011. And all of a sudden it sells. It’s something that has done nothing, but just sit there in storage, selling off a billion dollars into the market, probably, you know, started out as like 10 grand. Right? And where’s that money going? It’s going to the hands of Wall Street’s, going in the hands of, uh, governments. That’s actually the ironic part here. That’s why prices are tumbling. Because I think people are saying, well, gosh, we’re at a hundred grand. I’m sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m sitting on a billion dollars. Uh, I think it’s time to get out, right? But don’t be fooled, in my opinion, to think that these buyers are, uh, you know, they’re the dumb people holding the bag. I mean the, the people holding the bag, it’s Wall Street, right? They’re governments and reserves. And, uh, you know, big treasury companies, the story doesn’t end here. And the other thing is that Bitcoin story is not a one-off in history at all, right? In fact, you know, it, Bitcoin gets a lot of attention. But you even look at something like Amazon, right? December, 1999, Amazon stock trading at $106. Then the.com crash comes, and guess what? It fell down to $5 and 97 cents. That’s a Bitcoin like crash, right? And every talking had a eulogy written for the company. And if you were crazy enough to hold through that storm, your conviction paid off spectacularly. If you had $10,000 invested in Amazon in 2001, it’s worth over $20 million today. So anyway, that’s the point I have though. You know, it’s, the point is about conviction. Uh, and, and I’m not saying that you should just be dumb, buy something and be dumb about it, but especially on these asymmetric things where you think something could be really big, give yourself a time, a period, right? I mean. The only thing other than Bitcoin that I think I, I’m really interested in, in the crypto space is something called Solana. Solana is down like 50% from its ties, and I still think that, you know, when the dust settles, I think this is going to be something that’s gonna pay, pay off. Now if I were to watch it day by day, uh. It’s demoralizing, right? But, but I think the point is, if you have some conviction in something, give it some time. You know, say, I’m gonna watch this for at least five years if I can, if I don’t absolutely get into a situation where I need that money, which hopefully you don’t, because this is not where that kind of money belongs. Right? But give it some time and don’t look, there’s lots of noise, and, and, and then just give it some time and see what happens. Right? Now speaking of giving it some time, you know, a similar story in the sports arena in 1920, George Halas, I think it was Papa Bear, right? George Papa Bear. Halas bought the Chicago Bears franchise for a hundred bucks. Yep, a hundred bucks. Now the Halas family could have taken profits countless times, and they lived through lots of, uh, bad times. Depressions, uh, you know, world War, uh, a dozen recessions, five or six, uh, league restructurings, labor disputes, player strikes, decades of bad seasons. And maybe anybody else would’ve billed at some point if they’d made, you know, millions of dollars from the a hundred bucks. But they didn’t. And the Chicago Bears, as much as I don’t like the Chicago Bears, are valued over $6.3 billion. Now these stories, ultimately, they’re, you know, different time periods, different industries, but same lesson conviction, it’s one of the most profitable assets you can own or attributes at least. Maybe it’s not an asset, I don’t know. That’s a message I wanna leave you before we get into the topic of today, which is the economics of professional sports. Now, most people think of sports in terms of touchdowns, rivalries, super Bowl rings, all that kind of thing. But the truth is professional sports is one of the greatest wealth creation machines in American history, and few people understand those engines better than our guest this week. He’s one of the clearest, most respected voices of sports economics today. And he is gonna break it all down for us. We talk salary caps, streaming deals, team valuations. We talk about the Green Bay Packers and why they’re owned by the city of Green Bay instead of owners. All that kind of stuff that you might have wondered about but you never really knew. So if you’re a sports fan, enjoy it and happy Thanksgiving. We’ll have that interview for you right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it. At result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is, uh, Dr. Victor Matheson, professor of Economics and Accounting at College of Holy Cross. He’s a leading authority on sports economics, studying everything from the financial impact of mega events like the Olympics and World Cup, to the inner workings of professional sports leagues, lotteries, and public finance. Uh, welcome to the show. How are you? Well, thanks for having me. Great. Always happy to talk some sports economics. Oh gosh, this is interesting. I’m a huge, uh, I’m a huge sports fan, especially NFL and, uh, so, you know, instead of talking personal finance, you know, without, uh, without any, uh, uh, sports in it, this is definitely a, uh, welcome for me. So, um, well, vigor, let’s start, start with this, you know, um. Most of us who are big sports fans, you know, we’re really driven by the idea of the, the, you know, the, the emotion, the entertainment. Taking a step back from your perspective, how should we look at this whole ecosystem of sports as an economic system? Well, uh, first of all, it’s. It’s both bigger and smaller than, uh, than you would imagine. So if we think of the NFL, the NFL ha generat more revenue than any, uh, sports league in the world. Uh, this year it’ll come in somewhere around 22 ish billion dollars. Uh, that certainly seems like a lot of money. On the other hand, a Sherwin Williams paint store comes in at about that same sort of, uh, revenue, you know. On many podcasts talking about talking about paint, right? Um, if we talk worldwide, all the sports leagues all put together, uh, we’re talking about maybe a hundred billion or so, maybe 120 billion, roughly the same size as Johnson and Johnson. So, uh, you know, it’s a big industry. It’s a, you know, billions in with a B, but it’s also a tiny percentage of, of the total amount of economic. Being generated every year, and, and so we can easily get, uh, um, we can easily get ahead of ourselves and say, well, you know, uh, it’s the biggest company in the world, the NFL, it’s, it’s not even 500. Interesting. Um, so let’s talk a little bit about this, um, uh, how value is created in these leagues. So, so, you know, you said professional leagues are built on the economics of controlled scarcity. So talk a little bit about that, if you would, how this scarcity model drives value and, and, and protects, uh, uh, profitability. Right. So let’s compare, you know, let’s compare a Walmart. To the NFL, right? Uh, so Walmart takes a look at all these potential places that you could put a Walmart and they say, oh, this would be a good one. And a Walmart goes in. And now that Walmart’s generating economic impact and generating revenues for the, for the. For the company and all these sort of things. Now let’s look at the NFL, right? Uh, the NFL does the same thing. They said, Hey, uh, let’s look at Las Vegas. Would that be a good place for a, for a team? Uh, is is London gonna be a good place for a team? Uh, and they look at those. Uh, but here’s the deal. If Walmart looks at 50 places and says, Hey, these 35 would be good places. They’re not gonna just pick the best one for a franchise. They’re gonna put. Walmart’s in all of those, right? Uh, the NFL on the other hand, very specifically saying, you know, we actually don’t wanna put an NFL franchise in every place that we could, uh, make a profit in because we want to be in the, in a world where there are fewer NFL franchises than there are cities that want them, and that generates demand for this. Um, Walmart can’t do that because if Walmart doesn’t put in a franchise somewhere, uh, you know, Target’s gonna come in instead. Uh, that’s not gonna happen in the NFL, uh, because there’s no other competitor to that. So they can actually restrict the number of franchises they have, which means that every franchise is selling at a, a super premium price. These are, you know, at the lowest end, we’re talking five, six, $7 billion franchises. Now, uh, they could sell multiple new expansion franchises, but they choose not to. To maximize the value of those existing franchises. It’s been a while actually since the NFL expanded, um, the league. And I’m curious, what are, you know, what is it that drives them ultimately to do that? I mean, again, you just mentioned there’s this whole scarcity issue. I mean, what do you think are sort of the limitations or sort of the. You know, the, the, the points at which they say, well, gosh, maybe we do move to London, or maybe we do that. Like, do you have a sense of that? Yeah. So a couple things they wanna do. So first of all, one of the big things that all of the leagues in the United States have done is they want to be a big enough league to make sure that they cover all of the good spots or most of the good spots for a team. You don’t wanna leave enough good team locations that a rival league could come and start to challenge you. Right? So thinking back to the 1950s, uh, one of the most important sports leagues ever to come about in the United States. Actually never even existed. And this league is what was called the Continental League. And the Continental League in the 1950s arose as a challenger to major league baseball. Major League baseball in the 1950s was exactly the same size as it was in 1901. It was 16 teams. But the United States had grown immensely and the league had started to move, you know, the Dodgers to LA and the Giants to San Francisco, but you still had huge amounts of the country uncovered by baseball. And so this Continental League came about as an idea saying, you know what? We can take on Major League Baseball by putting franchises in places that it doesn’t exist. They said, oh, here’s our new eight league team. And the way Major League Baseball responded to that is before continental baseball could even start, uh, start existing, it said, oh yeah, well we’re gonna put a team in Minneapolis. We’re gonna put a team in Houston. We’re gonna put teams in these Lee in these cities that the Continental Baseball Association was gonna go into. And therefore, uh, continental baseball never got into existence because Major League Baseball expanded into those locations and everyone has taken that, that hit. You need to be big enough to make sure that every place with a, a good chance at having a team, or at least most of them, uh, are covered so that there’s 8, 10, 12 cities out there, uh, a big enough footprint that you could have your own new league. Uh, do that. So, I mean, if you look at the NHL, if you look at NBA major league baseball, NFL, all about 30 teams. There’s about 30 or a few more big cities. But what’s very important is there’s not 10 or 12 big cities out there, uh, without NFL teams, without football teams that. A rival league could move into that space. You know, I’m curious when you, you brought up that Continental league in baseball. It reminds me when I was a kid of, uh, the United States football, like the USFL and all, they got all these, uh, players, like I remember Herschel Walker started there and, and there was a number of actually guys who ended up in the NFL and being big stars there. So they, they definitely, uh, started out pretty strong. What went wrong for the USFL? It’s so funny you say that. Uh, the answer is actually one big, uh, name. It’s actually Donald Trump. Yeah. So, so what USFL did is, is they noticed that their niche was, um, was the spring, right? We play college football, we pay play high school football, and we play the NFL in the fall, which means that, uh, people out there in the spring, there’s no football out there to be had. The USFL said, you know, we could move into this market. So first of all, we’re gonna move into the spring where there’s not a rival. Second of all, we’re gonna take at least some cities where there’s not active, um, football teams either places like Birmingham, right? Uh, so any case, uh, what happened there is the USFL. Kind of got a little, its ego kind of got ahead of itself and it said, Hey, now that we’ve established ourselves in the spring, we do have some big stars like, uh, uh, Herschel Walker, like Doug Flutie, uh, some of these others. We’re gonna try to take the, uh, take the NFL on, uh, head to head and we’re gonna move from the spring to the fall. And the other thing they did that was very important is they filed a lawsuit against, uh, the NFL, saying that the NFL was engaging in antitrust activity that was keeping this rival league down. It was, uh, keeping them off TV by using their market power with some of the broadcasters. It was using its market power with stadiums to keep these teams out. And so they took him to court, and I think the, the hope was that there would have to be a settlement and that settlement would result in the USFL merging with the NFL. And the owners of the big teams in the USFL would kind of get a backdoor into the NFL this way. As it turns out, the court, in fact did find in favor of the USFL. Uh, they said yes, the NFL is engaging in illegal antitrust activity, but they also said. You guys are insane. Uh, going against the NFL in the fall, there was no way you’re gonna make it. So even though the NFL was found guilty, the jury only awarded $1 of damages. Uh, technically in antitrust cases, that’s tripled. So they actually were awarded $3 in damages and the league basically folded the next day. They won their lawsuit, but they folded the next day. But of course, the owner that had most. Most importantly pushed the league to go head to head against the NFL was the owner of the new, uh, New Jersey team, the Generals New Jersey Generals. Right? And it was Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump. Uh, so Donald Trump pretty much bankrupted the USFL. By, uh, by saying we’re gonna go head to head, uh, with the NFL instead of trying to build a, a Spring Sports League. Now, to be fair to Donald Trump, which I don’t necessarily want to be, but to be fair to him, um, there’s no guarantee that the USFL would’ve made it as a spring league either, but I think anyone, again, a jury looking at this said there was just no chance of that league, uh, surviving against, uh, the NFL. If you try to go head to head in the poll. Just, just outta curiosity, uh, you know, there, when you talk about Trump, I know like he’s had an interest in, you know, professional football teams for a long time where he did, at least, there’s a certain politics that goes into buying an NFL team as well, right? Right. So the NFL is a partnership. Yeah. Which means that they can choose who they decide to partner with. And, uh, the presumption was, uh, in the 1980s when Donald Trump was trying to become an NFL owner that Donald Trump, uh, neither had the money, nor had the friendships among other NFL player, uh, NFL owners, uh, to get into that very exclusive club. And so again, he was able to get into the USFL because it was a much lower buy-in, in terms of, of cost. The USFL owners couldn’t be as picky about who they wanted as fellow partners, and again, I think Donald Trump saw the USFL as a way to potentially get into the NFL through the back door through this lawsuit, and, and by moving directly in the, in the fall because the jury just didn’t find that, that there was any plan. By which the USFL teams could have ever become profitable, uh, going head to head in the fall against the NFL. Let’s talk a little bit about sort of valuations, because what’s interesting is, you know, you’ve talked about scarcity and, you know, the way that the leagues have manipulated, uh, that to make sure that there, you know, the values continue to grow, but at some point in the last 30, 40 years, the numbers just really skyrocketed, right? Where these football teams, you know. It wasn’t a straight line in terms of how much they were worth. What, what went into that massive inflection of, uh, of, of valuation? So, first of all, I think you’re exactly right. There has been this massive inflection. Uh, so I’ve been teaching sports economics since the 1990s and, and the 1990s were kind of at the end of an era where this was really one of the sames back in the seventies, eighties, and even as late as the early nineties, that if you wanna become a millionaire. Start out a multimillionaire and then buy a sports team because it was a, it was just a, uh, a dumpster fire that you could just burn up cash without any hope of any sort of real return. And that changed in probably the late eighties, early nineties. That really changed, uh, a couple things. Change that, uh, first of all. By the nineties and certainly by the two thousands, um, most of the big professional sports in the United States had solved lots of their labor relation problems with the, with the athletes. So there was always this question about, uh, you know, do athletes have the ability to bargain with other teams? Are they able to get free agent, uh, agency, are teams going to be constantly fighting and, and spending every dollar that they can down to the point of bankruptcy to buy that superstar team? And what happened again in the nineties, starting in the eighties through the nineties and the two thousands is pretty much leagues have, uh, agreed to a world where. We’re gonna limit the amount of spending, uh, that we’re gonna do on players so that we’re not all bankrupting each other, bidding for players. In order to get the players to go along with that, we come to an agreement that we’re gonna share basically half the money with the players. And that’s exactly how the NHL works, the NBA works and the NFL works. Major League Baseball is not like that yet. And we may see not this season, but the next one, um, them trying to finally join ranks with the other, uh, with the other leagues. Uh, the question is whether we’re gonna see that happen without a gigantic, uh, work stoppage that. You know, some people who are pessimistic think we’re, we may not have baseball at all in 2027. 2026 is fine, but 20, 27 may, may fall. So as soon as like your costs are all covered up, that you know that everyone is kind of playing on a level playing field. Once we know that we don’t have to worry about bankrupting ourselves. We are only paying players, what we’re bringing in as revenue. All of a sudden, this is a fairly safe investment in a way that it never was prior to, you know, this all dying down. Couple other things going on here as well is, of course, the country’s gotten bigger. We have gotten bigger, but without adding additional, many additional franchises, which means, uh, those, those tickets are becoming increasingly expensive. We’ve gotten richer in a, in a skewed fashion, so that, uh, that of course the rich have gotten richer, a lot faster than the poor have. But of course, going to a baseball game, especially with those luxury boxes and things like this, is, uh, an activity that is reserved for the wealthy. And as the wealthy have gotten more, uh, uh, have gotten, you know, increasingly rich, uh, that means that. You know, businesses like Major League Baseball in the NFL that cater to the upper class, uh, do disproportionately well. And the last thing, and I’m sure you’ve talked about, uh, this before, is on your show, obviously you can have, um, you can have investments that are irrational as long as you think there’s someone later that’s irrational, that you can, you can hand it off to, right? This is, this is all the Greater fool theory. Uh, although I don’t think necessarily in this case, the, the owners are fools, but. Sports teams are a toy of billionaires that you say, well, look, I, I am, I’m a Mark Cuban. I’ve made billions of dollars. Now I want to spend some of my, my money on a, a fun asset. You know, you and I might collect a baseball cards. Mark Cuban might collect baseball teams, right? Uh, so, uh, in a world you might be willing to overpay because you wanna be a sports soldier and you wanna rub elbows with. You know, KA Leonard, you wanna rub elbows with, uh, with, with Shhe Tani. Um, and you may be willing to overpay for that asset, but guess what? 20 years down the way, there’s still gonna be another billionaire who wants to rub elbows with that next generation of superstars. And so you’re fairly sure that the next time when it comes to sell your franchise, there will be another person who’s willing to pay a premium for that asset as well. So again, as we’ve gotten more billionaires, more billionaire wealth, um, this is something that, uh, you know, has attracted folks like Steve Ballmer to, to part with, with big money. And, uh, again, as billionaire assets have grown, uh, the ability and the desire to buy these teams has grown as well. I would think a major driver of the value. Is also coming from, um, the, the media sources, uh, that are changing, right? Where, I mean, I remember, you know, again, being a kid and there was this, you know, there was Monday night football and it was on NBC and. And that, that’s how it worked. But now there’s like bidding for these things and you’ve got Amazon, uh, doing Thursday night football, which is a little weird. Um, and you know, you sometimes you have, uh, uh, you have games on Peacock. What’s going on with that? How does it affect the economics? Uh, and ultimately, like where is this headed? So, uh, in a, in a league like the NFL, uh, over 60% of all revenues that they generate is media revenue, right? Because most of us aren’t going to games every day, uh, too expensive for us, or too time consuming or all sorts of other things. But, uh, lots of us tune in on tv. So we’re talking about, uh, well over $10 billion of annual media contracts with the NFL. Um, and those numbers have been going up, uh, at least in part because you have media companies, uh, in a pretty competitive environment bidding against one another for these things. Now, one of the things about, again, things like the NFL or the NBA is it allows broadcasters or other types of TV networks to bring in customers in a way that their regular programming doesn’t. So a, a company may actually be willing to overpay for the NFL, kind of as a way to get people to buy all of your other products. A famous example from early days, uh, is, is Fox, right? So in the old days there were three big networks. So old days, I’m talking, you know, 1970s, there were the three big networks, right? There was A, B, CNB, C, and CBS, and they all competed against one another. And then in the 1980s, this rival network came up and this is Fox. And they wanted to get into all these markets nationwide. Well, how do you make sure that a. A local station decides to pick up the Fox programming. So for example, I grew up in Denver and Denver had a, had a, an independent channel that, you know, played reruns and all sorts of other things, and, and so they have a broadcast license already. Fox goes up to them and says, Hey, would you like to carry our regular programming? And, and that, that channel said, well, I don’t really think so. We’re doing fine showing Gilligan’s Island and Love Boat and things like this, and we don’t need, uh, an entire set of your programming. We’re doing just fine, as as it is. Uh, so Fox couldn’t get a foothold in that Denver market. So what Fox does is they buy rights to the NFL. All of a sudden now they go back and say, Hey, we’ve got all this Fox programming, we’ve got the Simpsons, and we’ve got, I don’t know, uh, you know, uh, you know, these early, these early Fox programming. But, um, they say, but we also have the NFL. You can’t, you can’t turn down the NFL. And then all of a sudden that existing affiliate says, okay, all right, we’ll add the whole line of Fox programming because you’re right, we can’t turn down having the NFL. So what, what basically happens here is the NFL serves as this kind of must stock item. And uh, you know, Fox was willing to overpay for the NFL because now they’re gonna get everyone to be able to buy the Simpsons and everything else they were offering at the same time. Uh, and so media rights have gone much, have gone up much faster. And we see this all over the place, right? How do you get people to buy. Amazon Prime. Well, let’s say that’s the only way you get to watch, uh, football on Thursday nights. How do you get people to buy, you know, apple tv? You offer major league soccer games as part of their package, right? Uh, and so this is how you kinda legitimize yourself as an actual, real, uh, you know, quote real media company is by offering some, uh, live. Live sports. And that gets people who would not otherwise buy Netflix or Amazon Prime or Apple, uh, to actually purchase those because again, they’re offering this secondary item. Then presumably that in turn drives up the value of of the NFL and you know, they’re bringing in a lot more money because they’ve got not just the three major networks bidding on them, but they’ve got all sorts of big companies with deep pockets. Willing to, you know, increase their, their, their revenue is and, and that sort of snowballs. Is that, is that fair? No, and that’s exactly right. And, and for as much as I talk about, you know, that billionaire who wants the an NFL team or an NDA team as a. Prestige asset. Uh, they’re also concerned about having it as an actual functioning asset as well. So I’m willing to pay, you know, a lot more, even if I’m willing to pay a premium. That premium is based on a fundamental value in the first place. And how do you drive that fundamental value? You drive that fundamental value by maximizing the revenue you generate through things like media contracts, and by maximizing. And by minimizing your costs, by making sure that your labor costs aren’t gonna run away with you, uh, because again, hopefully you, uh, most of the leagues have solved kind of their long-term labor, uh, their labor strife between them and the players within each league. There is also some different rules, and specifically, again, being a big NFL fan, I love the fact that the NFL has a salary cap and profit sharing for each team. ’cause it makes for a much more competitive league, basically, you know, for people who don’t know what that means, essentially each team can pay, has a salary cap of how much they can pay players for a given year. But not all of the leagues have that. Uh, I don’t really follow the other ones. I, I’m not sure who has it, who doesn’t, but I know that, like in baseball, I don’t think they have that. And it creates a situation where you’ve got the Dodgers or the Yankees in, in, in the World Series. More often than not, and you know, you’re not getting the smaller teams usually. No. So you’re exactly right. So the NFL has what’s called a, uh, a salary cap, and it’s actually got what’s called a hard cap. So they’re actually quite serious about this, and there are very few exceptions that can be made to go over this cap. Uh, this cap is based on the total amount of revenue that’s being generated by the league. Uh, and again, the cap basically is the way that they make sure that they share. A fair proportion of the money with the players. Uh, what’s also important is they also have a floor. So the, the cap this year is about 225 million, if I remember right, but the floor is about 200 million. So every team in the league basically is spending the same amount on labor this season, which makes for a very even playing field. And we know that some teams are gonna lose and some teams are gonna win. And it seems like the Browns and the, and the jets never win. And it seems like other teams always do. But what’s important about that is it’s not just because they’re in a big city, that they have these gigantic revenue advantages and that they can buy a championship. It really is, you know, who is smartest with their money, who’s smartest with your coaching, who’s lucky with the draft and things like this. And, uh, that makes for a very nice thing here. What’s also super important is the NFL has a gigantic amount of revenue sharing, and the reason for this is every single game you watch on TV is part of a contract that’s being sold by the league, not the team. And because of that, the league is generating all these, all this revenue, and then is equally distributing that money to each of the individual teams. So a, a team playing in little tiny Green Bay is generating exactly the same amount of media revenue as the New York Giants. Or the LA Rams. So that’s really nice. Uh, again, gigantic amounts of, uh, again, even revenue sharing to all the participants. As a matter of fact, of all of the businesses in the United States, the NFL is probably the single most socialist company. In the United States. So this Great American pastime is wildly socialist when it comes to how they distribute their, their income. So what incentivizes a team to be better and to win Then from the ownership standpoint, if there’s revenue sharing, is it just at the, the other sources of income that come, like advertising, things like that. I’m, I’m just curious, like if there’s so much revenue sharing, what is it that drives a team to, you know, try to be better from the ownership standpoint? So first of all is that being bad doesn’t help you, right? This isn’t major league baseball, so we’re gonna go the o. The other extreme, at least for a US sport, is major League baseball. No, uh, salary cap there at all. So you can pay, uh, players as much as you want, although there is what’s called a luxury tax. So as you, as your, uh, salary, your total payroll gets too big, you start getting, uh, uh, paying penalties to the league, which is then redistributed to the poor teams in the league. That being said, you can spend as much as you want. So yeah, the Dodgers, they spent somewhere, uh, by some accounts somewhere around $400 million this year on talent, including, you know, gigantic contracts to folks like Shhe, Tani, right? Um, but there’s also no minimum either. So if you’re a team that decides, hey, we’re not even gonna bother to try to compete this year, uh, you are the. I don’t know to, if I should call them the Oakland A or the Las Vegas a a or the Sacramento A or the Traveling through the desert, sort of a for a while. Um, but, you know, this is a team that made a decision not to compete and had a, had a tiny payroll. Uh, other teams have decided to do this, and the, and the NFL you could decide that you didn’t wanna win. But it wouldn’t save you any money because again, not only is there a salary cap, there’s a salary floor. So if I have to pay $225 million each year anyway, I might as well try to win with that 225 million. Uh, ’cause I don’t have a choice to just collect my paycheck and hire, you know, the Minnesota Gophers for $20 million, uh, for my, for my team this year. ’cause that’s not an option. Right. Um, one of the things I wanted to just kind of, uh, drill down a little bit on is the model of the Green Bay Packers. As you um mentioned, it’s a tiny little town, northern Wisconsin. Uh, not much going on there. I’ve, I’ve been there myself for a game. It is unique in that it is owned, not by billionaires, but it’s owned essentially as by the fans. How, how does that work? And, and I guess the question is like, why, why aren’t other teams modeled that way? So other teams are not modeled that way because the NFL does not want other teams to be modeled that way, nor do any of the other, uh, major leagues out there. Uh, it’s not good for the NFL for a couple reasons. Uh, first of all. They have to open their books. If it’s a public company and they don’t like to open their books, um, you also don’t have a face for that, uh, league in a way that, that a person couldn’t, couldn’t be in there, uh, pouring extra money in as a kind of a, an, an angel investor. Uh, on top of that, uh, you can’t threaten to relocate to another city unless you get taxpayer subsidized. Um, you know, uh, stadiums and things because it’s a publicly owned team and we know that, that those public owners will not ever decide to move that team out. How did they get that status in the first place? That’s an interesting story, and it’s a story that’s not unique to. The Packers, but it is fairly unique to the United States. So, uh, in the rest of the world, this type of ownership model actually is fairly common. Um, teams that your, you know, listeners would’ve heard of, like Barcelona, like Al Madrid, these are club owned teams. Um, there is not an owner there. They are owned by the fans themselves, and they’re in the business of. Trying to stay in business every year while winning as many games as possible. Uh, there is, they’re not trying to win trophies for a, a Steinbrenner or a Mark Cuban. They’re trying to win, uh, trophies for that fan base. That literally, again, the, the season ticket holders are those owners. Um, the NFL itself, you know, was, was a very hard Scrabble league for a long time. It started in 1920, uh, and between 1920 and 1935. Roughly 55 teams played at least one season in the NFL. And of those 55 teams, basically all but about six of them, had gone outta business or relocated at some point in here. Uh, this is why actually we got such a socialist, uh, uh, business model here is because the owners of the big teams, the owners of the bears. Uh, the owners of the Giants, uh, they said, look, you know, this league isn’t gonna work if we can’t actually find someone to play. And yeah, we’re making money here, but we’re not gonna continue making money if we can’t find other teams that are gonna work in this league. So they said, Hey, we are gonna be very generous. We’re gonna make sure that, that we share our revenues with the people, uh, the other people in our league. We would rather have a small piece of a big pie, uh, than a big piece of a pie that is tiny or disappears completely. Uh, so that’s why we ended up with this, uh, revenue sharing. And of course they were very open to any sort of model that kept stable teams around, including a model where rather than some rich owner in, in Green Bay owns that team. Instead, it’s a municipally owned team. As long as that team had stability and conform long-term rivalries and can afford to put forward a product that’s gonna, that’s gonna work on a, you know, on an NFL field to make a competitive product, they were happy to kind of do whatever they needed to do because again, this was a, this was a really tough league to be in. For the first roughly 20 years with, you know, a lot more successes. There’s been a lot of talk, uh, I know about private equity entering the, uh, the NFL. Tell us, give us a little bit of an understanding of that. I mean, obviously, I, I kind of think of these owners in these buying groups as private equity already, so what’s the big deal? Is the point. So in most sports leagues have already allow private equity and already allow ownership groups with multiple owners, uh, to, to own teams. So again, uh, you know, the, the Red Sox, they have multiple owners of, of that team. Uh, again, Celtics, same sort of thing. Um, but in the NFL we have required basically one owner, right? So this is a, a person. That owns the team and is the face of the team and is this controlling majority owner, uh, they’re going to explicitly allow external people unrelated to the ownership group, to own pieces of NFL teams here. Uh, and I think the, the real issue here, uh, has to do with, uh, there are some franchises in the NFL where the owners are asset rich, but cash poor. I’m thinking actually, for example, the Bears. So the bears are still owned by the same group. Who bought the Bears back in 1920 ish. Right? So this, you know, the, the same family, the Halas, uh, have owned this team for a hundred years. Uh, by this point, you know, little pieces of the team have been handed down to all the cousins and the grandkids and the great grandkids and this sort of folks. Uh, so, uh, you know, I think in total there’s something like 86 different owners of the, of the Bears now, but they’re all part of that original ownership group that everyone. You know, has inherited a little, a little share here. Now mind you, you know, one 86th of the, uh, of the bears is like a hundred million dollars. You know, the bears are probably an $8 billion franchise. And so that’s a hundred million dollars of assets that each one of these grandkids has just because, you know, their grandfather made a smart, uh, smart investment a hundred years ago. Um, but it doesn’t mean that they can live the lifestyle of a person with a hundred million dollars. Because they’re not allowed to sell their share to anyone because private equity was never allowed. And the amount of money that that team is actually generating in terms of annual operating profits isn’t super high. So you’ve got a world where you’re wildly rich, but you can’t really do a lot with those riches. So you know, this is a team that would be prime for the idea of, well, let’s sell off 20% of this. 20% of the team is gonna be maybe a couple billion dollars. And, and then we will just share that basically it’s a big Christmas present to each one of these, uh, these kids here. And again, the, the thing here is that’s $2 billion in cash that each of these small minority owners gets rather than, you know, an asset that they can’t actually use. To buy a yacht in Monaco. Right? And so that’s giving these kids, or the, you know, these minority owners an option to basically, uh, you know, get liquidity for their ownership. And, and that’s the big difference, right? And of course the other thing is, is there are lots of wildly rich people who would like to be an owner of a team in a way that you could do that 20 or 30 years ago by being just a, you know, just a multimillionaire or a multi, multi multimillionaire. That was enough. Uh. You know, you can be a billionaire nowadays and not have nearly what it needs to become an owner in one of these big groups. So, uh, you know, if we think about, uh, Arod, right? Arod bought, uh, the Timberwolves, uh, in the NDA, um. But he couldn’t do it alone despite the fact that he was, uh, you know, for 10 years the highest paid athlete in the world, you know, signed the single biggest contract, uh, in the history of professional sports, uh, when he did so. Uh, and even a guy with that sort of money doesn’t have enough money to buy a sports franchise. So, uh, I think the NFL is, you know, looking down the, the road to a, a world where. Someone wants to sell, but there’s not that many folks with $10 billion out there. And so the idea that we were gonna keep a, a world where there’s gonna be one single owner forever, uh, you know that that’s a pretty small pool of people in a world where you’re thinking about selling franchises at $10 billion. But if we allow these to be sold private equity wise. Then people can live their dream of being a sports owner, you know, for a mere couple billion dollars. And of course, that increases the pool of, of potential people by a lot. You know, you, you mentioned, um, during, just a minute ago in, in passing that these teams don’t actually necessarily throw off a lot of cash. They’re not, you know, they’re not super profitable. It’s not like a bunch of money’s being distributed to owners. Uh, can you talk a little bit about that? I, I didn’t know that actually. Sure. So a bunch of these teams in, in fact, in terms of operating revenue, don’t actually generate gigantic amounts of, of money every year. Uh, again, taking an an NFL team, so an NFL team is gonna generate, you know, somewhere around $500 million, maybe six or $700 million a year, but you’re already competing about 250 million of that to, uh, to the players. So half of that revenue coming in automatically is going to the players. If you built yourself a new stadium anytime recently, obviously you could have big payments on that. Uh, there’s other operating expenses associated with that. Um, in, in a world where you’re not the NFL, but you’re a world like, uh, major League baseball, where. You have much more variability in your, in your player costs year to year and more variability in your revenue. Uh, you could easily end up with years where you’ve got negative cash flow or at least negative profits, and, uh, and that means that you need, you need to be able to weather that. And so of course that’s one of the reasons, for example, why the NFL, you know, wouldn’t just take anyone as an owner, you need to be for sure rich enough to, uh, to weather both the ups and the downs. Again, if you borrowed any money to, uh, to purchase the team, uh, that’s obviously a big, uh, big interest payment there as well. So you could easily have teams again, depending how the owner purchased that, that are not kicking out gigantic amounts of cash on a year to year basis. One of the things that I’ve been hearing about, I don’t really know how this would work, is the, is of private equity moving into potentially like college sports. So we’ve seen some changes in, uh, for example, in college football where now these players can legally get paid. So it’s, it’s starting to look more and more like a professional. Uh, professional league. So how would that work if you’ve got private money essentially buying, uh, the sports teams of an individual university? Or maybe I’m not, maybe that’s not exactly what’s happening, but that’s kind of the impression I got. So first of all, that is exactly what could be happening and, and what people are talking about. Uh, I am deeply skeptical that this is a good idea for the institutions involved. Um. So basically it works exactly like any other sort of, uh, sports franchise, right? Uh, basically you would have an owner, uh, you know, let’s call him Mark Cuban, although he’s not, you know, he’s, he’s not talking about doing this. But imagine Mark Cuban decided he wants to buy, uh, Ohio State, right? Uh, so he comes up with a a billion dollars hands over a billion dollars to Ohio State. And now Mark Cuban is the recipient of any revenues being generated by the Ohio State, uh, program here. Um, and so this works like, just like anything else, right? So this is, this is basically, um, a person like bringing money in, in exchange for a piece of the action. Uh, the reason I’m highly skeptical about this because. Uh, remember the name of your university is very, very strongly tied with the name of your athletic program, right? So, you know, the Ohio State University is the name of both the educational program as well as the, uh, you know, the sports teams, right? And so, uh, one of the reasons that that schools have sports teams in the first place. Is as a method of advertising for their other things, right? So they, they use spectator sports to bring in the students to, uh, bring in, uh, actually, you know, public taxpayer money, all sorts of things. Um, and of course if the school controls the money from the, uh, you know, controls the athletic program as well as the academic program, then we can presume that the interests of the athletic program and the academic program are aligned. As soon as you’ve sold off your, your athletic program to an external, uh, you know, an external buyer, then you have every reason to believe that the incentives of that athletic program, the incentives of the. Academic program are no longer aligned in, in a way that is useful. Um, for example, you could have that, that equity person say, you know what? I’m gonna make money no matter what, and I’m just gonna tank all of our programs because I’m gonna generate more revenue by spending less. And that’s what maximizes my profit. But that may very well harm the academic side. And so if you allow, you know, private equity to come in and they have any control. Over that, uh, athletic program, you basically outsourced an extremely important part of your business while still meaning that your business in the athletics is, is importantly tied to the other parts of your business that you haven’t outsourced. And, uh, that makes me deeply concerned for anyone who would consider going down this route. Is, is that likely to happen, do you think? I don’t think anyone who makes predictions about college sport to this point, uh, can, can do that with any certainty at all. It’s fascinating stuff. Um, and one last question I guess for you, which is, you know, we talk about like people who own teams, uh, being, you know, multi-billionaires. Um. Is there any way that fans can still get a stake if they’re just simple millionaires? Is that just not something that’s po un unless you’re live in Green Bay, I guess, is that pretty much non-existent? So it depends what you’re interested in doing, right? So if you’re a mere multimillionaire, uh, you’re not gonna become an NFL owner. You’re not gonna become an NDO owner. Right. Mm-hmm. Um, if you’re very famous and a multimillionaire, you might be able to come into an ownership group because they want you as the face of the organization. Right. Um, one example of this was George W. Bush who came in with a very tiny ownership stake, uh, when, uh, he bought the Texas Rangers and he owned about. 2% of that, that team. But he was the face of that because he was the son of the president. Right. Uh, and, and then when the Rangers did well, uh, you know, he, he made a fortune doing that as well. So, um, the answer is generally no. But as long as your heart isn’t wedded to the NFL or NBA, there are certainly options that you can come into. Right. Um, we have seen. One tier down, uh, buying into things like the WNBA or the, uh, NWSL in women’s soccer or, uh, or women’s basketball. Uh, even that’s become pricey nowadays. These are a hundred million dollar franchises now these days. Or you can take chances with lower level, essentially minor league, uh, soccer in the United States or, uh, elsewhere, uh, in, in the world. And I think you know where we’re going here. So if you’re a merely. Multimillionaire, uh, and you’re a, a famous, uh, movie star or two, you could put your money in and buy a football or soccer team in Wales, uh, called Reim. Right? And of course, that’s exactly what Ryan Reynolds did. And Malaney and, uh, you know, they did not have anywhere close to NFL money despite being famous guys, you know, big movie stars, you know, you know, tens of millions of dollars in, uh, in money. They’re nowhere close to being NFL owner money. Guess what they were wreck some owner money and, uh, they get all the fun and excitement of being an owner without needing to be a billionaire. Interesting. Well, listen, uh, I, I appreciate all your time and, uh, it’s, it’s fun for me personally as a sports fan to see how this stuff works. Um, do you have a site where you write, do you have people curious about this stuff or, or how can they learn more? So how people can learn more is, uh, is there is some fun sports economic stuff out there. Uh, the classic, uh, book in sports economics is of course Moneyball by Michael Lewis, who of course is a great writer about all things finance and, and people who are interested in, in general interest books about, you know, all sorts of things related from to the tech boom to, uh, obviously the financial crisis of the two thousands to. His early days in, in junk bonds in the 1980s. Uh, Michael Lewis is one of the, one of the great writers out there. Um, uh, other fun books by colleagues of mine, uh, omics by Stephan Semanski is, is a fun one. Uh, and, uh, you know, you can catch up, uh, with some, uh, some. Other podcasts that, uh, that follow these sort of things, including Freakonomics has often things on sports that are, that are fun as well. Uh, unfortunately if you wanna, you know, hear from me, it’s all textbook stuff and then I’ll have to give you a grade. And so probably that. Uh, but again, it, it’s a great time to be a fan of sports and of economics ’cause there’s just so much good stuff out there. Thanks so much for being on the program today. Again, my pleasure. You make a lot of money, but are still worried about retirement. Maybe you didn’t start earning until your thirties. Now you’re trying to catch up. Meanwhile, you’ve got a mortgage, a private school to pay for, and you feel like you’re getting further and further behind. Now, good news, if you need to catch up on retirement, check out a program put out by some of the oldest and most prestigious life insurance companies in the world. It’s called Wealth Accelerator, and it can help you amplify your returns quickly, protect your money from creditors, and provide financial protection to your family if something happens. Steve, the concepts here are used by some of the wealthiest families in the world, and there’s no reason why they can’t be used by you. Check it out for yourself by going to wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Hope you enjoyed it. And, uh, once again, uh, I wanna just wish you a happy Thanksgiving and, uh, thank you for, you know, being a listener of this show. And one more thing, just a reminder, uh, we are heading into sort of the last month or so. Of, uh, investment possibilities in the investor club. Wealth formula.com is where you go to join that group. And if you’re looking for a last minute tax mitigation type investment, make sure you sign up as soon as possible. Uh, that’s it for this week on Wealth Formula Podcast. Happy Thanksgiving. This is Buck Jre signing off. If you wanna learn more, you can now get free access to our in-depth personal finance course featuring industry leaders like Tom Wheel Wright and Ken McElroy. Visit wealthformularoadmap.com.

When you invest in real estate, you're not buying what it is today—you're buying what it will become a few years from now.  That's especially true in multifamily, which, despite all the noise, remains one of the most compelling long-term plays out there.  Unlike stocks, you don't get a live ticker reminding you every five seconds what your property is “worth.” And that's a good thing. Real estate moves slowly, and that patience rewards people who can see the story before it unfolds. The national headlines are confusing right now—depending on who you read, the sky is either falling or it's never been brighter. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.  Mortgage rates are still above six percent, affordability is strained, and national price growth has flattened. But beneath the surface, there's an entirely different story playing out—one that favors multifamily investors who understand that real estate is always, always, about location. Some markets are clearly soft. A few urban centers built too much too fast, and it's showing up in higher vacancy and flattened rents. But other regions—think the Carolinas, Texas, parts of Florida—continue to thrive because people are still moving there in droves. Jobs, climate, taxes, and lifestyle continue to pull migration south and inland, and those people need somewhere to live.  When you combine growing populations with a shrinking construction pipeline—new multifamily starts are down roughly 40% from their 2023 peak—you're setting the stage for tightening supply and rent growth in the right markets over the next few years. That's the part that separates pros from spectators. Anyone can read a national report and call it a trend. But the investors who win are the ones who know their markets intimately—who's building what, where the jobs are moving, and how local policies are shaping demand. In that sense, real estate offers the only kind of “insider trading” that's perfectly legal. The better you know the ground, the better your odds. For passive investors, that means something simple but crucial: partner with operators who live and breathe their markets. You want people who are plugged in at the street level, not just reading spreadsheets. Because in multifamily, the difference between a mediocre investment and a great one can be a single zip code. Real estate, especially multifamily, rewards patience, perspective, and proximity. You can't control interest rates or the national narrative, but you can choose where—and with whom—you invest. And if history is any guide, those who make smart, localized bets while everyone else is sitting on the sidelines tend to be the ones who look like geniuses a few years down the road. This week on the Wealth Formula Podcast, I talk with a former professor and renowned real estate analyst who's been studying these patterns for decades. We break down which markets are setting up for real opportunity, where caution is warranted, and what the next chapter of multifamily investing really looks like.

A few years back, I bought some very expensive sports coats. I wore them at first and enjoyed them. But over time, they kind of lost their luster.  As I have found often to be the case in my life, I don't tend to care that much about fancy stuff—fancy jackets, fancy shoes. My true self regresses to a fairly simple jeans and flannel circa 1992 style—not expensive.  Realizing that these fancy clothes were just rotting in my closet, I recently sold them on a well-known second-hand site with only designer stuff. And I was shocked when I realized I was only getting 10 cents on the dollar for what I paid!  But then again, I guess I shouldn't have been. Buying new fancy clothes has an extremely low likelihood of being a good investment. It reminded me of my good friend in town here who's made millions of dollars in his life. He only buys nice stuff. But he almost never buys new things. The furniture in his house is incredible. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of mid-century modern gems. And he buys vintage cars rather than new supercars off the lot. He also has a 7-figure collection of rare watches. It's all really nice stuff.  The difference between what he is doing and what I did with those clothes is that he was investing while I was spending. While he's bought millions of dollars of cars and watches, he's always made money with them because he has focused on their future value.  Maybe I'm a bit dense, but I never thought about stuff this way before meeting him. And I still have to remind myself of this paradigm. It's a different way to look at luxury and one that is certainly smarter when it comes to your pocketbook.  My guest on today's Wealth Formula Podcast teaches people how to live this kind of lifestyle with cars and watches. I've interviewed him before, and I'm doing so again because so many of you have engaged in this way of buying nice stuff that I get regular requests to have him back on the show. 

I grew up with a very different perspective on personal finance and investing than most. My parents were immigrants, and when they arrived in this country, they didn't come with any preconceived notions of conventional financial wisdom. My father grew up dirt poor in India—that's really poor and he had never even heard of investing as a kid. But he was blessed with a tremendous intellect and used it to rise from nothing to truly live the American dream. He came to the U.S. in the 1960s on an engineering scholarship and started working as a bridge engineer in Minnesota. When he finally began making a little money, he was confronted with the idea of investing for the first time.  Until then, life had always been hand-to-mouth. So he was approaching investing like an alien coming to this planet for the first time with an unbiased view on anything financial. With that perspective, the stock market didn't make sense to him. He wanted cash flow that would immediately improve his quality of life. Intuitively, it felt smarter to buy “streams of cash” than to “gamble” on stocks. So with whatever money he could scrape together, he bought small rental properties. Nothing glamorous—mostly low-income houses and duplexes in Minneapolis. But guess what? It worked. Before long, he started making real money and quit engineering altogether. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, I guess. Years later, I would also walk away from my career as a doctor to become a full-time investor. My father did really well. By the 1980s, he was having million-dollar years—that's a lot now, but back then it was a lot more! But then came the '90s. Like many others in the dot-com era, he got in over his skis. It seemed like everyone was making easy money in the stock market, and he got greedy.  Unfortunately, he sold a large chunk of his real estate portfolio and went all in on tech. And of course, we all know how that story ended—the bubble burst and so did his brokerage account. So there he was, in his 50s, starting over again after being obliterated by the dotcom bubble. He was terrified. But he knew what he had to do. He had to rebuild the same way he had built wealth the first time: cash-flowing real estate. Today, in his 80s, he's still at it. To be clear, his real estate career wasn't all smooth sailing either. This isn't a fairy tale. It's real life. For example, in the late '90s, Alan Greenspan suddenly cranked up interest rates, creating a situation not unlike what investors faced post-COVID when the Fed raised rates at record speed.  That hurt him, but each setback brought lessons, and he kept moving forward with an asset class that he trusted. Eventually, he recovered. We were always comfortable, and my dad made enough to pay for 3 kids' college tuition and medical school for me while still living comfortably, traveling, and enjoying his life. He'll be the first one to tell you that he only ever made money in real estate and that's what he believes in. Now, why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you this story because it shaped the way I see investing. Unlike most, I grew up hearing that the stock market was risky and that real estate was the safer, smarter path—pretty much the opposite of what everyone around me grew up with. And despite my own challenges from the post-COVID rate hikes, I can still say without hesitation that focusing on real estate has served me better than following the traditional investing playbook. Still, no one wins all the time. Every investor loses money sometimes. Surgeons have a saying: “If you haven't had a complication, you haven't done enough surgery.” That's as true for the best surgeons in the world as it is for the best investors. So what do you do? Sitting on cash guarantees you'll lose purchasing power to inflation. Money markets barely keep up. For me, the answer is to keep investing with discipline. Real estate is my medium, and like my father,

This week's Wealth Formula Podcast features an interview with a tax attorney. While I'm not a tax professional myself, I want to drill down on something we touched on briefly that is incredibly relevant to many of you: the so-called short-term rental loophole. If I were a high-earning W-2 wage earner, this would be at the top of my list to implement—and I know many of you are already doing it. The short-term rental loophole is one of those quirks in the tax code that most people don't even know exists, but once you do, it can be a total game-changer. Here's why. Normally, when you buy a rental property, depreciation losses can't offset your W-2 income. They're considered passive, and they stay stuck in that bucket. But short-term rentals—Airbnb, VRBO, whatever—work differently. If the average stay is seven days or less and you materially participate, the IRS doesn't classify it as passive. It becomes an active business.  That means the paper losses you generate can offset your ordinary income, even from your day job. Normally, you'd need a real estate professional status to get that benefit. This is the one situation where you don't. So let's walk through how it works. When you buy a residential property, the IRS requires you to depreciate the structure—the walls, roof, foundation—over 27½ years. On a million-dollar property, that's about $36,000 a year. It's a slow drip. A cost segregation study changes that. Instead of treating the property as one block of concrete and wood, it carves out the parts that don't last 27 years. Furniture, carpet, appliances, cabinets, and even ceiling fans—those are considered 5-year property. In other words, you can depreciate them much faster. Now add bonus depreciation. Instead of spreading those 5-year assets out over five years, the current rules let you write off most of them all at once in year one. Here's the example. You buy a $1,000,000 short-term rental and finance it at 70 percent loan-to-value. That means you put in $300,000 cash and borrow $700,000. A cost seg often shows about 30 percent of the property—roughly $300,000—is 5-year personal property. Thanks to bonus depreciation, you deduct that entire $300,000 immediately. So you put in $300,000 cash, and you got a $300,000 paper loss in the same year. In practical terms, you just deducted your entire down payment against your taxable income. This is what real estate professionals do all the time and why they often end up with no tax liability at all. In this case, it works for you as a W2 wage earner. And for that reason, I think its one of the most powerful tools out there for high paid professionals that is grossly underutilized. Remember, the biggest expense for most people is the amount of tax they pay—especially W2 wage earners. This strategy lets you use money you would otherwise pay the IRS to build a cash-flowing asset for yourself.  Listen to this week's Wealth Formula Podcast to learn other ways to legally pay less tax!

Bitcoin is definitely volatile. If you told me it was going to go down by 50 percent next year, I would hesitantly believe you. However, there is no way you can convince me that Bitcoin will not hit $500,000 at some point within the next five years. Think about what's happening: ETFs are everywhere, treasury companies are holding Bitcoin, there are rumors of central banks buying it, and even an American Bitcoin reserve. It is an asset that will go up. But it may go down before that, and that is unnerving. You should not put money into Bitcoin unless you commit to not touching it for 5–10 years. But then you face another problem—Bitcoin is like gold. Unlike apartment buildings, there is no rent, no cashflow. Other coins like Ethereum and Solana have mechanisms called staking that allow for yield. Bitcoin does not. Its beauty is that there are not a lot of moving parts. It's a vault of security, and that's pretty much it. Again, just like gold. There have been companies like BlockFi and Celsius—which are, indeed, traditional finance companies—that lost people's Bitcoin when they went insolvent. But now there may be a way to get yield from Bitcoin while keeping it in your custody. That's what we talk about on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, in addition to covering recent news and making predictions about Bitcoin's price.

It's been a while since I've talked about Wealth Formula Banking in detail, and I know we have a lot of new listeners who may not have heard about it yet. So today, I want to share a webinar that explains why I think this strategy is such a no-brainer. First off—what is Wealth Formula Banking? You may have heard of something called “infinite banking.” It's a similar concept, but instead of focusing on paying your bills, Wealth Formula Banking is specifically designed to amplify your investments. My introduction to this idea came the same way you're hearing it now—through a podcast. I kept hearing the phrase “be your own bank.” Honestly, I didn't know what that meant, and I tuned it out until a friend finally broke it down for me. That's when I had my aha moment. Here's why. Normally, when you want to invest in a cash-flowing asset, you park money in a checking or savings account first. The problem? Those accounts pay you almost nothing—well under 1 percent. Meanwhile, inflation is running at 2–3 percent, so you're guaranteed to lose money. That's why my friend Robert Kiyosaki always says, “savers are losers.” Wealth Formula Banking flips that script. You're essentially creating a special kind of cash value life insurance policy, where the money you put in grows at a virtually bulletproof 5–6 percent compounding rate per year. Not that sexy on its own, BUT…here's the kicker: you don't have to pull that money out to invest in your deal. Instead, you borrow against it from the insurance company's general ledger at a simple interest rate. That means your original money keeps compounding inside the policy at 5–6 percent—even while you've borrowed against it to invest in cash-flowing assets like real estate. That's the key. With a HELOC, when you borrow, your money stops working for you. With Wealth Formula Banking, your money never stops growing. So now you've got the same dollars doing two jobs at once: earning safe, compounding growth inside your policy and generating income from your investments outside of it. By simply routing your money through Wealth Formula Banking, you're supercharging your returns. And here's what makes it even more powerful: tax-free growth within the insurance account, real asset protection to shield your wealth from lawsuits and creditors. Plus, it includes a permanent death benefit, which means that in addition to building wealth today, you're also creating a lasting legacy for your family tomorrow. It's not magic—it's math. And it's the kind of smart arbitrage that can turn ordinary investments into extraordinary ones. Schedule a FREE consultation: https://wealthformulabanking.com

Most people picture investing as a game of chess. Everything is visible on the board, the rules are clear, and if you're sharp enough, you can see ten moves ahead. But markets don't work like that. They shift in real time—rates change, policies flip, black swan events crash the party. That's why I think investing looks a lot more like poker. In poker, you never know all the cards. You play with incomplete information, and even the best players lose hands. What separates them isn't luck—it's process. Over time, making slightly better decisions than everyone else compounds into big wins. That's the same discipline great investors use. They don't wait for certainty—it never comes. They weigh probabilities, manage risk, and swing hard when the odds line up. Risk isn't the enemy. Fold every hand and you'll bleed out. To win, you've got to put chips in the pot—wisely. Wealthy investors do the same. They protect the downside, but when they see an asymmetric bet—small risk, huge upside—they lean in. That's what early Bitcoin adopters did. That's what smart money did in real estate after 2008. And just like poker, investing is about knowing when to quit. Ego and sunk costs can trap you in bad hands, but the pros know when to fold and move their chips to a better table. In the end, both games reward patience, discipline, and emotional control. You don't need to win every hand. You just need to stay in the game long enough for compounding to do its work. The amateurs play for excitement. The pros play for longevity. That's the mindset you need as an investor and the reason I interviewed a former professional poker player on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast!

If you look at the wealthiest people in the world, they almost always get there through business ownership or real estate. The only real exceptions are athletes and entertainers—and let's be honest, that's not a realistic path for most of us. We talk about real estate a lot here and through deal flow in our investor club. But today I want to focus more on business ownership. One way in is to start a business from scratch. I've done that a few times—sometimes it worked out really well, other times it was a total disaster. That's the reality of startups. They require a certain wiring, an appetite for risk, and the ability to move forward without much of a safety net. It's harder to do when you're 52, have three kids heading to college and alimony to pay. Another option is to buy an existing business. The advantage here is that you're stepping into something that has already worked, which gives you confidence in the viability of the business. But it's not without risks. Some businesses depend heavily on key people or relationships that don't transfer, and the ones that truly run themselves tend to be very expensive and often out of reach. The third option is franchising. It's not risk-free either, but it does give you a roadmap. If you're the type who can follow a proven system, your chances of success go way up. You're not starting from scratch—you're plugging into a model that's already been tested and supported. For people who don't necessarily have the renegade startup personality but want more than just a paycheck and index funds, franchising can be a great fit. We've talked about franchises before, but this week's episode brings a fresh perspective from someone focusing on non-food franchises. I think you'll find it really interesting.

If there's one thing that separates the truly wealthy from everyone else, it's their relationship with risk. Not blind risk. I'm talking about conviction — the ability to see an opportunity before everyone else does, to lean into it while others are frozen, and to hold through the storm until the payoff is undeniable. The extreme example is Bitcoin. In 2012, when it was trading for less than the price of a cup of coffee, most people laughed it off as internet monopoly money. But a handful of people had conviction.  They understood the asymmetric nature of the bet — the downside was capped at the small amount they put in, while the upside was exponential. Those early adopters didn't just make returns; many became billionaires. Of course, most people hadn't even heard of Bitcoin in 2012, so that might not have even been an option for you. So let's take another example that you almost certainly did live through. Real estate after the Great Recession in 2008 was radioactive. Nobody wanted to touch it. Yet those who bought when fear was at its peak ended up riding one of the longest real estate bull markets in U.S. history.  Data from the National Association of Realtors shows that home prices more than doubled from 2012 to 2022 in many markets. Imagine the rewards of being on the buy side in 2012. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I believe we are in a similar scenario with real estate right now as we head into a descending rate environment following a real estate bloodbath.  Properties are severely discounted, and values are almost certain to go up as rates fall. But you have to see the big picture and not be scared. That's not easy to do when everyone else is.  Real estate moguls and business owners are the ones most likely to take their wealth to the next level. Real estate is accessible to you — and so is business ownership.  Look at the Forbes billionaire list and you'll see a pattern: nearly 70% of the world's wealthiest people are business founders or owners. They didn't get rich clipping coupons from the S&P 500.  They got there by creating or buying businesses that became valuable, saleable assets. The risk was obvious: most startups fail. But the payoff for the ones that succeed dwarfs anything you'll ever get in your brokerage account. Now, the reality is that most high-paid professionals never play in this arena. They're comfortable and don't want to rock the boat. Some call it the “golden handcuffs” — you make enough money to feel comfortable, but that same comfort prevents you from ever taking risk. And you know what? That's totally fine. Just know that doing your 9-to-5 and investing into your 401(k) is not going to create life-changing money. If all you're looking for is life-sustaining money, keep doing what you're doing. But ask yourself this question: What's the life you dream about? If it's the life you already have, then congratulations. If not, are you on a trajectory that even makes it possible to get there? If not, you've got to change course. My guest this week on Wealth Formula Podcast has done a great deal of research on the wealthy and has written a book based on what he has learned.

Something big is happening in Washington right now, and it has the potential to reshape everything you and I do as investors. A few weeks ago, the Trump administration attempted to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook, only to have an appeals court block the move on legal grounds.  At almost the same time, Stephen Miran—one of Trump's economic advisers—was confirmed by the Senate to the Fed's Board of Governors by a razor-thin margin.  On one side, an attempted subtraction. On the other, a confirmed addition. All of this is happening right before a major policy meeting, and it's not hard to see the writing on the wall. Trump's takeover of the Fed is not a question of if—it's a question of when. Whether it unfolds in a matter of weeks or drags out over the next few months, the direction is set and the outcome is inevitable.  The endgame is to bring interest rates down and, if necessary, use quantitative easing to drive bond yields even lower. That kind of policy would flood the system with liquidity, and the immediate effect would be a booming economy. Asset prices would rip higher—stocks, real estate, gold, Bitcoin—you name it. If you own assets, you'd feel wealthier almost overnight. But of course, there's another side to this coin. A dollar that weakens under the weight of easy money. A gap between the asset-rich and the asset-poor that grows even wider. Rising inequality, rising tensions, and perhaps a long-term cost to the credibility of the U.S. financial system. So is this takeover of the Fed a good thing? That depends entirely on where you sit. If you're a wage earner with no meaningful assets, it's bad news. If you're an investor, it's a reminder that ignoring policy shifts like this is done at your own peril.  The time to prepare is now, not later. Don't wait for rates to drop before acting. History shows that buying assets in a descending rate environment has been one of the most powerful wealth-creation maneuvers in the United States.  Think back to 2008. The Fed responded to the financial crisis with unprecedented rate cuts and waves of quantitative easing. What followed was more than a decade of explosive gains in stocks, real estate, and other assets.  Those who bought while rates were falling built extraordinary wealth. Those who stood on the sidelines missed out. But don't take my word. Listen to noted economist Richard Duncan explain the dynamics of this situation in this week's episode of Wealth Forula Podcast.  Learn more about Richard Duncan: richardduncaneconomics.com

When we think about investing, our minds usually go straight to stocks, bonds, and real estate. But some of the best opportunities come when you stop thinking of investing as something separate from your everyday life. What do I mean by this? A lot of the things we buy are treated as expenses when they could be investments. You might wear a watch or jewelry simply because you like them, but you avoid spending too much because it feels frivolous.  Yet what's better—paying $250 for a decent watch that will be worthless in 10 years, or $5,000 for a Rolex that could be worth twice as much over the same period? The same idea applies to cars and even furniture. I have a good friend who lives by this philosophy. For decades, he's chosen to invest in the finer things rather than the ordinary, and it has become a cornerstone of his personal investment strategy. It's about thinking differently—turning what most people see as expenses into assets. Art falls into that same category. I'm not a huge art guy myself. Sometimes I'll buy a piece off the street because I've never thought of art as an investment. Yet for centuries, people have purchased art for its beauty, cultural value, and emotional impact—and often made a financial killing in the process. Today, art is recognized as a legitimate asset class—something that not only enriches your life on the wall but also diversifies and strengthens your portfolio. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast, we're going to explore how fine art has evolved into an investment category in its own right, and how you might think about incorporating it into your wealth strategy. Learn more about Philip Hoffman and The Fine Art Group: www.fineartgroup.com

We all know technology and geopolitics shape the world, but there's a quieter, less obvious force that dictates the flow of wealth and opportunity: demographics. Where people live, where they move, and how populations grow or shrink — these are the currents that ultimately drive economic gravity. That's why all of the multifamily investments you see through Investor Club focus on areas where there is job creation. Where there is job creation, there is population growth, and people have to live somewhere. Scale that concept up to a global level, and you start to see why migration, climate, and demographics are the real megatrends of the century. Take China — decades of the one-child policy have created a demographic cliff. Contrast that with parts of Africa and South Asia, where populations are booming. Add to this the wildcard of AI, which could either amplify the advantages of youthful nations or offset aging ones. For investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone thinking long term, the key isn't where the puck is today — it's where the puck is going. That's the topic of this week's Wealth Formula Podcast.

One of the realities of building wealth is that the more you have, the more you have to lose. Asset protection and estate planning aren't just legal technicalities—they're essential parts of safeguarding everything you've worked for.  The worst time to plan is when you actually need it. If you wait until you're facing a lawsuit, a creditor, or a sudden death in the family, it's already too late. Think of asset protection like insurance. Most of us wouldn't drive without auto insurance or own a home without homeowners' insurance. Yet many wealthy people operate businesses, hold investments, and build family wealth without putting legal structures in place to shield those assets. One lawsuit or one major life event can undo decades of hard work. On the estate side, not having a proper plan doesn't just cost money—it creates stress and hardship for your loved ones. Without a solid estate plan, your family could end up tied up in probate courts, fighting over assets, and losing valuable time and resources.  We've talked on this show before about basic steps everyone should take—like forming entities to protect your business or making sure you have not only a will, but also a living trust. Those are the starting points. But as your wealth continues to grow, your planning needs to grow with it. High-net-worth families have to think about more robust strategies—things like dynasty trusts, asset protection trusts, and the best jurisdictions to set them up.  These aren't just technical details. They're the difference between wealth that gets preserved and multiplies across generations and wealth that gets chipped away by taxes, lawsuits, and poor planning. To help us understand these tools at the highest level, I've invited perhaps the most respected attorney in this space—someone who is seen by other attorneys as the thought leader in asset protection and estate planning—Steve Oshins. Steve has pioneered strategies that are now industry standards, and his work has shaped how families across the country protect and grow their wealth. You're going to want to pay attention this conversation closely.

I'm not a big stock guy. However, there are some companies out there that you know are just going to change the world, and it would be nice to be able to own part of them—especially before they go public. That's why this week on Wealth Formula Podcast we're diving into a topic that's been on my mind for quite some time: the world of pre-IPO investing. If you've ever felt like by the time a company finally hits the public market it's already ballooned in value and you're basically buying in at a premium, you're not alone. I personally had my eye on a company called Circle, which deals in stablecoins. As I've talked about on the show before, I think it's going to be huge globally. But as soon as Circle went public, the valuation shot up to a point where I felt like it was way too expensive to jump in. If I had access to those shares before the IPO, I would have definitely taken the plunge. Now, this isn't just about one company. We've seen this story play out with others, and right now there are some major game-changers like SpaceX on the horizon. SpaceX, one of Elon Musk's ventures, is one of those companies you just know is going to have a massive impact. But how do you get access to those deals? If you're an accredited investor, I have good news. Getting a piece of the action before these companies go public isn't just for the ultra-wealthy insiders anymore. It's becoming more accessible to accredited investors who want to get in earlier and potentially see greater upside. That's the topic of this week's Wealth Formula Podcast.Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com.  If you are purely investing in the public markets, in many cases, you've missed the majority of a company's growth cycle. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey Wealth Formula Podcast, coming to you from Montecito, California today. Before we begin, as I always do, I will suggest you visit walt formula.com, which is the, um. Primary Home of Wealth Formula podcast, and it's also where you can get some resources outside of the podcast, including access to our accredited investor club, otherwise known as investor Club. Uh, that is where you can get, if, if you aren't an accredited investor, you can get access to opportunities that you would not otherwise see because they are not available to the general public. Um, speaking of. That kind of investment that's not typically, uh, available to the general public. Uh, that takes us sort of to the topic of today's show. That is, um, well, you see, I'm not a big stock guy, as you probably know, if you've listened to this show before, I'm not, you know, listen, I'm not anti stock. It's just not, you know. Generally what I've invested in my life. However, there are some companies out there that you just know are going to change the world, and because of that, it'd be nice to potentially be able to own part of them, you know, especially if they, if before they go public. That's why this week on Wealth Formula Podcast, we're gonna dive into a topic that's sort of been on my mind for some time. The world of what's called pre IPO investing. Basically investing before a stock goes public. Now, if you've ever felt like by the time a company finally hits the public market, it's already ballooned in value and you're basically buying at a premium, you're not alone. Again, this is not something I do often, but I had, um, as you know from my previous shows, I believe heavily that this whole world of stable coins is going to be enormous. And I had my eye on a company called Circle and then trades with CR Cl, uh, which deals in stable coins, uh, which is a, a really big player in stable coins. I think this is gonna be huge. Uh, but as soon as Circle went public, the valuation shot up, like just took off where it was kind of ridiculous and.

Bitcoin may be breaking records again, but this time it's not because of retail frenzy. Search trends, social media chatter, and small-investor activity are all far quieter than they were in 2017 or 2021. The people driving this move aren't hobby traders—they're the biggest institutions and the wealthiest investors on the planet. Look at BlackRock. Larry Fink once dismissed Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering.” Now he's calling it “digital gold,” and his firm's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has become the fastest-growing ETF in history.  It's pulled in nearly $90 billion, representing more than 3% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist. Those billions aren't coming from TikTok influencers—they're coming from pensions, hedge funds, and the kind of family offices that have multi-generational plans for capital preservation and growth. Even Harvard University has made the leap. Back in 2018, its star economist Kenneth Rogoff said Bitcoin was more likely to hit $100 than $100,000. Today, Harvard's endowment owns more of BlackRock's IBIT than it does Apple stock in its U.S. equity portfolio. That's not just a change of heart—it's a complete reversal in worldview. And of course, there's Michael Saylor, whose MicroStrategy now holds close to 3% of the total future Bitcoin supply, turning a business software company into a corporate Bitcoin vault. This is institutional FOMO. The biggest asset manager on Earth is selling it, elite universities are holding it, corporate treasuries are betting their future on it, and family offices are adding it to the same portfolios that hold their blue-chip stocks and trophy real estate. But institutions aren't the only ones making this move. There's another wave—quieter but just as significant—coming from the ultra-high-net-worth crowd. The centimillionaires.  The people who can wire $10 million into a position without blinking. I've always said: never take financial advice from someone with less money than you. Well, Gary Cardone has a lot more than me—and he's all in on Bitcoin. Gary is part of what they call “smart money.” He's in the same camp as the other ultra-wealthy who aren't just dabbling in crypto—they're making conviction bets.  And when you see people with that kind of capital and that kind of access all moving in the same direction, it's worth listening to why. That's exactly why I sat down with him—to hear, straight from someone in that rarefied circle, why Bitcoin has gone from a curiosity to a core holding.

Hey everyone, If you've been following me for any length of time, you already know that I believe real estate is the single greatest wealth-building tool available to everyday investors like you and me. (Although, I'll admit, Bitcoin is making a strong case to be in that conversation.) But every once in a while, it's worth stepping back and asking: Why has real estate created more millionaires than any other asset class—and why do the ultra-wealthy keep buying it, decade after decade? It comes down to a unique stack of advantages that you simply can't replicate anywhere else: Leverage: Real estate is one of the few investments where banks are eager to give you money to buy an appreciating asset. You put down a fraction of the purchase price and control 100% of the property—and 100% of the upside. Leverage can be a double-edged sword in down markets, but it remains the most powerful tool in the arsenal of the rich. Other People's Money: Every month, your tenants pay rent that covers your mortgage and builds your equity. Essentially, they're buying the property for you. Appreciation (Natural and Forced): Over time, rents and property values generally trend upward. But here's the thing—you can force appreciation by raising rents, cutting costs, and improving operations. On properties over four units, these improvements increase net operating income (NOI), which directly determines the property's market value. That's how sophisticated investors manufacture wealth on demand. Tax Advantages (The Secret Weapon): The IRS lets you deduct a portion of your property's value each year—depreciation—even while the property itself often climbs in value. Now, here's where things get truly magical: cost segregation combined with 100% bonus depreciation. These strategies let you front-load those tax deductions, often allowing you to write off a massive portion of your investment in the first year. For example, let's say you buy a property for $1 million and put down $300K. With a proper cost segregation study and bonus depreciation, you might receive a K-1 showing a $300K loss that same year. That's a paper loss offsetting your taxable income—meaning money that would've gone to the IRS is now working to build your wealth instead. And with Congress reinstating 100% bonus depreciation, this playbook for savvy investors is back at full strength. If you think about it, upfront tax savings alone can turbocharge your returns before you've even collected your first rent check. This week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I sit down with Gian Pazzia, chairman and chief strategy officer at KBKG, to pull back the curtain on cost segregation and bonus depreciation. We'll dig into: How cost segregation really works—and when to use it. How passive investors and short-term rental owners can take advantage of it. What to know about recapture taxes, 1031 exchanges, and long-term planning. If you've ever wondered how sophisticated investors legally shelter huge amounts of income while building massive wealth, this episode gives you the inside track. P.S. If you want access to the “Do it Yourself” Cost Segregation tool mentioned in this podcast, you can access it HERE. Use the code FORMULAPROMO to get 10% off. 

Last week, we talked about side gigs—smart ways to earn extra income outside your day job. One of the options we touched on was affiliate marketing, a tried-and-true method still relevant today. But here's another strategy I've personally dabbled in: building websites designed to generate leads. These sites are created with specific search terms in mind—mine were focused on cosmetic surgery—but the model can be applied to nearly any industry. Once your site is ranking on Google and generating traffic, you rent out that digital space to businesses who want the leads. I had a friend who made millions using this model with smartlipo.com back in the day. It was like owning valuable digital real estate. But that was then. The landscape has shifted. With the rise of tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, fewer people are relying on traditional search engines. So the question is: Is this still a viable side hustle in 2025? And if it is, how does it work now—and how can you get started? That's exactly what we're diving into on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast.

My financial journey started after I accidentally picked up one of Robert Kiyosaki's books. It was the end of my honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, and my wife (at the time) and I were waiting for our plane back home. I decided to grab a book from one of the little airport shops, but there weren't many choices. In fact, I believe there were four, and three of them were romance novels with pictures of muscular men with long blonde hair on them. The only other option was Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant. I had no idea who Robert Kiyosaki was, nor did I really care that much about investing and personal finance. But it sounded like a better read than the others, so I bought it. At the time, I had just finished residency training and was focused on my career ahead. I never really thought much about money beyond the fact that I was finally going to make some after years of indentured servitude as a surgical resident. But on the flight back from Mexico, everything changed. Reading that book felt like a bolt of lightning, and it changed my mindset forever. This experience, I later found out, has happened to countless people I've met since then. I call it taking the pill (the book is purple). A world of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. I know it may sound strange, but the idea that I could ever not have a job and, instead, become an entrepreneur had never before occurred to me. In hindsight, I understand why. I was a very good student. “A students" get addicted to the educational system. When you get As, you are rewarded. You get accolades. Your teachers love you. What's not to love? That makes you try even harder. That feeling of success is addictive, and you want more of it. So you aspire to do the things that the smart kids are supposed to do, like going to a fancy college and becoming a lawyer or doctor. If you succeed in a system, you don't doubt the system. You don't look for alternatives. The system I bought into was an educational system created by industrialists a century ago. They didn't want to train entrepreneurs; they wanted to train a workforce. And I was winning in that system. C students, on the other hand, have nothing to lose. They search for success in other ways and often end up more successful than those who did better in school. That's why A students rarely become entrepreneurs. They never have a reason to look outside the system. The purple book I read on that plane helped me break away from that world. I saw life differently after reading it. Even though I was already a surgeon who had completed residency, I never wanted to work for anyone ever again. I started my own cosmetic surgery practice, then another medical business, and had a lot of success. I also tried my hand at other businesses that were less successful. I made lots of money and lost lots of money. Living the life of an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. I also believe, to a certain extent, that you are either born an entrepreneur or you are not. I was born an entrepreneur, despite the fact that it took me over 30 years to discover it. Because of that, I never push anyone to quit their job and go out on their own. That kind of risk is not for everyone. That said, there are certainly ways to dabble in entrepreneurship without risking everything. People call them side hustles. Side hustles are ways to make a little extra money that you can use to make an extra investment or simply go on a nicer vacation. One of those side hustles I have engaged in is affiliate marketing. Ten or fifteen years ago, I had websites designed to sell products to people by providing links to things they might be interested in—even Amazon links. If someone decided to buy something after clicking my link, I would get a small commission from the seller. It was not a huge money maker for me, so eventually I decided to focus on other things. However, opportunities like this still exist. And these days,

There's no shortage of doom-and-gloom in the podcast world—especially in the gold and silver crowd. You know the type. The ones who spend half their airtime warning you that the dollar is about to collapse, the grid will go down, and that only silver coins will save you. I used to buy into that narrative too. I was a card-carrying member of the Zombie Apocalypse school of personal finance. I even listened to Peter Schiff religiously. But as time passed and I realized that zombies would not rule the world, I gradually became an optimist. I believe in the resilience of the U.S. economy. I don't think society is going to crumble, and I'm not prepping for Armageddon. That said, there is one warning from the doom crowd that's absolutely true—and it's not a matter of opinion. It's a fact. The U.S. dollar is losing value. Fast. That might not feel dramatic. But it should. Because it means that if you're sitting on cash—thinking you're being conservative—you're actually guaranteeing yourself a loss. Robert Kiyosaki said it best: “Savers are losers.”It's a clever phrase, but it's not a joke. It's reality. Inflation isn't a glitch in the system—it is the system. In a country running record-breaking deficits and drowning in debt, the only viable solution is to devalue the currency. In other words, print more money. And whether that inflation comes in at a “modest” 2% like the Fed wants, or 7–9% like we saw in recent years, the outcome is the same: your money loses purchasing power. A dollar in 1970 had the buying power of nearly $8 today. So if your dad tucked away $10,000 in a shoebox thinking he was doing you a favor, that money is now worth a little over $1,200. Even the money you saved in the year 2000 has lost nearly half its value. Inflation is the background noise of our economy. It's always there, always working, always eroding. Slowly when things are “normal.” Fast when they're not. So what do you do? Well, if you're keeping large chunks of money in a savings account paying less than 1% interest while inflation clips along at 3–6%, you are, without exaggeration, bleeding wealth every single day. It feels safe. It looks safe. But it's not.It's a bucket with a hole in the bottom. And you don't even notice until it's almost empty. That's why the wealthy don't hoard cash. They own assets that inflate with inflation. They buy things that grow in value as the dollar shrinks—because they understand the system. They don't fight it. They ride it. Real estate is one of the best tools in the game. Home prices tend to rise over time. Rents go up. But if you lock in a 30-year fixed mortgage, your payment never changes. So while the cost of everything else is climbing, your loan stays frozen. Meanwhile, inflation is silently reducing the real value of the debt you owe. You're paying it back in cheaper dollars every single year. Then you've got ownership in productive businesses. Sure, stock prices can swing in the short term. But long-term? Equities in companies with pricing power—companies that can raise prices when costs go up—often outpace inflation. And as an owner, you benefit directly. And finally, there are the scarce assets. Bitcoin. Gold. Precious metals. In a world where central banks can conjure trillions out of nowhere, things that can't be printed tend to hold real value—or even multiply it. This is how the wealthy play the game.While most people are watching their savings accounts decay quietly, the wealthy are stacking assets that appreciate. They are playing offense in a very predictable system. So those are the basics. But let me give you one more ninja tip from the wealthiest real estate investors in the world: You can print your own money by using debt. Think about it. Let's say you buy a $250,000 property this year using a 30-year fixed mortgage. You put 20% down, so you're financing $200,000. Now fast forward three decades.

I want to share a story you may have heard before—but it's worth telling again. When I finished surgical training and joined a practice in 2008, we were in the middle of the Great Recession. But for me, the recession didn't mean anything. My net worth was below zero. I'd made less than $50K a year for seven years. I wasn't worried about losing money—I didn't have any. What I did have was a new six-figure salary and a baby on the way. Suddenly, I had to start thinking like a grown-up. I needed to protect my family. I needed life insurance. But I had no idea what that really meant. I started asking around. One of the younger surgeons told me to “buy term and invest the difference.” That's what Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman were preaching on TV too. But an older surgeon—close to retirement—told me something very different. He'd been financially wrecked by the market crash and said permanent life insurance was one of the only things keeping him afloat. Here's the thing: they were both kind of right. The young guy was right that most permanent life insurance is designed in such a way that it is a terrible investment. But the older guy had discovered something the hard way—permanent life insurance can offer unmatched financial stability when everything else is falling apart. Still, neither of them understood what I would come to learn just a few years later from some of my wealthiest friends. You see, permanent life insurance isn't one thing. It's a flexible tool. In the right hands, it can be optimized for estate planning, tax-free growth, or even used as a powerful retirement income strategy—especially for those of us who started making money later in life. That's when I took a deep dive, even getting a life insurance license so I could fully understand the mechanics myself. What I found became the foundation for Wealth Formula Banking, Wealth Accelerator, and now, Wealth Accelerator Plus.  In fact, some of these strategies are so effective that they've already helped people like me “catch up” on retirement income planning—even if we didn't start earning real money until our 30s. On this week's show, I talk with one of my new partners at Wealth Formula Banking, Brandon Preece. We unpack common misconceptions about life insurance, discuss mainstream strategies, and then go further—exploring new protocols that could be game-changers for your financial future. If you haven't learned about this stuff yet, it's time. And if you have, it's time to revisit all of these strategies. These strategies have played a major role in my financial life—and in the lives of many in our Wealth Formula community. And I can honestly say that I don't know of a single person who ever regretted setting up a plan!

I know some of you are tired of hearing about Bitcoin and digital currencies. That's not what this week's show is about. This week's podcast conversation is broader—it touches the entire global economy. But…you just can't talk about macroeconomic trends anymore without talking about digital dollars and Bitcoin. Leaving them out today would be like ignoring gold when discussing commodities. There's a section this week in my interview with Ian Reynolds that dives deep into the bond market and the growing influence of stablecoins. And I realized—it might be helpful to give you a bit of context up front. If you're already familiar, consider this a refresher. If not, this will make the second half of our conversation a lot more useful. Let's start with the 10-year U.S. Treasury—arguably the most important interest rate in the world. This one number influences everything from mortgage rates to stock valuations to how much it costs the government to borrow money. Historically, when inflation drops, yields on the 10-year tend to fall as well. That's the standard relationship: lower inflation usually leads to lower yields. But that's not what's happening right now. Despite a year of cooling inflation, the 10-year Treasury yield has stayed surprisingly high. Why? The answer boils down to supply and demand. On the supply side, the U.S. government is flooding the market with Treasuries—over a trillion dollars' worth every quarter—to finance its growing deficits. That's a lot of new bonds entering the market. At the same time, demand isn't keeping up. Foreign central banks like China and Japan, which used to be some of the biggest buyers of our debt, are pulling back. Some are dealing with their own domestic issues. Others are deliberately reducing their exposure to the dollar as a reaction to U.S. foreign policy over the past year. So: more supply, less demand—what happens? Bond prices go down, resulting in higher yields for bond investors. That, in turn, means higher borrowing costs for everyone—including the U.S. government, businesses, and consumers. That's why, even with inflation falling, the 10-year hasn't followed the script. But here's where things get interesting. A new kind of buyer has started stepping in: stablecoin issuers. Stablecoins—like USDC and Tether—are digital tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar. They've become essential plumbing for the crypto economy, but their growth is increasingly relevant to the broader financial system. Why? Because in order to maintain their dollar peg, these companies need to back their coins with something stable—and that “something” is often short-term U.S. Treasuries. It turns out, that's a great business to be in. These stablecoin issuers collect real dollars, turn around, and invest them in T-bills yielding 5% or more. That spread—between what they earn and what they pay out—is pure profit. It's essentially a 21st-century version of a money market fund, just running on blockchain. And it's growing fast. Tether now holds more Treasuries than countries like Australia or Mexico. BlackRock has launched a tokenized Treasury fund that already has nearly $3 billion under management. And just this week, Mastercard announced that it's integrating USDC and other stablecoins for cross-border settlement. In other words, this isn't fringe anymore. It's moved into the mainstream, and it's growing quickly. Even lawmakers are catching up. Just this month, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act, a bipartisan bill that sets clear regulatory guidelines for stablecoins. It requires full backing by liquid assets—like Treasuries—and regular public disclosures. It's now headed to the House, and while not law yet, the momentum is clearly there. The takeaway? Regulatory clarity is coming, and that opens the door for large institutions, payment processors, and even governments to scale up stablecoin usage with confidence. So why does this matter for bond yields?

My mission at Wealth Formula Podcast is to provide you with real financial education. You may have heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger curve. In short, when you start learning something new, you know that you don't know anything. That's the safe zone. The dangerous part is what I call the red zone—when you've learned just enough to think you know a lot, but really… you don't. Then, eventually, if you keep learning, you get to the point where you finally realize how little you actually know—and how much more there is to understand. That's kind of where I am now. And so, the only thing I can do—and the only thing I encourage you to do—is to keep learning more than we knew yesterday. Take this week's episode. We're talking about Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs. Until recently, I didn't fully understand how they worked. And I'd bet most business owners don't either. Which is exactly why this episode matters. Even if you don't currently own a business or a practice, I still think it's important to learn about strategies like this—because someday you might. And in the meantime, you're expanding your financial vocabulary, which is always a good investment. So, what is an ESOP? At its core, an ESOP is a legal structure that allows you to sell your business to a trust set up for your employees—usually over time. It's a way to cash out, preserve your legacy, stay involved if you want to, and unlock some massive tax advantages in the process. But before we talk about all the bells and whistles, let's address the number one question that confuses almost everyone—including me: Where does the money come from? If you're selling your company to a trust, and your employees aren't writing you a check… how the hell are you getting paid? Here's the answer: You're selling your business to an ESOP trust, which is a qualified retirement trust for the benefit of your employees. That trust becomes the buyer. But like any buyer, it needs money. So how does it pay you? There are two main sources: Bank financing – Sometimes, the ESOP trust can borrow part of the purchase price from a lender. Seller financing – And this is the big one. You finance your own sale by carrying a note. That means you get paid over time, through scheduled payments—funded by the company's future profits. The company continues to generate cash flow, and instead of paying it out to you as the owner, it pays off the loan owed to you as the seller. So yes—it's a structured, tax-advantaged way to convert your equity into liquidity using your company's own future earnings. You're not walking away with a check on Day 1—but you are pulling money out of the business steadily and predictably, often with interest that beats what a bank would offer. And here's the kicker: If your company is an S-corp and becomes 100% ESOP-owned, it likely pays no federal income tax, and often no state income tax either. That means a lot more money stays in the business—available to fund your buyout faster. If you're a C-corp, you might even qualify for a 1042 exchange, which can defer or eliminate capital gains taxes entirely if you reinvest the proceeds in U.S. securities. And here's something the experts probably won't say out loud—but I will: This isn't always about selling your business. Sometimes, it's just a very clever way to get money out of your business and pay less tax. You'll hear ESOP consultants talk about legacy and succession planning—and that's all true and valuable. But in reality, some owners use ESOPs as a pure tax play. They stay in control, they keep running the business, and they simply create a legal structure that lets them pull money out tax-efficiently while rewarding employees along the way. Think of it less like a sale and more like a smart internal liquidity strategy. You still own the culture. You still drive the direction.

Not long ago, I made the case that it's not too late to buy Bitcoin—even after it crossed the $100,000 mark. Why? Because the nature of the opportunity has changed. When governments and institutions start stockpiling a finite asset, you're no longer just betting on price—you're watching a new system take shape.And interestingly, a very similar story is unfolding not in financial markets, but in orbit.For most of the last century, space was strictly the domain of governments. NASA, the Department of Defense, the Russian and Chinese space agencies—these were the only real players. Private capital didn't have much of a role. That changed with SpaceX.SpaceX didn't just innovate—it obliterated the cost structure. In 2010, it cost about $50,000 to launch a kilogram into orbit. Today, thanks to the reusable Falcon 9, that cost has fallen to under $2,000—and Starship could bring it below $500. These aren't marginal gains. These are cost reductions that unlock entirely new industries.We're now seeing an explosion of opportunity: satellite internet that connects the most remote parts of the globe, smartphones that communicate directly with orbiting satellites, and AI-enhanced imaging tools that monitor everything from crop health to military activity in real time.Last year alone, space startups raised nearly $13 billion in private investment, even in a tighter funding environment. And Morgan Stanley projects the space economy could surpass $1 trillion by 2040—double its current size. Perhaps most surprising of all: over three-quarters of global space revenue today comes from commercial activity, not government programs.This isn't science fiction. It's infrastructure. It's logistics. It's telecom. And yes—it's investable. And that's why we are talking about it on this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast.

Bitcoin just crossed $100,000, and you're probably thinking: “I missed it.” And you wouldn't be alone. That's how most people feel. They heard about it at $1,000… were told it was a scam at $10,000… waited for a pullback at $30,000… and now that it's over six figures, they've mentally closed the door on the opportunity. It's human nature to assume that if you're not early, you're too late. But that's not how this works—not with Bitcoin. In fact, this might actually be the best risk-adjusted time in Bitcoin's history to buy. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it's true—and the data backs it up. Let's talk supply and demand. Since the halving in April, Bitcoin's issuance has dropped to just 3.125 BTC every 10 minutes. That's about 450 new coins per day, or just over 3,100 per week. Meanwhile, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs alone are buying more than 30,000 BTC a week—ten times what's being mined. And that's just the activity we know about from public filings. It doesn't include over-the-counter purchases from sovereign wealth funds, corporate treasuries, family offices, or high-net-worth individuals quietly accumulating behind the scenes. So where's the extra Bitcoin coming from? It's coming from long-time holders—early adopters who've sat on their coins for a decade or more and are only willing to part with them at much higher prices. This isn't hype-driven retail mania like in the past. It's a slow, deliberate transfer of supply from the original believers to large institutions. And here's the key: those institutions don't trade. They hold. Often for years—if not indefinitely—as part of their long-term strategic allocation. You are witnessing Bitcoin being monetized in real time.It's not speculation anymore. BlackRock's IBIT already has over $20 billion under management. Fidelity's FBTC is acquiring thousands of coins per week. El Salvador and Bhutan are actively accumulating. Even the U.S. government holds over 210,000 BTC from seizures—and here's what no one's talking about: they're not auctioning it off like foreclosed houses or impounded cars. They're holding it. The price isn't rising because of FOMO. It's rising because it now takes higher and higher prices to pry loose coins from the hands of holders who have no urgency to sell. Those coins are disappearing into cold storage, long-term trusts, and sovereign wallets—and they aren't coming back. This is what a supply shock looks like when the buyers have deep pockets and decade-long time horizons. And yet, the most dramatic shift in Bitcoin isn't even the price—it's the risk profile. Five years ago, Bitcoin was still speculative. Custody was clunky. Regulation was unclear. Access was limited. Today, institutions can buy it through BlackRock. Fidelity and Coinbase Prime offer secure custody. Legal frameworks and compliance protocols are firmly in place. Sure, volatility still exists—but existential risk? That's largely off the table. Bitcoin is no longer a “maybe.” It's a “when.” And that's why the opportunity still exists.Not because people are afraid to lose money, but because they still don't quite believe they're allowed to be this early to something this massive. The truth is, you didn't miss the train. You missed the garage-band phase. But now? You're standing right as Bitcoin steps onto the global stage—surrounded by the biggest asset managers in the world, all scrambling to buy up what little supply is left. The demand is relentless. The supply is fixed. The equilibrium price is rising. I truly believe we'll see a 10X in Bitcoin over the next five years. And if you still feel like you're playing catch-up, you're not out of options. There are ways to amplify your exposure—like Bitcoin treasury companies. MicroStrategy now holds over 214,000 BTC and has effectively become a leveraged Bitcoin vehicle traded on the stock market. In past cycles, it's outperformed Bitcoin itself. Metaplanet in Japan is following the same blueprint,...

We're living through truly extraordinary times—not simply because things are changing, but because of how breathtakingly fast those changes are happening. Take artificial intelligence: it's no longer some futuristic buzzword from a sci-fi movie; it's already reshaping our lives, economies, and even how we relate to each other. But here's what's really mind-blowing: artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. This isn't the kind of gradual innovation we're used to—it's a complete overhaul. AGI promises to rewrite the rules of entire industries practically overnight, delivering changes more profound and rapid than anything humanity has ever experienced. Forget the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or even the dawn of the internet—this transformation could eclipse them all, and do it faster than any of us can imagine. Parallel to the AI revolution, Bitcoin has had its own remarkable story. Just a little over a decade ago, it was an obscure digital experiment—dismissed by mainstream finance as a tech nerd's hobby, virtual Monopoly money with no real-world impact. Fast-forward to today, and Bitcoin has completely transformed. Countries like El Salvador now officially recognize Bitcoin as legal tender. Sovereign wealth funds—from Singapore to the Middle East—are quietly stacking it into their national reserves. Big corporations like MicroStrategy have turned conventional treasury management upside down, boldly choosing Bitcoin as their primary reserve asset. Bitcoin's journey from fringe curiosity to essential financial infrastructure underscores a major shift in how we store, exchange, and even define value worldwide. And it's not just technology and finance that are seeing these seismic shifts; geopolitics and economic strategies are also entering uncharted waters. With the Trump administration back in power, we're witnessing a total rewrite of the traditional economic playbook. Tariffs, once cautiously applied economic tools, are now wielded boldly, reshaping global alliances and challenging decades-old partnerships. Long-standing allies like Canada and Europe now find themselves in more transactional relationships, while surprising new economic partnerships emerge based purely on pragmatism. This rapidly evolving landscape is generating unprecedented uncertainty—but also enormous opportunity. So how do you make sure you end up on the winning side of this historic transformation? By actively educating yourself, staying ahead of the curve, and positioning yourself to prosper. I've always made it my mission to anticipate where things are headed—and more importantly, to share that vision with you. Back in 2017, I first introduced Bitcoin to you when it traded below $5K. Today, with Bitcoin over $100K, I'm more convinced than ever that we'll see it hit $1 million within the next five years. The conversations I'm having make it seem inevitable. It's those conversations you need to be a part of—either having them yourself or listening to them through podcasts like mine. A good place to start is this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, where I talk with Anthony Pompliano, better known as Pomp.

When I was a young surgeon just coming out of residency and finally started making some money, I had to do something I'd never done before: find someone to do my taxes. Naturally, I asked around. I went to the older, more experienced surgeons in my group and said, “Who do you guys use?” A few names came up, but one firm kept coming up over and over. So, I figured it was probably a good idea to go with them. One of the main things people said about this firm was that they were “conservative.” At the time, that sounded like a good thing. In hindsight, it absolutely wasn't. You see, the problem with how high-paid professionals—especially physicians—choose tax professionals is that we confuse what “conservative” means in different contexts. As a surgeon, being conservative is a virtue. You don't operate unless you absolutely need to. You're cautious. That kind of conservatism saves lives. But taxes? That's a whole different game. The vast majority of the tax code isn't about when you have to pay taxes. It's about when you don't have to. It's about the legal strategies and frameworks that allow you to keep more of what you earn. It's not black and white—it's grey. And to navigate the grey, you need someone who understands how to interpret the code, not just read it like a rulebook. A “conservative” CPA, in that world, is someone who avoids the grey entirely. They stick to the simplest interpretations, ignore all the nuance, and frankly, don't work that hard to save you money. And that's not what you want in a CPA. I learned that the hard way. The first couple of years, I basically paid more than I should have because I didn't know any better. Eventually, I figured it out. Now, to be clear—there are CPAs out there who work hard, understand the tax code deeply, and can make a huge difference in your tax liability. But chances are, you don't know them. Because you're asking your colleagues. Or you're using the same firm your parents used. If that sounds like you, I'd encourage you to reconsider before you waste another year failing to optimize your taxes. One of the guys I think does get it—who really understands how to interpret tax law and save people money—is Casey Meyeres. And he'll be my guest on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast and we will discuss the latest tax bill put out by congressional republicans.

ITR Economics has been predicting a “Great Depression” beginning around 2030. Over the past seven years, I've had multiple representatives from their firm on the show, and they've never wavered from that forecast. That might not sound so alarming—until you realize that their long-term predictive track record is 94% accurate over the last 70 years. To understand why their conviction is so strong, tune into this week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. Once you hear the reasoning, it'll all make sense. The major drivers of this projected economic downturn are debt and demographics. We're spending unsustainably on entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid—programs that virtually no politician has the appetite to reform. At the same time, the Baby Boomers—who make up a huge chunk of the U.S. population—are moving out of the workforce and into retirement, where they'll become a significant economic burden. It seems inevitable. But as you listen, I want to introduce one wild card that could change everything: artificial intelligence. I truly believe we're on the cusp of a technological transformation that could rival the Industrial Revolution. Think back to when Thomas Malthus predicted global famine due to population growth. What he didn't account for was the invention of the tractor, which revolutionized food production. In the same way, we may be underestimating the impact of the robotic age driven by artificial intelligence. Right now, economic growth is tied closely to the size of a country's working population. But what if AI allows us to dramatically increase productivity with the same—or even a smaller—workforce? What if robotics drives a low-cost manufacturing renaissance in the U.S., making us competitive again without relying on cheap labor from overseas? In my view, these are the most important questions in American economics over the next decade. And to understand just how critical it is that we get this right, this week's episode lays it out clearly: the alternative may look a lot like the 1930s. Learn more about ITR and their resources: https://hubs.la/Q03kw-Fs0

The Wealth Formula Community is filled with high-paid professionals and small business owners—I'm one of them. Most of us are so focused on making a living that we rarely think about the day we might want to sell our "jobs." Over the years, I've encountered many physicians and dentists who never even considered an exit strategy until private equity firms approached them. Some of these lucky professionals have become quite wealthy from these transactions. But here's the thing—they could have done even better if they'd planned their exit earlier. Even if your practice or business isn't huge, it's still an asset you can sell. In fact, if your business is on the smaller side, it's even more crucial to optimize it for a sale. So, how do you do that? It's actually pretty straightforward once you understand what buyers are looking for. Preparing your business for sale several years in advance can significantly increase the price you'll get when you sell. This week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast dives into these topics. If you have a business or practice you plan to sell someday, you definitely want to tune in. And even if you don't, understanding business valuation and the key terms related to business acquisitions is valuable knowledge for any investor.

Wealth Formula Network, our online mastermind group, is where we dive into the financial questions that keep us up at night, and one debate that keeps coming up is whether to pay off your mortgage. It's a complex question, but let's unpack the math and the emotion so you can decide for yourself. First, think of your mortgage as a lever: with just 20% down, you control 100% of your home's value. On a $500,000 property, that means your $100,000 down payment magnifies the impact of appreciation. If home values rise 4% in a year, your equity grows by $20,000—an effective 20% return on your original $100K. Had you paid the full $500,000 up front, you'd still make the same $20,000—but that's only a 4% return on investment. Next, consider opportunity cost. Every extra dollar you funnel into your mortgage is a dollar you can't deploy elsewhere—whether it's a diversified stock portfolio, a private deal, or even another rental property. Historically, a balanced investment mix has returned 10% annually, comfortably outpacing most mortgage rates and turning “trapped” home equity into “working” capital. Here's something else you might not have considered: your mortgage can actually serve as asset protection. Creditors (or an overzealous bank) are far less likely to tap a property that still carries a lien. By keeping a mortgage in place, you make your home less attractive as collateral and shield your equity in other holdings. So, when you run the numbers, the case for holding onto lower cost debt and investing the difference is compelling. But, math isn't everything. There's intangible value in the day you write “0.00” next to your mortgage balance: no monthly housing payment, no looming due dates, and a deep sense of security—especially as you head toward retirement. Bottom line—there is no single correct answer. Know the pros and cons, weigh your financial goals against your emotional needs, and choose the path that aligns with both your head and your heart. Make that decision thoughtfully, and you'll sleep better either way. Speaking of mortgages, have you ever wondered what reverse mortgages are all about? Those late-night commercials often make them seem like a ways to rip-off seniors. Is there something really useful there? Well, I invited an expert onto the show to teach us all about them and was pleasantly surprised. Reverse mortgages can be a smart tool for homeowners nearing retirement and something you might consider for yourself someday even if you've got other money. Curious to learn more? Tune in to this week's episode of Wealth Formula and get the full story.

I used to scoff at Wall Street, believing the stock market was the last place to build real, life-changing wealth. I leaned exclusively on real estate, private businesses—even Bitcoin—to grow my net worth. But times change. I've softened my stance on equities and now see a place for stocks in my portfolio—just not the way most people do. I think of them as cash-flowing assets, much like real estate, following the approach of Andy Tanner, Robert Kiyosaki's “Rich Dad” stock advisor. Over the past two weeks, I decided to put Andy's strategy to the test by selling covered puts on companies I wouldn't mind owning. In that short span, I've already pocketed a 4% return. Sure, it could be beginner's luck—or it might be the rich option premiums on names like Tesla and MicroStrategy—but I'm off to a promising start. Can I realistically expect 80–100% annualized returns? Probably not, especially once I'm assigned and actually own some of these shares. But those who follow Andy's more conservative, textbook version of the strategy often cite annualized returns of 25%—and that's what I'm aiming to learn. So I'm enrolling in his next Cash Flow Academy course to master the details. The takeaway? Even an old dog like me can learn new tricks, so long as he keeps an open mind. Don't worry—I'm still a real estate guy at heart. But I appreciate having some liquid, income-producing positions, and this feels like a smart way to do it. If you've got a retirement account that could use a boost, you might find this approach especially appealing. To hear why I've done a complete 180 on stocks, tune into this week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast, where I sit down with the cash-flowing-stocks guru himself, Andy Tanner. P.S. Don't miss Andy's free upcoming event—details here: https://yv932.isrefer.com/go/siwmo/ccc/

The last couple of weeks, we've been deep in the world of buying businesses. But what happens when it's time to cash out? Maybe you're ready to sell your business, that investment property you've managed for years, or another major asset you've poured your energy into. If you're like most people, the thrill of a big sale is quickly followed by a less-exciting thought: “Wait, how much am I going to owe in taxes?” It's the classic one-two punch—first the celebration, then the sinking feeling as you picture Uncle Sam's hand reaching for a chunk of your hard-earned gains. But here's the good news: you actually have options. Real, legal, IRS-approved options. And the right strategy can mean the difference between watching your profits shrink and putting your money to work for you—sometimes for years to come. Of course, things get a little trickier if you have a mortgage or other debt on the property, but don't worry—we'll break that down too. Let's start with one of the oldest tricks in the book: the 1031 Exchange. If you own investment real estate, you've probably heard about this one. The idea is simple: sell your property, buy another “like-kind” property, and—if you follow the rules—kick that tax bill down the road. But here's the twist: if you've got a mortgage, you'll need to replace that debt with equal or greater debt on your next property, or pony up the difference in cash. Otherwise, the IRS will want a piece of the action right away. So yes, leverage matters! Now, maybe you're tired of being a landlord but still want those tax perks. Enter the Delaware Statutory Trust, or DST. This is essentially 1031 exchanging into a syndication that is designed for this type of thing. You sell your property and, instead of buying another one yourself, you buy a slice of a big, professionally managed property—like an apartment complex or shopping center. DSTs often come with their own loans, so you can match your old mortgage and keep the tax deferral going. The upside? No more midnight calls about leaky faucets. The downside? You're trusting someone else to run the show and they need to be good at it (just like any syndication operator). And, there are some rules and restrictions that can affect your returns negatively. But what if you're selling a business? That's where Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs, come in. Imagine selling your company to the people who helped you build it—your employees—and deferring a big chunk of your capital gains tax in the process. It's a win-win, but if your business has debt, things can get complicated fast. This is definitely a strategy where you'll want a seasoned advisor in your corner. Now, let's talk about installment sales and structured sales. In this scenario, instead of getting paid all at once for your asset, you spread out the payments—and the taxes—over several years. Structured sales even bring in a third party to guarantee those payments, adding an extra layer of security. But—and this is a big but—if you have a mortgage, the IRS treats the amount the buyer pays off as if you got that money in cash on day one. So, you'll pay taxes on that portion right away. For example, if you sell for $1 million but owe $600,000, you can only defer taxes on the $400,000 you actually receive over time. The more debt you have, the less you can defer. And finally, we have the Deferred Sales Trust—the topic of this week's Wealth Formula Episode. Think of this as the “supercharged” version of a structured sale. Instead of waiting on the buyer for payments, you transfer your asset to a trust, which sells it and invests the proceeds. You get to choose how and when you receive your money, and the trust can invest in all kinds of assets while your taxes stay deferred. It's flexible, it's powerful, and it gives you the chance to grow your money while you wait. Which of these strategies is right for your situation depends on your goals, your assets,

Last week on Wealth Formula Podcast, we dove deep with an expert who specializes in due diligence for small business acquisitions. To reiterate, what makes small business acquisitions especially enticing are the incredible financing opportunities available through the SBA. Imagine this: you only put down 10 percent on a $5 million business, and suddenly, you're in control of a business that throws off a million dollars per year in cash flow after paying monthly loan charges. That's what these numbers look like. Now obviously, it's a business, and it's not going to be quite that easy. That's why you have the higher cap rate. But the value proposition makes it worth consideration nonetheless. It's complicated stuff, and whether it's buying commercial real estate, funding a promising startup, or acquiring a multimillion-dollar established business, the right guidance can mean the difference between stress and success. So, this week on Wealth Formula Podcast, we're taking the next logical step and talking to an expert on funding these deals. After all, there is no sense in doing all that due diligence if you can't actually pull the financial trigger.

Lately, I've been thinking about starting a new business. I know the market seems like it's crashing around us, and we're probably headed into a recession. But hey—I started my first business back in 2009, and it doesn't get much worse than that, right? Well, maybe it can. And that's exactly why I've been considering buying a business instead of starting one from scratch, particularly because of the SBA loan options available right now. Here's how an SBA 7(a) loan breaks down for a $1,000,000 business purchase: Total Loan Amount: $1,000,000 Typical Down Payment (10%): $100,000 Amount Financed: $900,000 Loan Term: 25 years Estimated Monthly Payment (at 10.25% annually): $8,200 Now, that monthly payment isn't exactly cheap. But consider this: a business selling for $1 million typically goes for about three times its annual earnings. For those of you from the real estate world, that translates to what we'd call a cap rate of about 33.33%. And remember—anytime your cap rate exceeds your interest rate, leverage works in your favor. Let's break down the numbers clearly. With annual earnings of $333,333 ($1,000,000 divided by 3), and an annual debt service of about $98,400 ($8,200 x 12 months), your annual cash flow comes out to around $234,933. Since you only invested $100,000 to get this cash flow, you're looking at a cash-on-cash return of about 235%. Pretty impressive, right? Of course, the devil is always in the details. One reason I've never pulled the trigger on buying a small business like this is because, as someone who's started businesses myself, I know firsthand just how volatile small businesses can be.  Often, their success hinges on key factors that don't necessarily transfer smoothly to a new owner. Think about it—if small businesses were all this easy, why would anyone ever bother buying anything else? That said, my guest on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast strongly advocates for buying existing small businesses and believes most people are overlooking a fantastic opportunity. He makes a compelling case—one that might just have you checking out business listings yourself. Curious? Make sure you tune into this week's Wealth Formula Podcast and see if buying a business might be the right move for you!

Now's the time to move. Markets are down, fear is high—and that's exactly when the smart money starts to deploy. If you've been sitting on the fence about the Wealth Accelerator, this might be your moment. Learn how you can leverage market downturns with guardrails in place and amplify your upside while protecting the downside. Connect with Rod at https://wealthformulabanking.com

Charlie Munger, the late sage of value investing and Warren Buffett's right-hand man, once said there are only three ways a smart man can go broke: “liquor, ladies, and leverage.” Now, of the three, leverage is the sneakiest. It shows up dressed like opportunity, whispers promises of scale and speed, and before you know it—you're in a capital call or margin call. But let's be clear: leverage isn't the enemy. In fact, if your goal is to become truly wealthy—if you want to build lasting, generational wealth—you're going to need it. Unless you're one of the lucky few who can throw a football 70 yards or sell out Madison Square Garden, leverage is your ticket to the big leagues. At its core, leverage is simply using other people's money—or time—to amplify your results. It's a mortgage on a cash-flowing property, a business line of credit, or a carefully constructed insurance strategy. When used properly, it's the financial version of driving a car instead of walking. It gets you there faster. Leverage magnifies everything—the gains, yes, but also the losses. It's the volume knob on your financial life. And in the last few years, when interest rates skyrocketed at the fastest pace in modern history, that volume went from background music to full-blown chaos. And here's the thing: it wasn't just the rookies who got caught. This cycle humbled everyone—developers with decades of experience, funds with billions under management, and institutional players with Ivy League MBAs. When the tide went out, even the smart money found itself swimming without trunks. Some were caught overleveraged. Others had short-term debt in long-term projects. And a whole lot of people made the fatal assumption that the low-rate environment would last forever. It didn't. But…just like the last financial crisis, this kind of wreckage creates extraordinary opportunity—if you know how to navigate it. Because as painful as the last couple years have been for real estate investors, they've also opened the door to a once-in-a-decade setup. Distressed assets. Motivated sellers. And amidst all the carnage, leverage—used carefully, conservatively, and respectfully—can once again become the powerful tool it was meant to be. This is not a time for fear. It's a time for strategy. For discipline. For underwriting with humility and deploying capital. This week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast is a postmortem on what went wrong in real estate over the past few years as interest rates surged and markets shifted. We break down the hard lessons learned—even by seasoned pros—and explore why today's environment is starting to resemble the rare window of opportunity we saw in 2010–2011, in the wake of the mortgage meltdown.

When it comes to building wealth, the allure of exotic investment products can be hard to resist. From cryptocurrencies to rare collectibles, these options promise excitement, exclusivity, and the potential for big returns. But are they truly superior to buying the market or some rental real estate? Let's take a look at a few popular […] The post 500: What Is the Big Deal about Private Equity? appeared first on Wealth Formula.

As I reflect on the difference between Trump's first administration and his current one, I notice a marked shift. When Trump first took office, his message and objectives weren't clear to me. Beyond the promise of building a wall, I struggled to understand his vision. This time around, it's vastly different. His message is laser-focused, […] The post 499: Scott Bessent's 3-Part Playbook for America appeared first on Wealth Formula.

Renewable energy is often discussed in political terms, but here's a straightforward look at the financial side. In the last decade, solar energy costs have fallen dramatically—by nearly 90% since 2010.  In top markets, solar panel costs dropped from about 29 cents per kilowatt-hour to under 3 cents. By contrast, new coal and gas plants […] The post 498: What Renewable Energy Looks Like without the Politics appeared first on Wealth Formula.

It's been some time since we did an Ask Buck show, and I realized last week that I have some unanswered questions in the inbox. The first question I read ended up being kind of a broad one, but it made me really think about how it all started for me. I started this podcast […] The post 497: Starting from Scratch as a New High Paid Professional appeared first on Wealth Formula.

I really hope you listened to last week's episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. If you did, it may have convinced you to get some exposure to bitcoin in your portfolio. And if you did that last week, all I have to say is…WELCOME TO CRYPTO! As of this writing, bitcoin is trading at approximately $84,000, […] The post 496: The Gold Bug Who Got Infected by Bitcoin appeared first on Wealth Formula.

To my credit, I was relatively early in my recognition that Bitcoin was for real and that it wasn't going to zero. It was 2016, and, up to this point, I had the misfortune of hearing only one narrative about Bitcoin—that of Peter Schiff. Peter is a very smart guy and quite convincing if you […] The post 495: What You MUST Know about Bitcoin in the Era of Wall Street and Government Adoption! appeared first on Wealth Formula.

Hey everyone, On this week's Wealth Formula Podcast, I'm talking with members of our very own community who are using Wealth Accelerator and Wealth Formula Banking as part of their personal financial plans. They're going to share their individual journeys – why they chose Wealth Accelerator/WFB, what challenges they faced along the way, and, most importantly, what kind of […] The post 494: Wealth Formula Community Members Share Their Stories appeared first on Wealth Formula.