Podcasts about IOU

Founder of the Raising Capitalists Foundation and previous co-host of The Real Estate Guys Radio show, Russell Gray, joins Keith to discuss the historical and current devaluation of the U.S. dollar, its impact on investors, and the broader economic implications. Gray highlights how the significant increase in interest rates has trapped equity in properties and affected development. He explains the shift from gold-backed currency to paper money, the role of the Federal Reserve, and the impact of the Bretton Woods Agreement.  Gray emphasizes the importance of understanding macroeconomic trends and advocates for Main Street capitalism to decentralize power and promote productivity. He also criticizes the idea of housing as a human right, arguing it leads to inflation and shortages. Resources: Connect with Russell Gray to learn more about his "Raising Capitalists" project and his plans for a new show. Follow up with Russell Gray to get a copy of the Beardsley Rummel speech transcript from 1946. follow@russellgray.com Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/558 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”.  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai  Keith Weinhold  0:01   Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, what's the real backstory on why we have this thing called the dollar? Why it keeps getting debased? What you can do about it and when the dollar will die? It's a lesson in monetary history. And our distinguished guest is a familiar voice that you haven't heard in a while. Today on get rich education.   Mid south home buyers, I mean, they're total pros, with over two decades as the nation's highest rated turnkey provider, their empathetic property managers use your ROI as their North Star. So it's no wonder that smart investors just keep lining up to get their completely renovated income properties like it's the newest iPhone. They're headquartered in Memphis and have globally attractive cash flows and A plus rating with a better business bureau and now over 5000 houses renovated. There's zero markup on maintenance. Let that sink in, and they average a 98.9% occupancy rate, while their average renter stays more than three and a half years. Every home they offer has brand new components, a bumper to bumper, one year warranty, new 30 year roofs. And wait for it, a high quality renter. Remember that part and in an astounding price range, 100 to 180k I've personally toured their office and their properties in person in Memphis, get to know Mid South. Enjoy cash flow from day one. Start yourself right now at mid southhomebuyers.com that's mid south homebuyers.com   Russell Gray  1:54   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold  2:10   Welcome to GRE from St John's Newfoundland to St Augustine, Florida and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith weinholden. You are inside get rich education. It's 2025. The real estate market is changing. We'll get into that in future. Weeks today. Over the past 100 years plus, we've gone from sound money to Monopoly money, and we're talking about America's currency collapse. What comes next and how it affects you as both an investor and a citizen.   I'd like to welcome in longtime friend of the show and someone that I've personally learned from over the years, because he's a brilliant teacher, real estate investors probably haven't heard his voice as much lately, because until last year, he had been the co host of the terrific real estate guys radio show for nearly 20 years. Before we're done today, you'll learn more about what he's doing now, as he runs the Main Street capitalist platform and is also founder of the raising capitalists foundation. Hey, it's been a few years. Welcome back to GRE Russell Gray.   Russell Gray  3:19   yeah, it's fun. I actually think it's been maybe 10 years when I think about it, I remember I was at a little resort in Mexico recording with you, I think in the gym. It was just audio back then, no video.    Keith Weinhold  3:24   Yeah, I remember we're trying to get the audio right. Then I think you've been here more recently than 10 years ago. But yeah, now there's this video component. I actually have to sit up straight and comb my hair. It's ridiculous. Well, Russ, you're also a buff of monetary history. And before we discuss that, talk about the state of the real estate market today, just briefly, from your vantage point.   Russell Gray 1  3:55    I think the big story, and I'm probably not telling anybody anything they don't know, but the interest rate hike cycle that we went through this last round was quite a bit more substantial, I think, than a lot of people really appreciated, you know. And I started talking about that many years ago, because when you hit the zero bound and you have 6,7,8, years of interest rates below half a point, the change when they started that interest rate cycle from point two, 525 basis points all the way up to five and a quarter? That's a 20x move. And people might say, well, oh, you know, I go back to what Paul Volcker did way back in the day, when he took interest rates from eight or nine to 18. That was only a little bit more than double. Double is a far cry from 20x so we've never seen anything like that. Part of the fallout of that, as you know, is a lot of people wisely, and I was on the front end of cheerleading This is go get those loans refinanced and lock in that cheap money for as long as possible, because a loan will actually become an asset. The problem is, when you do that, you're kind of married to that property. Now it's not quite as bad. As being upside down in a property and you can't get out of it, but it's really hard to walk away from a two or 3% loan in a Six 7% market, because you really can't take your same payment and end up getting more house. And so that equity is kind of a little bit trapped, and that creates some opportunities, but I think that's been the big story, and then kind of the byproduct of the story. Second tier of the story was the impact it had on development, because it made it a lot harder for developers to develop, because their cost of funds and everything in that supply chain, food chain, you marry that to the 2020, COVID Supply Chain lockdown and that disruption, which, you know, you don't shut an economy down and just flick a switch and have it come back on. And so there's all of that. And then the third thing is just this tremendous uncertainty everybody has, because we just went from one extreme to another. And I think people, you know, they don't want to, like, rock the boat, they're going to kind of stay status quo for a little bit, whether they're businesses, whether they're homeowners, whether they're anybody out there that's thinking about moving them, unless life forces you to do it, you're going to try to stay status quo until things calm down. And I don't know how close we are to things calming down.   Keith Weinhold  6:13   One word I use is normalized. Both the 30 year fixed rate mortgage and the Fed funds rate are pretty close to their long term historic average. It just doesn't feel that way, because it was that rate of increase in 2022 that caught a lot of people off guard, like you touched on Well, Russ, now that we've talked about the present day, let's go back in time, and then we'll slowly bring things up to the present day. The dollar is troubled. It's worth perhaps 3% of what it was 100 years ago, but it's still around since it was established in the Coinage Act of 1792 and it's still the world reserve currency. In fact, only three currencies have survived longer than the dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc. So talk to us about this really relentless debasement of the dollar over time, including the creation of the Fed and the Bretton Woods Agreement and all that.   Russell Gray 7:09   That's a big story, as you know, and I always like to try to break it down a little bit. One of my specialties I'd like to believe, is I speak macro and I speak Main Street. And so when I try to break macroeconomics down, I start out with, why do I even care? I mean, if I'm a main street investor, why do I even care? In 2008 as you know, is a wipeout for me. Why? Because I didn't think anything had happened in the macro I didn't think Wall Street bond market. I didn't think that affected me. One thing I really cared about was interest rates. And I had a cursory interest in the bond market. We just try to figure out where interest rates were going. But for the most part, I thought, as a main street real estate investor, I was 100% insulated. I couldn't have been more wrong, because it really does matter, because the value of the dollar, in other words, the purchasing power of the dollar, and usually you refer to that as inflation, right? If inflation is there, the dollar is losing its purchasing power, and so the higher the inflation rate, the faster you're losing that purchasing power. And you might say, well, maybe that matters to me. Maybe it does. But the people who make the money available to the mortgage community, right to the real estate community to borrow that comes out of the bond market. And so when people go to buy a bond, which is an IOU, they're going to get paid back in the currency that they lent in, in this case, dollars. And if they know, if they're making a long term investment in a long term bond, and they're going to get paid back in dollars, they're going to be worth a whole lot less when they get them back. One of the things they're going to want is compensation for that time risk, and that's called higher interest rates. Okay, so now, if you're a main street investor, and higher interest rates impact you, now you understand why you want to pay attention. Okay, so let's just start with that. And so once you understand that the currency is a derivative of money, and money used to be you mentioned the Coinage Act Keith money, which is gold, used to be synonymous with the dollar. The dollar was only a unit of measure of gold, 1/20 of an ounce. It was a unit of measure. So it's like, the way I teach people is, like, if you had a gallon of milk and you traded, I'm a farmer, and I had a lot of milk, and so everybody decided they were going to use gallons of milk as their currency. Hey, where there's a lot of gallons of milk. He's got a big refrigerator. We'll just trade gallons of milk. Hey, Keith, I really like your beef. I you know, will you sell me some, a side of beef, and I'll give you, you know, 100 gallons of milk, you know, like, Oh, that's great. Well, I can't drink all this milk, so I'm going to leave the milk on deposit at the dairy, and then later on, when I decide I want a suit of clothes, I'll say, well, that's 10 gallons of milk. So I'll give the guy 10 gallons of milk. So I just give him a coupon, a claim, a piece of paper for that gallon of milk, or 20 gallons of milk, and he can go to the dairy and pick it up, right? And so that's kind of the way the monetary system evolved, except it wasn't milk, it was gold. So now you got the dollar. Well, after a while, nobody's going to get the milk. They don't care about the milk. And so now. Now, instead of just saying, I'll give you a gallon of milk, you just say, well, I'll give you a gallon. And somebody says, Okay, that's great. I'll take a gallon. They never opened the jug up. They never realized the jug is empty. They're just trading these empty jugs that used to have milk in them. Well, that's what the paper dollar is today. It went from being a gold certificate payable to bearer on demand, a certain amount of gold, a $20 gold certificate, what looks exactly like a $20 FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE. Today they look exactly the same, except one says FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE, which is an IOU backed by nothing, and the other one said gold certificate, which was payable to bearer on demand, real money. So my point is, is he got money which is a derivative of the productivity, the beef, the soot, the milk, whatever, right? That's the real capital. The real capital is the goods and services we all want. Money is where we store the value of whatever it is we created until we want to trade it for something somebody else created later. And it used to be money and currency were one in the same, but now we've separated that. So now all we do is trade empty gallons, which are empty pieces of paper, and that's currency. So those are derivatives, and the last derivative of that chain is credit. And you had Richard Duncan on your show more than once, and he is famous for kind of having this term. We don't normally have capitalism. We have creditism, right? Everything is credit. Everything is claims on wealth, but it's not real wealth, and it's just when we look at what's going on with our current administration and the drive to become a productive rather than a financialized society, again, as part of this uncertainty that everybody has. Because this is not just a subtle little adjustment on the same course. This is like, No, we're we're going down a completely different path. But fundamentally, your system operates on this currency that is flowing through it, like the blood flowing through your body. And if the blood is bad, your body's sick. And right now, our currency is bad, and so it creates problems, not just for us, but all around the world. And now we're exacerbating that. And I'm not saying it's bad. In fact, I think it's actually it's actually good, but change is what it is, right? I mean, it can be really good to go to the gym and work out before we started recording, you talked about your commitment to fitness, and that if you stop working out, you get unfit, and it's hard to start up again. Well, we've allowed our economy to get very unfit. Now we're trying to get fit again, and it's going to be painful. We're going to be sore, but if we stick with it, I think we can actually kind of save this thing. So I don't know what that's going to mean for the dollar ultimately, or if we end up going to something else, but right now, to your point, the dollar is definitely the big dog still, but I think it's probably even more under attack today than it's ever been, and so it's just something I think every Main Street investor needs to pay attention to.    Keith Weinhold  12:46   And it was really that 1913 creation of the Fed, where the Fed's mandates really didn't begin to take effect until 1914 that accelerated this slide in the dollar. Prior to that, it was really just periods of war, like, for example, the Civil War, where we had inflation rise, but then after wars abated, the dollar's strength returned, but that ceased to happen last century.   Russell Gray  13:11   I think there's a much bigger story there. So when we founded the country, we established legal money in the Coinage Act of 1792 we got gold and silver and a specific unit of measure of gold, a specific unit, measure of silver was $1 and that's what money was constitutionally. Alexander Hamilton advocated for the first central bank and got it, but it was issued by Charter, which meant that it was operated by the permission of the Congress. It wasn't institutionalized. It wasn't embedded in the Constitution. It was just something that was granted, like a license. You have a charter to be able to run a bank. When that initial charter came up for renewal, Congress goes, now we're not going to renew it. Well, of course, that made the bankers really upset, because bankers have a pretty good gig, right? They get to just loan people money. They don't have to do any real work, and then they make money on just kind of arbitraging, you know, other people's money. Savers put their money in, and they borrowed the money out, and then they with fractional reserve, they're able to magnify that. So it's, it's kind of a cool gig. And so what happened? Then he had the first central bank, so then they got the second central bank, and the second central bank was also issued by charter this time when it came up for renewal, Congress goes, Yeah, let's renew it, right? Because the bankers knew we got to go buy a few congressmen if we want to keep this thing going. But President Andrew Jackson said, No, not going to happen. And it was a big battle. Is a famous quote of him just calling these bankers a brood of vipers. And I'm going to put you down. And God help me, I will, right? I mean, it was like intense fact, I do believe he got shot at one point. I think he died from lead poisoning, because he never got the bullet out. So, you know, when you go to up against the bankers, it's not pretty, but he succeeded. He was the last president that paid off all the debt, balanced budget, paid off all the debt, and we got kind of back on sound money. Well, then a little while later, said, Okay, we're going to need, like, something major, and this would. I should put on. I got my, this is my hat, right now, I'll kind of put it on. This is my, my tin foil hat. Okay? And so I put this on when I kind of go down the rabbit trail a little bit. No, I'm not saying this is what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me, right? Because I know that war is profitable, and so sometimes, you know, your comment was, hey, there's the bank, and then there was, you know, the war, or there's the war, then there's a bank, which comes first the chicken or the egg. I think there's an article where Henry Ford and Thomas Edison went to Congress. I think it was December. The article was published New York Tribune, December 4. I think 1921 you can look it up, New York Tribune, front page article   Keith Weinhold  15:38   fo those of you in the audio only. Russ started donning a tin foil looking hat here about one minute ago.    Russell Gray  15:45   I did, yeah, so I put it on. Just so fair warning. You know, I may go a little conspiratorial, but the reason I do that is I just, I think we've seen enough, just in current, modern history and politics, in the age of AI and software and freedom of speech and new media, there's a lot of weird stuff going on out there, but a lot of stuff that we thought was really weird a little while ago has turned out to be more true than we thought. When you look back in history, and you kind of read the official narrative and you wonder, you kind of read between the lines. You go, oh, maybe some stuff went on here. So anyway, the allegation that Ford made, smart guy, Thomas Edison, smart guy. And they go to Congress, and they go, Hey, we need to get the gold out of the banker's hands, because gold is money, and we need money not to revolve around gold, because the bankers control gold. They control the money, and they make profits, his words, not mine, by starting wars, because he was very upset about World War One, which happened. We got involved right after Fed gets formed in 1913 World War One starts in 1914 the United States sits off in the background and sells everybody, everything. It collects a bunch of gold, and then enters at the end and ends it all. And that big influx created the roaring 20s, as we all know, which ended big boom to big bust. And that cycle, which then a crisis that created, potentially a argument for why the government should have more control, right? So you kind of go down this path. So we ended up in 1865 with President Lincoln suppressing states rights and eventually creating an unconstitutional income tax and then creating an unconstitutional currency. That's what Abraham Lincoln did. And then on the back end of that, you know, it didn't end well for him, and I don't know why, but all I know is that we had a financial crisis in 1907 and the solution to that was the Aldrich plan, which was basically a monopoly on money. It's called a money trust. And Charles Lindbergh, SR was railing against it, as were many people at the time, going, No, this is terrible. So they renamed the Aldrich plan the Federal Reserve Act. And instead of going for a bank charter, they went for a constitutional amendment, and they got it in the 16th Amendment, and that's where we got the IRS. That's where we got the income tax, which was only supposed to be 7% only affect like the top one or 2% of earners, right? And that's where we got, you know, the Federal Reserve. That's where all that was born. Since that happened, to your point, the dollar has been on with a slight little rise up in the 20s, which, you know, there's a whole thing about whether that caused the crash or not. But at the end of the day, if you go look at St Louis Fed, which you go look at all the time, and you just look at the long term trend of the dollar, it's terrible. And the barometer, that's gold, right? $20 of gold in 1913 and 1933 and then 42 in 1971 or two, whatever it was, three, and then eventually as high as 850 but at the turn of the century, this century, it was $250 so at $2,500 it would have lost 90% in the 21st Century. The dollars lost 90% in the 21st Century, just to 2500 that's profound to go. That's right, it already lost more than 90% from $20 to 250 so it lost 90% and then 90% of the 10% that was left. And that's where we're at. We're worse than that. Today, no currency, as far as I understand, I've been told this. Haven't done the homework, but it's my understanding, no currency in the history of the world has ever survived that kind of debasement. So I think a lot of people who are watching are like, okay, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And then the big question is, is when that when comes? What does the transition look like? What rises in its place? And then you look at things like a central bank digital currency, which is not like Bitcoin, it's not a crypto, it's a centrally controlled currency run by the central bank. If we get that, I would argue that's not good for privacy and security. Could be Bitcoin would be better. I would argue, could go back to gold backing, which I would say is better than what we have, or we could get something nobody's even thought of. I don't know. We don't know, but I do think we're at the end of the life cycle. Historically, all things being equal. And I think all the indication with a big run up of gold, gold is screaming something's broken. It's just screaming it right now, not just because the price is up, but who's buying it. It's just central banks.   Keith Weinhold  20:12   Central banks are doing most of the buying, right? It's not individual investors going to a coin shop. So that's really screaming, telling you that people are concerned. People are losing their faith in giving loans to the United States for sure. And Russ, as we talk about gold, and it's important link to the dollar over time, you mentioned how they wanted it, to get it out of the bank's hands for a while. Of course, there was also a period of time where it was illegal for Americans to own gold. And then we had this Bretton Woods Agreement, which was really important as well, where we ended up violating promises that had to do with gold again. So can you speak to us some more about that? Because a lot of people just don't understand what happened at Bretton Woods.   Russell Gray  20:56   What happened is we had the big crash in 1929 and the net result of that was, in 1933 we got executive order 6102 In fact, I have a picture of it framed, and that was in the wake of that in 1933 and so what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in signing that document, which was empowered by a previous act of Congress, basically let him confiscate all The money. It'd be like right now if, right now, you know, President Trump signed an executive order and said, You have to take all your cash, every all the cash that you have out of your wallet. You have to send it all, take it into the bank, and they're going to give you a Chuck E Cheese token, right? And if you don't do it, if you do it, it's a $500,000 fine in 10 years in prison. Right? Back then it was a $10,000 fine, which was twice the price of the average Home huge fine, plus jail time. That's how severe it was, okay? So they confiscated all the money. That happened in 33 okay? Now we go off to war, and we enter the war late again. And so we have the big manufacturing operation. We're selling munitions and all kinds of supplies to everybody, all over the world, right? And we're just raking the gold and 20,000 tons of gold. We got all the gold. We got the biggest army now, we got the biggest bomb, we got the biggest economy. We got the strongest balance sheet. Well, I mean, you know, we went into debt for the war, but, I mean, we had a lot of gold. So now everybody else is decimated. We're the big dog. Everybody knows we're the big dog. Nine states shows up in New Hampshire Bretton Woods, and they have this big meeting with the world, and they say, Hey guys, new sheriff in town. Britain used to be the world's reserve currency, but today we're going to be the world's reserve currency. And so this was the new setup. But it's okay. It's okay because our dollar is as good as gold. It's backed by gold, and so anytime you want foreign nations, you can just bring your dollars to us and we'll give you the gold, no problem. And everyone's like, okay, great. What are you going to say? Right? You got the big bomb, you got the big army. Everybody needs you for everything to live like you're not going to say no. So they said, Yes, of course, the United States immediately. I've got a speech that a guy named Beardsley Rummel did. Have you ever heard me talk about this before? Keith, No, I've never heard about this. So Beardsley Rummel was the New York Fed chair when all this was happening. And so he gave a speech to the American Bar Association in 1945 and I got a transcript of it, a PDF transcript of it from 1946 and basically he goes, Look, income taxes are obsolete. We don't need income tax anymore because we can print money, because we're off the gold standard and we have no accountability. We just admitted it, just totally admitted it, and said the only reason we have income tax is to manipulate behavior, is to redistribute wealth, is to force people to do what we want them to do, punish things and reward others, right? Just set it plain language. I have a transcript of the speech. You can get a copy of you send an email to Rummel R U, M, L@mainstreetcapitalist.com I'll get it to you. So it's really, really interesting. So he admitted it. So we went along in the 40s and the 50s, and, you know, we had the only big manufacturing you know, because everybody else is still recovering from the war. Everything been bombed to smithereens, and we're spending money and doing all kinds of stuff. And having the 50s, it was great, right, right up until the mid 60s. So the mid 60s, it's like, Okay, we got a problem. And Charles de Gaulle, who was the president of France at the time, went to a meeting. And there's a YouTube video, but you can see it, he basically told the world, hey, I don't think the United States is doing a good job managing this world's reserve currency. I don't think they've got the gold. I think they printed too much money. I think that we should start to go redeem our dollars and get the gold. That was pretty forward thinking. And he created a run on the bank. And at the same time, we passed the Coinage Act in 1965 and took all the silver out of the people's money. So we took the gold in 33 and then we took the silver in 65 right? Because we got Vietnam and the Great Society, welfare, all these things were going on in the 60s. We're just going broke. Meanwhile, our gold supply went from 20,000 tons down to eight and Richard. Nixon is like, whoa, time out. Like, this is bad. And so we had inflation in 1970 August 15, 1971 year before August 15, 1971 1970 Nixon writes an executive order and freezes all prices and all wages. It became illegal by presidential edict for a private business to give their employee a raise or to raise their prices to the customers.    Keith Weinhold  25:30   It's almost if that could happen price in theUnited States of America, right?    Russell Gray  25:36   And inflation was 4.4% and it was a national emergency like today. I mean, you know, a few years ago, like three or four years ago, we if we could get it down 4.4% it'd be Holly. I'd be like a celebration. That was bad. And so that's what happened. So a year later, that didn't work. It was a 90 day thing. It was a disaster. And so in a year later, August 15, 1971 Nixon came on live TV after Gunsmoke. I think it was, and I was old enough I'm watching TV on a Sunday night I watched it. Wow. So I live, that's how old I am. So it's a lot of this history, not the Bretton Woods stuff, but from like 1960 2,3,4, forward. I remember I was there.    Keith Weinhold  26:13   Yeah, that you remember the whole Nixon address on television. We should say it for the listener that doesn't know. Basically the announcement Nixon made, he said, was a temporary measure, is that foreign nations can no longer redeem their dollars for gold. He broke the promise that was made at Bretton Woods in about 1945   Russell Gray  26:32   Yeah. And then gold went from $42 up to 850 and a whole series of events that have led to where we're at today were put in place to cover up the fact that the dollar was failing. We had climate emergency. We were headed towards the next global Ice Age. We had an existential threat in two different diseases that hit one right after the other. First one was the h1 n1 flu, swine flu, and then the next thing was AIDS. And so we had existential pandemic, two of them. We also had a oil shortage crisis. We were going to run out of fossil fuel by the year 2000 we had to do all kinds of very public, visible, visceral things that we would all see. You could only buy gas odd even days, like, if your license plate ended in an odd number, you could go on these days, and if it ended on an even number, you could go on the other days. And so we had that. We lowered our national speed limit down to 55 miles an hour. We created the EPA and all these different agencies under Jimmy Carter to try to regulate and manage all of this crisis. Prior to that, Nixon sent Kissinger over to China, and we opened up trade relations. And we'd been in Vietnam to protect the world from communism because it was so horrible. And then in the wake of that, we go over to Communist China, Chairman Mao and open up trade relations. Why we needed access to their cheap labor to suck up all the inflation. And we went over to the Saudis, and we cut the petro dollar deal. Why? Because we needed the float. We needed some place for all these excess dollars that we had created to get sucked up. And so they got sucked up in trading the largest commodity in the world, energy. And the deal was, hey, Saudis, here's the deal. You like your kingdom? Well, we got the big bomb. We got the big army. You're going to rule the roost in the in the Middle East, and we'll protect you. All you got to do is make sure you sell all your oil in dollars and dollars only. And they're like, Well, what if we're selling oil to China, or what if we're selling oil to Japan? Can they pay in yen? Nope, they got to sell yen. Buy dollars. Well, what do we do with all these dollars? Buy our treasuries. Okay, so what if I got this? Yeah, and so that was the petrodollar system. And the world looked at everything went on, and the world is like, Hmm, the United States coming back to Europe, and Charles de Gaulle, they're like, the United States is not handling this whole dollar thing real well. We need an alternative. What if all of us independent nations in Europe got together and created a common currency? We don't want to be like one country, like the United States, but we want to be like an economic union. So let's create a current let's call it the euro. And they started that process in the 70s, but they didn't get it done till 99 and so they get it done in 99 as soon as they get it done, this guy named Saddam Hussein goes, Hey, I'm now the big dog here. I got the fourth largest army in the world. I'm here in, you know, big oil producing nation. Let's trade in the euro. Let's get off the dollar. Let's do oil in the euro. And he's gone. I'm not sure I should put my hat back on. I'm not sure, but somehow we went into Afghanistan and took a hard left and took this guy out.   Keith Weinhold  29:44   Some credence to this. Yes, yeah, so. But with that said,   Russell Gray  29:47   you know, we ended up with the Euro taking about 20% of the global trade market from the United States, which is about where it sits today. And the United States used to be up over 80% and now we're down below 60% still. The Big Dog by triple and the euro is not in a position to supplant the US, but I think China, whose claim to fame is looking at other people's technology and models and copying it, looked at what the United States did to become the dominant economic force, and I think they've systematically been copying it. I wrote a report on this way back in 2013 when I started really paying attention to it and began to chronicle all the things that they were doing, this big D dollarization movement that I think still has legs. It's the BRICS movement. It's all the central banks buying gold. It's the bilateral trade agreements where people are doing business outside the dollar. There's been not just that, but also putting together the infrastructure, right? The Asian Infrastructure Bank is an alternative to the IMF looking, if you have you read Confessions of an economic hitman. No. Okay, so this is a guy that used to work in the government, I think, CIA or something, and he would go down and he'd cut deals with leaders of countries to get them to borrow from the United States to put in key infrastructure so they could trade with the US. And then, of course, if they defaulted, then the US owned that in the infrastructure. You can look it up. His name is Perkins, right. Look it up confessions of economic hit now, but you see China doing the same thing. China's got their Belt and Road Initiative. And you go through, and if you want to trade with China on that route, you have traded, you're gonna have to have infrastructure. You can eat ports. You're gonna need terminals for distribution. But you, Oh, you don't have the money. We'll loan it to you, and we'll loan it to you and you want. Now we're creating demand for you want, and we also are enslaving borrower servant to the lender. We're beginning to enslave these other nations under the guise of helping them by financing their growth so they can do business with us. It's the same thing the United States did and Shanghai Gold Exchange, as opposed to the London Bullion exchange. So all of the key pieces of infrastructure that were put in place to facilitate Western hegemony in the financial markets the Chinese have been systematically putting in place with bricks, and so there's a reason we're in this big trade war right now. We recognize that they had started to get in a position where they were actually a real threat, and we got to cut their legs out from underneath them before they get any stronger. Again, I should put my hat back on. Nobody's calling me up and telling me, I'm just reading between the lines. Sure,   Keith Weinhold  32:23   there certainly are more competitors to the dollar now. And can you imagine what rate of inflation that we would have had if we had not outsourced our labor and productivity over to a low wage place like China in the east? Russ and I have been talking about the long term debasement of the dollar and why. More on that when we come back, including what Russ is up to today. You're listening to get rich education. Our guest is Russell Gray. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your pre qual and even chat with President Chaley Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lendinggroup.com that's Ridge lendinggroup.com. You know what's crazy? Your bank is getting rich off of you. The average savings account pays less than 1% it's like laughable. Meanwhile, if your money isn't making at least 4% you're losing to inflation. That's why I started putting my own money into the FFI liquidity fund. It's super simple. Your cash can pull in up to 8% returns, and it compounds. It's not some high risk gamble like digital or AI stock trading. It's pretty low risk because they've got a 10 plus year track record of paying investors on time, in full every time. I mean, I wouldn't be talking about it if I wasn't invested myself. You can invest as little as 25k and you keep earning until you decide you want your money back. No weird lockups or anything like that. So if you're like me and tired of your liquid funds just sitting there doing nothing. Check it out. Text family, 266, 866, to learn about freedom family investments, liquidity fund again. Text family, 266, 866,   Garrett Sutton  34:36   hi. This is Rich Dad advisor, Garrett Sutton. You're listening to the always valuable. Get rich education with Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.    Keith Weinhold  34:52   Welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with the main street capitalists Russell gray about this long term debasement of the dollar. It's an. Inevitable. It's one of the things we actually can forecast with pretty good predictability that the dollar will continue to debase. It's one of the few almost guarantees that we have in investing. So we can think about how we want to play that Russ one thing I wonder about is, did we have to completely de peg the dollar from gold? Couldn't we have just diluted it where we could instead say, Well, hey, now, instead of just completely depegging the dollar from gold, we could say, well, now it takes 10 times as many dollars as it used to to redeem it for an ounce of gold. Did it make it more powerful that we just completely de pegged it 100%   Russell Gray  35:36   it would disempower the monopoly. Right? In other words, I think that the thing from the very beginning, was scripted to disconnect from the accountability of gold, which is what sound money advocates want. They want some form of independent Accountability. Gold is like an audit to a financial system. If you're the bankers and you're running the program, the last thing in the world you want is a gold standard, because it limits your ability to print money out of thin air and profit from that. So I don't think the people who are behind all of this are, in no way, shape or form, interested in doing anything that's going to limit their power or hold them accountable. They want just the opposite. I think if they could wave a magic wand and pick their solution to the problem, it would be central bank digital currency, which would give them ultimate control. Yeah. And it wouldn't surprise me if we maybe, perhaps, were on a path where some crises were going to converge, whether it's opportunistic, meaning that the crisis happened on its own, and quote Rahm Emanuel and whoever he was quoting, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste, and you're just opportunistic, or, you know, put the conspiracy theory hat on, and maybe these crises get created in order to facilitate the power grab. I don't know. It really doesn't matter what the motives are or how it happens at the end of the day, it's what happens. It happened in 33 it happened in 60. In 71 it's what happens. And so it's been a systematic de pegging of any form of accountability. I mean, we used to have a budget ceiling. We used to talk about now it's just like, it's routine. You blow right through it, right, right. There's you balance. I mean, when's the last time you even had a budget? Less, less, you know, much less anything that looked like a valid balanced budget amendment. So I think there's just no accountability other than the voting booth. And, you know, I think maybe you could make the argument that whether you like Trump or not, the public's apparent embrace of him, show you that the main street and have a lot of faith in Main Street. I think Main Street is like, you know what? This is broken. I don't know what's how to fix it, but somebody just needs to go in and just tear this thing down and figure out a new plant. Because I think if you anybody paying attention, knows that this perpetual debasement, which is kind of the theme of the show is it creates haves and have nots. Guys like you who understand how to use real estate to short the dollar, especially when you marry it to gold, which is one of my favorite strategies to double short the dollar, can really magnify the power of inflation to pull more wealth onto your balance sheet. Problem is the people who aren't on that side of the coin are on the other side of the coin, and so the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. Well, the first order of business in a system we can't control is help as many people be on the rich get richer. That's why we had the get rich show, right? Let's help other people get rich. Because if I'm the only rich guy in the room, all the guns are pointed at me, right? I wanted everybody as rich as possible. I think Trump and Kiyosaki wrote about that in their book. Why we want you to be rich, right? When everybody's prospering, it's it's better, it's safer, you have people to trade with and whatnot, but we have eviscerated the middle class because industry has had to go access cheap labor markets in order to compensate for this inflation. And you know, you talk about the Fed mandate, which is 2% inflation, price inflation, 2% so if you say something that costs $1 today, a year from now, is going to cost $1 too, you think, well, maybe that's not that bad. But here's the problem, the natural progression of Business and Technology is to lower the cost, right? So you have something cost $1 today, and because somebody's using AI and internet and automation and robots and all this technology, right? And the cost, they could really sell it for 80 cents. And so the Fed looks at and goes, Let's inflate to $1.02 that's not two cents of inflation. That's 22 cents of inflation. And so there's hidden inflation. The benefits of the gains in productivity don't show up in the CPI, but it's like deferred maintenance on an apartment building. You can make your cash flow look great if you're not setting anything aside for the inevitable day when that roof is going to go out and that parking lot is going to need to be repaved, right? And you don't know how far out you are until you get there and you're like, wow, I'm really short, and I think that we have been experiencing for decades. The theft of the benefit of our productivity gains, and we're not just a little bit out of position. We're way out of position. That's   Keith Weinhold  40:07   a great point. Like I had said earlier, imagine what the rate of inflation would be if we hadn't outsourced so much of our labor and productivity to low cost China. And then imagine what the rate of inflation would be as well, if you would factor in all of this increased productivity and efficiency, the natural tendencies of which are to make prices go lower as society gets more productive, but instead they've gone higher. So when you adjust for some of these factors, you just can't imagine what the true debased purchasing power of the dollar is. It's been happening for a long time. It's inevitable that it's going to continue to happen in the future. So this has been a great chat about the history and us understanding what the powers that be have done to debase our dollar. It's only at what rate we don't know. Russ, tell us more about what you're doing today. You're really out there more as a champion for Main Street in capitalism.   Russell Gray  41:04   I mean, 20 years with Robert and the real estate guys, and it was fantastic. I loved it. I went through a lot, obviously, in 2008 and that changed me a little bit. Took me from kind of being a blocking and tackling, here's how you do real estate, and to really understanding macro and going, you know, it doesn't matter. You can do like I did, and you build this big collection. Big collection of properties and you lose it all in a moment because you don't understand macro. So I said, Okay, I want to champion that cause. And so we did that. And then we saw in the 2012 JOBS Act, the opportunity for capital raisers to go mainstream and advertise for credit investors. And I wrote a report then called the new law breaks Wall Street monopoly. And I felt like that was going to be a huge opportunity, and we pioneered that. But then after my late wife died, and I had a chance to spend some time alone during COVID, and I thought, life is short. What do I really want to accomplish before I go? And then I began looking at what was going on in the world. I see now a couple of things that are both opportunities and challenges or causes to be championed. And one is the mega trend that I believe the world is going you know, some people call it a fourth turning whatever. I don't consider that kind of we have to fall off a cliff as Destiny type of thing to be like cast in stone. But what I do see is that people are sick and tired of monopolies. We're sick and tired of big tech, we're sick and tired of big media, we're sick and tired of big government. We're sick and tired of big corporations, we don't want it, and big banks, right? So you got the rise of Bitcoin, you got people trying to get out from underneath the Western hegemony, as we've been talking about decentralization of everything. Our country was founded on the concept of decentralization, and so people don't understand that, right? It used to be everything was centralized. All powers in the king. Real Estate meant royal property. That's what real estate it's not like real asset, like tangible it's royal estate. It's royal property. Everything belonged to the king, and you just got to work it like a serf. And then you got to keep 75% in your produce, and you sent 25% you sent 25% through all the landlords, the land barons, and all the people in the hierarchy that fed on running things for the king, but you didn't own anything. Our founder set that on, turn that upside down, and said, No, no, no, no, no, it's not the king that's sovereign. It's the individual. The individual is sovereign. It isn't the monarchy, it's the individual states. And so we're going to bring the government, small. The central government small has only got a couple of obligations, like protect the borders, facilitate interstate commerce, and let's just have one common currency so that we can do business together. Other than that, like, the state's just going to run the show. Of course, Lincoln kind of blew that up, and it's gotten a lot worse after FDR, so I feel like we're under this big decentralization movement, and I think Main Street capitalism is the manifestation of that. If you want to decentralize capitalism, the gig economy, if you want to be a guy like you, and you can run your whole business off your laptop with a microphone and a camera, you know, in today's day and age with technology, people have tasted the freedom of decentralization. So I think the rise of the entrepreneur, I think the ability to go build a real asset portfolio and get out of the casinos of Wall Street. I think right now, if we are successful in bringing back these huge amounts of investment, Trump's already announced like two and a half or $3 trillion of investment, people are complaining, oh, the world is selling us. Well, they're selling stocks and they're selling but they're putting the money actually into creating businesses here in the United States that's going to create that primary driver, as you well know, in real estate, that's going to create the secondary and tertiary businesses, and the properties they're going to use all kinds of Main Street opportunity are going to grow around that. I lived in Silicon Valley, when a company would get funded, it wasn't just a company that prospered, it was everything around that company, right? All these companies. I remember when Apple started. I remember when Hewlett Packard, it was big, but it got a lot bigger, right there. I watched all that happen in Silicon Valley. I think that's going to happen again. I think we're at the front end of that. And so that's super exciting. Wave. The second thing that is super important is this raising capitalist project. And the reason I'm doing it is because if we don't train our next generation in the principles of capitalism and the freedom that it how it decentralizes Their personal economy, and they get excited about Bitcoin, but that's not productive. I'm not putting it down. I'm just saying it's not productive. You have to be productive. You want to have a decentralized currency. Yes, you want to decentralize productivity. That's Main Street capitalism. If kids who never get a chance to be in the productive economy get to vote at 1819, 2021, 22 before they've ever earned a paycheck, before they have any idea, never run a business. Somebody tells them, hey, those guys that have all that money and property, they cheated. It's not fair. We need to take from them. We need to limit them, not thinking, Oh, well, if I do that, when I get to be there, that what I'm voting for is going to get on me. Right now, Keith, there are kids in ninth grade who are going to vote for your next president, right?   Keith Weinhold  45:56   And they think capitalism is evil. This is part of what you're doing with the raising capitalists project, helping younger people think differently. Russ, I have one last thing to ask you. This has to do with the capitalism that you're championing on your platforms now. And real estate, I continue to see sometimes I get comments on my YouTube channel, especially maybe it's more and more people increasingly saying, Hey, I think housing should be a human right. So talk to us about that. And maybe it's interesting, Russ, if I take the other side of it and play devil's advocate, people who think housing is a human right, they say something like, the idea is that housing, you know, it's a fundamental need, just like food and clean water and health care are without stable housing. It's incredibly hard for a person to access opportunities like work and education or health care or participate meaningfully in society at all. So government ought to provide housing for everybody. What are your thoughts there?   Russell Gray  46:54   Well, it's inherently inflationary, which is the root cause of the entire problem. So anytime you create consumption without production, you're going to have more consumers than producers, and so you're going to have more competition for those goods. The net, net truth of what happens in that scenario are shortages everywhere. Every civilization that's ever tried any form of system where people just get things for free because they need them, end up with shortages in poverty. It doesn't lift everybody. It ruins everything. I mean, that's not conjecture. That's history, and so that's just the way it works. And if you just were to land somebody on a desert island and you had an economy of one, they're going to learn really quick the basic principles of capitalism, which is production always precedes consumption, always 100% of the time, right? If you're there on that desert island and you don't hunt fish or gather, you don't eat, right? You don't get it because, oh, it's a human right to have food. Nope, it's a human right to have the right to go get food. Otherwise, you're incarcerated, you have to have the freedom of movement to go do something to provide for yourself, but you cannot allow people to consume without production. So everybody has to produce. And you know, if you go back to the Plymouth Rock experiment, if you're familiar with that at all, yeah, yeah. So you know, just for anybody who doesn't know, when the Pilgrims came over here in the 1600s William Bradford was governor, and they tried it. They said, Hey, we're here. Let's Stick Together All for one and one for all. Here's the land. Everybody get up every day and work. Everybody works, and everybody eats. They starved. And so he goes, Okay, guys, new plan. All right, you wine holds. See this little plot of land, that's yours. You work it. You can eat whatever you produce. Over there, you grace. You're going to do yours and Johnson's, you're going to do yours, right? Well, what happened is now everybody got up and worked, and they created more than enough for their own family, and they had an abundance. And the abundance was created out of their hunger. When they went to serve their own needs, they created abundance forever others. That's the premise of capitalism. It's not the perfect system. There is no perfect system. We live in a world where human beings have to work before they get to eat. When I say eat, it could be having a roof over their head. It could be having clothes. It could be going on vacation. It could be having a nice car. It could be getting health care. It doesn't matter what it is, whatever it is you need. You have the right, or should have, the right, in a free system to go earn that by being productive, but the minute somebody comes and says, Oh, you worked, and I'm going to take what you produced and give it to somebody else who didn't, that's patently unfair, but economically, it's disastrous, because it incentivizes people not to work, which creates less production, more consumption. I have another analogy with sandwich makers, but you can imagine that if you got a group if you got a group of people making sandwiches, one guy starts creating coupons for sandwiches. Well then if somebody says, Okay, well now we got 19 people providing for 20. That's okay, but then all the guys making sandwiches. Why making sandwiches? I'm gonna get the coupon business pretty soon. You got 18 guys doing coupons, only two making sandwiches. Not. Have sandwiches to go around all the sandwiches cost tons of coupons because we got way more financialization than productivity, right? That's the American economy. We have to fix that. We can't have people making money by just trading on other people's productivity. We have to have people actually being productive. This is what I believe the administration is trying to do, rebuild the middle class, rebuild that manufacturing base, make us a truly productive economy, and then you don't have to worry about these things, right? We're going to create abundance. And if you don't have the inflation is which is coming from printing money out of thin air and giving to people who don't produce, then housing, all sudden, becomes affordable. It's not a problem. Health care becomes affordable. Everything becomes affordable because you create abundance, because everybody's producing the system is fundamentally broken. Now we have to learn how to profit in it in its current state, which is what you teach people how to do. We also have to realize that it's not sustainable. We're on an unsustainable path, and we're probably nearing that event horizon, the path of no return, where the system is going to break. And the question is, is, how are you going to be prepared for it when it happens? Number two, are you going to be wise enough to advocate when you get a chance to cast a vote or make your voice heard for something that's actually going to create prosperity and freedom versus something that's going to create scarcity and oppression? And that's the fundamental thing that we have to master as a society. We got to get to our youth, because they're the biggest demographic that can blow the thing up, and they're the ones that have been being indoctrinated the worst.   Keith Weinhold  51:29   Yes, Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself said that we live in a economic system today that is unsustainable. Yes, the collectivism we touched on quickly descends into the tyranny of the majority. And in my experience, historically, the success of public housing projects has been or to mixed at best, residents often don't respect the property when they don't have an equity stake in it or even a security deposit tied up in it, and blight and high crime rates have often followed with these public housing projects. When you go down that path of making housing as a human right, like you said earlier, you have a right to go procure housing for yourself, just not to ask others to pay for it for you. Well, Russ, this has been great. It's good to have your voice back on the show. Here again, here on a real estate show. If people want to connect with you, continue to see what you've been up to and the good projects that you're working on, promoting the virtues of capitalism. What's the best way for them to do that?   Russell Gray  52:31   I think just send an email to follow at Russell Gray, R, U, S, S, E, L, L, G, R, A, y.com, let you know where I am on social media. I'll let you know when I put out new content. I'll let you know when I'm a guest on somebody somebody's show and I'm on the cusp of getting my own show finally launched. I've been doing a lot of planning to get that out, but I'm excited about it because I do think, like I said, The time is now, and I think the marketplace is ripe, and I do speak Main Street and macro, and I hope I can add a nuance to the conversation that will add value to people.   Keith Weinhold  53:00   Russ, it's been valuable as always. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show. Thanks, Keith.   Yeah, terrific, historic outline from Russ about the long term decline of the dollar. It's really a fresh reminder and motivator to keep being that savvy borrower. Of course, real estate investors have access to borrow giant sums of dollars and short the currency that lay people do not. In fact, lay people don't even understand that it's a viable strategy at all. Like he touched on, Russ has really been bringing an awareness about how decentralization is such a powerful force that reshapes society. In fact, he was talking about that the last time that I saw him in person a few months ago. Notably, he touched on Nixon era wage and price controls. Don't you find it interesting? Fascinating, really, how a few weeks ago, Trump told Walmart not to pass tariff induced price increases onto their customers. Well, that's a form of price control that we're seeing today to our point, when we had the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman here on the show, five weeks ago, tariffs are already government intervention into the free market, and then a president telling private companies how to set their prices, that is really strong government overreach. I mean, I can't believe that more people aren't talking about this. Maybe that's just because this cycle started with Walmart, and that's just doesn't happen to be a company that people feel sorry for. Hey, well, I look forward to meeting you in person in Miami in just four days, as I'll be a faculty member for when we kick off the terrific real estate guys Investor Summit and see and really getting to know you, because we're going to spend nine days together. Teaching, learning and having a great time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.   Speaker 3  55:13   Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.   Keith Weinhold  55:36   You know whatever you want, the best written real estate and finance info. Oh, geez, today's experience limits your free articles access and it's got pay walls and pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. It's not so great. So then it's vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that adds no hype value to your life. That's why this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point because even the word abbreviation is too long, my letter usually takes less than three minutes to read. And when you start the letter, you also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's all completely free. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be easier for you to get it right now. Just text. GRE to 66866, while it's on your mind, take a moment to do it right now. Text, GRE to 66866   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, getricheducation.com.

Lex chats with Yuval Rooz, CEO and co-founder of Digital Asset, about the company's transformation from its early institutional blockchain experiments to launching the Canton Network - a purpose-built, privacy-enabled smart contract platform designed for financial markets. Rooz shares insights into why Digital Asset was inspired by Bitcoin's financial principles rather than its technical assumptions, highlighting the importance of rethinking blockchain infrastructure rather than replicating flawed legacy models. He also unpacks the hard lessons from high-stakes projects like the Australian Stock Exchange overhaul, emphasizing why large-scale financial infrastructure must evolve incrementally to succeed. Finally, the conversation dives into Canton's unique tokenomics, where 70% of block rewards go to the developers and users who create economic activity on the network, challenging traditional validator-centric models and aligning incentives more fairly for long-term ecosystem growth. Notable discussion points: 1. Canton's innovative tokenomics: Unlike Ethereum, where validators capture most of the rewards, Canton allocates 70% of block rewards to developers and applications, creating sustainable alignment. 2. Lessons from ASX: Rooz reflects on the failed ASX blockchain migration, advocating for iterative upgrades rather than “big bang” infrastructure transformations. 3. True tokenization: Rooz critiques superficial on-chain IOU models, asserting that real tokenization must place the asset's books and records natively on-chain to unlock the benefits of DeFi and composability. MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION Topics: Digital Asset, Canton Network, DRW, ASX, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Plaid, DAML, fintech, web3, tokenization, digital assets, financial infrastructure, DeFi, onchain ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 

Half marathon? Hard. Full marathon? Very Hard. Ultra Marathon? Insanely hard. Ultra marathon while breastfeeding a baby and still managing to win your division? WHAT IN THE F**K?!?! Let's talk about that, IOU a rimjob Willy Wonks candy bars, accidentally spilling 70,000 lbs of bees on the highway, Joe smashing his head into the ceiling in an airplane bathroom, and more on today's episode of Can You Don't?!*** Wanna become part of The Gaggle and access all the extra content on the end of each episode PLUS tons more?! Our Patreon page is LIVE! This is the biggest way you can support the show. It would mean the world to us: http://www.patreon.com/canyoudontpodcast ***New Episodes every Wednesday at 12pm PSTWatch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/f5-70tzYJP0Send in segment content: heyguys@canyoudontpodcast.comMerch: http://canyoudontpodcast.comMerch Inquires: store@canyoudontpodcast.comFB: http://facebook.com/canyoudontpodcastIG: http://instagram.com/canyoudontpodcastYouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3wyt5rtOfficial Website: http://canyoudontpodcast.comCustom Music Beds by Zach CohenFan Mail:Can You Don't?PO Box 1062Coeur d'Alene, ID 83816Hugs and Tugs.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"Have you ever done something so efficient that you think you could get away with committing crimes?" With Billy Pill in the Dan seat today, we react to the Knicks vs. Pacers game with a full hour of analysis. HA! Just kidding. It's time for the high-level IOU, the peasant garage, and Sydney Sweeney's bathwater soap. Today's cast: Billy, Stugotz, Chris, Izzy, Jeremy, Roy, and Tony. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This explains the true nature of our world and its very real, tireless, dangerous predators who make no secret of what they're going to do you us and our families... If we let them.SHARE THIS with someone and then ask them if any war since WWI to present was ever in America's interest, and if the outcomes ever weakened or eliminated EVIL threats to mankind, or did it end up strengthening and expanding their reach and power?  This is a good, non-invasive way to break people out of the ether of our conditioning and programming.I NEED YOUR HELP! PLEASE FOLLOW THESE LINKS BELOW. I'm aggressively shadowbanned and blacklisted from most major social media platforms.https://www.instagram.com/drgliddenclips/https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.glidden.clipshttps://www.youtube.com/@baalbustershttps://rumble.com/c/BaalBustershttps://www.brighteon.com/channels/baalbusters/videos/allGet My Book and More here:https://SemperFryLLC.comPods & Exclusives AD-FREE! Just $5/mohttps://patreon.com/c/DisguisetheLimitsDaughter's Piggy Bankhttps://givesendgo.com/BaalBustersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262/support.

In today's heart-to-heart, we have a Special Guest - Dr Susie Mierzwik with us. Dr Susie is sharing what is like to get rid of pain without drugs. Dr. Susie is a retired teacher, and she did time in corporate finance, and that combined experience led her to entrepreneurship.Within our hour together, we walked through divorce, corporate challenges, reinforcing all along how timing is everything. Follow as long and discover how exactly A Bobble Head on a Body came up in conversation.We learned about Dr. Susie's 3 Key to success. Look In. Look Out. Look Up.We also tapped into: Coincidences Which Dr Susie doesn't necessarily believe in. However, today, on the show, we both witnessed coincidences. Were we looking for them? Or did they just appear?I do believe in coincidences. Coincidences act as validation, reassurance, and hope. Coincidences show up creatively, through conversation, music, experiences, or a message on a license plate. Then there are those coincidences that lead to serendipitous moments.Join us for some laughter and fun as we go through this conversation together.What an amazing episode, with so much to unpack!! Resources & Recommendations:Dr Susis's 3 Keys to Success - https://susiemierzwik.comYour Story Matters - a woman's self-love, self-awareness workbook - https://a.co/d/ja675wrThe Four Agreements - https://a.co/d/gSqvyftLet's learn a little about Dr Susie Mierzwik Since 2009 Dr. Susie (hc) helps her clients restore their health to a pain-free state, using phototherapy light patches that signal the body to create balance while removing toxins and inflammation. This technology enables clients to enjoy pain free living and stem cell regeneration. She is the bestselling author of “Sow in Tears, Reap in Joy. A Transformational Memoir."She also collaborated on 13 other bestselling books after retiring from teaching. Susie has received numerous awards for her work and community service and is currently serving as the co- director of GSFE Virtual Network. Dr. Susie (hc) retired from teaching after 26years. She also has an MBA and worked in corporate finance. She is a volunteer with Operation Christmas Child, and helps to assemble gifts for thousands of children worldwide.“Her keynote talk is 3 Steps to recover your Life when your Lifeboat Hits the Rapids” What you will learn:The 3 IOU's of survival: Look In for self evaluation, assessment and reflection.Look Out for support from your tribeLook Up to God/ Divine for guidance and hope Dr. Susie's clients are worldwide and she is a frequent speaker on podcasts.Connect with her at:Facebook https://facebook/SusanEMierzwik LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/SusieMierzwik Instagram https://Instagram.com/SusieMierzwik Website https://susiemierzwik.comThank you, Dr. Susie, for being on our show.xxReady to ditch the frustration and step into a life of unstoppable clarity and confidence? If you're serious about breaking free from emotional eating, boosting your energy, and conquering financial stress, then it's time to stop making excuses and start making progress. Your journey from feeling overwhelmed to absolutely unstoppable starts now. Take the first powerful step – book your discovery call today. Your brighter future awaits:Resource link, like social links, personalized assessments and upcoming events https://linktr.ee/sonyajanisse and my website www.sonyajanisse.com~ Sonya xoSonya JanisseNLP_Life Coach, HWL, PTSEmpowerment Catalyst ~ Where ambition meets transformation, and your best life begins

Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the Still Spinning Podcast. We appreciate you checking us out! You can watch the live taping every Monday at 7 PM on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram OR wait until the official podcast release on Wednesday morning. Visit our website for more details on becoming a sponsor, buying merch and check out old episodes. All of this at stillspinningpodcast.com. Maybe it is us but it seems there is a new term being used in the world almost every single week. This is true this week with the term “unbossing” which means something different to businesses than it does to workers. Basically workers no longer want to work in management roles, for a variety of reasons. Dan and Nicole both share personal stories that fall into this world. Have you ever visited a restaurant or store that is located near a high school, particularly when that high school has a lunch break or when it ends for the day? There is a McDonald's in Virginia that has a new 21 and over policy because of the behavior of the kids from a nearby school. Nicole and Dan discuss and talk about how scary kids can be. And finally, road rage has taken a turn (pun intended) and you will never believe what happened when a woman got mad and lost her shit. You can watch the (somewhat graphic) video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DJFKE4eOjlk/ Nicole sent this to Dan but did not tell him what it was about. We encourage you to just watch it before reading anything about it. Thank you so much for checking us out! Spinners, we may have to write you an IOU on bonus content this week, we have some scheduling issues we are trying to work out. But we promise, we will load you up on bonus content as soon as we are able!

 IOU tribute to the moms in our racing world   Rick Sabo has some excellent information on you financial future   Lernerville Victory Lane Interviews with Sprint Car Winner Parker Price Miller   The very exciting Late Model Feature went to a surprised Kenny Schaltenbrand   Rex King Jr spoke about his off season in the Modified main event.   And Curtis Bish discussed his car owners and the green to checker feature.  

SPONSOR: Direct Bullion. Download your free Guide to Gold Pensions Now. (plus get a special bonus).CLICK HERE NOW: https://robmoore.directbullion.com Rob is joined by hedge fund manager Rob Gardner, who has helped over a million clients invest. He shares with Rob how he helps manage other people’s money, his investment strategies and the beliefs and principles he invests and lives by. They also talk about who they think controls the world, the power banks and investment firms hold, and their thoughts on taxation. KEY TAKEAWAYS Rob has a set of investment beliefs and principles that he uses to guide him, particularly with more difficult decisions. It can be easier to work with other peoples money than your own as it isn’t just you working on decisions, but a team, and it also keeps you clear-headed and professional. You have to maintain discipline to be able to invest calmly and safely. It’s also important to recognise that you won’t get every decision right. Rob wants to be financially free by the time he is 55, to meet this target he tries to double his money every year. When investing, it’s important to diversify across equity, bonds and properties. Investing should always be for the long term. For example, when investing in businesses, think about their longevity. Rob believes that we can still live in a capitalist society and reduce on reliance on fossil fuels. The idea of overnight success isn't real, yet people are becoming obsessed with quick results. As a society, we need to think about how we change this mindset to continue to create the entrepreneurs of the future. BEST MOMENTS “Personally I’ve always had a set of investment beliefs.” “Investment is risk, but risk is to shake people off” “I want the freedom to say I don’t want to work” “Ask yourself, if this business didn’t exist, would the world miss it?” “The world and economic growth needs cheap energy and that energy can come from other places” “People don’t realise that a pound note is an IOU” "How do we have radical reform? What is a way to fire up the UK economy again?" VALUABLE RESOURCES https://robmoore.com/ bit.ly/Robsupporter https://robmoore.com/podbooks rob.team ABOUT THE HOST Rob Moore is an author of 9 business books, 5 UK bestsellers, holds 3 world records for public speaking, entrepreneur, property investor, and property educator. Author of the global bestseller “Life Leverage” Host of UK’s No.1 business podcast “The Disruptive Entrepreneur” “If you don't risk anything, you risk everything” CONTACT METHOD Rob’s official website: https://robmoore.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robmooreprogressive/?ref=br_rs LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robmoore1979 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Soph broadcasts live from her parents' kitchen (with some White Lotus background noise), armed with a paloma and a whole lotta feelings about egg freezing, the cost of being a woman, and why her Gossip Girl rewatch is the only hormone-free coping strategy she can actually afford. Expect big convos about the tariff tit-for-tat between China and the U.S., including why Apple stock soared and why Chinese factories are now selling $8 Lululemon leggings straight to your TikTok feed (yes, really). We're talking about how Hermes just served LVMH the ultimate glow-down by overtaking them in market value and China's $800B bond power play and how it could send the U.S. economy into a bit of a spiral. Oh, and over in Australia, there's talk of banning social media for under-16s - except YouTube, which gets a free pass for being “educational”.WTF Does That Mean? A Guide to All the Jargony BitsTariff – A tax on imports. Basically, countries throwing financial shade at each other.Bond – A boring-but-reliable IOU. You lend money, they pay you back (with interest).Interest Rate – How much extra you pay (or earn) when borrowing or saving money.Emergency Fund – Your oh-sh*t stash. For car repairs, surprise bills, or life.Insurance – Pay now so Future You isn't broke if things go wrong.Share Price – The cost of owning a slice of a company. It goes up, down, and all around.Stock Market – The big ol' shop for buying and selling company shares.Currency Strength – Strong currency = bougie holidays. Weak = staycation it is.Click here to listen to the full Abbie Chatfield convo we played in this episode.⁠⁠Leave us a message on The Curve Hotline

The boys discuss best way to get a job, locks and IOU's

How to assess the damage that the conspiring witnesses would have caused if they hadn't been determined to be conspiring: especially with monetary cases, such as the value of a ketubah, for example. But if he were to have died, he'd only have lost the value of the ketubah, without having to pay it out. So the risk of her having been widowed becomes part of the equation - including whether someone might have been willing to buy out the ketubah. Likewise, a case where the person they're testifying against has done the thing they're testifying about - and in that case, how much damage have they caused him? Also, a caveat about whether a loan is made with a promissory note - and how the default 30 days before asking for your money back kicks in only with a formal IOU. Plus, a concern about opening a collar on a shirt - and how that would be a violation of Shabbat, in contrast to removing the stopper from a wine barrel.

In this week's episode, we'll discuss when your retirement plan is really an IOU to the IRS and what you can do about it. If you have a certain amount in a pre-tax type of account, do you really have that much for your retirement? Would a Roth conversion be a wise choice for you? How can you fire the IRS from being your partner in retirement? Isn't it time to get answers to the tough retirement questions now?Join Certified Financial Fiduciary® and bestselling author Tim Wood each week to discuss protecting your retirement dollars, guaranteeing your lifetime income, wisely planning for taxes, and more. Visit us online at www.SafeMoneyRetirement.com for more information, to join us for this week's webinar, or to get a FREE copy of Tim's bestselling book.Safe Money Retirement® - Insuring Your Retirement Dreams

Dive into the future of AI in game development with this insightful panel from GDC featuring Aaron Farr (CTO at Jam and Tea Studios) and Liam Dean (Principal Analyst, Games at Omdia). They explore AI-native games, emergent gameplay, development acceleration, and how AI is transforming both game creation and player experiences. Essential viewing for game developers, executives, and anyone interested in how AI will reshape the gaming landscape.Timestamps0:00 - Introduction and panel overview1:50 - How revolutionary will AI be for gaming?3:30 - Current limitations of AI in game development5:10 - The concept of "AI native games" explained8:00 - Retail Mage: A real example of an AI native game11:10 - Emergent gameplay with AI - The painting IOU story14:20 - AI games vs. multiplayer games comparison17:40 - The controversy around AI in the games industry18:50 - Ethics of AI in game development22:20 - Who wins and loses with AI in game development?24:40 - The "organizational meta" and how AI will reshape studio structure27:40 - AI's impact on product development velocity30:20 - How traditional game studios will adapt (or fail)34:00 - Behind the scenes of an AI-native studio36:10 - How AI dramatically reduces development time (8 weeks vs 4 years)38:10 - The AI Dungeon Master example43:30 - Practical AI applications available right now47:10 - Q&A: Examples of AI-native games in the market49:30 - Q&A: Impact on staffing and team sizes52:40 - The future of game development organizationsSUBSCRIBE TO GAMEMAKERS:- Newsletter: https://gamemakers.substack.com/

April Fool's Day is all about jokes and pranks, but when it comes to retirement planning, getting fooled can cost you real money. Today, we're uncovering the beliefs that fool retirees and pre-retirees into making bad financial moves.   Important Links: Website: http://www.yourplanningpros.com Call: 844-707-7381   ----more---- Transcript:  Speaker 1: It's time once again for another edition of Plan With The Tax Man. And April Fool's Day is around us, all about the jokes and the pranks, but when it comes to retirement strategies, we want to make sure we don't get fooled in a way that can cost us any real money. So let's talk about that this week here on the show.   What's going on everybody? Welcome into the podcast. This is Plan With The Tax Man, with Tony Mauro from Tax Doctor Inc. Serving folks all around the Iowa area. If you've got some questions, some concerns, need some help, please check him out and go talk with a qualified professional like Tony online. You can get some time on this calendar@yourplanningpros.com. That's yourplanningpros.com, or you can call him at 844-707-7381. We'll have information of the podcast if you'd like to click on those as well. Tony's got 30 years of experience helping people get to and through retirement, and a great resource for you to tap into. So, Tony, it is April Fool's Day-ish at the time we're dropping this. I think we're dropping this like maybe a few days beforehand, but are you a big prankster?   Tony Mauro: I'm a huge prankster.   Speaker 1: Are you?   Tony Mauro: It's my second favorite holiday, yeah.   Speaker 1: Oh, okay. All right. So does your wife get tired of it?   Tony Mauro: My wife gets tired of it, my son, my dad, everybody.   Speaker 1: Okay.   Tony Mauro: But they play them on me too, so yeah, we have a lot of fun with April Fools.   Speaker 1: Good. That's good. Yeah, my dad was pretty bad about it when he was with us. He was always pulling something on his family members, so it was like, all right, now you had to be on guard whenever it rolled around.   Tony Mauro: Absolutely.   Speaker 1: You knew he was up to something. But let's talk about a few categories here from a financial standpoint where we don't want to get fooled, Tony. We want to make sure, and look, it's super easy right now. Right. I mean, between the news headlines, social media, the polarization of people, whether you're left or right, you like the administration, you don't like the administration. Everybody's got an opinion every six seconds of the day. Right. And so it's very, very easy to see a bunch of stuff that maybe kind of gets you all worked up. Right.   So we want to make sure that we're not just stepping in something just because we're having a visceral reaction to some sort of media bombardment or whatever. So let's start with the high returns since obviously right now, Tony, we had a choppy March, right? So the markets were choppy. I think it's easy when we find it, we all love it when it's high, right? So we all love the market when it's doing well, and we've had a pretty good market for, let's be honest, we haven't really had a prolonged downturn, right? Since 08, 09. If you think about it, we're closing in on 20 years since we've had a sustained prolonged downturn.   Now we've had blips, we've had the COVID downturn, and we had different things. 22 was rough for a little bit as well, but it's not been sustained more than a couple of months, right? So I think people that are kind of get lulled into the, Hey, the market's beating you up, let's get you into this product that's got guaranteed high returns. Be careful of that, right? Make sure you're really doing your diligence and reading the fine print.   Tony Mauro: Yeah, you do have to have that, because it is, and I always know when maybe the markets are possibly too high, when everybody, especially people that are just tax clients, aren't wealth management clients are saying, "What do you think about this stock? What do you think about that stock?"   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: And,-   Speaker 1: Or should I get into an annuity or whatever?   Tony Mauro: Yeah.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony Mauro: All that kind of stuff, because they think that because where we've been for the last 20 or so years, returns are easy and there's some foolishness to that, I would say.   Speaker 1: Some fool, yeah, fool's goal, I think that's a good way. Yeah.   Tony Mauro: Because you got to look at it this way. High returns do come with volatility and some risk. And so whether it's in a stock or you're locking yourself up in an annuity, which is a whole different type of product, then you certainly got to understand what those risks are and have that explained to you. And if that's not your appetite for obtaining that return, which we always work off, we're trying to get you the best return based on how you want to get to point B, so to speak, with the least amount of volatility and the least amount of potential tax consequences. Now that may not be, and even come close to say S&P 500 returns, but for you that might be good, but for somebody else,-   Speaker 1: Good point.   Tony Mauro: It might not be.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony Mauro: But don't just say, well, I want the highest return out there because there's always something new. Nobody, in my opinion, can accurately predict what the market is going to do tomorrow in the short term. Now, a lot of them, obviously, it's pretty easy to say, well, over the long term, that the market's the place to be.   Speaker 1: Oh, the market always comes back, right? I just saw this earlier today. We were just chatting about it, you and I, before we jumped on the podcast, and it was like, people are freaking out. "Oh, I'm losing my retirement because of this 10% correction we've had in March." And it's like, okay, first of all, and the immediate comment from someone is, "Well, don't worry. The market comes back." And they freak out and they go, "Well, I don't have time to wait for it to come back." Well, if you didn't have a strategy in place and you were planning on retiring and a 10% correction crippled you, then you weren't in good shape to begin with anyway.   Tony Mauro: No.   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: And you shouldn't have been in the market if you're ready to retire or you should,-   Speaker 1: Not at 10%. Yeah. Yeah.   Tony Mauro: Not there. So it is,-   Speaker 1: Exactly.   Tony Mauro: We constantly battle that with tempering and making people understand and get their whole plan in front of them, just so they're not so focused on what's going on today,-   Speaker 1: Right. Right. Yep.   Tony Mauro: In the news.   Speaker 1: Yep. Which is the point of this podcast this week is, the April Fools, not that it's April Fools that they're pulling a prank, so to speak, but it's just kind of being fooled into things because of the constant bombardment of the media. You and I talked on the last podcast that in the course of the same day that we were chatting, the news cycle ran from the sky is falling earlier in the morning with the market to, oh, the outlook is looking pretty good because the inflation numbers came in and were down a half a point or a point.   Tony Mauro: Yeah.   Speaker 1: So they just run with whatever's going to get them eyeballs. So just make sure we're, I think we all know that, but whenever we start to panic a little bit, that's when that little devil on our shoulder kind of creeps up and taps us and says, Hey, be worried. So let's talk about the next one, which is the tax time bomb. Getting fooled into underestimating taxes on your account. And here's the angle I wanted to take on this, Tony. So again, regardless of what your political slant is, if you find yourself, and here's, let me set this up. It's going to take a second, folks, but I think it'll, hopefully it'll make sense.   I'm one of those people, Tony, that my personal health and the family history says I'm going to probably pass away young, right, in my 70s. Now I could totally plan to liquidate and blow through all my money and have big fun and spend it all by 72 when I think I'm going to croak. But if I'm wrong, right, I'm going to be screwed. I'm going to be screwed, right, because I'm not going to have anything. Well, if you're right now, if you're all excited about the no tax on social security, no tax on tips or the conversation about abolishing the IRS or getting away with, great. Look, if that happens and they get rid, I think I'm sure we'll all be dancing in the street if they get rid of the IRS.   However, if they don't, don't you think you should have a strategy for dealing with the tax time bomb that you're probably sitting on, right? And that's my point, right? If you've got a million dollars sitting in a 401K, don't just kind of like go fool's gold and think, Hey, Trump's going to eliminate all the taxes and Bob's your uncle and you're going to get to keep all that money. Be smart in the event that you still have to pay your RMDs or whatever.   Tony Mauro: And I mean, you look back through all of history. Now, keep in mind what I tell people when they start talking like this is, tell me where you think that this, the biggest arm, the only arm almost for collecting the accounts receivable for the US government is, which is the IRS. They're going to go away. How do you think the government will function? Now, maybe they'll, like you said, maybe they'll come up with something over time.   Speaker 1: Sure.   Tony Mauro: And,-   Speaker 1: Maybe the tariffs will be the end of the solution, whatever, right?   Tony Mauro: Maybe it will.   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: But history points to, it's probably not. And many, many of us, I can't remember how many trillions is probably in the 401Ks right now, but we have,-   Speaker 1: That's a lot. Yeah.   Tony Mauro: We all have an IOU.   Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. It's almost 40 trillion, Tony. I'm glad you mentioned that.   Tony Mauro: It's 40 trillion?   Speaker 1: Yeah. Because the debt's 36 trillion, and they're always talking about the target that is, the retirement accounts is about 40 trillion out there.   Tony Mauro: We got 40 trillion. It's all in traditional 401Ks and of course,-   Speaker 1: A lot of tax money.   Tony Mauro: A lot of tax money. The IRS wants it. We all have an IOU to Uncle Sam with that money. And they know that and they want pieces of it. Hence, they're changing rules as we speak, that nobody seems to pay attention to when somebody dies and you inherit some of this stuff because they want their money.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And look, regardless of your stance, if DOGE does a good job and gets rid of some of the debt and some of the spending and our national debt's able to come down, maybe we don't have to tax ourselves into oblivion. Maybe that's the upside, right? Instead of going, we're in historically low tax rates, right, with the TCJA.   Tony Mauro: Just going to say that. Yeah.   Speaker 1: And at the time we're here taping this, Tony, we still don't know if that's going to get extended or not, right? Maybe it does, that's the prevailing wind, but maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But at least if nothing else, if it does, then we don't have to necessarily go up in taxes. But you're still going to have to have a strategy for being tax efficient, because that's a big chunk of your retirement money.   Tony Mauro: And that's what we focus on, is trying to be as tax efficient as possible, especially from the tax angle side, from being tax people that we want to make sure that they're not getting any more than they have to.   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: And so you have to, especially on the distribution stage, really be strategic about it and make sure you're following the rules and that you're not overpaying just because you don't know any better. And I think that's really the gist of it. And I would also encourage anybody go out and google the history of the tax rates. And you're right, we're at historically low tax rates compared to where we were just even in the 80s.   Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.   Tony Mauro: And so,-   Speaker 1: Well, even during the prior administration. If the TCJA expires, right, we're going back to what it was under Obama administration tax code. So even that goes up a little bit, so.   Tony Mauro: But that goes up. Now one could say, well the way to fix all this is just raise taxes. Well,-   Speaker 1: And nobody wants, I mean, look how we whine about,-   Tony Mauro: Nobody's going to do it.   Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we get all bent out of shape about the stock market dropping 10%. You want to pay 10% more in taxes? Of course not.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. No. Nobody wants that. Nobody politically seems to want that. And of course, if you can't, it's like in business, if you can't control your spending, it doesn't matter how much you bring in.   Speaker 1: Yep. That's what,-   Tony Mauro: Right. I mean,-   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony Mauro: You got to do something.   Speaker 1: Isn't it wild where we're at as a society? We all know we got to control spending, yet when you get somebody in there that starts doing it, they start screaming foul and going, why are you cutting spending? It's like, because we have to. We're $36 trillion in debt. That's crazy.   Tony Mauro: That whole thing is,-   Speaker 1: We're in the goofiest time period.   Tony Mauro: Hours.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony Mauro: Yeah. It's just crazy. But we have to, as advisors and as the public, we got to work with what we have.   Speaker 1: Right. You got to play by the rules. Yep.   Tony Mauro: We got to make it try to work for us and I think that's importance of planning.   Speaker 1: Yeah. I've said forever and a day, that it's their chessboard. We have to play by the functioning rules of the chess piece, right? If we're that chess piece is able to move one step at a time, then that's all we can do, right? So,-   Tony Mauro: We're done.   Speaker 1: We have to do those different pieces. So again, no matter what your political slant is, the point of this is you don't want to kind of fall for any one thing, one side or the other. You want to have a good strategy in the event that it does come through, or the event that it doesn't come through. Because you want to make sure that you can hopefully retire as efficiently as possible in any administration or any economy or whatever the case might be. So final one, we'll wrap it up this week just on a couple of things to be careful with, because we knew these were going to be some big ticket items Tony, is Medicare misunderstanding.   We'll switch gears and go to this one. Especially for the folks that are getting close to retirement, their first time stepping into it. My brother just got to 65. He's trying to get his bearings with understanding Medicare and the different things that it does. My mom's 80, in her mid 80s and she's quite used to it, so she's trying to school him on some things, but there's a lot of miscommunication out there on what it covers and what it doesn't.   Tony Mauro: There's tons of it and it's very complex. And then you add on to the top of it the federal government bureaucracy, and it makes it kind of a nightmare for a lot of retirees. But I can tell you this, it certainly doesn't, do not be fooled, it does not cover everything in retirement.   Speaker 1: Correct. Right.   Tony Mauro: You've got to make sure that you have some of these gaps and things covered.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony Mauro: And that's where what I do is I have a Medicare specialist that I consult with for clients because I can't keep up on all those rules and he helps me with clients. And now of course, if he ends up selling them some insurance they need, well, obviously that's how he gets paid. But nevertheless, he really has the ins and outs of what it does and doesn't cover. And then also, okay, if something's not covered, are you willing to spend X to get it covered? And,-   Speaker 1: Good point.   Tony Mauro: Like everything else, you got to make a decision. Do you want to keep that as a gap and take that risk, or is that risk too big? But boy, Medicare, I mean, it serves a good base, but it does not cover everything and you really need to be on that.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Even within the same category too. And don't forget that they changed the way it's set up and providers can shift too. Like my mom recently, I think in the last couple of years she's gone through three different dentists because something happens with the program and the dentist she was going to says, "Well, we no longer accept it." Right. So, which is, I didn't think you could do that, but apparently you can. So different places can accept different things at different levels. So you have to kind of see who's in network, right, and who's out, all that kind of stuff.   Tony Mauro: My dad's like that. And like I say, he's 83 and he is over insured in this area because he like buys everything just because he doesn't want any gaps. And I think he, we tried to get him not to do that and because he's actually kind of wasting a little money.   Speaker 1: Sure. Sure.   Tony Mauro: But sometimes it does work in his favor.   Speaker 1: Makes him happy, right? So,-   Tony Mauro: Makes him happy.   Speaker 1: He walks in and he's covered, I guess, so.   Tony Mauro: He's covered. Yeah, I mean, he's got coverage, but to your point, sometimes it changes and then he sees a lot of different doctors and whatnot, not because he wants to, because like the plan change covered and they say, "Nope, you got to go over here now."   Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. She sees the same thing. So a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to Medicare as well. So just make sure that you're working with some professionals who can help you. Most advisors, offices, if they don't have a Medicare person on staff, they usually have someone they refer people out to so they can kind of, especially someone who does this in and out every day, they kind of know the nitty-gritty a little bit better. So if you need some help with that, as always, make sure you're reaching or any of the stuff that we talk about, make sure that you're talking with a qualified pro like Tony and his team at Tax Doctor Inc. You can find them online at yourplanningpros.com. That is yourplanningpros.com.   Don't forget to subscribe to us on Apple or Spotify here at Plan With The Tax Man. Simply type the name of the podcast into the search box. You can find it that way. Or just go to the website, make it easy on yourself, yourplanningpros.com. We'll have links in the descriptions below. And as always, we appreciate your time. Tony, thanks for hanging out my friend. And don't be too hard on folks when you pull some pranks on them in April.   Tony Mauro: Oh, no. No, I'll just get my family and we'll see what happens. I'll let you know on the next podcast.   Speaker 1: All right. Let me know how it goes. Yeah, my dad was crazy. He would pull something that got a little mean-spirited sometimes. It's like, all right, now you need to back it off a little bit there, bud. So have yourself a good one, folks. We'll see you next time here on Plan With The Tax Man.   Securities offered through Avantax Investment Services SM, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through Avantax Advisory Services. Insurance services offered through an Avantax affiliated insurance agency. Investment strategies discussed in this episode may not be suitable for all investors. Please consult with a financial professional.

If there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits, how he made his vast fortune, and why, in unprecedented ways, he decided to go all in on Trump.In this second of two episodes on Musk, Matt and Sam bring his story up to the present. After offering a few concluding details on Musk's various romantic and familial entanglements, they chart the course of his political derangement, especially focusing on his seeming addiction to Twitter—the social media platform he eventually bought and renamed "X," which also is the name he gave one of his young sons. Musk's purchase of Twitter is treated as a case study in how the billionaire now tends to operate, from his penchant for making wild claims and impulsive decisions, to the way he manages people, tasks, and money. The discussion concludes with a theory of why Trump made such a show of buying a Tesla at the White House, and how to understand what Musk is up to with his erratic, ignorant work at DOGE, with plenty of eyebrow-raising details along the way.As mentioned: Join Matt and Sam and Jamelle Bouie at Dissent magazine's fundraiser on April 8 in New York!Listen again: "Becoming Elon Musk, Part One"Sources:Kate Conger & Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)Ella Yurman, "Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk's Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online," Mar 20, 2025Kylie Cheung, "World's Richest Man Allegedly Refuses to Pay Appropriate Child Support," Jezebel, Mar 21, 2025Faiz Siddiqui, "Elon Musk is worth $270 billion. He'd buy Twitter with an IOU," WaPo, April 22, 2022Theodore Schleifer  & Maggie Haberman "Elon Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Into Trump Political Operation," NYTimes, Mar 11, 20225.Eric Lipton, "Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts," NYTimes, Mar 23, 2025.Jessie Blaeser, "DOGE shared its receipts — and some of them don't match," Politico, Feb 22, 2025. Hadas Gold, "Trump says he'll buy a Tesla to support Elon Musk, whose companies are struggling," CNN, Mar 11, 2025.Sam Adler-Bell, "Capital without Borders," Commonweal, Feb 8, 2017.  ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to access to all of our bonus episodes!

Sign-up for my free 20-day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com--Series: Wisdom for Work from PhilippiansDevotional: 2 of 4Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.” Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky. (Philippians 2:14-15)Want to “shine among” the non-Christians you work with? Paul tells you how: “Do everything without grumbling or arguing.” Apparently, working without grumbling and complaining was as countercultural in Paul's day as it is in ours.C.S. Lewis once said that, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood.” The inverse is also true. People can get a whiff of heaven through the joyful mood of its citizens. Dr. Randy Alcorn goes so far as to say that, “Happiness in Christ is one of our most powerful evangelistic tools.”The question, of course, is how can we be joyful and work without grumbling when your co-worker replies all to yet another email or your boss makes an urgent request at 4:45 on a Friday? By focusing on what Christ has done for us.Just a few verses before today's passage, Paul writes about how Christ “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death” for you and me (see verse 8). “Therefore,” Paul says in verse 14, “do everything without grumbling or arguing.”The cross is the source of our joy amidst less than desirable circumstances. Once you focus on what Christ accomplished for you at Calvary, grumbling about the smell in the office refrigerator feels ridiculous. Tim Keller once compared it to being a “spiritual billionaire…wringing your hands over ten dollars.”Grumbling is so second nature we often don't notice we're doing it. Here are three simple ways to prevent, confess, and respond to complaining.First, prevent grumbling by writing Philippians 2:14-15 somewhere you'll see it while you work. On a post-it note, your phone background—wherever.Second, confess grumbling by creating a grumble jar. And every time you or someone on your team complains, drop in a dollar (or, if you're like me and never carry cash, an IOU to tally later). My family and I did this recently to break a different habit and it was shockingly effective. We were able to kick our habit in less than a month. Finally, respond to grumbling by expressing gratitude. Think back to the last thing you complained about and thank God for something related to that thing. For example, this morning I grumbled about the house being a mess. But I then said a quick prayer of gratitude that I have children to make said mess.Do whatever it takes to wrestle your grumbling to the ground, believer. Because as Dr. Alcorn put it, “Our happiness makes the gospel contagiously appealing; our unhappiness makes it alarmingly unattractive.”

Most people think they've done everything right by saving in a traditional IRA or 401(k). But what if I told you that a big portion of your retirement savings actually belongs to the IRS?In this episode, we'll break down a recent CNBC article featuring insights from IRA expert Ed Slott, who calls traditional IRAs "the worst possible asset" for retirement.Here's what you'll learn: ✔️ Why your IRA is an IOU to the IRS✔️ How Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) can push you into higher tax brackets✔️ When a Roth conversion makes sense✔️ The importance of building tax diversification with Roth accounts and brokerage accountsIf you want to keep more of your hard-earned wealth and pay less in taxes in retirement, this is one episode you don't want to miss.Episode ResourcesCNBC Article Don't Miss Out: Smart Retirement Savers Read Atomic IdeasWant weekly tips to make smarter financial decisions? Subscribe to Atomic Ideas, a free newsletter packed with timely market insights, helpful visuals, and proven retirement strategies.Get Atomic IdeasReady to Create Your Atomic Retirement?Take the next step! Schedule your FREE 20-minute Atomic Retirement Roadmap appointment today. What's included? Tax Return ReviewInvestment Check-UpRetirement Income AnalysisGet Your Free Atomic Retirement RoadmapShare Your ThoughtsEnjoyed this episode? Please leave a review and share it with someone who's planning for retirement.

Place your bets with these old time radio mysteries involving gamblers and the (sometimes) crooked games they play. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find murder among the roulette tables of a French casino in "The Case of the Double Zero," starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (originally aired on Mutual on November 19, 1945). Philip Marlowe tries to find a friend's stolen IOU but stumbles across a corpse during the search in "The Promise to Pay" (originally aired on CBS on May 14, 1949), and Nero Wolfe is hired to find out who dealt a deadly hand during a poker game in "The Case of the Killer Cards" (originally aired on NBC on January 12, 1951). Finally, Sgt. Joe Friday hunts for the man who's impersonating a cop to extort money from gamblers in "The Big Shakedown" from Dragnet (originally aired on NBC on May 22, 1952).

We all know the best way to overcome objections is to not have them in the first place (which we will get into how to show up better for yourself and why that's so important) but when they do happen, it's important to have some strategies and tactics in your back pocket and what I'm going to share with you today made us and our IFCA clients thousands of dollars we wouldn't have made otherwise. We'll go over the IOU strategy when it comes to referrals, prerequisites of being a great coach and salesperson in the first place, share a bonus ambassador strategy with you, and more!   Time Stamps:   (1:02) The Best Way To Overcome Objections (1:17) Our Former Company T4E Systems (4:39) Being The Leader For Your Prospects (6:39) Prerequisites For A Great Salesperson (9:04) Tom Cruise Example (10:14) Objection Handling (12:04) Referral Tactic (14:09) Bonus Time: Ambassador Program (16:44) Please Leave A Rating and Review ---------- Whenever You're Ready, Here Are 4 Ways We Can Help You (For Free)   (Community) Join the Fitness Business Secrets FB  Community to Unlock Your Free 5 Clients in 5 Days Mini-Course   (Content) Grab our exact post templates that are responsible for more than 3,500 online clients in our business Automated Post Planner   (Instagram) 3-5x Your Engagement, Grow an Audience and Generate Dream Clients from Instagram IG Playbook For Health & Fitness Coaches   (Get Clarity) Schedule a FREE No-Obligation 15-minute Call to Explore How To Add 10,000/Mo to Your Business–Guaranteed

In this episode of Leaning Into Leadership, Dr. Darrin Peppard sits down with Dr. Joe Famularo, a veteran educator and superintendent, to explore his IOU Leadership framework. Dr. Famularo shares his journey from classroom teacher to district leader, the principles that guide his leadership, and how the IOU model—Inward, Outward, and Upward Leadership—helps leaders build a thriving culture rooted in trust and continuous improvement.Key Topics Covered:✅ The IOU Leadership Framework: What it means to lead inward, outward, and upward.✅ The Role of Self-Awareness in Leadership: Why knowing yourself is the foundation for effective leadership.✅ Building a Culture of Trust: The impact of relationships and shared leadership in schools.✅ Living with Intention vs. Living by Default: How to shift from reactive to proactive leadership.✅ PH2E Life Propeller Assessment: A tool to evaluate personal and professional growth.✅ The Importance of Clear Vision and Common Language: How defining values and mission creates sustainable success in schools.✅ Leader in Me & The 7 Habits: How Covey's principles influenced his district's transformation.About Dr. Joe FamularoDr. Joe Famularo is a lifelong educator with over 34 years in the same district, including 18 as superintendent. Passionate about leadership and continuous improvement, he developed the IOU Leadership framework to help individuals and organizations create cultures of trust, purpose, and excellence. He is the author of IOU Life Leadershipand the upcoming book IOU School Leadership.

Get more notes at https://podcastnotes.org Live Below Your Means For Freedom (Listen) Episode 6* “People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyle just can't fathom” – Naval Ravikant* Once you start making money, keep living like your old/poorer self* When you upgrade your life as you make more money, you just stay in the “wage slave trap”* Nassim Taleb has said – “The most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary”* They're both highly addictive* One reason the very high marginal tax rates for the so-called wealthy are flawed:* For many people, they toil/work extremely hard for decades, and then it finally pays off with a massive payday* “Then of course Uncle Sam shows up, and basically says, ‘Hey, you know what, you just made a lot of money this year. Therefore, you're rich. Therefore, you're evil and you've got to hand it all over to us.' So, it just destroys those kinds of creative risk-taking professions.” – Naval RavikantGive Society What it Doesn't Know How to Get (Listen) | Episode 7* Get rich by giving society what it doesn't yet know how to get – at scale* Money is like an IOU from society for something you did good in the past, that you can use in the future* “Society always wants new things and if you want to be wealthy, figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get, but it will want, that's natural to you and within your capabilities. And then you have to figure out how to scale it.” – Naval Ravikant* Creations start as just an act of creativity* Then, for a little while, only rich people have it (like a chauffeur)* Then it makes its way to everyone (like Uber)* “Entrepreneurship is essentially an act of creating something new from scratch, predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it and get it to everybody in a profitable and self-sustaining way.” – Naval RavikantThe Internet Has Massively Broadened Career Possibilities (Listen) | Episode 8* “The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.” – Naval Ravikant* The internet connects everyone on the planet* This means that you can find an audience for your product/service no matter how far away they are* “The internet allows any niche obsession…from people who collect snakes to people who like to ride hot air balloons to people who like to sail around the world by themselves…whatever nice obsession you have, the internet allows you to scale.” – Naval Ravikant* “If you want to reach 50,000 passionate people like you, there's an audience out there for you”* “Each person on Earth has different interests and obsessions, and it's that diversity that becomes a creative superpower” – Naval Ravikant* Before the internet – this didn't really matter* Your town/village didn't necessarily need your unique creative skill* But now – you can go out on the internet and find your audience and utilize that to build wealth* The space of careers has been broadened -Examples:* People are now able to upload videos to Youtube to make a living – this wasn't possible 50 years ago* Professional bloggers* Podcasters – Joe Rogan makes about $100 million per year from his podcast alone* “The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you're the best at it, to scale-out” – Naval Ravikant* Because every human is different, everyone is the best at something* “Escape competition through authenticity” – Naval Ravikant* Just do your own thing – “No one can compete with you on being you”* “The more authentic you are, the less competition you're gonna have”Play Long-term Games With Long-term People (Listen) | Episode 9* “All the benefits in life come from compound interest” – Naval Ravikant* Whether it's in relationships, life, your career, health, or learning* Long-term games are good for both compound interest AND trust* If you want to be successful, more likely than not, you'll need to work with other people* You'll need to figure out who you can trust over a long period of time, so you can keep working with them so that eventually compound interest will let you collect the major rewards* If you keep switching careers/networks – compound interest can't take effect* Add to that – you won't know who to trust and your new network won't know to trust you* “It's important to pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people” – Naval Ravikant* A good analogy:* In a long-term game, everyone is making each other rich* It's positive-sum* In a short-term game, everyone is making themselves richPick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity (Listen) | Episode 10* Pick people to work with who have high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity – you CANNOT compromise on this* The world is full of smart/lazy people – this is why high energy is important* But high integrity is the most important* Otherwise, you just have a smart/hardworking crook who will eventually cheat you* How do you figure out if someone has good integrity?* Read signals* “Signals are what people do, despite what they say” – Naval Ravikant* If someone treats a waiter badly, it's only a matter of time before they treat you badly* Another tip – Find people to work with who seem irrationally ethical* “Self-esteem is the reputation that you have with yourself” – Naval Ravikant* Good/ethical/reliable people tend to have high self-esteem because they have good reputations with themselves* “Generally, the more someone is saying that they're moral, and ethical, and high integrity, the less likely they are to be that way” – Naval Ravikant* Similarly – “If you openly talk about how honest, and reliable, and trustworthy you are, you're probably not that honest and trustworthy”* Sam Altman has said – “One of the important things for delegation is to delegate to people who are actually good at the thing that you want them to do”* “I almost won't start a company, or hire a person, or work with somebody if I just don't think they're into what I want them to do” – Naval Ravikant* “If you're trying to keep someone motivated for the long term, that motivation has to come intrinsically” – Naval RavikantPartner With Rational Optimists (Listen) | Episode 11* Don't partner with pessimists* Avoid them* To create great things, you have to be a rational optimist* Rational in the way you see the world* Optimistic in your capabilities* “All of the really successful people I know have a really strong action bias. They just do things.” – Naval Ravikant* The easiest way to figure out if something is viable or not is by doing it* “You've got one life on this planet. Why not try to build something big?” – Naval Ravikant* But do know that it takes a lot of effort to build even small things* “I don't think the corner grocery store owner is working any less hard than Elon Musk“ – Naval Ravikant* Think BIG – but be rational about it* Being an irrational optimist > being a rational cynic* If you think about it, we're descended from pessimists* If two people were in a forest 10,000 years ago, and they hear a tiger – the optimist doesn't run and ends up getting eaten, while the pessimist books it and survives* “We're genetically wired to be pessimists, but modern society is far, far safer” – Naval Ravikant* “It made sense to be pessimistic in the past, but it makes sense to be an optimist today”* In society today, we're dealing with situations which have limited downside and unlimited upside* Just think – if you build the next Tesla or SpaceX you can create billions of dollars of value for society (and yourself)* If you fail, so what? A few investors lose money and you're right back to where you started.Arm Yourself With Specific Knowledge (Listen) | Episode 12* “We have this idea that everything can be taught…..everything can be taught in school. And it's not true that everything can be taught. In fact, the most interesting things cannot be taught. But everything can be learned.” – Naval Ravikant* Specific knowledge is the knowledge that you care most about* You can't be trained for specific knowledge* If it were possible to be trained for it – then someone else could be trained for it too* You'd then be extremely replaceable – by other humans and eventually robots* How do you discover your specific knowledge?* “Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion” – Naval Ravikant* “If you're not 100% into it, then someone else who is 100% into it will outperform you”* Look back on your own life and see what you're uniquely good at* Specific knowledge is the stuff that feels like play to you but looks like work to othersSpecific Knowledge is Highly Creative or Technical (Listen) | Episode 13* Warren Buffet once went to Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor, and offered to work for him for free so he could learn about investing* Benjamin told him – “Actually you're overpriced. Free is overpriced.”* Apprenticeships are VALUABLE – if specific knowledge can somehow be taught, this is how* Specific knowledge tends to be highly technical or creative – on the bleeding edge of art, communication, or tech* An example of specific knowledge – what Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has done with his career* He's essentially becoming one of the most credible people in the world by making persuasive arguments and videos on Periscope* What he does will NEVER be automated* Specific knowledge can only be built by spending lots of time doing whatever you're obsessed/interested in* It can't be taught in a book or course* Career Advice – Aim to get in the 10-25th percentile of 2-3 things and then combine them instead of trying to be the very best at only one thing* Scott Adams originated this idea in this blog post* For example: Become a very good writer and knowledgeable about finance – then write about finance* Double down on what you're a “natural” at* Everyone is a natural at something* “Take the things that you are natural at and combine them so that you automatically, just through sheer interest and enjoyment, end up top in the top 25% or top 10% or top 5% at a number of things.” – Naval RavikantLearn to Sell, Learn to Build – You Will Be Unstoppable (Listen) | Episode 14* “Learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable.” – Naval Ravikant* Every business has someone who's building/trying to grow it* Then there's sales* But selling can mean marketing, communicating, recruiting, raising money, inspiring people, or doing PR* The great companies have a killer combo of builder + seller* Example – Apple (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak)* Venture investors look for this combo whenever possible* If you can BOTH build and sell – it's a superpower* Someone like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen* “The real giants in any field are the people who can both build and sell” – Naval Ravikant* “Long term, people who understand the underlying product and how to build it and can sell it, these are catnip to investors. These people can break down walls if they have enough energy, and they can get almost anything done.” – Naval Ravikant* It's much more difficult for someone skilled in selling to pick up the building skill than vice versaGo to Podcastnotes.org to read the full notes Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Welcome to today's Wacky Wednesday episode as we start Phase 4 of the From Ashes to Destiny curriculum. This episode is from Chapter 13 of Phase 4 and deals with the story of IOU. We look at those people who trouble us and what we have learned in recovery by influencing us to turn to others ideas and reject what they told us in rehab or in the program. IOU's story ends with him waiting for the morning bus to go back to rehab, but for him the morning never came. Are you ready to stop waiting for tomorrow, for your morning bus?

Indiana basketball earned their biggest win of the season with an 84-74 home win over Rutger, who was without star freshman Dylan Harper.  Ace Bailey tried to make up for the loss with 39 points, but the Scarlet Knights could not overcome Indiana's 3-point shooting and offensive rebounding.  Todd Leary breaks it all down and previews IOU at Penn State on Sunday at the Palestra in Philladelphia. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/indiana-sports-beat-radio-with-jim-coyle--3120150/support.

In the case of one who wrote an IOU document in his own handwriting, without witnesses, then the collection can only take place from unencumbered property -- even if that same IOU was later ratified in court. A bill of divorce is brought in the attempt to argue that such a document should function as a complete IOU and be able to collect from property that has a lien on it. Though the Gemara highlights the differences in the cases instead of accepting the argument. Also, in the case of needing the collect (and pay back) the guarantor... to avoid being strangled. With praise going to one sage, even though the halakhic decision is not according to him -- because the process of halakhic thinking is part of what is needed.

“Dr. Cheryl, how can I be more present for my sweetheart?” “What's the number one gift to give my spouse?” “How do I make Christmas more exciting?” This season, remember that gifts don't have to have a monetary value. Show your partner you care by being intentional and letting them know how much they matter to you. A happy, healthy relationship involves shared rituals—why not give your lover the gift of presence? On today's classic episode of Sex, Love, and Elephants, you'll hear a rerelease of one of my all time favorite episodes where I focus on the sex and love part of Christmas and show you some special ways to make this time together magical.  Remember being a kid on Christmas morning, waking up even before the sun… overwhelmed and giddy at the idea of what Santa Claus might've brought? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to recapture that special, magical feeling—even long after we stop believing in old St. Nick? In This Episode, You Will Learn: Yes, you CAN make the holidays more romantic and sexy and avoid becoming totally burnt out by the end of the season (04:33)  It's not about the presents, it's about the presence (11:00) If you've got  little inquiring eyes and ears around, put your stocking stuffer in an envelope or add an IOU for an erotic massage (12:34) If you don't celebrate Christmas, you don't have to put your gifts in a stocking (13:52) Why not try out The 12 Days of Christmas for Couples? Instead of a partridge in a pear tree, what about dancing to a romantic song together in the living room? (18:08) Today's LoveByte (25:52) Want to learn more about Buddhism and relationships? Cheryl's book Buddha's Bedroom is a great resource! Want to rate your relationship on the three keys to great long term love? Take the Passion Quiz. Let's Connect!   Website - Sign up for Weekly LoveBytes here  Youtube Follow @drcherylfraser on Instagram 

More on people who have the same name -- and a need for a scribe to write an IOU -- with a third approach to making the deal work, including, if both parties are present at the scribe. Also, a new mishnah! When one of many (or even 2) IOUs has been paid back - and the holder of them doesn't know which of them is paid back -- the mishnah says to act stringently, to ensure nobody would be paying back twice. Also, another new mishnah! On the role of a guarantor - and how one might cheat via the guarantor, or cheat him. But what if the original signatory has the funds to pay? Plus, the supporting story of Benjamin and the cup in leaving the halls of Egypt (for a different kind of guarantor), including a biblical prooftext.

Shtaros to be careful to make sure they dont seem like sheker and an IOU chov

Everyone agrees that if the date of an IOU is the date of a Shabbat or Yom Kippur, the given assumption is that the document was post-dated, with some occasions that - despite this apparent exceptions that are the subject of a dispute between Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Yossi. Also, other cases of bills being dated to some future date, after the funds for that bill becoming available -- presumably for financial flexibility.

When an apparently previous owner claims he is the current owner, against the apparent current owner. What kind of proof would be necessary? All of which leads into a case and a story - to summarize the issues and the legal decision: an outstanding loan that is contested. Also, a new mishnah! The case of one who has paid a portion of his debt, what do you do with the IOU notes? How much scope for confusion - or fraud - and when do you need the courts?

Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel prepared documents occurring to the practice of the land - regular or bound/tied - but did he have to? Certainly, the different kinds of documents are available as options. Plus, an agreement for kiddushin, based on a dinar of gold -- that turns out to be silver, with all the ramifications (except it seems to be approved). And the question of how precise people are with their words, when specifying details or conditions of a document. Also, a regular document with one witness, or a tied document with only two witnesses -- especially when combined with some other form of authentication, after debating, the sages sent the question to R. Yirmiyah in Babylonia. He demurs, but also answers. At least tentatively. Plus, a different version of what gets sent to R. Yirmiyah - with the question of whether two decisions from two different courts can combine, as it were, to be testimony. Also, a new mishnah! On claiming a lesser amount than an IOU.

Boortz tells you about the biggest scam in American hisory: Social Security. He prepares you for how social scurity IOU's will run out!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Boortz tells you about the biggest scam in American hisory: Social Security. He prepares you for how social scurity IOU's will run out!Atlanta's ONLY All Conservative News & Talk Station.: https://www.xtra1063.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do you plead? Tonight's show is inspired by favors, and Frank is on his knees trying to coax Joanne into his scheme. Joanne gets settled in the catbird seat as Frank, the dog, learns to beg. Our cuties spin stories of tit for tat involving an x-rated chore wheel, a prowling cougar, a friend cashing in his IOU and handywoman ready to do some mounting. Our callers this week included the talents of Ross Child, Meghan Falcone, Pat Harvey, and Hannah Schooner. Our story editor is Aliza Brugger. Josie's Lonely Hearts Club is a semi-improvised audio drama set in the studio of New Mexico's 2nd-best relationship call-in show. On-air, Josie mends the broken hearts of a weekly collection of hilarious improvisers. Off-air, listeners get to eavesdrop on the life of Josie's secret identity: shy, unassuming Joanne Holtzinger. Join Joanne and her puckish producer Frank as they navigate the pitfalls of love and fame as the show slowly becomes a national sensation. Josie's Lonely Hearts Club is brought to you by the Good Story Guild. Keep track of us on Instagram @goodstoryguild and join our Discord. If you enjoyed the show, consider leaving a rating and/or review on your preferred podcast listening platform. Nighty night, cuties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're in line, STAY IN LINE! Or come back later, most states have an IOU vote policy Listen here for real time live updates to the 2024 presidential election (recorded 2 days before and released 3 days after, but they script that shit anyway so we just asked and got an early edit)

Keith discusses the inefficiency of compound interest in wealth building, advocating for compound leverage through real estate investments. He illustrates how a $100,000 investment in a $500,000 property at a 6% annual return can yield much higher returns due to leverage (see the math below). He also explains how mortgage rates are influenced by long-term bond yields and discusses the benefits of real estate over stocks. A coaching call with GRE Investment Coach Naresh highlights the process of investing in real estate, including financing considerations and the role of a coach in guiding investors.  Here's the math on a 5:1 leveraged RE return at a 6% appreciation rate:  Year One: $500,000 x 1.06 = $530,000. Subtract $400K debt = $130,000 equity Year Two: $530,000 x 1.06 = $561,800. Subtract $400K debt = $161,800 equity Year Three: $561,800 x 1.06 = $595,508. Subtract $400K debt = $195,508 equity. GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/526 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai   Keith Weinhold  0:00   Keith, welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, make America rich again in play numbers. You'll get a fresh take today on how compound interest does not build wealth and compound leverage does. Then you'll learn about how bond market moves affect mortgage rates. Finally, you get to listening to a call between one of our investment coaches and a GRE follower today on Get Rich Education.   Speaker 1  0:33   Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests and key top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast or visit get rich education.com   Corey Coates  1:19   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold  1:35   Welcome to GRE from Altoona, Pennsylvania to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and this is get rich education, the voice of real estate investing Since 2014 you're going to hear some things that you've never heard before today, and some listeners tell us that GRE is unlike any real estate information they've ever heard. And with what I want to tell you today, well, again, it's information that I've never heard anywhere else, either. So what I endeavor to regularly do for you here on this show is to tell you what I wish I had known sooner make America rich again, nope, that is not my presidential campaign platform for my run in the year 2032, or anything like that. It is this, don't get your money to work for you. In fact, if you want real wealth, don't work for money or get your money to work for you. Don't make either of those things the focus anyway, avoid growing your money through compound interest, because that's not the formula either. Now you and I have covered that ground before, if you're new here, and that material makes you say what you might have thought things like that were the holy grail of wealth building, nope, and today, for the first time on the show, in over 500 episodes, I'm gonna put some real numbers to that to show you exactly what I mean. Let me explain to you how to invest to truly win in a way that you've never seen in your life. You're not gonna improve only your life, but generationally, your entire family's life. At your job, you are like a dock worker. You're trying to pull your boat up to the dock so that you can then make a short, easy hop onto the boat and get away. And you'll learn how I did that and how I would begin investing today if I could start all over again. Now, after I had graduated college and had a job, I used to think, Well, yeah, I'll invest through a 401K in mutual funds, because it's easy and it's just deducted right from my paycheck. Well, when you do the easy thing in life, there's usually not much reward. And back then, I thought, Well, why would I invest in real estate anyway? I mean, a stock and mutual fund return on investment is about 10% over time. Real Estate is more like five or 6% plus real estate has all these maintenance hassles, and in the stock market, your 10% return enjoys compound interest. I don't really know how that works over on the real estate side, all right. Well, let's look at some numbers with how this would all work anyway. Here we go with $100,000 invested in stocks at 10% after year one, it's grown to $110,000 in year two, you don't just have 120k you've got more, because the 10% compounds on the 110 10k so now in year two, you've got $121,000 and I bet that you don't see any problem in this yet, right? Hey, things are going great. And after year three, you're up to $133,100 All right, so there we are. You begin with 100k and after three years, you've got then $33,100 in profit, your gain, on top of your 100k All right, that's what compound interest does. Well, let's take a closer look at that. $33,100 first, okay, I could attack it a slew of reasonable ways, if I wanted to, we could subtract out the constant drags on that of inflation, emotion, taxes, fees and volatility. But let's just take one volatility. We smoothed out our 10% return saying that you achieved it every year in that example there, we know that does not happen in the real world. Stocks are volatile, and the more volatile the return, the lower the return. Because instead, if you were up 20% one year and then down 20% the next year, which stocks are known to do you're not even you're down your 100k would instead go up to 120k in year one and down to 96k in year two, a loss, like I've told you before, that right there is the difference between what's called the compounded annual growth rate and the average annual return. But we'll just leave stocks number right there. We'll say that despite all five drags, volatility, of which is just one, the compound interest still somehow gave you this $33,100 gain. That number is about to look really disappointing, and this is about to get really interesting.    Let's compare that to real estate, and we'll say that despite that, it only returns, say, 6% per year here. Well, how do most people buy real estate? They do it with other people's money. OPM, remember earlier that I talked to you about how you don't create wealth from getting only your money to work for you, like you did in the stock example. Yeah, here's how you ethically use other people's money to buy real estate. When you invest 100k in a rental property. That's your 20% down. You get to borrow 80% from the bank, 400k so now you control a $500,000 property. And here's the thing, its entire value appreciates a 6% all 500k not only your 100k invested, yes, so you're now about to get the return on both your 100k and all of the bank's money. 400k that you get to leverage returns from both are about to go to you. Oh, yes, let's run these numbers, instead of compound interest, you're about to get compound leverage, using those borrowed funds to amplify your own return. So with your 100k invested on a 500k property at 6% after year one, you've got 130k after year two, $161,800 and after year three, $195,508 why? Because, again, your 6% return was accumulating on the 500k property. All right, so after year three, with this $195,508 you're gonna subtract out your 100k down payment, and your gain is $95,508 All right, that is compared to your compound interest based stock and mutual fund return of just $33,100 if you'd like to see the math for that leverage. Return that is in the show notes. Look for it there. See, by employing other people's money, it's like when you were a kid and in the evening, your body cast a shadow five times taller than you actually were. That's how leverage allows you to magnify returns and appear to be a bigger, taller investor than you actually are. Yes, your 20% down payment on real estate gave you five to one leverage amplifying your returns. If you listen to the show for a while, you understand that, but you never saw that numeric dollar per dollar comparison like we just did. So after three years, how about 33k profit on stocks and 95k on real estate? Real estate returns almost three times as much. But in reality, it's probably more than a 3x win for real estate because you're 95 Gain over three years in real estate, equity is actually going to be higher, because your tenant is also paying down your principal balance on your 400k loan every single month for 36 months in this three year example, if your property is vacant, 10% of the time they paid it down for you 33 out of 36 months, and as we know, at the same time, inflation pays down your loan even faster than the tenant does. Real Estate is also more tax advantaged than your stock gain, because you never have to pay capital gains tax on your 95k profit with a 1031 tax deferred exchange. And on the downside for real estate, upon owning the property, you will need to pay closing costs of maybe four to 5% of the purchase price. All right now, in this 95k gain for real estate versus 33k gain for stocks, I did some rounding there. Yes, even if your stock return was in a 401 K type fund, well, you would still have to either pay the tax now with a Roth or later with a traditional retirement plan. So you're still paying the tax. The higher real estate return is also more likely because real estate is less volatile than stocks, and I've got more vitally important things to tell you about how you just grew wealth about three times faster with leverage than with compound interest. And yes, this is exactly the kind of stuff I wish I knew when I had just started out. Now if you think you don't have the money for a down payment. I'll get into that. But first, a big review here, and I've woven threads of this review through previous episodes. First, don't focus on getting only your money to work for you. And second, stress compound leverage, not compound interest. Optimize using other people's money. And when you take out a loan for rental property, you get to use other people's money three ways at the same time, three different entities, you're using their money. Number one, it's for the bank's loan, like we discussed. Number two, you're using the government's money for generous tax incentives. I only touched on one of the tax incentives. And then, thirdly, you are using the tenants money to pay down your mortgage loan and pay all of your properties operating expenses, like maintenance repairs, insurance, property taxes and pay your property manager to make this all mostly passive for you. I don't manage any of my own properties. I think you already know that. And on top of that, hopefully you'll have a little residual income after expenses every month, your monthly profit of rent income minus expenses, that is called cash flow. And when I talk about doing this ethically, use an experienced property manager. Never get called a slumlord. Provide housing that's clean, safe, affordable and functional, okay, some really core, enduring, GRE mantras in there. But what if real estate goes down in value? It's not common, but I did have it happen to me around 2008 we won't even talk about what happens when stocks go down in value, but when real estate values went down in 2008 it just didn't matter that my rental property's values were temporarily suppressed because my rents were higher than my expenses, I was still making income each month off the property. That's a good way to own property, if you can. I'm not motivated to sell an asset. I mean, are you motivated to sell an asset that's paying you income every month during a time when it's capital value dip, so probably not. And by the way, there is nothing new or esoteric here. You just haven't had it explained to you in this way before. This 33k from stocks and mutual funds versus 95k from real estate you haven't seen that before. This is simply buying houses with plain vanilla 30 year fixed rate loans, and it's just simply long term buy and hold. This is not flipping, as I like to say. This is not day trading. This is decade trading, as you continue along in your real estate journey, keep stacking more properties, and it's gonna go faster than you think, because you've got this power of compound leverage, and your tenant also pays you income that you can use toward buying the next property, and then as a backup, you have that trapped equity that keeps accumulating in your property. And the reason this goes faster than you think is that you can also release that equity by removing it with a completely tax free event, a cash out refinance, all while you still hold onto the asset and you. Use the untrapped equity to put down payments on more property. Now, what if you think you don't have the money to start or get as big as you want, as fast as you want? Well, I've met a lot of people that when they understand this compound leverage concept, they withdraw their 401 K funds, pay a penalty and pay the taxes, and they put those funds toward real estate. I mean, you would owe taxes on it anyway. Now that part may or may not be ready for you, but you know, once I understood this, what I did is I stopped contributing to my 401K and I instead got into compound leverage. Yeah, this is how to make America rich again. Now, what if you think you don't have 100k to invest in property like we did in our example? Well, there are perfectly good $200,000 properties at GREmarketplace.com where you could make a $40,000 down payment. But you still might be thinking, I'll just say that the real estate market is just really competitive now, and that your small down payment maybe it can't compete with a deep pockets all cash offer, because all cash buyers can close really fast, but no your small down payment can still compete with all cash offers, because Some sellers don't want a quick sale for either tax reasons or myriad lifestyle reasons that they might have, I like to say that using debt is like using fire if it's misallocated, like with 23% credit card debt, that's what the average credit card interest rate is right now, 23% well that can burn down your financial house. But if you know how to use the debt in a controlled manner, like from income property that others paid down for you, oh, that fire is contained in a stove, and that fire or fireplace will heat your home. If I could start all over again with what I know now, it would be to embrace good debt, because tenants pay down this debt for me, so use it as leverage to build a real estate empire. Think of it this way, besides the employer match, every dollar that you lock inside a 401K is $1 that you cannot use to leverage other people's money. Back when I started investing, I should not have contributed to a conventional retirement plan beyond the employer match myself. So I used leverage to pull my boat up to the dock more than three times faster and escape the day job when I was still young enough to enjoy it. And once you know the difference, why would you want to do life any other way? You might have heard that real estate has made more people wealthy than any other investment today.    You've learned how now, sometimes it is hard to stop and turn off a mindset if the same thing has been believed for a long time. I think we've all experienced that. If you believe something for a long time, well then it's hard to change your mind on that, and you might even fight and defend that core belief. That could be the case here with me, denigrating the wealth building capability of compound interest. And if you're still wrestling with that yourself, a great compliment where I discuss this more in depth and in a different way, can be found on an episode that I did earlier this year that is on GRE Podcast, episode 507 episode 507 is called compound interest is weak. I'm here to talk to you about things that are really gonna move the meter in your financial life, like what I've covered with you so far, and what I'm gonna help you learn next. You know, there's just some information out there, even real estate information, it's just not that useful. Say, for example, mortgage purchase applications were down from last week, but yet they were up month over month. Well, that might matter to certain sub industries, but it doesn't move the meter in your life with how you're going to actionably build wealth.    Hey, before we move on, I want to give a major shout out to this show's long time, steady, capable sound engineer, Vedran. He just hit the 10 year mark of filling that important role for us here. Yet 10 years almost since the inception of this show. He's been with us since November of 2014 so since about episode five, and he's edited every single episode since then, and he recently told me that he looks forward to the next 10. Congratulations, Vedran. Also, thanks to you, the listener, the follower. Here, we held three GRE live virtual events this year, webinars. You. You are really taking action. Back in June, we broke a record with 307 registrants for that event. And then our latest event that was held about 10 days ago saw another record broken, 528 of you registering, and I say thanks, because you make me feel good. You're showing that I'm helping make a difference in your life. And now maybe you're thinking these events or this platform, it's getting too well known, and if you show up to a future event that you might not get to ask a question, no, that's not the case. Not everyone that registers shows up for the event live, and then you can ask a lot of your own questions with a personal free coaching call as well. I'll let you listen into a coaching call later on, today's show. In fact, now I've shared with you a few times before that changes to mortgage rates don't follow changes in the federal funds rate that Jerome Powell and the FOMC said. I've also told you that mortgage rates closely track long term bond yields, but let me tell you about what all that really means, and this is going to help you understand and perhaps even predict the future direction of mortgage rates. In fact, it's unusual. You know, the largest market in the world is not the real estate market, it's not the stock market, it's the bond market. And What's unusual is here we are on episode 526, and we've really never discussed the bond market. Well, you're probably aware that a month and a half ago, the Fed dropped interest rates by a half point. Their next decision is in just three days. Now I don't think they should drop rates again, though they could. That's because since the rate cut, GDP and job growth have been strong. That's why I don't think they should do it. I mean, rates usually get cut to help a wounded economy, so why lower them now? I mean, recessions usually see rate cuts. But here's what even fewer people understand when the Fed cut rates a month and a half ago by a half point, why have mortgage rates soared since then? They were about 6.1% and then the Fed made their cut, and mortgage rates recently spiked up to 6.9% well, many still feel that the long term trend for all types of interest rates is lower. But you know for one thing, rates are really hard to predict. The Fed only controls short term rates. Long term rates, like the 30 year and 15 year mortgage are tied most closely to the yield on the 10 year treasury note, and here after I'll just call that the 10 year All right, so what is this and what controls it? Well, don't let that name intimidate you. This is get rich education. So let's break down each word yield on the 10 year treasury note. Yield just means interest rate. 10 years is the period of time that this loan is made for the duration the US Treasury issues them so they receive the loan and a note is an IOU. It was also known as a bond. That is what's held by the person or the entity that loaned the money, the person that loaned this money to the Treasury. It could be you yourself, or it could be a foreign nation. So you hold on to this note because you made the loan to the Treasury. That's the breakdown of every word of the phrase the yield on the 10 year treasury note. Okay, so to say it a different way, if you hold a 10 year treasury note, that is basically your receipt, your proof that you made a 10 year long IOU to our federal government and it is going to pay you an interest rate known as a yield. All right, that is the simplest explanation I can give. Well, a month and a half ago when Jerome Powell cut short term rates, the 10 year was 3.7% at that time, and at the beginning of last week, it was up to 4.2% that's the highest since July. And again, 30 year mortgage rates most closely track the 10 year all right, as you and I sort of hold hands through this together next, let's ask what made them rise. And you know, some think this is harder to understand than trying to understand why YouTube viewers constantly fall for ludicrous housing price crash videos. Okay, but relax. This is easy. When the economy gets hot, all these things tend to rise in value, real estate, stocks and also productivity rises. Employment rises. Is an inflation that tends to rise as well. Because a 10 year investor needs a real return above the rate of inflation, this yield must rise as well. That's it. You got it. You got it. So therefore, when a rosy jobs report comes out, the 10 year tends to go up. When a strong retail sales report comes out, the 10 year yield tends to go up or a high flying CPI is released, the 10 year tends to go up. And therefore, because it rose in the past month, investors have expectations for a strong economy and more persistent inflation. So conversely, expect both the yield on the 10 year treasury note and the 30 year mortgage rate to fall when the economic outlook gets more dim. It's important to understand that, like a lot of things in the stock market, yields on the 10 year they tend to be more of a reflection of future economic expectations than the current economy. And this should be pretty easy for you to remember, because when you think about it, that makes sense. Since you've lent out your money to the federal government for 10 years. I mean, you're really interested in what that 10 year future is going to look like. So yes, though this is somewhat less exciting than watching a motorcycle jump over the Grand Canyon now that you listen closely for the last few minutes. Congratulations. Now you know that the 10 year can tell you both what investors expect to happen in the future, and can tell you the direction of 30 year mortgage rates. And, yeah, I mean, this is just more the type of material that I wish someone had explained to me sooner, in a way, just like that. And you know, are you interested in doing things that at the end, they make you say, You know what, I just got 1% better this week. I mean, think about the kind of person you'll be if you make yourself just 1% better each week. Now you better understand how leverage beats compound interest and what makes mortgage rates move. Go out and vote tomorrow as far as next, listen into one of our GRE investment coaching calls. I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to get rich education.   Hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine, at Ridge lending group NMLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Caeli Ridge personally. Start Now while it's on your mind at Ridgelendinggroup.com that's Ridgelendinggroup.com.   your bank is getting rich off of you. The national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. If your money isn't making 4% you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation. Let the liquidity fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk, your cash generates up to an 8% return with compound interest, year in and year out. Instead of earning less than 1% sitting in your bank account, the minimum investment is just 25k you keep getting paid until you decide you want your money back. Their decade plus track record proves they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know, because I'm an investor too, earn 8% hundreds of others are. Text FAMILY to 66866, learn more about freedom. Family investments, liquidity fund on your journey to financial freedom through passive income. Text Family to66866.   Zack Lemaster  29:08   this is rent to retirement. Zach Lemaster, listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.   Keith Weinhold  29:22   Welcome. Back to get rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, there will only ever be one GRE podcast episode five under 26 and you're listening to it. Let's let you listen into a coaching call between GRE investment coach Naresh and GRE follower, Brenda, and then I'll be back to wrap it up at the end.   Naresh Vissa  29:41   hey, Brenda, good to Good to see you after emailing back and forth. Thanks for setting up this call.   Brenda  29:47   Yeah, thanks, Naresh, thanks for setting up time to talk to me.    Naresh Vissa  29:49   Yeah. Well, tell me what made you schedule this call, like, Why did you hit that button saying I want to talk to the real estate investment coach?   Brenda  29:59   Yeah, well, I've seen some of the newsletters that come from GRE I'm familiar with some of the podcasts, but then I had gotten into the newsletters, and then I saw that there was an option for a free consultation to talk to you. And I thought, Well, I'm not sure what this really means, or what we talk about, or how you can help me, as far as, like, the vision, or how do I set my goals? Or what is it exactly that I would do with you with GRE, like, what kind of consultation Do you provide?   Naresh Vissa  30:29   Yeah, well, so that's you came to the right place. So let me tell you a little bit about GRE, a little bit about me, who we are, how we operate. So get rich. Education is an education company. As you know, you listen to the podcast, you read the newsletter. It's free. The podcast is free. The newsletter is free. You can go to our website, read our blog, go through past podcasts. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, subscribe to our social media, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, X, you name it. That's all free content available for you, and this service, the real estate investment coaching, is completely free of charge. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but you'll never pay as a dime. I'm here to help you throughout and along your real estate investment journey. Think of me as a super connector, someone who can introduce you to all the right people, whether it's specific markets you want to invest in. Providers. There, wholesalers, flippers, lenders, appraisers, although your lender will take care of the appraiser part, if you need a second lender, financing, CPAs, attorneys, anything at all, just come to me and I can introduce you to the right people, or at least point you in the right direction. I'll try my best to do it 100% of the time. I don't, or I should say, I don't, have answers 100% of the time, but I do have answers most of the time, and I can forward you and refer you, point you in the right direction. So think of me as a super connector. Think of me as your silent partner in deals, because I get any equity in the deals who you don't have to pay anything to think of me as an advisor, a consultant. Again, this is a completely free service. There's you're not going to get like, a bill in the mail saying, Hey, you talked to Naresh five times, so you owe us $1,000 for that. Now, there's none of that. So the most common question I get after telling people this or, like, well, then, I mean, you can't be doing this for free. Like, why are you doing great? Like, like, yeah, what's the catch here? And they also have, I mean, I'm sure you're wondering, how do you make money? Well, if you listen to the podcast, if you go to our website, you'll see advertisements, sponsorships. We are paid marketing fees, advertising fees from partners. So you listen to the podcast, I'm sure you hear many of those commercials. We make our money on the back end, so we can keep services like this and our newsletter and our podcast free on the front note, like I said, GRE is not is an education company. We are not a broker or a wholesaler or a flipper or a builder or an agency or a realtor service or any of that a brokerage, where we're not of that, we're purely education, education based through our educational content or free educational coaching, which I offer too. So that's what you are. Got it .we work with all those other companies. So we can refer you to all those other types of companies that can help you on your real estate investment journey. But we are not any of those. Now me, personally, I am an investor myself. I own eight properties in southeastern United States. I got started in 2017 I bought my first property in a single family home. That was rehab. Back then, rehabs are very hot. That was what you should get in, that what made sense to get into. And I scaled pretty quickly. I went from one to eight in a matter of it's been seven years since I bought that first property, but I actually went from one to eight in a matter of more, like two and a half years, I just kind of went so I bought, like I said, southeastern United States, bought my last property in 2020 I'm saving up for my next property because I personally now only, like new construction, I rehabs have their place, certainly For certain investors. And at the time, I got six rehabs, rehab properties from 2017 to 2019 so I personally, though, am now saving up because new construction is more expensive than than rehab. So I'm saving up for my next real estate property, which is most likely going to be a new construction. So that's a little bit about my investing background. I've been a real estate coach Since 2019 came in 2021 to GRE and have run the coaching side ever since. So that's a little bit about me on the real estate side, on the coaching side. Now, my background is not in real. Real Estate. I like, I said, I got in 2017 before that, and I still do work in tech. So I worked in tech from 2000 really, from 2005 and still do work in tech. So it was through my tech work that I got involved in real estate, because I would do back end tech work for real estate companies. And doing that work, I was like, Oh, I started learning about real estate, and then I said, huh, if this doesn't seem hard or difficult. And I also got an investment coach who helped me, like I said, with that competitor, they also had investment coaches or investment counselors. So I had a coach who helped me a little bit, but that's what the coaches are for there to help investors like me, especially newbie investors, or even veteran investors. They're there to help investors with the networking part, with the who are offering the best deals, special deals, special interest rates, who's honest, who's dishonest? That's what I'm here to do. So that's a little bit about GRE About me, about my background, how our coaching program works. So now, Brenda, it's all about you. I want to hear I'm sure you have tons of questions based on what I just said, but before you ask those questions, I'm just going to start out with, how much cash do you have ready to invest? Because really, I could be of most service if you're looking to invest, otherwise, I can't really be of much service. So how much cash do you have ready to go to invest? And then I'll answer, I'll say something about that, and then I'll let you ask whatever questions you want.    Brenda 36:35   Sounds good. Just a cash ready for deployment is 100,000 but I'm assuming that doesn't all have to go to one property, right? Or depending on the property?   Naresh Vissa  36:46   Yeah, so, so is that lick? So what I should have clarified my question as how much liquid cash do you have on not like a 401, K, or properties that you have to cash out refinance, or it's just if you today, if you were to take a property and and you had cash ready to do so be $100,000 Yeah, correct. Okay, so, so a few things that's very good, because with 100,000 that gives you optionality. You can either go for a rehab property, and we have rehab property right now. Our hottest provider is in Memphis, Tennessee, and you can get a rehab property. Worst case scenario, let's just say the property, the average property, is about $100,000 and so you just put down a 25% down payment. So let's just give or take, let's say $30,000 I tell our investors. I say, Look, if you want to buy your first property, or Yeah, your first rehab property, you need at least $50,000 cash, liquid in the bank, ready to go. That's just because you want that cushion. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. So I say, if you want a rehab property, you need 50,000 if you want a new construction, single family 100,000 because the new constructions are going to cost you at least $240,000 at least. So if you take 25% of that, plus closing costs and cushion and everything, just if you want to be a good investor, you have to be disciplined. And you have to be disciplined enough to be able to save the 50,000 or the $100,000 if you want to make it as a real estate investor. So 50,000 for a rehab property, 100,000 for a new construction. If you want a duplex, you need, I say, a new construction duplex, which is probably our hottest new construction asset class right now in Florida, 150,000 for a new construction. Down payment or not. Down Payment task, ready to go for a new construction duplex, because those are selling for about 490,000 give or pay. So it's 50,000 for rehab that you should have in the bank. 100,001 in the bank for a new construction, single family. 150,000 for a duplex. Anything beyond that, then we can talk. You know, later you wanted a squad or something else, but that's generally what I say. And I tell, I tell investors. I say, Look, if you only have $30,000 in the thing, let's connect after you get up, because I don't want you putting all that 30,000 into a rehabbed property, whereas, who knows, maybe the economy might go into a recession and it stays vacant for six months. I don't want you to have to go through that. So let's stick to those numbers. So you said you have 100,000 so you have options. You can you can get either a rehab property or you can get a new construction. So it's completely up to you. It's about your new construction. Single family, it's completely up to you. I personally, I, like I said, I started out with the rehabs, and then I've kind of graduated up to new construction. God, they the lowest risk you can take with 100,000 is by starting with a. Be just a low price rehab where you put in $30,000 and full, you know, down payment burden, costs, everything else you put that, you know, 30 grand, if it first property, you put that 25 to 30 grand in, and you treat that as a learning experience. And you go through the experience, and if everything goes smoothly, then you can buy the second property, and you can decide whether, hey, do I want to continue with this rehab, or I'd still have enough capital for the new construction single payer. But I would start small. If you're new, if you're an advanced veteran investor who has six figure, well into the six figures in the bank, ready to go. I tell those people. I say, hey, let's just go for new construction. Let's go for the new construction. Single family. Let's go for the duplexes. Some of them have 700 $800,000 in some cases, a million dollars plus. I say, hey, let's let's just go for the quad to the construction four Plex. The incentives are great, etc, etc. So in your case, 100,000 you certainly have choices. And what I'll do after this call is, well, first I want to hear, based on what I said, What are your thoughts on anything, whether it's renew, construction versus rehab, and then what I brought up earlier about coaching?    Brenda  41:12   Yeah, I actually thank you, Naresh, I really like what you said about starting small. I have purchased two single family homes in the past, their rentals, but I never went through a coach. I just kind of did it on my own, and luckily, things worked out. But certainly having a coach and starting out small, just to kind of go through the process, it's really helpful. Here's the situation that I think is just a little bit different, and I know that this would probably be something that I talked to like a lender about. But in your experience, I actually just came from an 18 year career. Actually, I was in tech myself, but I'm now transitioned from a corporate w2 into more, but 1099, what's classified as like a independent company, you know, type of income, what has been your experience with other clients that transitioned from that type? Is it easier? Is it harder to obtain loans? Is there going to be different requirements? 25% does that still stand?    Naresh Vissa  42:13   Yeah. So I could give you a full, you know, lecture on this, or something called the housing expense ratio and something called the total obligation ratio. I'm not going to get into those details, because the lenders, I can refer you to lenders, and they can explain all that, and those ratios mean a lot to getting you pre qualified. But what I will say is, unfortunately, if you are 1099, you are at a disadvantage, because it's not steady, consistent income, unless you can show two years of steady, consistent income. I mean, really is the last for your last two years of tax return. So if it's a new 1099, gig, yep, you're gonna have to wait until you have two years of consistent high income. If you've been doing it for a while, then send your last two years. And if it's, you know, if it's looking good, then, then you'll get approved. The other option, and this is, this is not a personal question or anything, but it married couples can go together on one loan. So if this actually helped me out a lot, because my wife is a high income earner, and I have my own business, and my business does pretty well, but if you're 1099 as as you know, there are all sorts of things you can do with your tax return that are completely legal and to where you pay yourself as little as possible, so that you can cut your income tax. So in any case, that's like 1099 workers are a disadvantage for mortgage because all they care about is your pay stub, your you know, how much income did you have? So there were times when I put my wife on the mortgage and she's got a high income, and so you can put a spouse on there, and you can both do it together. Now you're allowed 10 loans per person, so if you want a spouse go on a mortgage that counts, even if it's for one mortgage, one property, that counts as one for each of you. So for two working husband and wife. For a couple where both spouses are working with good income, I say look, you'll want one spouse to do 10 properties and another spouse to do a completely different 10 mortgages. That way you can do 20 combined. Now, if you do it together, then you'll only be able to buy 10 combined because you're older than so 1099, workers. We get that question a lot, and it actually it is a problem, because the standards changed after 2008 so either wait the two years and have your consistent records to show high income, or if you already have it right now, then you can get approved.   Brenda  44:54   Got it. Got it. This would be for just conventional loans. What about other loan products? Like, I think I've heard of the DSCR loan where maybe just the rental property would cover, you know, part of the I'm not sure, like, I guess you're guaranteeing that the property will make enough money to cover the payment of the loan.   Naresh Vissa  45:12   Yeah, DSCR and loans are hard to get approved. Really, what I should do is introduce you to some of our lending partners. If you're interested. DSCR is meant more so for people who have utilized you want to use those 10 loans first, so because if you go you're going to have a higher interest rate if you go with the deal. So those DSCR loans, or Portfolio loans, are meant for people who have used their 10. Their spouse has used their 10. They've got capital low rolling in their ultra high net worth. So they're fine, okay, just get me another loan. I need the tax benefit. I need the tax break. I'm fine paying a 10% interest. So they'll go for a portfolio loan or a vsdr loan. In your case, first property, your first investment property, first turnkey we want to go for a loan.   Brenda  45:58   Got it makes sense. And then another question, so this was about the financing. But another question that I meant to ask earlier is, I know you mentioned, like, you know, I am not like a realtor or anything like that, but how does it work? Like, I'm think about when I'm purchasing a home, personally, I kind of say, hey, I want to three bedrooms, four bedrooms, this many baths. Like, how does that work with you? Like, do I give you criteria of what I'm looking for, or, you know, based on my goals? Do you kind of craft a plan? How does that work?   Naresh Vissa  46:29    Yeah, so I actually sent you an email just right before this call it. I think you got the email, and it includes a link to about 20% of our inventory. It's not all of our inventory. That inventory is just there. To get you started to see the types of properties that we have available. We have some constructions and the markets that we cover, again, it's only about 20% of the inventory. If you go to our GRE marketplace, you can see all of the markets that we cover. Your biggest source will be, I send out emails. So your biggest source will be, if I email you, I'll email you like a property. It'll be, Hey, I just came across this deal. It's like, it's my VIP email list. So you'll get my, you know, VIP emails, and that's going to be your, your best source. You also get Keith white holds newsletter, which promotes properties from time to time and and we only promote the best. We there are hundreds of properties we can promote. We only distill it down to the best of the best. So don't think, oh, like, there might be another property that narration knows about. Now we promote through our social media, through my email list, through Keith's newsletter, through the podcast, through the webinars, the best of the best. So that's the best way to to find out,   Brenda  47:49   got it your inventory or what you currently right,   Naresh Vissa  47:52    and with your permission, I can add you to my VIP email list. If it's okay, yeah, that would be cool. I'll go ahead and add you, and you'll start getting those emails in real time. I only send out an email maybe once every three weeks, so I really only want to send the best of the best. I want to waste people's time.   Brenda  48:07   Great. So what if you do send me an email and I'm like, Yeah, I love it. I think this is fits exactly what I'm looking for. Do I email you back? Do I contact you? Like, how do we stay in contact?    Naresh Vissa  48:18   So email is the best form of communication, because in real estate and business in general, we want documentation of everything. We don't want any miscommunications. So if you see something you like, email me. I'm available. You have my phone number. You can text me, you can call me, you can email me. I'm very accessible, but email is preferred, because that way it's in writing, and I'll know exactly what you want, the address, everything. So let's say you see a property that you like from an email that you get from Keith or from me, and you email me to say, hey, I'm interested. What are next steps? I will get you in touch with the actual like I said, we're just an education company. I'll get you in touch with the actual builder or the broker or the agent on the property, and they'll be able to answer way more questions than I can answer way more and that that's for anything. If your question is about financing, I can get you in touch with several good, low rate lenders, and they can answer all your questions about financing. Your question is CPA Tax stuff. I can get we have, uh, several good contacts who can help you out there as well.    Brenda  49:20   Got it, got it. So then what, what does our communication look like from there? Like, do if I say yes, I want it, then you get me in contact with them, and then I kind of work with whoever it is that has this property. And then hopefully we just close on the property. And that's it, right? Am I understanding that correctly?   Naresh Vissa  49:40   Sure? So, so all correctly? Yeah, I'll refer you over to them, and they will, they will take care of you. Should copy me on all emails that way. Okay, what's going on? Copy, you remember, I'm your coach. I'm here to help you, like it's free, so copy to an email so I know what's going on. If there's a problem, I can jump in. In many cases, I hold a leverage over a lot of these. People, if a problem happens, I can step in and say, Hey, treat her better. Or, you know, you should waive this cost, or whatnot. So copy, because the people who get into trouble are the people who didn't copy me on the emails. And many, many time, time just goes by, and then they come with their problem as they Hey, if you came to me a year ago, I could have actually helped you with this. Now, the statutes expired, and it's, it's a complete mess. So always, even after you're done posing on the property and you have a tenant in there and just copy me on me.    Brenda  50:30   Got it. Okay,  So kind of bring you along the journey. Okay, so let's say I'm at the end, like, do these providers help me? I'm assuming in some of these cases, you've mentioned places that are far from where I live. So do they help provide additional resources, like, who's going to manage my property, or who's going to find me a tenant? Like, could they help me with that?   Naresh Vissa  50:51   Absolutely. So the entire point of GRE of this investment coaching program, the entire point is so that you can become what's called a laptop landlord. You can literally live free and have just take a step back and have your properties run on their own. So the idea is not for you to invest down the street and become a property manager and a landlord down the street. It's you can be anywhere in the world. Buy properties anywhere. Like I said, I live in Florida, but by Prop, I've never visited any of my properties. I've never met a tenant. So that's what you want to do, and that's what we help people do. If you want to buy a property across the street and become you can do that yourself. Go through all the loops yourself. We are here to help you invest in Ohio, in Tennessee, in Florida and Texas and all these places that you may not have even visited every other life, but you can still have a very fruitful investment journey. So we set all that up for you, the property management, every all that it's going to be taken care of, so that your hands off. That's why it's called turnkey real estateReal real estate investing.   Brenda  51:56   Got it. Okay, sounds good. And typically, how long does this process take? I mean, I'm sure it's different for everybody, but what can I expect, like from beginning, from when I talk to you, to when hopefully I have a property that I'm signing off on?   Naresh Vissa  52:12    In some cases, it's literally taken two days. In other cases, it's taken there's not even an answer, because people did end up buying Okay, yeah, so, so, yeah, in in the case of, like, our Memphis burr properties, which are rehab properties in Memphis, I recommend that you watch our burr webinar. I can send that to you after this call, if you'd like. But I had people who watched the webinar talk to me. I introduced them that same day to the provider in Memphis. They talk to their provider in Memphis, and then the next day, they pick the property, and the day after that, they sign a contract. Oh, okay, so it's all about the investor. If you're a serious investor, it can be very quick, like me, I was very serious. That's why I scaled. I bought eight and two and a half years, eight properties in two and a half years. Other people, if you want to take your time, it could, you could literally take your time and never buy any and a lot of people are doing that, because in 2019 they said, Oh, you know what, I'm gonna wait. There's gonna be a crash and this and that. And so they waited, they waited, and prices skyrocketed, and now they said, You know what, I'm I'm priced out of the market, so I'm just not gonna invest in real estate anymore.   Brenda  53:16   Yeah, it's that analysis paralysis. I've experienced that. Yeah, yeah, got it. Okay, cool.   Naresh Vissa  53:23   All right. So any other questions?    Brenda  53:25   No, this is really helpful. It's kind of good to know, like, kind of where you step in and kind of where you hand off, and again, the timeline is different for everybody, but it's kind of good to know that I could literally be standing here two days later and have a property if I want. So good.   Naresh Vissa  53:42   Yeah. So as we end this call, next step, so I told you about new construction versus rehab. Are you? Are you interested in both, or leaning towards one or the other? Right now? Just    Brenda  53:54   probably the rehabs, because I think, like what you said, I like the idea of the E step into like, let me see how this process goes first before kind of committing a bigger chunk of capital to something larger. Yeah, I agree.   Naresh Vissa  54:06   Okay, so here's what I'm going to do as next steps. I'm going to send you a link to the webinar we did for our hottest rehab asset class right now, hottest rehab provider out of Memphis. It's the Memphis Burkey webinar. I went ahead and just emailed that to you. So watch that webinar. It will answer like every question imaginable regarding the provider, how they do their process, the properties, everything. So watch that webinar and then shoot me an email after you're done with the webinar on what you're thinking just you can watch webinar today and you want to shoot me an email right after, just let me know what you're thinking, and we can go from there. I think that's would be the next step. Just watch that webinar, and then we'll, we'll reconnect.   Brenda  54:54   Sounds good? Okay, I like that.   Naresh Vissa  54:57   Okay, very good. Well, I sent that link to you, and. And that's about it. If you have no more questions like I said, you can add my phone number to your phone book and feel free to reach out whatever you want.    Brenda  55:07   will do. Thank you so much.    Naresh Vissa  55:09   All right, thank you. It was great.   Keith Weinhold  55:11   Yeah,  I hope that you found that helpful in making America rich again. Namely, you. Of course, no two coaching calls are the same. Some GRE followers will perhaps have more questions than Brenda did. There. We are here to learn your situation. We know the mistakes you've got to avoid, and we can connect you with the best income property for you across the nation. We really filter it down to the best of the best, and besides being a truly free coaching call, we don't try to upsell you to a paid course or anything like that, because we don't even have any product to sell really. So even if you wanted to buy something from GRE, I don't know if you could, maybe unless you buy a GRE logo t shirt from our website or something like that. So keep all of your funds for the property down payment. As far as now, you can book a coaching call at GREmarketplace.com and select the free investment coaching area. Until next week, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.    Speaker 3  56:21   Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively,   Keith Weinhold  56:41   The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get rich, education.com  

Every firm has distinct principles that guide its approach to financial planning. In this episode, we take you behind the scenes to explore the core values and unique processes that set our firm apart. We'll walk you through how we get to know our clients on a deeper level, create personalized financial strategies, and how our approach redefines what it means to have a successful financial planning experience.   Important Links: Website: http://www.yourplanningpros.com Call: 844-707-7381   ----more---- Transcript:    Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, we're going to talk about what makes Tony's process and the team's process unique at Tax Doctor, Inc. Let's talk about that this week here on Plan With The Tax Man.   Hey, everybody, welcome in to the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with Tony and I for a few minutes, as we talk investing, finance, and retirement. On this episode, we're going to maybe walk behind the scenes just a little bit, talk some core values, things of that nature, on what Tony and his team do at Tax Doctor, Inc. I thought it would be a good idea to refresh this a little bit. I think we probably talked about this stuff once or twice before over the last couple years of doing the podcast. But it's important I think, to go back to some of the roots, if you will. Some of the basics, if you will. We're going to have a little conversation with Tony.   What's going on, my friend? How are you doing this week?   Tony: I'm doing well. Getting ready to start the week, and weather's still looking good here.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony: Everyone is happy.   Speaker 1: Well, we're taping this the last week of October, dropping it on Halloween. So Happy Halloween! Get your candy on.   Tony: That's right, get your costumes and candy.   Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite candy? I'm in my 50s now, Tony, but I still have a favorite candy. Do you?   Tony: Still the favorite, which I think is the number one for Halloween, and that's Reese's.   Speaker 1: Okay, all right. Yeah. That's one or two. You see it goes back and forth. Snickers, I'm a Snickers guy. I think those are usually the top two right there.   Tony: Right.   Speaker 1: I don't know, black licorice.   Tony: I was just going to say ... Go ahead.   Speaker 1: I was going to say, I was going to ask you a question about black licorice. Do you eat it? Have you ever eaten it?   Tony: I have never eaten it. In fact, oh, it's bad.   Speaker 1: Right?   Tony: To me.   Speaker 1: I don't even know, why do they still make it? Does anybody like it? I don't know.   Tony: Somebody must like it.   Speaker 1: They must. But I have never met anybody, in all my travels, that likes black licorice. Hey, if you like black licorice and you're checking out the podcast, shoot us a message, let us know. I'd be really curious to find out how many people like black licorice.   Tony: I would, too.   Speaker 1: But anyway, you were going to say something?   Tony: I was going to say I just heard, it was actually on the way to work, I don't know if this accurate, but it was on Sirius XM. They were saying the estimated spending on Halloween this year is approaching $11 billion.   Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy?   Tony: Between the candy, the costumes, and all the parties. Boy, that's just a big number.   Speaker 1: Isn't that nuts? That's just nuts.   Tony: On a day that just really you go out, and beg for treats, and get scared.   Speaker 1: Well, I think with the craziness of the world all the time, sometimes we just have to hang on to some of those few traditions, and some of those things that maybe just give us a little fun, a little reprieve, a little whatever.   Tony: Yeah.   Speaker 1: I guess it could be worse. But yeah, that's some crazy ... I think Valentine's Day, too. Crazy numbers that come in on Valentine's Day.   Tony: Yes. That's another one, yeah.   Speaker 1: It's pretty wild.   But anyway, let's get into our topic this week. Tony, let's talk about your core values. What mission statement, if you will, or to go Jerry Maguire for a second here, if you were writing out a mission statement about your patient process, what is the core principles that you and your team try to exude?   Tony: Yeah. Probably the biggest one is we take the approach that you have to do all of your planning with I call it tax-centric or tax in mind. One of the biggest things that people I think lose track of, even though they're always complaining about all the taxes they pay, is taxes over your lifetime are one of the biggest expenses you'll ever pay. You want to make sure, in your planning process, that you're taking all that into account. I think that some advisors don't do that. Obviously, some of them don't have tax backgrounds, which is why they don't do that. I think that you need to use that in there with your process because that is going to make a big difference on that end goal and number.   When we're working through our plans, we always are trying to keep that in mind. Every time we meet with clients to go over their plans, we're discussing that as well. I think if you don't get anything out of this podcast, make sure that you are doing that in your own situation, because that is real key for us.   Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's an interesting point because not to say that advisors who aren't also CPAs are tax-focused are doing a bad job.   Tony: Exactly.   Speaker 1: But you do have to have this other layer of you're working a financial professional who says, "Okay, here's the things we're doing. Now run that by your CPA to make sure everything's groovy." Granted, to be fair, a lot of financial advisors are very tax smart and very tax efficient. But you have that extra layer there, as a CPA, CFP, and an EA. Of course, it gives you the ability to not only think about it now, which I guess would be the CPA side, but then also the future looking tax implications, which is marrying both of those worlds.   Tony: Yeah. I love 401Ks and everything else, and tax deferred savings.   Speaker 1: Sure, sure.   Tony: A lot of people that are accumulating large balances in those tend to forget that they have an IOU to Uncle Sam toward the end.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony: Now with the new rules, when you die you have to take it out faster and things, it's just something to think about when you're planning.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Let me ask you a question, Tony. I don't know if I've ever asked you this. Which one were you first? Were you a CPA first, or a CFP first? Were you an accountant or a financial advisor?   Tony: I started out as an accountant.   Speaker 1: Okay.   Tony: Early on, when I was working for somebody else, this was 30 years ago plus, all the partners got to talk about all the good stuff. We were just the grunts, if you will. I always wanted to do that-   Speaker 1: The adding machines, yeah.   Tony: Yeah, yeah. We were the operations, and they were the people that got to talk with the clients, and do all the things, and the planning.   Speaker 1: Right.   Tony: I wanted to be that. This was well before even the CFP stuff, and financial planning was even a thing.   Speaker 1: Gotcha.   Tony: It just was one of those things, "I want to be able to do that." That's how I got into it, way back in the day.   But yeah, in answer to your question, I was an accountant first.   Speaker 1: Okay. Again, the role of the CPA typically, it's revisionist history. They're doing their job, they're doing their job well. They're looking at the tax situation that's just expired, the past year. They're going back, and they're helping you do all that kind of stuff. I think by having that hat, and then moving yourself into the CFP, it probably gave you a really interesting and unique approach, which is probably why you set your business up the way you did. To say, "Look, I want to do this not only for the current calendar year, but we've got to be tax efficient through all the years moving forward because that's really where we're going to make a real dent." Is that a fair assessment?   Tony: That's a fair assessment. With tax clients, we already know, at least on the financial side, a lot about them, doing their tax over the years.   Speaker 1: Sure, yeah.   Tony: You know where they're at. You can even back into what they have or haven't saved. It's easy to have conversations about, "You need to start thinking about," say for example, retirement. "Oh, by the way, we have to try to do it tax efficiently." That's how the conversations generally start. If they're not working with somebody, then that's when we will introduce ourselves and say, "Let's try to put something together."   I think most planners are this way, especially us. If people have an outside relationship, we are definitely not out there trying to step on anybody's toes, or steal clients.   Speaker 1: Right, right. There's enough folks out there.   Tony: Number one, it's not good business ethically.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony: It's not good if somebody else is doing a good job. We're basically looking at the tax clients and others that don't have that.   Speaker 1: Sure.   Tony: Or some of the people have retired, or they don't hear from them, that kind of thing, is where we come in.   Speaker 1: Well, I think the new numbers ... We've been hearing for a while now that, it was what 10,000 Boomers a day retiring. We've been hearing that for a couple years. Well, I think now, in 2024 going in 2025, I think it's now at maximum peak. They're calling it Peak 65 that's been making the rounds on some of the media lately, you might have saw that. It's 12,000, I think, people a day are eligible for retirement. That's a huge number. Granted, that's globally. But still, that's a big number. Plenty of business to go around, to your point.   Tony: Yeah.   Speaker 1: There's no reason to go poaching, so to speak.   Tony: No.   Speaker 1: Let's talk about customization and client education. How do you help clients build that strategy and make those informed decisions? Because education clearly is a big piece of this. Some people really want to come see a professional like you, Tony, and say, "Okay, teach me what I don't know, help me understand this stuff." Others will come to you and say, "I don't care, just handle it."   Tony: Right.   Speaker 1: You have to balance that customized plan to, I guess their individual wants and needs, as far as even just knowing the information.   Tony: Really, right off the bat, before we even agree to work with someone is, after we've had a conversation or two and they want to move forward, we basically have them in, and we go through ... It is basic. There's literally 10 or 12 things. We just have them check a box saying, "Does this thing worry you?" Then we score it. Then based on that, I don't show this to the clients, but I basically say, "Yeah, you probably do need some help." Or, "You've pretty much got everything under control by the way you answered this." Then I'll ask them, "Why are we even talking?" But most of them have some anxiety and some pain, so we start there.   Once that's determined, then we go into the plan. Of course, we use software, like most everybody does.   Speaker 1: Sure.   Tony: Then we have some more detailed things to try to get to know them. I always tell people, just like your doctor, I'm uncomfortable with recommending things until I know more about you. I've got the tax stuff.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony: I need to know what some of the emotional stuff is. Your goals, what you want out of life, and all of this, before we can make recommendations. Because I think a lot of people think all we sit around and do is make recommendations, and mine could be further from the truth.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Pick this stock, pick that fund. Right, yeah.   Tony: Yeah. Not it.   Speaker 1: That's definitely not the case. Well, Tony, you said something a minute ago. Let me expand on that. You've been doing this for 30 years, in different capacities. You've been in the financial services world. If somebody walked in for their initial consultation, and handed you their files, their basket of stuff. Like a lot of advisors and professionals who've been doing this a long time, I imagine that you probably could look it over, and probably pretty quickly, within five or 15 minutes, have a rough idea of what they should or shouldn't be doing. But to your point about, "I don't know you yet," that's not the best way to give a recommendation. Could you do it because you have the skillset? Yeah, you probably could.   Tony: Yeah.   Speaker 1: But you need to learn more about ... You can see all the data, but now let's find out about who the person is. I think that's the real happy marriage in that relationship.   Tony: It is. Once you design a plan for them, and I walk them through it on a basic level. We don't like to talk in jargon, or anything like that. We just set some goals. No different than you'd do, whether it's your business, whether it's your fitness. We monitor those goals and say, "Where are we?" When we meet again, are we progressing toward that goal? Or has it changed and we need to reassess?   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Tony: Because that'll tell us a lot about are we in the right things, as far as investments go, to meet those goals. Or maybe, we need to switch things up. Really, I like to call us we want to be the financial quarterback of your financial situation. Yes, we're going to have some investments in there and some different things, but we want to make sure you're covered from start to end. And not only investments. It could be charitable giving. It could be you're under-insured. It could be you're concerned about putting things in trust for some grandkids, things like that. It gets people talking about some things that sometimes they never thought about, for sure.   Speaker 1: Well, that really brings me to my last point, which is how do you value, or how do you assess success for your clients? Yeah, obviously we could go with the basic financial metrics.   Tony: Right.   Speaker 1: That's pretty much a given. Hey, is the plan solid? Is it going to get you ... "We've run the numbers, you're going to be able to make it until 99 before running out of money," or whatever, something like that.   Tony: Yeah.   Speaker 1: But what other metrics do you guys use to measure success for a client?   Tony: Well, besides that stuff, which is a given, we have some little charts that we call the Client Happiness Charts. We have clients fill this out at different times along their journey. Then toward the end, when they're retired. Because we want to make sure that they're checking of the boxes that really matter to them, as far as what they consider success. For some of them it's "Hey, I'm now able to travel, I've always wanted to do it." For some of them it's, "I've got this little menial job, I love going to it." There's about 25 of them there.   As we go through the process, it's fun to see, especially if somebody started say in their 30s. We've had a few. I pull them out, they're now retired. To show them, "Well, here's what was important back to you back when you were 35, this was 15, 18 years ago. Now look what you're doing." Just show them the progress.   That's what gives us the most joy, is to see them doing what they want to do. Obviously, some of that takes money, and that's the whole point of trying to grow it. It's that, and making sure that they understand how much they can take out each year and not outlive their money, because that's a big issue with all of our retiree clients.   Speaker 1: Yeah. To your point a second ago as well, are you happy with all the other different pieces? Have we addressed and dealt with the legacy conversation?   Tony: Right.   Speaker 1: Just checking off the bucket list stuff. There's all these little pieces that go into valuing or measuring success for the client. Is it a pleasant experience? Do you look forward to coming in, and talking with your advisor? And saying, "Yeah, I feel like we're buddies. We don't hang out and go to dinner together, but I feel like we have a good rapport." I think that's really important in a lot of business relationships in life, but certainly when you're talking about your money.   Tony: Absolutely.   Speaker 1: With your doctor, too. Some people dread seeing their doctor because they don't like their personality. It's like, well, maybe get a different doctor so that you can have a conversation with them that you're going to take to heart, and it also resonates with you. I think same thing financially. If you go see an advisor, and they don't click with you, and they're giving you good information but you just don't like them, and therefore you don't follow through with it or do anything, you're just wasting your own time. You know what I mean?   Tony: Exactly. Yeah.   Speaker 1: It's important. Good stuff. Well, good conversation, man. Thanks for hanging out with us and chatting a little bit about what makes you guys unique. People in general are unique, so every situation's going to be different. Certainly, there's those big generalities, Tony, that affect all of us in the financial world. Social security, and taxation, and inflation, and blah, blah, blah. All the big core tenets that we have to deal with, that's certainly a part of the game that we have to run through. But every person's little puzzle is different from the next. You and I are completely different people, so our strategies are going to be different.   If you need some help, get on the calendar. Have a conversation with Tony and his team. Or if you're already working with him, and you've got some friends or loved ones that maybe should have that chat for themselves, let them know. Let them check out the podcast. Or just reach out to Tony and his team at yourplanningpros.com. That is yourplanningpros.com for a complimentary consultation and conversation with the team at Tax Doctor, Inc.   Tony, thanks for hanging out, my friend. Good conversation.   Tony: All right. We'll see you next time.   Speaker 1: Always appreciate it. Of course, it's Halloween as we're dropping this, so happy Halloween to everybody. Stay stay and sane. Don't forget to get out there and vote, because it's just around the corner. We'll see you next time here on Plan With The Tax Man.   Securities offered through Avantax Investment Services SM, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through Avantax Advisory Services. Insurance services offered through an Avantax affiliated insurance agency. Investment strategies discussed in this episode may not be suitable for all investors. Please consult with a financial professional.

Explorations Commence. by horn pixy. Listen to the ► Podcast at Connected.“My tongue?” she said, sounding a little squeaky.“Yes, Emily. Slip it in my mouth.”There was a moment of silence, and then she asked, “why?”“I want to show you something delicious,” he said, and instead of the pity he might have expected when he realized that she had never done this, he only felt a primal, primitive male pride to be the one to teach her, to show her.He felt her warm little tongue pressing hesitatingly against his lips and opened them, sucking it hard inside his mouth.“Oh my,” she gasped; or tried to, anyway; and he grinned a little in pure satisfaction.“Good, huh?” he asked after he let go.“Uhm,” she muttered.“Want to do it again?”“Uhm,” she managed again. He slanted his mouth over hers and lapped at her tongue again, this time drawing it into his mouth. He suckled, hard, and she made a small, helpless little sound as both his hands started kneading her ass, covered with the stiff material of new jeans. He pressed her body harder against the door frame, desperate to have more of her. The kiss became urgent, and he realized the exact moment she stopped worrying about what to do and just let her body react, because suddenly it was even more perfect; her lips moving with his, her tongue meeting and thrusting against his, tasting and feeling and exploring. The sounds they were generating were loud in the stillness of the hallway; her moans, his groans, her sighs, his murmurs. Her accelerated breathing, his satisfied growls when she tested and tried something new, something that worked. They kept at it for a few more minutes; it might have been hours for, all he knew; and he dragged one hand up and into her hair.“Ouch,” she gasped, and the fog lifted a little from his brain, enough to clear his mind for a few seconds, enough to make him realize that he was mauling her in the hallway.“What?” he asked, and this time he was the one who felt dazed.“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Just my head, against the doorframe. Please, continue with what you were doing. Don't let me interrupt you…”He laughed a little and pressed his forehead against hers, his eyes closed tightly as he tried to get a grip over his hormones. His cock was rock-hard by now, straining against the fly of his jeans. He wanted her so badly, wanted to sink into the softness that was Emily, the gentleness of her embrace. Wanted to teach her everything he knew about lovemaking, demonstrating over and over until she knew exactly what was the best way to fit tab B into slot A.But she was new, and innocent, and as appealing as the idea was, the small part of his mind that was still capable of rational thought knew that taking her right now, braced against the doorway was not only incredibly stupid (due to the whole public aspect of the milieu) but also extremely selfish. She deserved to be taken slowly, gently, preferably with somebody who would take the time to show her everything she needed to know. And also, a bed would be nice.“Just give me a minute,” he said, taking deep breaths.“No! No, no, no! Don't take a minute; you're going to change your mind if you do!”He laughed again. “Not bloody likely,” he said. “Just; just hold on a bit, okay?”“Okay,” she murmured, circling her arms around his body and leaning against him. Her soft hair tickled his chin as she tucked her head in the crook of his neck. He pulled her inside the apartment and closed the door behind them, almost stepping on her glasses in the process. He picked them up and put them on a little table in the corner, and then turned to look at her.She was standing with her hands folded in front of her, head bent down so that he couldn't see her face.She was radiating shyness, and uncertainty, and just a little bit rejection. Tenderness swirled in him again and he stepped closer to her, allowing himself one swift, hard kiss.“Look at me,” he said. She lifted her head slowly and he smiled at her.“You're beautiful,” he said. “don't even think of arguing with me, not even in your mind. Especially not in your mind. I won't have anybody, least of all you, think otherwise. I won't put up with that. You are lovely, and I want you so much it aches. But I want to do what's right.”“What would that be?” she whispered, and he cupped her neck, his thumb playing in the hollow of her throat.“I don't know,” he admitted ruefully. “Right now I just want to take you to bed, so my judgement is a little cloudy.”“Do it,” she said. “Please, Brandon. Take me to bed. I'm so tired of wondering, of not knowing what sex is like. I want; I want to know, and I want to learn.” She was quiet for a second. “I want to feel.”He searched her eyes. “Your first time should be with somebody special,” he objected, knowing that he wouldn't leave unless she asked him to. Knowing exactly what would happen if he stayed. His beautiful, shy little librarian was about to ask him to make love to her, and he was powerless to deny her anything, least of all what she was offering. He was human, and male, after all.Emily looked at him with her heart in his eyes. “You are special,' she said after a few seconds. “You make me feel wanted. Wanton. You make me want to take you to the library and do something in the non-fiction section where nobody ever goes.”He laughed, a raw sound that was being torn from him as his throat closed up. Had he really thought she would be unresponsive and boring?“You have to be sure,” he said. “I'm not doing this if you're not sure.“I was sure the first time I saw you. I didn't know what to say except, ‘a glass of whiskey, please'.”“I've never seen a woman drink whiskey like you did before,' he said with a little smile. “You just sat there, sipping glass after glass of Jameson without making a face, though I'm pretty sure you thought it was disgusting.”“I hated it,” she admitted.” But I didn't know what else to order, and I was too shy to ask your advice.”He made a vow to himself to take her back to the bar one evening and let her have a sip of every single drink he had in stock, until she found something she likes. And then he would mix some cocktails, and teach her about shaken and stirred, and she would never have to drink whiskey alone in a bar again.He kissed her then, a sweet kiss that wasn't about passion as much as compassion. He had feelings for her. They were undeveloped yet, but he wasn't about to deny their existence like some footloose bachelor, afraid of commitment. He didn't know if it was the right thing, making love to her without giving her the chance to get to know him better, but he knew that he could no more let her go right now than he could cut off his own arm. So he stroked her hair, marveling at the silky feel as his lips taught her a few more secrets and his tongue tasted her again. He slid the strands through his fingers and pulled her head back to taste the skin on her neck.She tipped her head willingly, giving him better access. He teased her earlobe, nibbling lightly and flicking it with his tongue before sucking it into his mouth. The silver hoop she was wearing was in his way, so he used his fingers to get rid of it. He tickled the sensitive area behind her earlobe and tasted the dryness of perfume she had dabbed there. It was bitter, and though it smelled like heaven, he wanted to taste Emily, so he traced a line down her neck and across her collarbone, following the line of an imaginary necklace with his tongue, until the last of the perfume had rubbed off on her skin and all he could taste was Emily. Sweet and unique and still a little bit scared.He explored the hollow between her collarbones, taking his time over it. Her skin was like satin; smooth, silky, and so completely feminine. She moaned, a small sound in the back of her throat as she leaned helplessly against him, her hands around his head and her fingers tangled in his hair. She pulled at his head and he went willingly back to her mouth, to kiss and taste and take.He was never going to get enough of her mouth, he though as he toyed with her lips and let her do the same to him.She stepped away for a second and crossed her arms in front of her, pulling her sweater over her head in one smooth move. Brandon felt his breath catch in her throat when she stood in front of him in only her thin white chemise-like top and a lacy white bra that pushed her boobs together in the most perfect way imaginable. He stopped her hands when she wanted to take the top off and slid his hands over her body reverently. She was so warm, but despite the heat in the room her nipples were hard, beaded little nubs, straining against the honeyed fabric of her thin top.He pulled one strap over her shoulder and tasted the skin he unveiled before reaching down and getting rid of the blasted thing completely. And then his hands were in the skin of her softly rounded, perfectly proportioned hips, and her skin was softer and smoother than the silk of the top that had fluttered to the ground and was now lying there, like a pool of sex, on the floor. Brandon looked her in the eyes, and she gazed back unflinchingly, despite the blush that stained her cheeks a delicious shade of pink. Her tits were spilling a little over the lace edge of her bra, something that the designer had undoubtedly taken great pains to accomplish. It was like... froth, he decided as he traced the edge of the material. Or the white foam on top of a wave as it rolled to shore.He reached behind her, holding her gaze as he undid the clasp of her bra, the movement bringing their bodies together. She made a small sound when he stepped back deliberately and let the bra join the other clothes on the floor.“You are so lovely,” he said, gazing at her body. She was so completely female, so gloriously, radiantly beautiful, and he couldn't believe she was standing there, allowing him to desecrate her innocence. He cupped one of her tits, enjoying the way it spilled over his palm just a little. The tip was pale pink, like a very young rose just ready to bud open. He weighed a tit in each hand and was fascinated by the softness and fullness. His thumbs skated over the tips until they were even harder. He wanted to devour her, but this first time was not for him. It was for her, to feel and learn, and experience. To understand, to know, and to enjoy.“Oh,” she gasped when he bent down and took one nipple into his mouth. Just for a second did he allow himself to be selfish and suckle on it, but then he pulled back and pressed a kiss right in the middle of her cleavage. She moaned a little and moved restlessly, but he didn't relent. He kissed all over her tit, spiraling teasingly toward the nipple, knowing it would drive her crazy. He rubbed his cheek over the sensitive nub, abrading it lightly with his stubble-roughened skin and laving it unexpectedly with his tongue. He nipped lightly with his teeth, and she moaned again, slightly louder this time as he took his time nibbling it.“Do what you did again,” she begged him breathlessly.“And what was that?” he asked, teasing her by drawing his tongue round her nipple without touching it.“What you did before,” she said incoherently.“This?” he asked, licking over it once with his tongue flat.“No,” she said, her head thrown back and her eyes closed.“This, then?” he wanted to know, flicking it quickly.“No! you know what I mean!”He took pity on her. “Is this what you want?” he asked, drawing her into his mouth and suckling hard and sure, playing with his tongue around the tip as he did so.“Oh, yes,” she moaned; a long, drawn out sound that grabbed at his control.He picked the pace up after that, forgoing the torture on her other tit and going straight for the good part, sucking the nipple relentlessly until she let go of his hair and put her hands behind her own head, increasing both her vulnerability and her pleasure as she arched her body into his hands and mouth.She felt something hit the back of her knees and opened her eyes, surprised to find that he had carried her into her bedroom without her noticing it. She was lost in sensations as his mouth travelled across her skin, insistently licking and nibbling, stopping every now and then to explore some new place he wanted to get to know intimately.She heard him unzipping her pants and lifted her body instinctively to help him get rid of it.“Brandon,” she sighed when she was laying naked except for her panties; pretty white lace that matched the bra she had been wearing; on her bed, and Brandon was kneeling at the feet of the bed, trying to get rid of her shoes so he could undress her completely.“Yeah?” His voice was strained with the effort of holding back his passion.“Come up here for a second,” she whispered. He got rid of her shoe and when he had pulled off her jeans he leaned over her, bracing himself on one knee and both arms immediately.“Everything okay?” he asked gently, his face showing no sign of the storm raging inside him. He wanted to rush, wanted to hurry, wanted to burry himself in her body, but he was determined not to. This was for her. For Emily. He would have time later to show her unbridled passion. But right now he wanted her to have the most perfect first time any girl has ever had, anywhere.“It's perfect,” she smiled up at him, her hair flaring out over her pillows.“This is a lot better than the last time I undressed you,” he said, grinning.“What last time?”“Well, you were fairly drunk, so I'm not surprised you don't remember,” he said, tracing a pattern on her tit with his finger; lazy circles and shapes that made her arch a little. “I only took off your coat and your shoes,” he added. “Like I said. This is much better.”She laughed a little. “I'm still sorry you spent the night on the couch.”“Yeah,” he said. “You're going to need to get a bigger couch if I'm going to spend the night again.”She licked over her lips, a small gesture he recognized by now as a sign of nerves, so he waited for her to speak, trying to ignore the throbbing in his cock.“Why don't you just use the bed next time?” she asked tentatively. “If you want there to be a next time, that is. I don't want you to feel I expect anything, or that I presume this, right here, right now, that it means I…”He cut her off. “What are you talking about, woman?” he asked, but he thought he knew, and he didn't like the direction of her thoughts.“I don't want you to think I expect the fact that you're making love to me means I will expect more than just that,” she said carefully. “I'm not naïve enough to think this means happy-ever-after.”“Okay,” he said. “With that cleared up, can we go back to the love-making?”“By all means,' she said. He kissed her then, letting her taste a bit of his anger because, damn her, had the thought ever crossed her mind that he might want more? That once might not be enough for him?She sank back into the fluffy duvet, her arms around him pulling him down with her. She pressed her tit against his upper body. He moaned at the feel of her naked body against his clothed one, especially when she rubbed herself against him.“You're overdressed,” she said and he gave a bark of laughter, hurrying to remedy just that. He was out of his shirt in record time, and she leaned up to watch as he struggled a little with his jeans. Getting it past his raging hard-on was a delicate operation, but he managed not to injure himself.“Let me,” she said when the jean was around his ankles and he started on his black boxer briefs.She scooted closer to him, dressed only in her lacy white panties, the scent of her arousal wafting through the air.She was very careful when she slid one hand into the waistband and pulled it away from his body and down. It kept getting stuck on his cock, so she used her other hand to hold his cock out of the way. They both gasped when her fingers touched him. Finally the boxers was around his ankles, so he kicked it and the jeans off and out of the way.She stared at his cock for a few seconds, her hand hovering as if she wanted to touch it.“'Can I …” she indicated and he nodded, his throat dry. She touched one finger to his shaft, running it up and down his thick length.“It's so hard,” she said, marveling. “and at the same time, it's so soft. Why is that?”He moaned something in response as she made a fist around him, testing the thickness and pressing lightly.“Harder,” he gasped. She did just that, and he groaned. Emily yanked her hand away.“Did I hurt you?” she asked, wide-eyed. “I'm sorry! I've never, you know, seen one. In real life. Tell me what to do.”“Later,” he gasped and pressed her down on the bed, kissing her senseless as he roamed over her body with one hand. “I'll let you do whatever you want later. But now I want to show you; do you trust me?”She blinked up at him.“Yes,” she said, and the simple word tore through his last resistance. He kissed her with all the passion he'd been holding back, letting her know how much he wanted this, wanted her as he slid one hand down and into her panties.“You're shaved,” he said, surprised.“When I was in my early twenties, I went for permanent hair removal,” she said. “Each time I tried shaving, I wound up cutting myself, so I just decided, screw that. I'm sorry.”“Don't be sorry,” he said as he stroked his finger over her hairless mound, testing the softness of her skin before dipping lower.And then he groaned as his finger was instantly coated in wetness. She was soaking.She moaned at the strangeness of having somebody else's finger inside her. He explored the lips, the petals, her clit, before dipping his fingertip inside her and dabbling a little while he kissed her again. She opened her legs wider instinctively, unaware of the eroticism of the movement. He rushed a little as he pulled her panties off and threw them over his shoulder. He knelt between her legs, spreading her knees further as he wedged his shoulders between her thighs.“Emily, may I go down on you?” he asked formally. Just to be sure.“You mean; you want to; Yes, all right. You don't have to, though.”“It's not ‘have to' as much as ‘want to',” he said. “I want to taste you.”“Well, don't let me stop you,' she said, still a little shy.He used the fingers of one hand to spread her lips and the middle finger of his other hand to dibble inside her again, coating his finger in her juice and spreading it around her cunt. She wriggled a little and gave a small moan. Brandon knew he wasn't going to last a hell of a lot longer, and he needed to get her off so he could get off. So he honed in on her clit with his finger, rubbing it fast and light, and then hard, and then in tight little circles, trying to find out what she liked best.Emily closed her eyes and fisted her hands in the duvet as Brandon's finger did things to her nobody else has ever done. She gave a gasp when he hit just the right spot, and he must have noticed, because he focused on it then, rubbing and tapping at it. A strange need was building inside her. She knew what orgasms feel like; and it was nothing like this. This was an urgency she couldn't stop, a tidal wave rising from every nerve-end in her body.“Brandon,” she gasped, clawing at his back to get him to stop. There was something wrong with her; this wasn't normal. But he didn't seem to realize her urgency, because then, oh mercy, his mouth was on her pussy, and he was sucking first the one lip and then the other into his mouth before getting to her clit. He moaned a little and muttered something about how good she tasted, but Emily was still fighting the feelings building up inside her and didn't respond beyond little mewling sounds as she tried to get away from the sensations the way an inexperienced swimmer tries to escape an enormous wave. Brandon growled and flicked his tongue over her clit for a second, before rubbing it hard with his tongue. He nibbled lightly and drew it into his mouth, suckling like he did on her nipple.“Let go,” he whispered against her, his breath warm on her wet skin. “Stop fighting it and let go, Emily.”She cried out loudly, her back bowing and her hips thrusting as she rode his face, her hands drawing his head closer. The orgasm broke over her; a tidal wave that wreaked havoc with her nervous system and set every nerve ending on fire. It just lasted and lasted, one wave after another cresting through her body as she came, again and again and again.Brandon growled as he lapped at her, and she realized dimly that he was licking up her juices. His hands were on her hips, holding her down as she bucked.She floated back and was limp while he gave her a few seconds to adjust. She couldn't open her eyes, could barely breath, but she welcomed the feeling of his warm body sinking down on hers. It was unfamiliar, the weight of somebody else on top of her, but she loved the feeling and even if she had wanted to, she couldn't have pushed him off. Her body still twitched every few seconds from the strength of her orgasm.He settled between her legs and she could feel the hard length of his cock against her.“Condom,” she managed, but he kissed her on the lips. Shoe could still taste herself on his lips and it was surprisingly erotic.“Taken care of,” he said, his voice strained. “Are you ready, honey?”“Yes,” she whispered.“I don't want to hurt you,” he said. “And since you no longer have a hymen, it shouldn't be too painful. But it will still feel strange. I'll go as slowly as I can, but I'm not going to last very long.”“I'm not scared,” she said softly. “Because it's you, and it's now, and it's perfect.”He positioned himself with one hand, first sliding his hard manhood around through her lips, coating himself and the rubber with slickness. His head pressed at her entrance and she opened her legs, lifting her knees. He held there for a little before he pushed in deeper. Just a little bit, giving her time to adjust. He slid in, and it was surprisingly easy, though her body tried to reject his advance at first. Then he pushed a little bit more, a little bit harder, and he slid home.“Oh, my,” she gasped as he held perfectly still inside her. She could feel the struggle between his mind and his body as he strained to hold himself from moving.“Are you all right?”She couldn't speak, so she just nodded her head. She was so full; he was so much bigger than her vibrator, so much more effective, for that matter. It was a strange feeling, having something that big inside her. But the more her body relaxed around him, the better it got.“How does it feel to no longer be a virgin?” he whispered hoarsely against the curve of her neck. She still couldn't find her voice, so she just smiled.Brandon seemed to understand, because he pressed his lips against her and moved his hips, shifting back just a little before surging back again. She swallowed away the tightness in her throat that always indicated tears and took deep breaths while he moved slowly inside her, gradually picking up the pace. His breathing was hard and labored when he slid in and out with measured strokes.“So tight,' he moaned. “So wet. “So perfect…”“Can you; go a little faster?” Emily asked hesitantly. She was no longer sore, just full, and she wanted something, anything, to fill the sudden, unexpected emptiness that seemed to have come from nowhere and settled between her legs.“No problem,” he said, moving a bit more forceful, his hips straining to get closed to hers.She crossed her legs around his waist and her arms around his body as he kissed her neck. The sound of their breathing filled the room, followed by the wet sounds that came with sex, and the slaps of their bodies banging against each other.Her awkward attempts at thrusting back had him clenching his teeth as he slipped in and out of her slick, hot core. She was so damn wet, so damn tight, and he wanted to come so badly. But he wasn't ready to stop yet, not with Emily in his arms, under him and around him, making sounds that drove him crazy.He started thrusting faster and wilder, feeling her inner muscles clench his cock as he pumped into her. He lifted himself on his knees and pulled her hips towards his bodies, holding her up with his hands cupped under her ass. The new position had her body bowing backwards as he thrust in deeper and harder. She gasped with every stroke as the tip of his cock went in deeper than before. Her hands cupped her tits and she rubbed and pinched her nipples.“Oh, yes,” he moaned. “Fuck, that's hot. Don't stop!”“More,” she gasped when he went even faster. “I need more. Please, Brandon, I want; I need…”“Tell me,” he said, hissing through his teeth for breath. “Tell me what you want.”“You,” she said, and his balls slapped against her with each thrust. “Just you, taking me; Oh, oh, yes! Right there, please, again!”He complied, rubbing her clit with one finger as the other hand held her lower body up for him to use.“I'm going to cum,” she said. “Please; oh, yes, yes, Brandon!”She threw back her head as she came again and even through the condom, Brandon could feel the fresh gushes of nectar. The walls of her cunt was pulsing and pulsating, tugging him deep and hard, milking him and tugging at his cock like a slick, wet velvety fist. It was the hot liquid tugs, the expression of bliss on her face and her triumphant scream that made him lose control. He trembled as he lunged inside, as deep as he could go, one last time. He felt that too-familiar feeling as his balls drew up tight against his body, as the delicious orgasm hit him, seeming to come both from outside and within his body. He held himself deep and ground down on her as he came hard, spurt after spurt filling up the rubber, so much so that he was almost afraid it would overflow. But he was helpless to do anything but keep inside her tight sheath as the tremors in them both subsided.After a few minutes, his heartbeat had returned to only three times as fast as usual, and he flopped down on the bed next to her. He pulled of the condom and cleaned up his cock with a tissue from the box on her bedside table. She was still breathing fast, and he pulled her into his arms, entwining their legs as they came down from whatever cloud they had been on.“I have this fantasy,” she said after being quiet for so long that he'd thought she had fallen asleep.“Sure thing, honey,” he muttered. “Just gimme a few minutes and I'll be good to go again.”“Not right now, you dolt,” she said, snuggling in deeper to belie her words. “Later. I have this fantasy. Of sex. In a bar.”He opened one eye and looked at her. “Really?”“Oh, yes,” she said, putting her arm around his chest and rubbing her leg soothingly against his. “I've always had a thing for hot bartenders.”“Well, well,” he said, keeping the inevitable drowsiness at bay so they could enjoy the post-coital chat a little longer. “And to think I've always had a secret librarian fantasy.”She looked up at him, her blue eyes struggling to focus on his without her glasses, but then she smiled. “Is that so?”“Yeah,” he said. “I've always had a thing for hot women telling me I'm not allowed to talk.”She giggled. “Then stop talking right now,” she commanded.He grinned.This was going to be so much fun.Back to the tavernSomebody had paid for a Carrie Underwood song on the jukebox in the back corner, causing a few girls in cowboy hats at the nearest booth to scream ‘who!' and shoot their fists into the air, signaling their pleasure and desire for another round of shots. Some of the men watched them with drunken grins, appreciating the slutty cowgirl getups and clear willingness to go to bed, a bathroom stall or the backseat of any random guy's car.The bar was full; nothing like the evening before a national holiday to get drunk; and the staff had their hands full, trying to deliver the right drinks to the right table. At the bar Brandon was busy mixing fruity drinks for what was clearly a group of sorority girls hell-bent on going wild. As Carrie beat up her boyfriend's pretty little souped-up four-wheel-drive, he added the requisite cocktail umbrellas his nieces always wanted when they played with their Barbies.Who said girls ever grew up?One of the waiters whisked the tray away and left him to deal with more hard-core drinkers - beer, beer, rum and coke, beer, some shots of tequila, beer…It was one of those moments where everything seemed to fall in place; the music ended and there was no new song yet, so a silence settled over the bar for a heartbeat, just as the door opened, letting in a rush of wind and a few lost raindrops. The girl stepped inside, clearly enjoying the spotlight of the moment as every male eye in the bar was fixed on her. She looked around leisurely as she started to work on the buttons of her black coat, undoing each one slowly and with a knowing little smile, making it look like a very public striptease. She moved her shoulders sensually to let the coat slide from her shoulders, reminding Brandon of a girl in a silky nightgown, seducing her boyfriend in the bedroom. Her gaze lingered on Brandon for a few seconds while the attendant at the coatrack took her coat and handed her a ticket.Brandon felt the heat of her eyes burn through his body, and swallowed a little uncomfortably. The girl was hotter than any chili he had ever tasted and he knew his girlfriend would not approve of the fantasies running through his mind at that second.The newcomer made her way over to the bar, ignoring the men who shifted their bodies to brush up against her as she slid past them on black fuck-me-senseless heels. The elevation of the shoes was doing the most interesting things to her legs, making them seem as if they just went on forever. Her dress; if you could call that excuse for an outfit a dress; was a lace and leather orgasm waiting to happen, held together by silky strings Brandon could imagine undoing with his teeth. It ended just south of respectable, and dipped so low in the front, a good jiggle would probably shake the precarious hold it had on her boobs and dislodge one of them.Brandon wanted to jiggle her.And it wasn't just her clothes. She had a face and the body to match his every wet dream. Silky, dark brown curls brushing down her back, blue eyes that portrayed a vulnerability completely at odds with her sin-on-heels outfit. Her mouth was full and plump and looked like a vodka-soaked cherry that needed to be licked and sucked and nibbled on. She had painted it wine-red and it glimmered wetly in the low lighting, begging to be kissed. Brandon stared down the college boy who worked behind the bar part-time as the kid hurried to serve her.“What can I get you?” he asked as she slipped one hip onto the high barstool, crossing her legs and letting one of the strappy heels dangle of her foot. Her tongue shot out and tasted the edge of her upper lip. His eyes followed the movement, almost hypnotized by the small pink movement, reminding him of another pink little female nub he liked to suck on.“What do you have that's good?” she asked, her fingers touching the edge of the bodice of her dress seductively.“How about a martini?” he asked, his eyes trying their best to untie that string that held together her dress at the front.“No,” she said, simply.“Sex on the beach?”She lifted one sexy eyebrow. “We're a little far from the beach, don't you think?”“A screaming orgasm, then,” he said, getting very obvious in this game of seduction they were playing.She leaned forward, getting perilously close to showing him her nipples.“I'll have one of those,” she said, “and take an I O U.”“First one's on the house,' he said huskily, “but you can open a tab for those I O Use.”She smiled, a cat-in-the-birdhouse smile that played havoc on his hormones.He compared her to his girlfriend as he turned to start mixing the drink and felt a stab of shame and guilt. Emily was a librarian; a mousey girl with dowdy glasses and a sweet personality. This vixen behind the bar was his every fantasy come to life. And he was going to screw her before he went home to the girl he planned to ask to marry him.One last fling, he told himself as he added the Bailey's to the vodka over the crushed ice. He opened a new bottle of Kahlua and added it, stirring the glass before setting it down in front of her. One last wild thing before I settle down, become a respectable white-picket-fence husband, and start mowing the lawn on Saturdays.The thought was almost depressing, but he knew it was time to move on from bachelor life and Emily was the perfect girl to marry. He even loved her, which made the whole deal seem worthwhile.To be continued, by horn pixy.

In this episode of Freshly Grounded, Faisal sits down with Mansoor Danish, a key figure at the International Open University (IOU). Mansoor shares his insights on negotiation, body language, and psychology in both business and everyday life. He breaks down the art of negotiation, drawing parallels between business dealings and personal situations, and offers practical tips on mastering body language and nonverbal communication. Mansoor also gives a behind-the-scenes look into his role at IOU, where students from over 200 countries come to learn Islamicized degrees, offering a unique blend of secular and Islamic education. Get an Education degree (and others!) from an accredited university by Muslims, from the comfort of your home: http://www.iou.edu.gm/fg

In this episode of The Goin' Deep Show, Hat Trick returns, not just with stories but with cleavage that commands attention from the get-go. The episode is a straightforward plunge into the world of sexual exploration, starting with the phenomenon of female ejaculation.  The Kid proudly discusses his recent bedroom conquests, particularly his newfound prowess in making women blast all over a room. It's an open conversation about technique, expectations, and the practicalities that come with such an act. No sugar-coating here; it's all about the squirt, from the excitement of the experience to the logistics of the aftermath. The discussion isn't just skin deep. They touch on the transactional nature that oral sex has sometimes taken in relationships, with The Kid sharing a personal anecdote where it felt like an IOU system. Hat Trick offers her take, where such acts are more about mutual pleasure and appreciation than keeping score. Family and body image sneak into the chat with Hat Trick talking about her candid conversations with her daughter, proving that in their household, even boobs are up for discussion. It's a slice of real life where body talk is normalized, and it adds depth to the episode beyond the bedroom banter. The show ventures into the porn industry, with a light-hearted comparison of real-life lovers to adult film stars, and a nostalgic nod to the good ol' days of bush-centric pornography.  Wrapping up, they tease the next episode with a hint at exploring new fetishes, promising listeners more uncensored insights into the wilder side of human sexuality. This episode of The Goin' Deep Podcast is raw and real, not holding back on the nitty-gritty of sex, relationships, and everything in between. If you're after the unvarnished truth about the bedroom, this one's for you.

California homeowners face a complex puzzle in decarbonizing their homes: electrification without rooftop solar could increase bills due to expensive electricity, while installing solar first risks oversizing or underutilizing the system. Balto Energy, a startup founded by James Quazi, uses AI to analyze utility bills and recommend the most cost-effective clean energy strategy. In this episode, we discuss Balto's tool, its potential to empower contractors, and what California's situation reveals about the future of clean energy policy nationwide.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsHello everyone. This is Volts for September 13, 2024, "A tool that enables solar first home electrification." I'm your host, David Roberts. Californians who want to decarbonize their homes face something of a conundrum. If they electrify their cars and appliances without getting rooftop solar, they could end up paying higher overall bills thanks to California's notoriously expensive electricity and cheap natural gas. If they install rooftop solar before electrifying their cars and appliances, they could either undersize the system for their eventual needs or oversize it and over-produce and export solar power to the California grid. Thanks to California's recent NEM 3.0 decision on rooftop solar compensation, utilities pay much less for that exported rooftop solar power than they used to.The most economical strategy for most homeowners is likely to be some mix of electrification, batteries, and rooftop solar. The more a California homeowner stores and consumes their own cheap rooftop solar power, the more value they get out of that solar and the lower their total bills. It is a complex calculation, though, that most homeowners are in no position to make. That's where the startup Balto Energy comes in. Founder James Quazi, a longtime energy modeler and entrepreneur, has built a tool that can use a home's utility bills to create a model of its consumption patterns, predict what they will be as appliances are electrified, and recommend the maximally economical approach.It's part of a larger effort to help contractors and solar companies navigate a post-net-metering world. I'm excited to talk to Quazi about why his tool is needed and how it works, how it will empower contractors, and what California's present says about the future of clean energy policy in the rest of the country.With no further ado, James Quazi, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.James QuaziThank you for having me. That was a great intro.David RobertsThanks. So, you know, I sort of went over it a little quickly in the intro there. But let's talk a little bit about this conundrum for Californians who are trying to decarbonize. So, just by background — I don't even know if everyone's been following the California rooftop solar wars, I kind of assume everybody has — but just by way of background, California recently basically issued a new policy on rooftop solar, and the long and short of it is that they're going to compensate homeowners much less. It used to be that basically you could get paid the retail rate for your excess solar, and now they're just going to pay much, much less than that.On the surface, this really damages the economical case for solar for homeowners, they'll get compensated much less. This has resulted in a huge blow to the solar industry in California. There are solar companies shutting down, jobs being lost, etcetera, etcetera. So, talk a little bit about the conundrum and how you think about solving it.James QuaziYeah, so about a year ago, the net energy metering policy in California changed from NEM 2.0 to NEM 3.0, now called Net Billing Tariff. The difference is, as you mentioned, that now customers get paid on a schedule. Each hour per year is a different rate. But generally, you can think of it as between like $0.05 and $0.08 for exported energy, while imported energy for me in San Diego is between $0.38 and $0.52 an hour. So it degrades the value proposition for residential solar for a homeowner. For contractors, it's also proven really difficult. So in the past, it was really easy to have rule of thumb sizing or heuristics, or if you took annual energy over the last twelve months and you designed a system that produced around that same amount of energy, it was generally going to be a good value proposition for the homeowner.But now, what you need to understand is, like, how much of that solar production is actually coincident with the load on the house, because the export of energy is devalued.David RobertsRight. So, the economics now have shifted to make it so that, I mean, maybe this was true already, but more true now that the ideal thing for Californians with rooftop solar to do is to consume as much of the generated power as conceivably possible.James QuaziThat's absolutely correct. So, if you can think of it as, and I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the terminology, like LCOE. So, the cost of solar, residential rooftop solar, is somewhere between, let's say, $0.10 and $0.12 a kilowatt-hour to produce, whereas the retail rate is much higher depending on the IOU that you're a part of. To the extent that you can consume cheap on-site electricity, you are hugely benefited as a customer.David RobertsRight. So then the question becomes, well, there's a bunch of different ways of approaching this question, but from this sort of like, if I'm trying to sell solar, right, I need a little bit of a new pitch, right? Because before, with full retail compensation, it's kind of a no-brainer, you could make a lot of money, but now you can make a lot less money. So this changes the value proposition for solar. So, explain exactly how the sort of calculation shifts.James QuaziSure, I would actually reframe it a little bit in terms of, like, I believe so in the previous net metering paradigm. We often saw simple solar paybacks in the five to seven years. I believe that those paybacks are still available to homeowners, but it's just a different set of products and services than simply rooftop solar on the roof. So, I think our goal is to help retool the solar industries, to help look at a house as a whole, maybe converting a lot of the energy on site that we previously ignored, whether that's natural gas or gasoline, and then power that all with cheap onsite renewables, and that will drive the value proposition for that homeowner.David RobertsRight. It's still worthwhile getting solar, even maybe still a comparable payoff period, but a different approach. And basically, it's going to be a little bit more of a complicated approach. Right? Like, it's one thing just to stick solar on the roof. Like, how much energy do I use, let's stick that much solar on the roof. Pretty easy. Once you bring in the whole home, just the combinatorial, you know what I mean? Just the calculations get a lot more complicated.James QuaziFor sure. So, like, I think in two respects. One, it's more complicated for the contractor to feel confident in the system that they're proposing and the financial outcome for the homeowner. And then two, from a homeowner's perspective, it's more complicated to understand and digest and comprehend a suite of services that might include solar and a battery and a heat pump and an EV, than it is simply like panels on a roof. Our goal at Balto Energy is to sort of do the modeling and ingest the complexity and then deliver it in a way that's consumable for both a contractor and a homeowner.David RobertsRight. So, talk briefly about what your tool does. What is the outcome supposed to be? What is it trying to accomplish?James QuaziYeah, so our perspective on it is that oftentimes in the past, if you asked for a solar quote, you would get maybe one option, two options, or three options, max. Really, like, if I take my own house as an example, so I live in San Diego, I can fit up to 30 panels on the roof, which is constrained by roof geometry, area shading, what have you. So let's call it maybe 20 to 30 different flavors of solar systems that I could possibly engage in. If I layer on batteries, I could have 1, 2, 3, 4 batteries. And then EVs, one or two EVs, and heat pump or not heat pump, water heater or not water heater.And our first step in the process is to ingest an address and then interval bill data. So, we need hourly electric reads and daily gas.David RobertsAnd that, just to be clear, this is the sort of raw information that's going into the model?James QuaziYeah, that's correct.David RobertsIt's utility bills. And this, these are available from the utility. There's no, it's not difficult to get this information.James QuaziSomewhat loaded question. It should be available. I just finished listening to your podcast on "Free the energy data." I have —David RobertsThat's why I ask. I'm wondering how straightforward it is to get the raw data that you need.James QuaziI would say that having been in this industry for 20 years, it's much easier now than it has ever been before. That being the case, there are still hurdles. There's a lot of missing intervals. There's patchwork to be done. There are services that provide synthetic intervals. It's not as clean of a dataset as I would ideally like, but it's generally like the authorization, and there are a couple of third-party companies now that do it and are making it easier.David RobertsIs it notably easier in California than it is in other states? Different in California than in other states? Or is this just a utility by utility thing across the country?James QuaziOur focus is in California right now. So, I have the most depth and experience there for this problem. Even within California and the IOUs, it is utility by utility.David RobertsSo are you restricted geographically where you can sell your product based on the utilities, whether you can get these to utility information or not?James QuaziOur position is that to accurately model a home's energy use and consumption profiles, you need two things. One is you need a physics-based model of the building, and then you need to be able to calibrate that with what is actually happening in the home. I've done a lot of energy modeling, auditing, that sort of thing. I think the one definitive thing that I've learned is that the best site observed data is actually bills. It will help you ferret out how people use their home, what their preferences are, and is actually the ground truth data.So, our position as a company is because we want to be able to confidently project — like, let's say if I converted a gas furnace to a heat pump, and I want to know on an hourly basis, what is the energy input to that system. To do that accurately, I believe that you need interval data.David RobertsSo you are in some sense beholden to utilities here or dependent on utilities to be forthcoming?James QuaziYeah, I think, unfortunately. And then to "Free the energy data" podcast. Yes, this is true, and it is being in some ways held hostage, and that's not great for the industry. I would say that our success rate right now is like, it's significant enough that we see this as somewhat of a hurdle, but not a deal breaker.David RobertsRight, right. So, I mean, getting utility bills seems straightforward enough. You just ask the homeowner and they give them to you. But when you say a physics-based model of the house, you have to go do that in person. Can you construct that from publicly available data?James QuaziYes, you can. We've done this in several iterations in the past. So, the background engine that does this is an NREL product called EnergyPlus. And it has, let's say, a full set of data requirements, which you can imagine has a lot of physical attributes of the specific house. And what we do ourselves and through partners, is comb, let's say, permit record databases and MLS listings. And we can get close enough with that set of information to build the first model. And then it's really, in comparing that model to the billing data, what's actually happening on an hourly basis, that allows us to calibrate it.David RobertsInteresting. So, you don't have to do a site visit to do any of this, really. You could theoretically do all of this modeling remotely?James QuaziYep. Everything like roof geometry, shading, building modeling, tariff engines, all the things that are sort of the processes to get to an output, can be done remotely.David RobertsAll right. And so, you put all this information into the model, and then what is the model supposed to do? And here's a question I had also: Am I the homeowner, interacting with this model in any way, or is the model a tool for contractors?James QuaziOur plan, at the very start, we're working with a set of contractors, and we're in Napa and Sonoma to start, most notably Northern Pacific. Our plan is to deliver a tool to a solar contractor that they can use to propose a wide range of solutions that a homeowner might want. I think that this will become a customer-facing tool or exploratory tool in the future, but we are definitely starting with solar contractors.David RobertsInteresting. Yeah, because one of the questions I had about this is just that I'm sure I'm not telling you anything as someone who's worked in energy for a long time, but just like, people are pretty lazy, and the way people make decisions about appliances and stuff like that is generally to ignore it until it breaks and then go to Home Depot. So, like this comprehensive, long-term, holistic planning, I'm just like, wondering, like, how many homeowners are really that committed?James QuaziSo, let me give you an idea of, like, what the output of the tool is, then where I see this going. So, you know, back to my house, 30 panels, batteries, EV's, all the things. What we want to do is expand the solution set for all possible outcomes for that house. So, if I permutate those things, it ends up being a set of maybe like a couple hundred to a thousand different individual pathways. It could be 28 panels —David RobertsAnd these are like mixes of the number of panels, the number of batteries, what kind of appliances, that kind of thing.James QuaziThat's absolutely correct. And then what we've created is sort of a decision-making framework that allows you to search that space for the thing that's right for you. At first, contextualized in one of three goal seeks. So the first one being a very standard solar approach, which is "Deliver me the best financial outcome." The second one, which we're seeing a sort of increasing adoption around, is like, "Yeah, I want a great financial outcome, but I also want to power this set of critical loads or my entire house through an outage of this duration. And I'm not cost-sensitive around that."So, like, if I need to add a battery or two batteries and it provides that service, that's fine. And then the third one is a sort of immersion. Ten years ago, when I was in the solar industry, it was like there was a time when we thought we had to deliver day one savings to get adoption. And it turned out there was a segment of the population, mostly retirees or people that were about to retire, who, let's say, had a $150 utility bill. And they're like, "You know, saving money isn't as important to me as, you know, I experienced the grid cost is volatile, but always volatile in the upward direction.And if you are going to put on the system and it has a 20-year lifespan, can you lock in this $150 for 20 years? And I don't experience any increase in costs." So those are starting points. I will say that I think there's more out there. So, there are a segment of customers that could be interested in just like the environmental outcome, and there's ways to calculate that based on grid dynamics. That's where we're starting, and I think we'll kind of learn our way into the solution.David RobertsRight, so you can tweak the model depending on what your goals are, depending on what your aims are. And I guess one of the questions I had about it is, like, in California at least, grid electricity is so expensive and natural gas is so cheap, and solar compensation is now so low, that it seems like the most economical outcome for homeowners is always going to be to electrify all your appliances and put a bunch of rooftop solar to power your appliances. It seems like that's always going to be the cheapest outcome, is it not? And that's also always going to be the most environmentally preferable outcome, right?Because it's zero carbon. In other words, what if I, as a contractor, just came to you and said, "Look, I can do all these complicated calculations, but trust me, you want to electrify all your appliances and put rooftop solar on your roof. That's what it's going to end up showing you." Does it ever show otherwise?James QuaziSo, if we were to implement generalized or rules of thumb, I think that would be a good one. What I have seen is there are time when your're roof constrained, so you might not have the roof capacity to power all the things, and then you'd want to make better decisions. To the extent that you have vast plains of south-facing, west-facing roof area, we want to make sure that we're installing the right amount of solar and batteries. So, I think that there's an optimization problem there. But, I think you're right in the sense that to the extent that you can self-consume a ton of energy that you generated on-site, that will be the best outcome for you.David RobertsSo then, if I'm a homeowner and I run this model, or a contractor comes to me and runs this model, and the outcome of the model is the most economical approach for you, the homeowner, is to buy a heat pump, buy a heat pump water heater, buy an induction stove, et cetera, buy a bunch of batteries and put a bunch of rooftop solar on the roof. On the one hand, I might believe, I might find it perfectly plausible that that is the end state that will yield the lowest ongoing operating costs for my house. But on the other hand, that's a daunting upfront investment. Do you know what I mean?In a sense, if I'm a homeowner and a contractor comes to me, he's like, "I'm selling solar. And by the way, I have this fancy tool that shows me that you also need to buy a bunch of other stuff from me." I guess I'm just a little suspicious.James QuaziI think the intent of the tool is to allow a homeowner to make the best decision for them. To the extent that the best decision is, in fact, a larger PV system, more batteries, maybe a heat pump, and all of those things in aggregate end up being expensive directionally , but have great payback. I think that hits on like sort of the second vein of Balto. So the first is like, how do we create a decision framework and compute engine to give you the scenarios and help you make a decision? Once you've made a decision —David RobertsWill the model also crank out a preferred order of operations for that? You know what I mean? Not just like an end state that would be best, but like, what steps in what order are economical?James QuaziThis is getting back to the solar-led electrification vision for this. Our position is that solar and storage should lead always , and we should be building 20 or 25-year products for the future energy consumption. The tool is there to say, can we share a vision of the future and what applies and things you'll be engaged in, whether that's EVs or heat pumps or whatever. Once we have that, can we build 25-year renewable infrastructure on site to support those things over time? We think that there are interesting ways. And I'll touch on the financing in a little bit about how to transact this and make it consistent.David RobertsYeah, I want to get to the financing in a minute, but before I leave this question. So, why always solar and batteries first? Or put it this way, why shouldn't I put a little bit of solar and batteries on, enough to power my current appliances? And then, you know, when I switch out my furnace for a heat pump, just stick a couple more solar panels on the roof. Why not do it incrementally like that?James QuaziYes, I myself have a background, and then we've got some deep partnerships with contractors. They are not a fan of that approach for a number of reasons. One is if I take a five-kilowatt system and then I append a three-kilowatt system on later, that is not the cost of an eight-kilowatt system. It's much more costly.David RobertsBecause just coming out to the site again and all—James QuaziRedesign, permitting. Yeah, all the things. And then separately, depending on the time lag between system one and system two, there are at times, compatibility issues with modules that make it more difficult. I think solar's gotten inexpensive enough where if you were going to engage in one of maybe the three big electrification projects, which would be EV, heat pump, heat pump water heater, I mean, you should be sizing for at bare minimum that. And I would argue for the whole thing if that's what you intend to do, on day one. And then if you're doing other things, let's say that have a more de minimis impact on your meter or your electrical consumption, like a stove, then maybe it's fine to wait.But to the extent that, like, you're considering solar and storage and one of the other things, I think it makes a lot of sense to size appropriately for future loads.David RobertsSo, you would say to any homeowner contemplating solar that the financially smartest thing to do is to size a system for your projected total need in the future, not your current need.James QuaziYeah, no, I feel strongly that that is the case. I will take myself as an example again. I have an EV. I am considering a heat pump. I have a tankless hot water heater that is in a closet and is not easily replaceable with a heat pump water heater given form factor. But given those things, I did size the PV to the anticipated heat pump. Even if that doesn't happen on day one, it might happen on year one, three, five, or seven, right?David RobertsSo, are you not then, while you have the solar that's oversized for your current needs, are you not sort of financially losing out in the interim, in the meantime?James QuaziSo, I think that again, the export value for solar today directionally is much lower. So, there is some value, it's not a lot. I would categorize it as you're not optimizing the system today.David RobertsSuboptimal, then let's see.James QuaziBut I think that what you're really doing is putting together the infrastructure to adopt more products in the future.David RobertsRight. A contractor comes to me as a homeowner, says, "Let's look at how much solar you will need once you've electrified your home," basically, and install that amount. Do you envision these same contractors who are trying to sell solar, selling these other things to homeowners as well? Sort of like offering, like moving beyond solar to offer kind of total home electrification packages type of things.James QuaziI think there's going to be a couple of different flavors, and we'll see what sorts out. In San Diego, one of the biggest residential installers actually has historically had a heat pump division of their company. That's probably not the norm. I do see a lot of solar installers — I mean, certainly, a solar installer is now installing storage by default. A lot of them install EV chargers. I've seen some interest in heat pump water heaters as the installation is quite a bit easier than heat pumps, HVAC. So, I think that we'll see some adoption of product over time.I do believe that the heat pump is probably the one thing that is a set of expertise that is probably different than what solar providers have in-house. What they can do, and we anticipate doing, is a lot of pre-wiring work. It's taken as an industry axiom that HVAC products get replaced when they break. To the extent that that infrastructure, whether it's a 240 circuit to the existing furnace location, is not in place, it's very likely that the existing thing gets replaced with something very similar, and then we're locked into this pattern for 15 years.So, we're very interested in, again, sizing appropriately, but then also doing some of the pre-work that allows these things to be adopted.David RobertsTrey, interesting. And so, from your perspective, you're going to put the tool in the hands of contractors, and then to some extent, the contractors are going to figure out exactly how best to use it and what kind of packages to offer and stuff like that. Is Balto out being a contractor, like running this, interacting with homeowners?James QuaziNo, we are not. So, what we're doing is providing a toolset, which is computational tools, finance tools that allow existing contractors today to be more effective.David RobertsGot it. And so, talk about the financial side of this. So, I'm guessing I'm borderline illiterate when it comes to money issues. But I'm guessing that part of the promise of this is that if you can more accurately and reliably project future energy needs in a home, you're going to have an easier time financing the sort of oversized solar system that you want in anticipation of those loads. Is that right? Part of this is like giving confidence to financial institutions to finance these things, right?James QuaziYeah, that's exactly right. So, I would say that the first step is having a shared vision of what the future of this home looks like. So, what are the appliances that are on the list and off the list? EVs, whatever the case is. And then, from past learnings at Solar City and Dandelion, really what you have to do is package it in a way that people can experience the savings at the same rate as they chunk off the capital cost of these projects. And then, in terms of energy savings over time and confidence, I think the goal there is, and we could think of it as if you were getting a loan.One factor in the loan might be your debt-to-income ratio. How much debt do you have, and can you actually service this loan over time? And our position is, to the extent that these suite of products actually lowers your obligations to pay, so your utility bills, that should be factored into any financial product as well. Does that make sense?David RobertsYeah. So, it's almost like future income increases, almost like.James QuaziYeah, so if I had, like, if my obligations to pay a loan provider were $1,000 a month, just randomly, and I made x amount of income, if the obligation was less, if it was $500 a month, given all these energy savings, I would have a greater ability to pay back that loan, and that should be factored in.David RobertsOh, I see, I see. So, is the idea here just for this tool you've created to give confidence to homeowners who are going to banks and stuff, or are you getting in the finance game at all?James QuaziOur intention is to provide the financing for it as well. I mean, like, I think any time we're trying to make the process as seamless as possible. So, it's sort of like a one-stop shop in terms of assessing what's right, what's the best fit for you in terms of these projects, and then packaging it in a way that — we're hoping it incentivizes people to do more sooner, but to the extent that they want to do things over time, it is also like a flexible facility that allows you to adopt a heat pump water heater in year three, if that's what you want.David RobertsSo the contractors are the ones offering the homeowners this sort of financing package?James QuaziYep, that's correct.David RobertsRight. And the contractors are able to do it because they have this information from your tool that gives them confidence?James QuaziHand in glove.David RobertsRight. So, just having gone over all this, let's rewind and just imagine I'm a homeowner, and a contractor knocks on my door. What do you envision the contractor sort of like, what is the homeowner facing pitch from the contractor? Because there's a lot of complicated stuff going on behind the scenes for the contractor. What is the homeowner hearing? What is the pitch to the homeowner?James QuaziYeah, we see it as a stepwise process. So, because our go-to market is through solar contractors, the first step is to say, if I were any other solar contractor, and you called me for a solar and potentially storage system, what I would have done is looked at your current electrical bills and size the system this way, and this is what... "You want a five kilowatt solar array and one battery, 110 kilowatt hour battery." The next step is to say, "Hey, listen, we're actually in that world. We're only looking at one of probably three silos of energy that you're using."So, we're ignoring the natural gas side of the bill. We're ignoring everything that's happening at the pump. But, if we look at your energy spend holistically, here are a suite of options that are available to you. And this is the differential sort of financial outcome versus just a solar system, versus, like, resiliency versus bill stability kind of thing.David RobertsSo, the idea here is, I go to the contractor and say, "Hey, I've been thinking about solar and battery," and the contractor says to me, "Well, hey, what about this larger package? You could have even bigger savings, and you could have resilience," and stuff like this. So, it's a little bit like an upsell for a contractor.James QuaziYeah, I mean, I would think of it as like, being able to more holistically address energy spend. Like, that's our goal, is to say, "It's not just one flavor that we're dealing with. We're looking at the entire house and things, and we want the best solution for you."David RobertsIt makes me wonder how long it will be before homeowners think that way, or if they ever will. Because homeowners just think of products as separate products. I don't know that a lot of homeowners, especially outside our world, even sort of think of the home as a system, right? With certain energetic inputs and outputs that should be dealt with as a holistic system. Like, that's just — I'm not even sure homeowners are at all accustomed to thinking that way.James QuaziI wonder if I myself am, like, blinded by sort of a friend group or whatever the case is. But I would say that, like, I don't know of a lot of people that aren't at least considering an EV, right? Even if they're not, like, actively join in. But it's like, "Hey, listen, this is actually a real option." I don't think that heat pumps are very far behind that curve. It's interesting, like when people, like historically, when people inquire about solar, we often times have thought of that as they want bill savings. But I am not entirely sure that that is the reason.David RobertsDo we know? Have we done surveys and polls? I'm so curious. I would also assume, just out of a sort of, I guess, a low, like a background degree of cynicism, that that's going to be the dominant motivation. But is it? Like, I don't feel confident about that at all.James QuaziWell, I don't either. My belief is that bill savings are part of a decision-making process, but probably very rarely the primary driver. And that is the thing. And even if you look at, like, the funnel conversion metrics of, like, the solar industry as a whole, it's just like, for every hundred people that inquire, single-digit people actually do the things. And our perspective is like, you know, they're getting stuck somewhere in the process. And it's oftentimes with questions that cannot be answered, and that's when they stall out. And that is our reason for expanding the set to everything that's possible in your home and letting you search that, because we think we'll figure out what are the motivations. I think that there's a strong cohort of people that are just anti-utility.David RobertsThat's a piece of it. There's an environmental piece of it. There's a sort of independence, anti-utility piece of it. There's a vague mix. There's just social contagion, there's just peer pressure. You see it around you. It's the whole stew of motivations. I'd love to understand that better. So, I mean, it kind of seems like what you'd want is for your tool to be in the hands of everybody involved in any of those products. Do you know what I mean? Like, if I want an EV and I go to the car dealership, you know, it'd be cool if the car dealer could say to me, "Hey, you know, save even more money if you threw in a heat pump with this and a solar panel."You know, like if, or the heat pump, people are like, "Hey, throw in an EV and solar panels." Like, it'd be nice if homeowners confronted the idea of total electrification everywhere they looked, right? I mean, that'd be ideal.James QuaziYeah, 100%. I really think that's the vision, and that's where we're going. I think the entry point into a lot of this stuff will be varied. Like, it will be through an EV at the start, or a broken furnace that gets replaced by a heat pump or whatever the case is. I think our goal is to engage homeowners in a way where we have a persistent bill connection. I think that this is why that episode resonated so much with me. If we have an address and a persistent daily, hourly, monthly, whatever the case is, bill connection, you can drive insights over time to a homeowner at very meaningful times to intercept them.Right now, I think this business, like solar in general, is very transactional. We think of it as like, we get leads in the top of the funnel, we set them at this rate, we convert them at this rate, we install them. It's a 30% gross margin, and then that's the end. Whereas, I don't believe that that's the way the products will be adopted and people will have to, I mean, internally we call it energy literacy. Like, how do I start to understand the problem and the solutions?David RobertsRight. So, in the same way, you sort of have a financial advisor, you could have like a home advisor, basically. A home energy advisor.James QuaziAnd we also think it's got to be low impact, so it can't be like, "Hey, you've got to go do this detailed sort of appliance audit or whatever the case is." So it's bills and address, and then, you know, this is a great state of change problem where utility rates are constantly changing, prices of products are changing, incentives are changing, and there's always a chance to message. I very viscerally feel this in the sense that, like, when I took four years off and then reengaged with the industry, I was like, "Wow, we like, crossed the threshold, like, the point of no return, where electrification now makes sense for everyone," and I had missed it, and this is the only thing I'd ever done.David RobertsYeah, I mean, it's moving so quickly. I will say, though, one thing I hear from, you know, and there's been articles written about this. It's just like, it's all out there from people who have tried to do this total electrification thing. It's just incredibly difficult, just incredibly difficult to synchronize everything and arrange everything. And so, in that context, the idea of having a kind of home advisor where, like, your hot water heater breaks and you just call your home advisor, you figure out, like, what's the right approach here, what's the economical approach, where to look, what kind of thing to get?A lot of people would very much welcome having one of those, I feel like.James QuaziAnd I think that this speaks to the general funnel conversion in the industry, but generally, a lead comes in, and then what we're trying to do is furiously convert them to a sale and install as quickly as possible, hopefully within 30 days, hopefully in one set. And I just don't believe that that's the way that people will consume products. It will be through a bunch of different experiences over time. And I think that's a meaningful difference. Like, you know, we're in such a rush to do all the things. Like, I'm in a rush to do all the things at once, but I think we have to also meet people where they are and, like, engage them in some way over time so they can make a decision, so they can make another decision.David RobertsI hope it changes because, honestly, like, you know, I've thought about solar. Ten years ago, we did one of those sort of, like, online audit things, and it was like, "No, you're too shaded." But I think it's just changed since then. Uh, just like, what's possible. But, like, I know that if I got a solar contractor and sat down at a table with that person, that they would just be sweaty and desperate, you know what I mean? To sell me just like it, exactly like I feel at the auto dealership, which is just like, "Ew," kind of uncomfortable, you know what I mean?And rushed and don't feel like I have a full sense of all the pieces in play, and that I can't trust the person I'm talking to, to help me out, you know what I mean? I'm sort of, like, adversarial. I hate that whole model, you know what I mean? And just like, I would be, I don't know how representative I am, but I'd be inclined to spend more money if I just had a person who was like, had the big picture, had the model, had the data in hand, said, "You know, like whenever you're ready, this is the right first step."Just like a better environment for homeowners to deal with these things and think about these things.James QuaziYeah, no, I get it. I feel very similarly. I totally understand from the other perspective, like solar sales reps are expensive and they're hired to do one thing. I just don't know that it's the way that most people want to adopt the things.David RobertsYeah, I can't believe that it's going to go to truly, truly mass penetration running on this model. It's going to have to evolve into something else. As we near the end here, let's pull the camera back a little bit and talk about the Agile Electrification project. My understanding basically is that the NEM 3.0 decision in California threw the solar contracting world into a bit of a tizzy. And there are efforts now to organize and figure out how to move forward and how to help contractors and what the right approach for contractors is in this new world.So, tell us a little bit about what the Agile Electrification project is.James QuaziIt is an industry-sponsored project that's hosted at the Design and Innovation Center at UCSD. The genesis of it was a lot of, quite honestly, hammering around NEM 3.0. It was like if you read Canary or any of these publications, a lot of it is doom and gloom. This industry is down 70%.David RobertsYeah, there's a lot of "sky is falling" sentiment flying around.James QuaziYeah, I think there have been. And you know, a lot of people are like, "Hey, listen, a lot of the bad actors are going to get flushed out with this," which I believe. I also believe a lot of some good actors will go out of business. So this is like a real issue. In times of turmoil, there's oftentimes opportunity and there's a group of people, contractors, manufacturers, investors, who have come together in this venue where sometimes it would be competitive or driven by business interests and they're coming together to solve problems for the industry. So right now it's a series of three projects to expand from there.One is like energy modeling for the entire state of California. It's something that everyone needs. We want to do it and open source it. Another one that we touched on earlier is understanding customer motivations and understanding where they got stuck and how to unstick them, because our general sense is they want to save money. And I don't know if that's the primary motivation. And then the third one is around incentives and rebates and how to, like, it's a constantly evolving landscape and just staying on top of it is like a challenge and maybe a full-time job.So, it's how to open-source that aspect of it, and how to qualify people for rebates and make sure that they're up to date, make sure they're not over-allocated, and deliver that information to the people on the ground that are actually installing the systems.David RobertsRight. And so, I'm stuck on this point. I just wanted to reiterate one more time. So, it's your belief that, because I think this sort of popular belief is that the NEM 3.0 decision has radically reduced homeowner incentives to get solar power, that it's just not as worth it anymore to get solar power. What you're saying is, with the right holistic approach, solar power is as valuable as ever and just as worth getting as ever. Is that your position?James QuaziThat is my position, yes.David RobertsDo you think that that is widely, like solar contractors believe that, or are you having to sort of buck them up and convince them of that?James QuaziWell, I think we're in a stage right now where, I mean, we set up the simplest possible website, have done very little marketing. We've had directionally 75 to 100 contractors sign up and say they're interested. I believe that the contractors are looking for solutions. For sure. That is definitively true. I think they should believe this because it is true that there is a great value proposition in homeowners. I think the issue here, maybe the persistent issue that's undeniable, is that it's more complex. Describing the value proposition has become more complex. For sure. There's no way around that.So, we're trying to find ways to — I mean, the back-end compute engine is great. The real challenge is finding ways to deliver that information to customers in a way that's actionable.David RobertsFor sure. Final question then. A lot of this seems very Californian. The fears and the solutions and all of it seems sort of very customized to California's current circumstances. How applicable is all of this, do you think, outside of California? Would your model be helpful to a homeowner in, I don't know, like Arkansas?James QuaziYeah. So, I would take it in two flavors. One is, I think there's the expectation, for good reason, that these policies in California will get exported to other states. So, it will become hugely relevant soon.David RobertsYou mean rooftop solar compensation getting cut way back? It's already happened in a couple of other states. I mean, it's definitely a trend.James QuaziYeah. So, that's true. NEM 3.0, or like the difference between export energy valuation and import and parity, does not have to be true for this general value proposition to hold true. So, to that extent, I would say that it's portable anywhere. We chose to start in California because it is by far the biggest solar market. It accounts for about 50% of solar and there was a demonstrated need. I will say that it's a very complex problem to solve and it has geographic sides to it. So, as you move location, utilities change and their tariffs change and the way that they charge and weather changes.David RobertsThe information they make available.James QuaziExactly, exactly. So, we've tactically started it in California for those reasons and constrained it. But there's no reason why this shouldn't be applicable to, like, any other place.David RobertsRight. It's sort of interesting. The big fear, or I guess the thing that solar people used to say to utilities when warning them away from NEM 3.0, is like, "Look, if you cut compensation too much, we're just going to self-consume and then install more electric appliances and then slowly wean ourselves off the grid and then not need the grid anymore. And then you're losing customers." The much-fabled death spiral. It seems like you're organizing to make that real, to make that happen.James QuaziI have some thoughts on this. I really do think, and I don't know the answer, but at some point down the road, we're going to have a fork. That fork will be either we find a way to use essentially distribution resources to cooperate, and I think that is the best societal outcome, or we find that we can't cooperate and everyone has to be their own, like a little micro picogrid, and that we have to build the infrastructure to do it. And, you know, I think that it's probably more likely that that's going to happen, which is unfortunate, but I do think that, as always, the affluent will serve themselves first and make good decisions and the rest of the costs will be pushed on to everyone else. And actually, in my heart of hearts, what I think will happen is we'll find a way to cooperate, but only after we've sort of incurred a huge amount of pain.David RobertsThat sounds like the American approach that I know and love. We'll stumble through some disasters and then eventually get our act together.James QuaziYeah, you end up doing the right thing when you're forced to. So, I think that that's the way I see it happening.David RobertsAll right, well, cool. James, this is really interesting. I've been meaning to look into solar in California, how they're dealing with all this. And this is a really interesting approach. I mean, it's never funny. Until I sort of read about this, it never occurred to me, even though it's really obvious, that like, of course, electrifying your appliances and getting your battery and getting your solar panels are — that's like the same thing. You know what I mean? Like, that's all one. That's all one thing. Like I said, it's like a switch that kind of flips in your mind.You're like, "Oh, like, it's a holistic system." It would be interesting to try to train homeowners to think that way more. Thank you so much, James. Thanks for taking the time.James QuaziThank you. Appreciate it.David RobertsThank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review or telling a friend about Volts, or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Industrial Talk is onsite at DistribuTech and talking to Bill Cappel and Kyle Slagle with Cross Discipline Engineering about "In a rapidly changing utility market, listening and driving to a solution is key". Scott MacKenzie hosts an industrial podcast from Distribute Tech in Orlando, highlighting the importance of innovation and problem-solving in the utility and power industries. Bill Cappel and Kyle Slagle from Cross Discipline Engineering discuss their roles in addressing complex challenges such as achieving carbon neutrality without sacrificing reliability. They emphasize the need for prioritizing goals, understanding client needs, and staying updated with regulatory changes. They also stress the importance of standardization and updating outdated standards. Bill and Kyle share their backgrounds in military and utility operations, respectively, and offer their services through Cross Discipline Engineering, encouraging listeners to reach out for solutions. Action Items [ ] Reach out to Cross Discipline Engineering through their website at crossdiscipline.com or on LinkedIn. [ ] Contact Scott MacKenzie on the Industrial Talk podcast platform to promote technologies, solutions, or events. [ ] Attend conferences like Distributech and PowerGen to see innovations and network with others in the utility and energy industries. Outline Introduction and Conference Overview Scott MacKenzie welcomes listeners to the Industrial Talk Podcast, highlighting the focus on industry professionals and innovations. Scott MacKenzie mentions the current location at Distribute Tech in Orlando, Florida, and introduces the guests, Bill Cappel and Kyle Slagle. Bill and Kyle discuss their experiences at the conference, emphasizing the importance of networking and innovation. Scott MacKenzie shares a conversation with a fellow attendee, Jim, about the rapid pace of technological advancements in the industry. Kyle Slagle's Background and Role Kyle Slagle introduces himself as a Solutions Expert, focusing on partnering with clients to find solutions to their problems in the power industry. Kyle explains his background in the power industry, including his 14 years with an IOU and his role as Director of Engineering. Scott MacKenzie and Kyle discuss the evolving nature of the utility industry, particularly in grid management and matching supply and demand. Bill Cappel shares his background, detailing his 21 years in the military and his current role as Director of Field Services at Cross Discipline Engineering. Challenges in Achieving Carbon Neutrality Scott MacKenzie and Kyle discuss the challenges of achieving carbon neutrality while maintaining reliability and avoiding excessive costs. Kyle emphasizes the importance of prioritizing goals and addressing them progressively to avoid overwhelming clients. Bill Cappel highlights the need for utilities to identify their main problems and work towards solving them without sacrificing reliability. Scott MacKenzie and Kyle agree on the importance of understanding market demands and guiding clients towards long-term solutions. Cross Discipline Engineering's Approach Bill Cappel outlines Cross Discipline Engineering's four-step process: understanding client needs, anticipating solutions, communicating expectations, and executing the...

How was the financial world changed by the structured use of wooden sticks with dents in them? Why did silver coins disappear from England as soon as they were minted? How did one country that aimed to eliminate money ultimately end up creating the most stable currency in Europe?Paolo Zannoni is  Executive Deputy Chairman at Prada, and the author of the book Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World. Greg and Paolo discuss Paolo's career choices between academia and banking, his research into the history of financial systems, and the key historical figures and places that have shaped modern banking practices. They also delve into the importance of trust in finance, the transparency of early banking methods, and the pivotal role Italy played in the origin of modern banking.Zanoni and Greg discuss the significance of historical financial transactions and their transparency, comparing them to present-day financial technologies like blockchain. They also cover the interesting evolution of financial instruments such as the bill of exchange, public finance systems, and the impacts of these systems on the state and society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Common debt before common currency34:07: It was cheaper issuing debt in Écu than issuing debt in your own national currency. That was the beginning of the common currency and could have been the beginning of the common debt. But the first part went fast, reasonably fast, and reasonably far. The second did not take off. And that shows the areas in which the Continental Congress of the United States was much superior to the EU. The Continental Congress of the United States had common public debt because before having a common currency. That I found is so marvelous, so innovative, and so great. They did not have a common currency, but they had common debt.When banks fail, they turn to financial history45:55: When banks go bad, they start confronting that particular crisis of the past, and depending on how good the financial history is, they go back in time. How an orderly banking system preserved centuries of financial history27:44: Bank debt was a combination between a registered IOU and a banknote. And so when the bank was making promises, they were issuing these pledges of credit, but the pledges of credit afterward, to be deposited in a bank account, had to be entered into a special ledger by bank employees. And when that ledger, when that pledge of credit was entered into the ledger, was returned, all hundreds of years of pledges of credit are neatly stacked on the shelves. That's how you can find how much Caravaggio was paid for his painting. Isn't it amazing? With enough time and knowledge, you can find almost every big transaction.On Venice's early banking transparency09:49: They had two features. The first one was that they were public, and banking was transacted. The banker opened up his ledger, and the two parties, maybe not at the same time, appeared in front of him. And the second was that the government was checking those ledgers. I mean, Venice had magistrates that were required to supervise the ledgers of the bank. At the ledgers of the bankers, and they did supervise the ledger of the bankers, and the only place where you find those ledgers today are in the part of the archives that comes from those magistrates and from the senate.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Luca PacioliFibonacciLiber AbaciPhilip II of SpainTally stickÉcuFerdinando Galiani - WikipediaAlexander HamiltonRudolf HilferdingGresham's lawunSILOed - William Goetzmann - How Finance Made Civilization PossibleBernardo DavanzatiPolymathGuest Profile:Board of Directors page for PradaHis Work:Book - Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the WorldArticle - Fortune - The government using taxpayer money to bail out banks will unavoidably continue. Here's why

Our Gemara cites a mishnah from Ketubot regarding not determining status, specifically of a kohen, when there is testimony from only one witness - with caveats and those who say we do trust the one witness, depending. Refining the dispute - can witness testimony be combined (that is, when the witnesses are not testifying together). Plus, a dispute over an IOU, which turns out to be forged - though the debt is real.

Are your clients prepared for the impending tax hike that could DOUBLE in the next decade? Don't let your clients get blindsided by this financial tsunami and help them strategize NOW to minimize their tax burden in retirement! I am excited to share my top 10 takeaways from the recent Heroes of Zero conference, where I got to hear from David McKnight, Ed Slott, Tom Hegna, and Van Mueller. Get ready to crush those retirement goals! Start implementing these strategies TODAY to secure a brighter future for your clients. #RetirementPlanning #CashValueLifeInsurance #FinancialSecurityHIGHLIGHTS00:00 The strategies to help clients minimize taxes in retirement.03:45 What is the concept of IRA as an "IOU to the IRS"?05:30 The importance of guaranteed income in retirement.08:00 Why you should leave life insurance over a lump sum for your children?10:00 The reason why you need a comprehensive retirement plan.11:45 Why you should ALWAYS choose appreciating assets.13:00 The importance of mastering your craft and becoming invaluable to your clients.14:15 Why is it recommended to have life insurance coverage of 20x the client's income?15:45 What is the role of cash value life insurance and annuities in an optimal retirement plan?18:00 What are the benefits of investing in tax-free vehicles and cash-value life insurance?RESOURCES + LINKSWatch the full episode on YouTube: HEREJoin Thousands of Insurance Agency Owners and Build Your Business - With our Proven System Responsible for over 200 million in Insurance Sales! FREE 7-Day Demo TRY NOW  Learn to Become a 6 Figure Life Insurance Producer HERETrain Your New Hire in Just 10 Days HERE   "Game Changer: Taking Your Insurance Agency To The Next Level" by Michael Weaver: Unlock the secrets to success in the insurance industry. ORDER NOWConnect Directly with Us:Text "BUZZ" to (816) 727-7610 to chat directly with MichaelFOLLOWWebsite: https://www.weaversa.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelweaverwsa/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/themichaelweaverInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_michaelweaver_/Youtube handle: @michaelweavertraining https://www.youtube.com/@michaelweavertrainingJoin Thousands of Insurance Agency Owners and Build Your Business - With our Proven System Responsible for over 200 million in Insurance Sales! FREE 7-Day Demo TRY NOW

The question that is circulating all our instagrams and the internet right now…be aware or beware when out with the girlies ordering the whole menu. The big question we all find ourselves navigating...who owes what and I O U's.

In this episode of Freshly Grounded, we are excited to have International Open University (IOU) as our sponsor! IOU is dedicated to providing accessible, high-quality bachelors education to students worldwide - from the comfort of your home. IOU aims to educate and empower students through an array of courses designed to foster intellectual and spiritual growth. They offer a diverse range of programs and tech through Islamized education. Enroll before 1st September and receive a 10% reduction in fees! Visit http://www.iou.edu.gm/freshly2024 --- We are joined by Dr. Asif Munaf on this episode of Freshly Grounded. We dive into the intricacies of balancing faith, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and the evolving mindset of Muslim communities in the modern world. Dr. Asif shares his unique perspective on the importance of risk in entrepreneurial ventures, the generational shift in understanding and practicing Islam, and the strategic thinking necessary for building a resilient community.

Get ready for a new drinking game! Play along with Katy as Hannah tells her the story of George Barnes (aka: George Kelly) and the spectacular, if not poorly planned, kidnapping he pulled off during America's Gangster Era. And see if you can figure out which infamous figure we're talking about before Katy does (no cheating!) From smooth talking bank robbers, to fumbled kidnappings (with IOU's), to an unnecessarily complicated ransom-exchange plan, the girls cover it all, and go through a whole bottle of wine. So pour your own drink of choice, sit back, and join us for this indulgence in Hannah's 1930's fixationSources:https://multimedia.fbi.gov/?q=&perpage=50&page=1&searchType=image&tags=Machine%20Gun%20Kellyhttps://archive.org/details/machinegunkellys0000hami/page/70/mode/2up?view=theaterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Gun_Kelly_(gangster)https://www.biography.com/crime/machine-gun-kellyhttps://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1933?amount=94250https://www.alcatrazhistory.com/mgk.htmSupport the Show.Follow us @thetaleswetellpodcast on Facebook and Instagram, or thetaleswetellpodcast.comSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/thetaleswetellpodcast?Click here for merch!

We're joined by President Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, David Stockman. He tells us what real estate investors and everyday people need to know. Stockman served as Reagan's Director of Office, Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985. He tells us to expect higher inflation and interest rates for longer, maybe even the rest of the decade. Don't expect rate cuts for a long time. The US is moving toward an unsustainable debt situation, with $100T in public debt expected within twenty-five years. We have embedded deficits. Learn why the recession has been postponed. David also reveals what will inevitably pull the trigger to potentially start the recession. Hint: Household budgets. Pandemic stimulus programs gave citizens $3T. Half of it has now been spent. He was also one of the founding partners of Blackstone. David Stockman tells a story about President Reagan's personal touch with him. You can subscribe to David Stockman's Contra Corner for free here. Resources mentioned: David Stockman's Contra Corner For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to our Ivory Coast, Keith Whitehill. There are some dire warning signs for the future of our economy. We're joined by none other than the father of Reaganomics. To break it down with us. Today is late. President Ronald Reagan's budget director joins us. When is this perpetually postponed recession coming? Why? Inflation and high interest rates could carry on for the rest of the decade. And what it all means to your finances and real estate today on get Rich education.   Robert Syslo (00:00:34) - Since 2014, the powerful get Rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from past real estate, investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show host Keith Wine, who writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad Advisors and delivers a new show every week. Since 2014, there's been millions of listeners downloads and 188 world nations. He has A-list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get Rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener.   Robert Syslo (00:01:08) - Phone apps build wealth on the go with the get Rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get Rich education podcast or visit get Rich education.com.   Corey Coates (00:01:19) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:35) - We're going to drive from Glen Burnie, Maryland, to Glen County, California and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Reinhold, and you're listening to get Rich education. We're going bigger picture this week before we talk to President Reagan's money guy in the white House. Understand that today's guest was also one of the founding partners of Blackstone, and they are in the real estate business. You're going to get a lot of deep, uniquely qualified insights today. And I'll tell you what's going on around here. Lately, things have been feeling awfully presidential between last week's program and now this week's program. Hey. Stars and stripes forever. Semper fi. Rah! Now, as the greatest detonation in the history of the world, how in the heck are we, as the United States, going to keep financing our debt now, you can think of a treasury, also known as a bond, as an IOU, as we take on debt to fund our government spending programs.   Keith Weinhold (00:02:42) - Really, what we do is issue then these IOUs to the rest of the world and then down the road. We need to pay back these IOU holders, treasuries, holders, whatever we've borrowed with interest on top of that. That's a really simple way to describe how it works. Think of a Treasury as an IOU. Well, we have $9 trillion in treasuries that need to be rolled over at higher interest rates just this year alone. Okay. Well, how does the market look for that sort of thing? Well, a lot like before you decide to sell a piece of real estate, you would want to know how that buyer's market looks. How is the buyer's market for us selling more treasuries, which is basically us issuing more IOUs? How is that world interest level in our treasuries? Well, this is a time when the world is selling treasuries. We're trying to get rid of them. Well, why would they buy more when we keep printing like crazy, debasing the dollars that they will eventually get their treasuries repaid in down the road? Case in point, China is down to just over 700 billion of treasuries that they're holding.   Keith Weinhold (00:04:01) - Well, they were 3 trillion not too long ago, more than four times that Russia and Iran sold all of their treasuries. Other countries are shedding them too, like Japan. It gets even worse than that because the number one holder of our own debt is our own fed. And then it gets even worse than that. Yet, because even our own fed is rolling treasuries off of their balance sheet. So who is going to finance this often irresponsible US spending the 10 trillion or $11 trillion every single year for the next ten years that we have obligations toward already, and it looks like all those are going to be at higher interest rates, too. Now, I am not telling you how to think about us as the United States, for example, sending foreign aid to multiple nations. That's up to you to decide whether it's Ukraine or the Middle East or Taiwan that gets political. And that is beyond the scope of GR. We are an investing show. What I'm saying is that backdrop that I just gave you, that's something that you need to take into consideration, is you weigh those foreign aid decision types.   Keith Weinhold (00:05:20) - Speaking of getting worse, do we at least have competent decision makers today? Now, as we'll talk to the father of Reaganomics here shortly, someone that served in an earlier era. Here's a clip from this era that really went viral lately, but it's apropos to play it here. This is Jared Bernstein today. He chairs President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers. How much confidence does this instill? And remember, this guy chairs the economic advisers to today's president.   Jared Bernstein (00:05:56) - The US government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money.   Voice (00:06:00) - Like you said, they print the dollar. So why? Why does the government even borrow?   Jared Bernstein (00:06:04) - Well, the, so the I mean, again, some of this stuff gets some of the language that the, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money. And then it lends that money by, by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They they, the.   Jared Bernstein (00:06:34) - Yeah. They, they they sell bonds. Yeah. They sell bonds. Right. Because they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So a lot of times, a lot of times at least to my year with MMT, the, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing. But there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to so, yeah, I guess I'm just I don't, I can't really, I don't, I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about.   Keith Weinhold (00:07:08) - Well geez. How's that for clarity and confidence from today's major decision makers on our economy? Gosh. Now, in my opinion, back in 2020, our government, they set up the wrong incentive structure to deal with the pandemic. Remember things like the PGP, the Paycheck Protection Program, remember mortgage loan forbearance and the eviction moratorium. See when that type of aid is given, well, then the result is that citizens don't learn that they need to keep some cash handy, and then that behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated in that behavior is handouts.   Keith Weinhold (00:07:53) - And then the expectation for more handouts. 56% of Americans don't even have $1,000 for an emergency expense. Well, see, they're not really incentivized to in the future. If in a crisis, everyone just gets another taxpayer funded handout, but then see those same people that got that handout get hurt in the long run. Anyway, with the longer run inflation that the handout created, don't let there be one day of austerity for the least prepared American, I guess. Instead, bail them out and add on to everyone's debt load, which you know that right there. That seems to be the playbook. Like that is the protocol of the day that is not responsible, in my view. Now, the minutes of the latest fed meeting, they said that some fed officials would be open to raising interest rates if inflation doesn't let up. I mean, that news alone that sent stocks plunging like they were riding the Tower of Terror, giving the Dow its worst day in a while. I'll discuss that more with the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman, today.   Keith Weinhold (00:09:01) - It's the kind of episode that can stretch your thinking here. Now, what is Reaganomics? Well, one thing that you should know is that it's committed to the doctrine of supply side economics. You probably heard that term before. And really what that's all about is lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, and allowing free trade and what was called the Reagan budget. That's something that his budget director Stockman expected would help curtail the welfare state. And he gained a reputation as a tough negotiator for that. He lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan today, and it's kind of funny with macroeconomic discussions. You'll notice something here, the word million, that doesn't even come up that much anymore. It's simply a number that is too small. It is more like billion and trillion. And hey, let's see if the term three orders of magnitude above trillion comes up today. Quadrillion, or even the one after that quintillion. Is that where we're going next? We'll see. before we meet David Simon, I've gotten more questions about something, because the national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings.   Keith Weinhold (00:10:18) - And where do you really get a decent yield on your savings, even beyond the 5% in an online only savings account or a CD, which that does not outpace true inflation? For years now, I've reliably been getting 8%. What I do is keep my dollars in a private liquidity fund. You can do this to your cash generates up to an 8% return. The minimum investment amount is just 25 K, and you keep getting paid until you decide that you want your money back. And the private liquidity fund has a decade plus track record, and they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know this because I am an investor with them myself. So see what it feels like to earn 8%. A lot of other great listeners are any investing involves risk, even dollars at a brick and mortar bank. So to learn more, just text the word family to 66866. Learn more about the liquidity fund. Get 8% interest. Just do it right now while you're thinking about it.   Keith Weinhold (00:11:23) - Text family to 66866. Let's meet David Stockman. A Wall Street and Washington insider and Harvard grad. Today's guest is a former two time congressman from Michigan, a prolific author, and he is none other than the man known as the father of Reaganomics. He was indeed President Ronald Reagan's budget advisor. Welcome to the show, David Stockman.   David Stockman (00:11:54) - Great to be with you. And, that was a while back. But I think there's some lessons from that time that we would be well advised to try to apply today, that's for sure.   Keith Weinhold (00:12:05) - Well, it's an illustrious title that you'll never shake. It's a pleasure to have you here. And David is a real estate investing show. At times we need to step back and look at the bigger picture. And now on the economy, one seems to get a different answer depending on who they speak with. You have a highly qualified opinion. What do both investors and citizens need to know today about the condition of the American economy?   David Stockman (00:12:29) - I don't think the outlook is very promising, but I think it's important to understand what that means for real estate investors, because the fact is, if you're in real estate and I know many of your listeners or viewers are very knowledgeable and sophisticated, there's really two ways to look at real estate.   David Stockman (00:12:49) - One is as a property that generates a flow of cash or income that is highly reliable, and that you can count on and produces a rate of return on the invested capital that's attractive. That's one way. The second way is that if you invest at the right time, when perhaps interest rates are falling and therefore multiples or cap rates are becoming more attractive and property values are rising rapidly, mainly because of easy money and lower interest rates, then there's a huge opportunity for capital gains. As another way of generating return on capital. But those are two obviously very different tracks. The capital gains route by old invest, improve flip flop the gain and move on or the, you know, income based rent and earnings based, approach to property. Now, I think the reason I went through this is pretty elementary, of course, is that the macro environment is very different between the first strategy and the second strategy. And therefore, the important thing to understand about the macro environment is which environment are you in and is it conducive to strategy a the income strategy or b the capital gains strategy? I would say right now we're totally in an incomes strategy environment, the first route.   David Stockman (00:14:34) - And that's because as we've gone through several decades of easy money, of rapidly rising asset values, of ultra low interest rates, very high multiples, in terms of property values to income that has generated trillions and trillions of capital gains for smart real estate investors. But I think we're out of that environment, and we're in an environment now where we're stuck with massive public debt and deficits. We're stuck with a, central bank that is, basically painted itself into a corner, created so much fiat credit, generated so much liquidity into the economy that now it will be struggling with inflation for years to come. Which means, notwithstanding Wall Street's constant belief that rate cuts are coming tomorrow, there won't be rate cuts for a long time to come. And what we're facing, therefore, there is likely higher rates for longer. A environment in which property values are flat if not declining, and therefore the capital gains route is not going to work very well. But if you have good properties with good tenants and good cash flows and, rental flows, real estate mine works out pretty well.   David Stockman (00:16:05) - But you have to understand the macro environment. And that's one of the things that I work on daily when I, publish my daily newsletter, which is called, David Stockman's Contra Corner.   Keith Weinhold (00:16:19) - You can learn more about Contra Corner, David's blog, before we're done today. David, you have a lot of interesting things to say. There we are in this environment where rates have been higher, longer. It sounds like you believe that is going to continue to be the. Case is rate cuts will be postponed is a little more difficult question. It's some crystal ball stuff. But can you tell us more about that? What can we expect for inflation in interest rates for the rest of this 2020s decade, which has about six years to go?   David Stockman (00:16:48) - There's going to be high rates for most of this decade because we have so much inflation and excess demand built into the economy. We really went overboard, especially after 2020 with the pandemic lockdowns and then these massive stimulus program, something like $6 trillion of added stimulus, was injected into the economy in less than 12 months.   David Stockman (00:17:16) - That created a undertow of inflation that is still with us. And despite all the hopeful commentary that comes from Wall Street, if you look at it year to date, I don't look at just the CPI because the headline number is somewhat volatile and can be pushed and pulled a lot from a month to month based on nonrecurring conditions. But if you look at something called the 16% trimmed mean CPI, it's just the same CPI, but it takes out the lowest 8%, the highest 8% of price observations each month out of the thousands in the market basket. What it does is basically takes the extreme volatility out of the top and the bottom, and gives you a trend that is more reliable if you're looking like on a quarter by quarter or year by year or even multi year basis, well, I mentioned this is important because the trim means CPI is still running at about 4.3% during the first four months of this year to date. That's not a victory over inflation. That's double what the fed says his target is. And frankly, the Fed's target is a little bit phony.   David Stockman (00:18:35) - I mean, what's so great about 2% inflation if you're a saver and your savings are, you know, shrinking by 30% over the course of a decade, so they're going to have a tremendous wrestling match with inflation, not just for a few more months, but I think for several more years in this decade, I don't see the federal funds rate, which is kind of the benchmark rate for overnight money coming down below 5% very soon, or if at all. And that's because with inflation running at 4% or better, if you have a 5% money market rate, you're barely getting a return on capital, especially if you factor in taxes. You know, it's like it's a rounding error and that doesn't work over time. I mean, you're not going to get long term savings. You're not going to get long term capital investment. If the return is after inflation and taxes are either non-existent or negative, as they've been for quite a while. So even though everybody would like to hope we're going back to the good old days of 0% over 90 money or 1% money, which they got so used to over the last couple of decades.   David Stockman (00:19:55) - It was bad policy. It wasn't sustainable. It caused a huge amount of bubbles and distortions in our economy. But once we finally got to the end of that in March 2022, when the fed had to finally pivot and say, yeah, inflation isn't transitory, it's, embedded, we got to do something about it. People think we're going right back to where we were, and that's the key thing to understand. We are not going right back to where we were, in part because of all this inflation business I've talked about, but also in part because they got so used to borrowing money on Capitol Hill and practically zero interest rates that they are now, you know, they have built in deficits of 2 trillion or more a year. And, we are going to be pushing into the bond pits, massive amounts of new government debt. There's no consensus to do anything about it. You know, if the Republicans talk about reforming the entitlements, the Democrats say you're throwing grandma out the snow. If the Democrats talk about raising revenue, the Republicans talked about, you're going to get slaughtered with higher taxes.   David Stockman (00:21:12) - And then everybody's for more wars and more defense and the bigger and bigger national security budget. And that's all she wrote. If you don't do with revenue, you don't do it national defense and entitlements. The rest of it is rounding errors. And so we're stuck with these massive additions to the debt. Now, everybody knows the public debt. Is 34 trillion. Ready? Yeah. What I'd say they don't understand is that by the end of this decade, you ask about the decade, right? Will we close to 60 trillion of debt. And, if you look at the last CBO, projection they do every year at long term projection, and CBO actually is more optimistic than it is warranted in any way. In other words, their long term assumptions I call rosy scenario. There's no more recessions for the next couple of decades. Inflation is well-behaved, interest rates stay low. Full employment lasts indefinitely and forever. Well, this doesn't happen. Look at the real world. Over the last 20 or 30 years, we've been all over the lot.   David Stockman (00:22:18) - So if you look at the CBO forecast, which is I'm just saying here is exceedingly optimistic. They never are the less are projecting that the public debt and they don't even write this number down in their report because it's too scary, will be $100 trillion before the middle of this century.   Keith Weinhold (00:22:41) - That's a.   David Stockman (00:22:42) - Trillion. Yeah. Now, if you ask people today who are market savvy, I like a lot of your viewers. Where are the Treasury bills, notes and bonds today? Well, if you average it all out, it's about 5%. I don't think it's going to come down much. It'll vary a little bit up and down over time, but let's just say it stays at 5%. That means the carry cost of the public debt of a couple decades will be 5 trillion a year. The interest okay. It's staggering. That's almost as much as the whole federal budget is spending this today at, you know, about 6.6 6.7 trillion. So that's where we're heading, a massive debt crisis because they built in a structural deficit that the politicians and I call it the unite party.   David Stockman (00:23:33) - They fight about silly things, but they agree on the big things which are leading to this outcome. The unit party has no ability to do anything about this structural deficit or the march from the 34 trillion that we're at today to 60 trillion by the end of the decade, and 100 trillion of public debt by mid-century. Now, for a real estate investor, that's probably the most important number you're going to hear. You know, at least this week or maybe this month or even this year, because what it means is that the amount of new government debt flowing into the bond pits, that'll have to be financed and that can't be monetized by the fed anymore because there's too much inflation, is going to put constant, enormous pressure upward on interest rates. And of course, higher interest rates mean lower property values. That's just basic real estate math. That's the environment we're heading into, which means good properties with good income and good rental flows are really the only way to go.   Keith Weinhold (00:24:55) - Yeah, well, there's an awful lot there.   Keith Weinhold (00:24:57) - And with this persistent higher inflation that you expect, the way I think about it is the higher the rate of inflation, the more that moves a person's dollars out of a savings account and instead out onto the risk curve. Well, David alluded to a problematic economy. We're going to come back and talk about more of those warning signs and what you can do about it. You're listening to Get Resuscitation, the father of Reaganomics and Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, I'm your host, Keith Reinhold. Role under this specific expert with income property, you need Ridge Lending Group and MLS for 256 injury history from beginners to veterans. They provided our listeners with more mortgages than anyone. It's where I get my own loans for single family rentals up to four Plex's. Start your pre-qualification and chat with President Charlie Ridge. Personally, they'll even customize a plan tailored to you for growing your portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending group.com Ridge lending group.com.   Speaker 7 (00:26:06) - This is author Jim Rickards. Listen to get Rich education with Keith Reinhold and don't quit your day dream.   Keith Weinhold (00:26:23) - Welcome back to Get Ready. So we're talking with the father of Reaganomics. His name is David Stockman, President Reagan's budget advisor. David, you've been talking about a problematic economy and places we can look and the outcomes that that can create. Why don't we talk about some more of those where we're here in a period where we feel like it's an official recession postponed, for example, are there other places that we should be looking? Is it the sustained inverted yield curve that we had for almost two years, the longest one ever, and a Great Recession predictor? Or is it that we're on the precipice of implosion from a debt to GDP ratio that's at 122%. It actually spiked to 133% when Covid first hit. Or for example, is it something and you've already touched on it a bit, is it more of that federal spending on our debts, interest payments alone each year, which had almost $900 billion for that interest line item that now even exceeds the massive $800 billion that we spend each year on national defense, or should we be looking at somewhere else? So what's out there that's really problematic and what's overblown?   David Stockman (00:27:28) - Okay.   David Stockman (00:27:29) - That's great. And all of those things you mentioned you should be looking at, it depends on your time frame. But I think on the initial question, where is this postponed recession? Why hasn't that happened? The place to look is somewhere that I think most Wall Street analysts aren't focused on, but they should be. And that's a series published by the Federal Reserve that tracks household balance sheets, in other words, liabilities and assets. But there's a particular series that I think is critically important to look at, and it's basically bank deposits, checking account savings accounts plus money market funds. This is all the liquid cash accounts of the household sector, not long term investments in real estate or stocks or bonds, but the short term money. It's the spendable money that households have now, what happened during the pandemic and lockdowns. And then the 6 trillion Is stems that were injected into the economy, like some kind of fiscal madness was going on in Washington, created a total aberration in the amount of cash in the economy, in the household sector, in these accounts that I just mentioned, normally right before the lockdown started and the stimulus was injected, you know, the level of cash accounts was about 12 trillion.   David Stockman (00:29:00) - Within two years it was up to 18 trillion. And normally that cash balance grows about the same rate as the economy. In other words, as incomes go up, people save a small share of their income that goes into various bank accounts. There tends to be a lock step relationship. But what happened during that two year period was there was so much extra cash sent out to the households with the $2,000 checks in the $600 a week extra stimulus money, and then the, trillions that went, you know, for things like the Small Business Administration loan program, which was all forgivable, was about almost upwards of $1 trillion. You know, we could itemize all the others. But this enormous government, unusual cash flow into the economy added to these bank accounts enormously. And then something else happened. The geniuses in Washington, led by Doctor Fauci, decided to shut down half of the service sector, the economy. I'm talking with restaurants and bars and gyms, malls and movies and and all the rest of it.   David Stockman (00:30:09) - So all of a sudden, the normal money that people would have been spending on the service venues, which is a big part of total spending, was stopped. It was kind of forced into artificial savings, sort of government mandated savings. Now, if you put the two together, there was about 2 trillion, extra transfer payments sent out to the public during that two year period. And there was a little over a trillion of normal service spending, restaurants in, etc. that didn't happen because there was a closed sign on the door, compliments of Doctor Fauci, or people were scared to death to go out because, you know, they created all this fear that Covid was some form of black death, which it really wasn't for 95% of the population. In any event, if you put the extra free stuff from the government, 2 trillion and the for savings because of these lockdowns, trillion, you have 3 trillion of unusual cash that flowed into the economy on top of the normal production. Income and profits and spending that would have otherwise gone on.   David Stockman (00:31:26) - Now that 3 trillion temporarily ended up in this account, that I'm just talking about the cash balances of the household sector and its peak, there was about 2.8 trillion extra compared to what would been be the normal case in a regular economy. In a normal economy, that money has been slowly spent down by the household sector, even as the fed has tried to put the screws to the economy. In other words, there was so much extra cash in the system that even as the fed raised interest rates from 0 to 5% and did their darndest to slow things down, all of that excess that was built up during the pandemic period was available to spend. It was spent. And here's the key point. About half of it is now been spent. In other words, there's only about a trillion and a half of the nearest 3 trillion left. Now that is what's delayed the recession. If that big, massive 3 trillion nest egg had been there and the fed began to push rates up as it normally did in a normal cycle, we would have been in recession months ago.   David Stockman (00:32:41) - But what has delayed or deferred the recession is this, cushion, this huge macro piggybank of cash that the government inadvertently or adversely is the case may be generated, during the pandemic period. So that's new. See that? Nobody looks at that because normally it's not a factor. You know, the cash balances are a pretty, prosaic, neutral part of the economy. They're not where you look for the leading edge of where the cycle was going or where new developments may turn up tomorrow. But this time, because of this total aberration of what happened to government transfer payments plus the lockdowns, we have a, X factor, let's call it in the macro picture that is confusing people. It's leading a lot of people to abdicate this no landing scenario. In other words, you know, there's not going to be a recession. We're just going to go on to bigger and better things. And, the fed will get inflation under control and then we can be back to happy times again. No, they're missing.   David Stockman (00:33:56) - The elephant in the room is this massive aberrational unusual one time cash balance that was, generated by these policies. And that still has a little ways to go now. I think at the rate it's being run down, you can almost calculate it a couple hundred billion dollars, a quarter sometime next year, all of that extra cash will be out of the system. And then people will be back to spending only what they're earning. And frankly, earnings they're not. I'm talking about wage and salary earnings, are advancing barely at the inflation rate at the present time. So when we get back to about zero real growth in earnings, we're going to finally see the recession.   Keith Weinhold (00:34:45) - I think one of the big takeaways here is that all these artificial economic injections really take time to unwind.   David Stockman (00:34:56) - Exactly. You have to look at, you know, they always say, well, when the government changes policy, fiscal policy, you tighten or you loosen or monetary policy they raise or lower interest rates. They got QE or they got cute putting money in or taking money out that there's lag and lead times in all of this.   David Stockman (00:35:18) - The problem is, none of the great economic gurus who talk about this really know whether the lag time is 12 months, 25 months, 50 or 5, and it varies. I mean, the circumstance has changed so much in a world GDP of 104 trillion, a domestic economy with 28 trillion of GDP, and all the complex factors that are moving back and forth in today's world, especially as it's enabled by technology and global trade and the internet and all the rest of it, nobody knows the lag times. And as a result, it's very hard to predict when the, brown stuff is going to hit the fan, so to speak. On the other hand, you don't have to know the exact date. You really need to understand the direction, the flow of things. And if you're in an environment that isn't sustainable because you're borrowing like crazy or interest rates or artificially. Low or stock price multiples are way the L2 ie or cap rates on real estate or you know, abnormally low. Then what you have to say is we're going to a different state.   David Stockman (00:36:35) - It's not going to be as conducive as the current state, and we have to be prepared for it, even if we are not sure whether that's 12 months from now or 24 months. But it's going to change. So one thing you can be sure of, there is a famous economist back in my day when I worked on Capitol Hill earlier on, he was Nixon's chief economic adviser in the early 70s. And he famously formulated an aphorism, I guess, which said anything that is unsustainable tends to stop. Okay, that's what I know about the lag times. We're in unsustainable financial, fiscal and monetary environment. And the trends that it has given rise to are going to stop and and not in a good way.   Keith Weinhold (00:37:24) - He even fed Chair Jerome Powell has confessed as much as that. This situation is indeed unsustainable, the exact word that he used. Well, David, this has been great in winding down as Ronald Reagan's budget director. Can you share any anecdote, story or quote from you spending time personally with Ronald Reagan? And the reason I ask is because he is perhaps the most revered president of the past few generations.   Keith Weinhold (00:37:52) - That might mean a lot to our listeners here.   David Stockman (00:37:54) - He should be revered, and not only because he was a great president and a great communicator, and did a lot of important things in policy. Some of them got implemented, and a lot of them were frustrated by Washington and the politicians and the Democrats and everybody else. But also, he was a great human being. And my story about that was when I was budget director, in the fifth year of the Reagan administration, we had our first child, and my wife was in the hospital. At that point in time, President Reagan was in Europe on a very important big international, series of meetings. But, somebody in the white House told him that our daughter had been born. And so he took the time out of his schedule for a call from Germany, the hospital where my wife was, and said he would like to talk to her and, congratulate us on our new arrival. But my wife was in a room with another, a new mother.   David Stockman (00:38:53) - She the other person answered the phone and she said to my wife, there's some joker on the phone with President Reagan. And sure enough, he was there. and he took the time to congratulate my wife. And, so that's the kind of, person he was. He really was a great human being.   Keith Weinhold (00:39:13) - Wow. Yeah. That really shows that he can still be warm and heartfelt, even while doing some key international negotiations there. Potentially. Well, we mentioned it earlier. I can tell you, the audience, that David is a regular author and contributor to his Contra Corner blog and letter, and you can get access to that for free. This is information coming from the father of Reaganomics to you. If you think you would find it a value. David, tell us how our audience can connect with you there.   David Stockman (00:39:44) - Just Google David Stockman Contra corner I publish, I have a website, issues a newsletter every day. It comes automatically in the email. I also have a Substack version. You can sign up for either one, the email from my site or from Substack.   David Stockman (00:40:02) - And every day we try to publish something on these issues that we've been talking about. One day it might be Wall Street, another day it might be Capitol Hill, another day it might be, you know, the war in Ukraine. All of these things matter. All of these things influence the environment that investors have to function in. So we try to comment on a variety of those issues based on, you know, the long experience that I've had, both not only in Washington, but also I was on Wall Street, for about 20 years. I was one of the founding partners of Blackstone, for instance. And we were in the real estate business in a major way, even then.   Keith Weinhold (00:40:44) - Well, we absolutely love that. And I sure am appreciative of your time. It was great connecting with you. And thanks for being on the program today, David.   David Stockman (00:40:53) - Very good. Enjoyed it.   Keith Weinhold (00:41:01) - Yeah. Deep insights from the father of Reaganomics. Stockman thinks we'll be struggling with inflation for years to come.   Keith Weinhold (00:41:08) - There won't be rate cuts for a long time. He sees real estate values as flat or declining, so have good tenants with steady income streams. Of course, in our favoured real estate segment here, residential 1 to 4 units where you can get 30 year fixed rate debt. Higher mortgage rates tend to correlate with higher prices, just like it has for the last three years and almost every period before that too. But there could be more pain for the commercial sector then, and assets that are tied to floating rate debt. And if you're aligned with David Stockman on that, you might want to look at your helocs, because after a fixed rate period, their rates tend to float along with the fed funds rate. So be cautious with Helocs and ask David for specifics. He doesn't see the federal funds rate coming down below 5% anytime soon, and you probably know that is the interest rate that a whole bunch of other interest rates are based off of. And that rate is currently at about 5.3%. By the way, there is projected to be more than 100 t more than $100 trillion of public debt before the middle of this century.   Keith Weinhold (00:42:22) - That's less than 25 years away. I mean, these figures just become unfathomable sometimes. Pandemic wrought inflation that really occurred due to this greater supply of dollars that was introduced chasing a reduced supply of goods. And there were fewer goods because people got paid to stay at home not producing anything. Plus, what had been produced often could not be shipped either. David discussed the 16% trimmed mean CPI, and I've got to say, as much as I am a student devotee in studying inflation, I had never heard of that from his vantage point to find recession signs, look at household balance sheets and what's delayed the recession is that those pandemic measures put an extra 3 trillion bucks into households, and households still have about 1.5 trillion left to spend, which could further delay a recession. He projects that it's sometime next year that all of that extra cash will be out of the system. When you talk to how many people got this recession predictions so horribly wrong? Back in October 2022, Bloomberg Economics forecast a 100% chance of a recession by the following fall, which is almost a year ago now.   Keith Weinhold (00:43:48) - Well, a 100% chance that left no room for anything else to happen. And they really whiffed on that one. Now, you know, I've got to add something here. A personal note if I can, but I'll give you a lesson along with it. And that is that at times like today, where I found myself one degree of separation from one of the most revered presidents in all of American history, I sometimes have some difficulty understanding how I keep having the opportunity to share time with people like today's guest. Now, I'm certainly not a PhD economist. And in fact, on the flip side, I've also never been a person that's been so poor and destitute that I was dying of hunger. But I do come from a modest place. When I flew the coop and left my parents home, I rented my first pathetic place to live a $325 a month pool house in the back of my landlord's property at 852 Spruce Avenue in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Yeah, a pathetic little pool house right next to the landlord's swimming pool.   Keith Weinhold (00:45:04) - I mean, I was living really pathetically there for a while as I was struggling just to do things like find gainful employment and figure out the world and find a steady income. Yeah, it was 325 a month plus electric and the one small heater that was there, it was electric and it was really expensive to run. And on the coldest days, it wouldn't even adequately heat my pathetic little pool house that I ended up living in for 18 months. And just because I couldn't figure a way out of that situation for a while, I mean, I was too ashamed to ever bring a girl back there to that sad pool house. It was just one sink for the whole place. Combined kitchen and bathroom sink in the bathroom. I mean, most of my friends, they got their driver's license at age 16 and they soon had their own car. I didn't own a car until I was aged 22 or 23, and it's not because I lived in an urban area and walked. Everywhere use public transit there in Pennsylvania.   Keith Weinhold (00:46:02) - It just took me a long time to afford a beater car and pay for insurance. I really needed a car and couldn't afford one. So really my point here is that sometimes I have to wonder how I got here from there. And I think what it is is taking an interest in real estate and investing. And despite just having a humble bachelor's degree in geography, it's really about becoming an autodidact, meaning self-taught. And it's easy to teach yourself when you find what interests you. And let me point to two other things besides adopting an auto didactic ethic to help me turn the corner into being in a place where I can have conversations like the one that I've had today. It was getting around aspirational friends. Like I've mentioned before, that showed me how I can start with a bang buy with little money. On my first home, I could put a 3.5% down payment on a fourplex, live in one unit and rent out the other three. And I will give myself some credit for doing those things. And then really, the third thing is that stroke of luck element, like just 4% of world inhabitants have been.   Keith Weinhold (00:47:15) - I was one of that 4% that was born in the United States. And then I had two great, married, stable, supportive parents to cultivate the right environment for me. And well, today was just one of those days where I sort of nudged myself and I'm glad that it happened. Most importantly, I trust that you got value from today's show and that you do every single week here. Check out David Stockman's Contra Corner. Next week, we'll look for signs of distress in real estate as we delve inside the foreclosure market and how you can find discounted deals there. Until then, Idaho's Keith Wayne hold don't quit your day trip.   Speaker 8 (00:48:02) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get Rich education LLC exclusively. The.   Keith Weinhold (00:48:30) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building.   Keith Weinhold (00:48:34) - Get rich education.com.

Learn the pros and cons of bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency. Bitcoin can be moved well across space and time. You can't move dollars over time due to inflation; you can't  move gold over space due to weight and security concerns. Real estate, bitcoin, and gold are all scarce and take real-world resources to produce. Bitcoin is a global digital currency that's decentralized. Nick Giambruno joins us to discuss why bitcoin has value today.  Since there can only be 21 million bitcoin, it cannot be debased like dollars are. By April, bitcoin will experience a halving. Rather than 900 new bitcoins brought into issuance daily, there will be 450.  The SEC's recent Spot EFT approval will give more investors bitcoin access. The higher the stock-to-flow ratio, the harder the asset.  What about governments shutting down bitcoin, regulating it, or taxing it to death? We discuss. Bitcoin price volatility is a problem in currency adoption. Lots of energy is used in bitcoin mining. But much of it is stranded energy. Bitcoin cannot produce income. Keith Weinhold stresses his preferred way to hold bitcoin. Timestamps: Bitcoin's value proposition (00:00:01) Keith Weinhold introduces the topic of Bitcoin's value and why it is relevant to a real estate show. Jamie Dimon's criticism of Bitcoin (00:05:27) JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon expresses his disdain for Bitcoin and blockchain technology in a heated conversation. Bitcoin's resistance to debasement (00:07:19) Keith Weinhold discusses the resistance of Bitcoin to debasement and the skepticism of governments and financial institutions towards it. The origin and value of Bitcoin (00:08:18) Nick Giambruno, an international investor, explains the history and value proposition of Bitcoin, emphasizing its decentralization and resistance to debasement. Bitcoin's hardness and production rate (00:14:21) Nick Giambruno delves into the concept of Bitcoin's hardness and its production requirements, comparing it to other assets like gold and real estate. Bitcoin's upcoming halving event (00:16:28) Nick Giambruno discusses the significance of Bitcoin's upcoming halving event, which will impact its stock-to-flow ratio and reinforce its value proposition. Bitcoin's scarcity (00:19:42) Bitcoin's limited supply and its unique scarcity attribute, compared to other commodities like gold. Upcoming halving event and Bitcoin ETF approval (00:20:53) Discussion on the significance of the upcoming halving event and the approval of a new spot for Bitcoin ETF, indicating the growing acceptance of Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a currency and value proposition (00:22:42) The value of Bitcoin as a currency for transferring value and its resistance to debasement, emphasizing the importance of self-custody of Bitcoin. Global adoption of Bitcoin (00:24:30) Comparison of Bitcoin adoption in different nations, highlighting the potential benefits for early adopters and the impact of Bitcoin on the world's financial landscape. Bitcoin's market potential and investment consideration (00:27:27) The potential market share of Bitcoin in the global economy and the consideration of Bitcoin as an investment asset. Government's ability to regulate Bitcoin (00:34:11) Discussion on the government's potential regulation and taxation of Bitcoin, emphasizing the power of economic incentives and Bitcoin's resilience to government intervention. Bitcoin's uniqueness and credibility (00:36:12) Differentiating Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies, highlighting its credibility and resistance to change, making it the real innovation in the crypto space. Bitcoin as a Store of Value (00:37:55) Discussion on Bitcoin's role as a store of value and its comparison to gold. Bitcoin as an Emerging Form of Money (00:38:25) Explanation of Bitcoin as an emerging form of money and its distinction from established money like gold. Bitcoin's Transaction Network and the Lightning Network (00:39:37) Explanation of Bitcoin's transaction network, scalability, and the use of the Lightning Network for smaller transactions. Earning Income from Bitcoin (00:41:40) Discussion on earning income from Bitcoin through related companies, dividends, and caution regarding Bitcoin lending services. Bitcoin Exchanges and Custody (00:44:20) The importance of custodying your own Bitcoin and the risks associated with centralized Bitcoin exchanges. Connecting with the Guest (00:45:13) Information on how to connect with the guest and access a helpful Bitcoin guide. Bitcoin's Energy Use and Price Volatility (00:46:01) Insights into Bitcoin's energy use, price volatility, and the use of stranded energy sources by miners. Real Estate vs. Bitcoin (00:47:04) Comparison of real estate as a wealth builder with the merits and risks of owning gold and Bitcoin. Disclaimer and Conclusion (00:47:54) Disclaimer about the content and a conclusion to the episode. Resources mentioned: Show Page: GetRichEducation.com/488 More on Nick Giambruno: FinancialUnderground.com For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Why does Bitcoin have any value? And why is a real estate show dedicating one episode to this topic now? The benefits and criticisms of the world's largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin today on Get Rich Education. If you like the Get Rich Education podcast, you're going to love art. Don't quit your day. Dream newsletter. No, I here I write every word of the letter myself. It wires your mind for wealth. It helps you make money in your sleep and updates you on vital real estate investing trends. It's free. Sign up egg get rich education com slash letter. It's real content that makes a real difference in your life, spiced with a dash of humor rather than living below your means, learn how to grow your means right now. You can also easily get the letter by texting gray to 66866. Text gray to 66866.   Corey Coates (00:01:06) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:22) - Work degree from Quito, Ecuador, where I am today, to the Mosquito Coast, Nicaragua, and across 188 nations worldwide.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:29) - You're listening. One of the United States longest running and most less than two shows on real estate investing. I'm your host, Keith Reinhold. Yes, we're a real estate show, but with 488 episodes, it's time to focus at least one of them. Finally, on Bitcoin. We'll bring it back to US real estate next week. Now, this is for a few reasons. Today, Bitcoin is largely misunderstood. It's become so big that it's hard to ignore. And there are two recent Bitcoin events two happenings with global impact that makes now the right time to cover this. Now look, I think that it's human nature that when you learn about something new for the first time and you don't understand how it works like Bitcoin, it's sort of innate to you start criticizing it or sort of discounted in your mind, chiefly because you don't understand it. Though Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin paper in 2008 and the first Bitcoin was issued in 2009. And, you know, when I first heard about it sometime after that, I probably discounted it in my mind as well.   Keith Weinhold (00:02:45) - And I think most people that don't understand Bitcoin, you know, they first think something like, oh come on, what is this. Just magic internet money. How does that work? How could that have any value. And I think is one matures when encountering the unknown. They inquire rather than criticize it. Look now and I'm getting really personal here, aren't I? I don't do drugs and I never have. But I don't criticize those that do drugs because it's a world that I just don't understand at all. Last year I was having dinner with a couple. They asked me what book I'm currently reading, and I told them that it's a 350 page book about Bitcoin, and the response was laughter, sort of dismissing it. And they said, well, how could anyone write that many pages about Bitcoin just completely discounting the whole thing? Well, for me, a turning point on Bitcoin is when I found highly intelligent people that understood it well and they were excited about it and they endorsed it. Now real estate has more intrinsic value than the dollar or gold or Bitcoin.   Keith Weinhold (00:04:02) - Because real estate is essential to your survival. You can make arguments that the dollar, gold and Bitcoin all have questionable backing. But today enough people agree that the dollar, gold and Bitcoin all have value. People are agreeing all three gold, the dollar and Bitcoin have varying levels then of anthropogenic faith. Today you and I, we live in a digital world that's comprised of 195 world nations. Well then, shouldn't money be made of something that's digital and doesn't know any national borders? Think of Bitcoin's value proposition this way you cannot move dollars across time. That's due to inflation. You can't move gold across space that's due to weight and security. But consider this Bitcoin can be officially moved across both space and time. Its supply is absolutely fixed. At 21 million, there can never be more than 21 million bitcoin either. It's traded on the blockchain, which is basically a digital ledger, but not every intelligent or influential finance person believes in Bitcoin. Of course, not every one of them. For example, it gets a little heated here from last month.   Keith Weinhold (00:05:27) - This is one of the most powerful men in the world. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. He's getting annoyed about CNBC asking him about Bitcoin just entirely too often. What do you make of the other firms the BlackRock's of the world.   CNBC (00:05:42) - That that obviously and Larry Fink change his view of this obviously. And maybe he changed his view because you think he genuinely believes in Bitcoin or or believed it because he thinks that there's a marketplace for it and he wants to be part of that market. But what do you think of the there's about a dozen big financial companies, fidelity included.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:05:59) - Number one I don't care. So just please stop talking about this. And and I don't know what he would say about blockchain versus currencies to do something versus Bitcoin that does nothing. And maybe that's not different than me. But you know, this is what makes a market. People have opinions. This is the last time I'm ever in state. In my opinion.   CNBC (00:06:18) - Gold really didn't do anything either.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:06:21) - Yet because it's limited in supply.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:06:23) - So it's and it's been used. Uh, so you think so, huh? I do think there's a good chance that when bitcoin when we get to that 20 million bitcoins 42 know that Satoshi is going to come on there laugh hysterically. Go quiet. All Bitcoin is going to be erased I think. How the hell do you know it's going to stop at 21? I've never met one person who told me they know for a fact they take that as it's not.   CNBC (00:06:44) - It hasn't happened because by the last one will be mined in 2150. And it gets harder and harder every time there's another halving. But but, Jamie, I do like looking back over.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:06:55) - Just do what you want. I'll do what I want. Ask for gold.   CNBC (00:06:57) - You can. The six characteristics that make gold valuable for 4000 years. They're all present in Bitcoin. That's all I'm saying. I love you and I don't want to. And I also don't I don't also don't want to be a you may enjoy Joe.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:07:08) - You may be right.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:07:09) - Yeah. Like I don't own gold either. So okay. That's what.   CNBC (00:07:11) - I mean.   CNBC (00:07:12) - Couple of quick final question.   Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase (00:07:12) - I like to own things that pay me incomes, but it doesn't cost money to carry anyway. And it costs money to carry Bitcoin to. By the way.   Keith Weinhold (00:07:19) - Uh, that was Jamie Diamond. Now governments and banksters like Jamie Diamond, they often dislike bitcoin because it cuts out the use of their chief product, the dollar. So governments are especially hesitant to want to promote bitcoin, a lot of them in the world. Anyway, I've got a conversation with a bitcoin expert coming up. We're going to talk about its value proposition and then the criticisms. Yes, I'm in Quito today. I was last year in Ecuador two years ago, this Colorado sized nation of 18 million people. I plan to attempt climbing to the summit of a 20,000 foot mountain later in the week. As for today, let's continue with why should Bitcoin have any value? Today's guest is the founder of the Financial Underground, and he is the editor in chief of that publication.   Keith Weinhold (00:08:18) - He's a renowned international investor, and he specializes in identifying big picture geopolitical and economic trends ahead of the crowd. And you've seen him featured seemingly in everything from Forbes to the Ron Paul Liberty Report. He was a speaker at the well-known New Orleans Investment Conference as well. Hey, it's great to welcome on to gray, Nick. Jim Bruno.   Nick Giambruno (00:08:41) - Hey, Keith, great to be with you.   Keith Weinhold (00:08:43) - I think a lot of our listeners are real estate investors are going to be wondering now, why are you talking about Bitcoin on a real estate show? Actually, I think there are a few more commonalities here than what a lot of people think. What a real estate in Bitcoin have in common. They're both scarce, neither can be easily deluded, and they both take real world resources to produce more of. You could apply those same three attributes to gold. So real estate gold and bitcoin they have this scarcity. And really I think that's a wise investing theme. Go ahead and invest in what's scarce. Limit what's abundant and take zero cost to produce like dollars.   Keith Weinhold (00:09:21) - So really that's the commonality between real estate in Bitcoin. But on a real estate show, I think we have a lot of listeners that just don't have an overall common understanding. Nick, of just what is bitcoin and why does it have any value in the first place?   Nick Giambruno (00:09:37) - Well, that is a some very good observations and a very profound question. What is Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is a relatively new asset. However it has been decades in the making. People don't understand that Bitcoin didn't just fall out of the sky, or is some kind of accident in some mad sciences garage. This is something that has been in the the works basically since the late 70s, and it came out of the Cypherpunk movement. Now, you may have heard of these people. You may have not. The Cypherpunks are basically I find them as the good guys. They are involved in creating technologies that empower the individual and disempower the state. They are behind some of the most prominent freedom oriented technologies that you and I may take for granted, including encryption.   Nick Giambruno (00:10:27) - And that's another story in and of itself. Let me just briefly get into that, because that's what puts the crypto cryptography in cryptocurrency. Cryptography is a very important field. It's basically the method of encoding information so that only the recipient can see it. And it's very important to understand that while we take for granted the average person has access to unbreakable cryptography today, that was not always the case. Cryptography has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks, and maybe even before, but it's always been a government monopoly until very recently in terms of historical standards, when cryptography was made available to the average person. That is a very profound thing, because now the average person can secure their information and secure their online life in a way that nobody can break. The US government can't break it. Chinese government can't break it, nobody can break it. And that is very important. And that laid the foundation for Bitcoin. So what is bitcoin. It's just a summit. But it is a superior alternative to central banking.   Nick Giambruno (00:11:27) - And that is a very revolutionary thing. It basically does the job of what a central bank does but much much, much better and removes all of the corruption, all of the nastiness that goes along with central banking. So what we have here is a genuine, workable alternative to central banking, and we can get into the details of that. But if you want to look at it, what it is, that's what it is. And at the same time, it's a form of money that is not just resistant to debasement, it's totally resistant to debasement. You're talking about gold and real estate. Well, gold. What made gold money over thousands of years? Yes, it is scarce. However, I always like to use this example. There's a concept that's related to scarcity, but it's not that it was scarce. And the reason is, is think about platinum and palladium. There's actually scarcer than gold, like there are fewer ounces of platinum and palladium in the world than there are gold ounces. So why don't people use platinum and palladium as money? It's a very, very important point.   Nick Giambruno (00:12:26) - The reason is, is because the platinum and palladium supply is not resistant to debasement. So it's scarcer, but it's not resistant to debasement. What does that mean? It means the annual supply growth of platinum and palladium are basically equal to the stockpiles. So depending on what this year or next year's annual production of platinum or palladium are going to be, it can wildly swing the market. That is not true of gold. Gold is only about 1.5% growth per year. And that's very, very consistent. What does that mean? That is a very important concept. So the gold supply only grows at about 1.5% per year.   Keith Weinhold (00:13:02) - And this is basically an inflation rate.   Nick Giambruno (00:13:04) - Yes it is its inflation rate. But it's very small and nobody can really change that. Think about it. There's a. It's not as if people don't want to increase the gold supply. They would love to. The way that the gold is distributed in the world, and the cost it takes to mining it puts a really hard limit on what you can produce each year.   Nick Giambruno (00:13:22) - So that's what makes it a good store of value. And if something is not a good store of value, it's not going to be a good money. These are some very, very fundamental concepts I'm talking about because they also apply to Bitcoin.   Keith Weinhold (00:13:35) - Then when someone asked me what Bitcoin is to give it a really short definition, I call Bitcoin a global digital currency that's decentralized. And you brought up the decentralization. That's really important. That's where I can make a peer to peer payment without having to go through an intermediary where I can send my Bitcoin directly over to Nick. There was no bank involved in that transaction, for example, the decentralization of Bitcoin. But we talk more about why Bitcoin has value. I believe you began touching on it there, Nick. Bitcoin has this hardness, which is a strange term to people because Bitcoin is digital. So can you tell us more about Bitcoin's value that comes through its hardness.   Nick Giambruno (00:14:21) - Let me just touch on a quick point you made also. So simply put, the value proposition of Bitcoin is that it allows anybody, anywhere in the world to send and receive value without depending on any third party.   Nick Giambruno (00:14:32) - At the same time. It's a form of money that is 100% resistant to debasement. That's its value proposition. That's a very profound thing. So going to the hardness. Yes, hardness is a concept that a lot of people get confused. Look, I love gold, I own gold, I recommend gold chain from the gold community. And I know the gold community. So I think a lot of people in the gold community get confused around this hardness now. They think it's hard, like physically hard, like abrasive metal. That's not what art means. Hard. And in terms of a hard asset, what it means is hard to produce. That's what it means. Yeah, that's what a hard asset is. It's hard to produce. And what is the opposite of that? Something that's easy to produce. Nobody would want to store their value, store their savings, store their economic energy into something that somebody else can make with no effort, almost like, you know, oh, let's put our life savings in arcade tokens or frequent flyer miles.   Nick Giambruno (00:15:26) - It's ridiculous when you think of it in that way. But that is, in my humble opinion, the most important attribute of money is that it's hard to produce all the other attributes of money. Quite frankly, are meaningless if the money is not hard to produce. Because if it's not hard to produce, none of the other stuff matters. And that's the most crucial attribute of money.   Keith Weinhold (00:15:45) - Yes, reinforcing why we have that investing theme of invest in something that's scarce and difficult to produce and takes real world resources to produce, much like real estate does. Much like gold with all the mining and assaying and much like Bitcoin, because to produce new Bitcoin, it takes electricity, it takes hardware and it takes software, some real world resources in order to produce Bitcoin. We talk about the production rate or the inflation rate in just a couple months. Here we're coming up on something really interesting, which is really one reason why I have you on the show talking about Bitcoin now. And that is the having event, the halving being that rate of new Bitcoin issuance is cut in half every four years.   Keith Weinhold (00:16:28) - So tell us more about that and bring the stock to flow ratio into the conversation here. We're at a cusp.   Nick Giambruno (00:16:34) - Of a very important moment in monetary history. Because you can quantify the hardness of an asset. It is quantifiable. It is basically the inverse of the supply growth. And there's another way of saying that, as you mentioned, the stock to flow ratio basically. In short, you got the stockpiles. That's what's available. And then you have the flow which is like the new supply. So the higher the stock to flow, the harder the asset is and the more resistant to debasement it is. And same thing when you take the the supply growth, you want a smaller supply growth. It's just the inverse of the stock to flow. So gold has always been mankind's artist money for thousands of years and gold's stock to blow ratios about I think it's around 60 which means it takes about 60 years of current production to equal current supplies. If you look at silver, it's much less than gold.   Nick Giambruno (00:17:25) - And every other commodity is closer to one, which means that every year the new production basically equals the existing stockpiles. And that's not a very good attribute for something that you want to have as a store of value. Now, what is going to happen in this having that's coming up in around April of this year? You can quantify the stock that flow. I just told you how to quantify it. So right now Bitcoin and gold have about equal stock to flow ratios in about equal hardness. However a key feature of the Bitcoin protocol is that every four years the new Bitcoin supply issuance gets cut in half until around the year 2140, when it is just goes to zero. So Bitcoin is not only going to exceed gold's hardness in a few months, it's going to double it. Now that is a very interesting moment in monetary history because mankind has not had a harder money than gold I don't think. Ever. So this is all going to be very important and it's coming very soon in April. Late April I think is when it's going to happen.   Nick Giambruno (00:18:28) - So a very important moment in monetary history.   Keith Weinhold (00:18:31) - There is real profundity there with the stock to flow ratio of Bitcoin exceeding that of gold with the upcoming having. And if you, the listener still hung up on the stock to flow ratio, we're talking about the ratio of the existing stock, how much of this stuff already exists, whether it's real estate or gold or Bitcoin divided by the rate of new issuance. So the higher the stock to flow ratio, and as it has the greater hardness it has. And currently 900 new bitcoins per day are being produced. And the having means just what it sounds like in April that will drop to 450 new bitcoins being mined into existence each day. So really you can think of Bitcoin as being disinflationary. It will continue to inflate until the year 2140. Like Nick described. That's when new bitcoin will cease to be mined. And until that point, the new amount the flow continues to get halved. Every four years, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin that exist, and 19.6 million of those have already been mined.   Keith Weinhold (00:19:36) - So you can get an idea of the hardness and how this helps supply the value of Bitcoin.   Nick Giambruno (00:19:42) - Well, absolutely. And it's he talks about that. I think it's something like 93% of the time, supply has already been mined, and the remaining 7% are going to come online over the next 120 years or so. You might want to get some before other people figure this out. There is definitely not enough Bitcoin for every millionaire to have one bitcoin, it's far less. I think there's something maybe 50 million millionaires in the world, probably more. They can't all have a bitcoin. It's a very tight supply and we have a situation here too that is related. Because Bitcoin is the only asset, the only commodity were higher prices cannot induce more supply. If gold went to 10,000, you can be sure there are going to be more gold miners getting into the business, more economic deposits being found and and exploited and more supply eventually coming on to the market. Great point. And the same is true for every commodity.   Nick Giambruno (00:20:38) - Gold is just the most resistant to that process. However, Bitcoin, no matter how high the price goes, it cannot induce the production of more Bitcoin. That's a very unique scarcity attribute that I don't think people really appreciate very much. It's certainly there.   Keith Weinhold (00:20:53) - So this upcoming halving event is one reason why I'm having Nick on the show now to do our first ever Bitcoin episode in almost 500 episodes. And the other reason is the nation see of the SEC approving a new spot to Bitcoin ETF. And all that basically means is it helps give everyday investors really easy access to Bitcoin without having to set up a crypto wallet and bam, hey, your mom can become a crypto bro now.   Nick Giambruno (00:21:22) - It is certainly a milestone in acceptance. I think it signifies that Bitcoin is no longer a fringe. It's here to stay. It took over ten years for the SEC to approve one of these things. I think the Winklevoss twins applied over ten years ago for the first Bitcoin ETF, so they reluctantly did it. I don't think they want it to do it.   Nick Giambruno (00:21:43) - I think they lost a couple of key court cases that kind of forced their hand, but they did approve it. I frankly don't recommend the ETFs. It's not really Bitcoin because what you have is a Bitcoin IOU, several Bitcoin IOUs. So let's say you buy the Blackrock Bitcoin ETF. Will you have an IOU from your broker for the Blackrock ETF share. And the broker has an IOU from Blackrock. And then Blackrock has an IOU from Coinbase which actually holds the Bitcoin. So I always tell people look it's a spectrum. If you want to take that trade off and you're taking a trade off for convenience over a security and sovereignty, if you want to take that trade off, that's go right ahead. But be have your eyes wide open and be conscious of the trade off that you're making. I always prefer to, uh, tell people Bitcoin is unique. This is a bearer asset. People forget about bearer assets. Bearer assets are a very good thing. They give the people who hold them ownership over them.   Nick Giambruno (00:22:42) - I think people who are interested in sovereignty. One thing too that's very important is that even if the Bitcoin price stays flat forever, it doesn't go up at all. It still offers people tremendous value as what we were talking about before, even if it stays flat and doesn't go up ever again, it's still offers anybody, anywhere in the world the ability to send and receive value from anybody else, anywhere in the world, and to hold money that's resistant to debasement, that's hugely valuable, even if the price doesn't go up. So and you can only get those benefits if you hold Bitcoin properly in your own bitcoin wallet, where you control the keys and only you control the keys, because that's who has ownership to this. Bitcoin is by who controls those private keys. You can just kind of think of that like the password dear Bitcoin. So that's what you want to do. If you can learn how to drive a car you can learn how to self-custody Bitcoin.   Keith Weinhold (00:23:33) - I love what you did there, Nick, because what you helped us do is you helped us transition from talking about Bitcoin as an investment asset to using bitcoin as a currency, if you wish to use it to transfer value.   Keith Weinhold (00:23:47) - Really, Nick, I think a lot of people in the United States, one reason that they're not that interested in Bitcoin is because our currency, our United States dollar, it sure has problems. It sure recently went through a big wave of inflation, but our currency just is not as bad as some of these worthless pieces of paper have been in the Argentine currency or in Turkey or in Iran or Haiti. So maybe Americans don't have enough of a reason to want to go ahead and get a currency that holds its value. So what are your thoughts with what people in other nations are doing, including El Salvador, with immediate legal tender versus the United States, where we have this dollar that's being debased but just not quite at the rate of most other world nations.   Nick Giambruno (00:24:30) - That's a good point. I see this in my travels around the world. It may seem like an advantage for the Americans, but I think it's a disadvantage because they're going to be catch on to this last because they're going to have, oh, we've got the dollar.   Nick Giambruno (00:24:43) - The dollar's great. So why do I need to look at other alternatives. And and they're going to be the last people. So you're going to have I think what you could see over this the next few years, and certainly over the longer term, is that countries like El Salvador, the countries that are experiencing the highest rates of inflation now and are thus more motivated to look at a superior form of money like Bitcoin or gold, but a lot of them are going to Bitcoin. These are going to be the countries that might fare better over the long term, because they're going to be relatively early adopters in this superior monetary technology. Nobody takes a horse and buggy from New York to California anymore. No, you don't need to because you have airplanes, you have cars, superior technologies for transportation. And likewise, we now have a superior technology for money, which is to say storing and exchanging value. That's all money is. People think it's all confusing. You need a PhD and there's all these charts and confusing jargon.   Nick Giambruno (00:25:38) - Money is not confusing. It's actually intuitive and anybody in the world can understand it. It's just something that stores and exchanges value. It's really quite simple. So now we have a superior technology for storing and exchanging value. And I think people who adopt it first are going to reap the most benefits. There are a lot of Americans who have adopted it, but they have been spoiled by the fact that the dollar has been the world's reserve currency. Now, I think that's going away. That's a whole other story. I think that's the two big reasons why, you know, you shouldn't just depend on the dollar one. We can talk. This is a whole new discussion about the dollar as the world reserve currency. I think it's going away. But now despite that we also have a superior alternative with Bitcoin. So yeah, I think the people who are going to adopt this technology sooner are going to reap the most benefits.   Keith Weinhold (00:26:24) - Well, Nick, in your opinion, is Bitcoin's takeover inevitable and how does that look?   Nick Giambruno (00:26:30) - I don't think anything's inevitable.   Nick Giambruno (00:26:32) - I think it's a good that I mean, if I thought it was inevitable, I would sell everything and buy it. I have a more diversified portfolio, but I have a strong conviction in it, very strong conviction in it. But nothing is certain. Nothing's 100%. So I never tell people, you know, and I'm not giving anybody any investment advice. I'm not a registered investment advisor or anything like that. But in any case, even if I was, I wouldn't tell anybody to go all in on anything. And that's certainly not how I manage my risk. However, I do have a very high conviction in it, and I think as it stands now, it has an excellent chance at gaining huge market share in the market for money. And people don't think of money as a market, like a real estate market or a technology market, or the market for any industry. But money is a market. It's probably the biggest market. And I think Bitcoin is you need to put it into perspective, the market cap of all the gold in the entire world is about $13.7 trillion.   Nick Giambruno (00:27:27) - The market cap for all Bitcoin in the world, last I checked, is around $850 billion. So we're less than 10% of gold's market cap. It has. And that's not even including all the fiat currencies. All the fiat currencies have a much larger market cap than even gold. So Bitcoin is just a blip on people's radars. So I think it has a lot of upside from here.   Keith Weinhold (00:27:46) - One important question an investor can ask themselves once they learn more about Bitcoin is, can I really afford to have absolutely none? You're listening to get reciprocation. We're talking with Nick Bruno of the Financial Underground Warren. We come back when now we've talked about the upside of Bitcoin. Let's talk about a lot of the criticisms you're listening to get rejection I'm your host Keith Weiner. Role. Under this a specific expert with income property, you need Ridge Lending Group and MLS for 256. In gray history, from beginners to veterans, they provided our listeners with more mortgages than anyone. It's where I get my own loans for single family rentals up to four Plex's.   Keith Weinhold (00:28:29) - Start your pre-qualification and chat with President Charlie Ridge personally. They'll even customize a plan tailored to you for growing your portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending group.com Ridge lending group.com. You know, I'll just tell you, for the most passive part of my real estate investing, personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom Family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in returns, or better than a bank savings account up to 12%. Their minimums are as low as 25 K. You don't even need to be accredited for some of them. It's all backed by real estate and that kind of love. How the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains and your W2 jobs income. They've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 66866. Oh, and this isn't a solicitation. If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to six, 686, six.   Keith Weinhold (00:29:52) - This is Richard Duncan, publisher of Macro Watch. Listen to get Rich education with Keith Winchell. And don't quit your day dream. You're listening to SOS created more financial freedom for busy people just like you than nearly any show in the world. This is jet versus cash, and I'm your host, Keith Whitehall. We're talking with the Financial Underground's Nick Bruno. We're talking about Bitcoin in a dedicated episode for the first time ever here in the history of the show. And when we had a chance to talk to Nick Bruno, you can see why we wanted to do this. But, Nick, a lot of people in the United States are concerned that the US government might do something similar to what China did and just go ahead and shut down Bitcoin and shut down cryptocurrency because Bitcoin, it basically competes with the US government's product, the dollar. So what are your thoughts when people say, oh I don't know about that. The government can just shut Bitcoin down.   Nick Giambruno (00:30:53) - I'm glad you mentioned China because the communist governor of China is a very powerful governments.   Nick Giambruno (00:30:58) - It's one of the most powerful and maybe arguably the most powerful government in the world. And they've tried many times to ban Bitcoin. You know how it turned out. It was a total failure because Bitcoin is basically code in its mathematics. So it's not the easiest thing to ban even if they wanted to ban it. You're trying to ban mathematics because that's all Bitcoin is. And further many Bitcoin wallets and it all works on cryptography. As and as I said, cryptography is just advanced mathematics. Many Bitcoin wallets have a way to back up your funds a 12 word phrase. So if you can memorize well words, which represents your wallet, you can potentially store billions of dollars just in your head. Now this is how are you going to ban that? You can't ban that. It's completely impractical. I always tell people, you know, look at how governments have tried to ban cannabis. Everybody has been able to buy cannabis in any city they wanted to. And then also other countries have tried to ban US dollars.   Nick Giambruno (00:31:57) - Argentina tries to ban U.S. dollars, Venezuela tries to ban U.S. dollars. You know what it does? It creates nothing. But an underground market doesn't extinguish people's desire to have dollars. And I think that's what we have here. I think economic incentives are more powerful than governments. And aside from that, I don't think that's going to happen because what they approve all these ETFs, that they were just going to turn around and ban it? I don't think so. Further, you have lots of court cases. There is established federal court cases that have ruled that computer code, which Bitcoin is just computer code, is equivalent to free speech protected under the First amendment of the US Constitution. Oh yes, I understand the Constitution is not people can change it and it's malleable. But still, that complicates any government's desire to ban it. They're going to have to overturn those federal court cases. That's not going to be easy. And even if they do, how are you going to ban something that somebody can just memorize with 12 words written on a piece of paper or in their head, it's completely impractical.   Nick Giambruno (00:32:58) - And then, of course, you have the example of China, which has banned Bitcoin several times. You know what? Absolutely nothing happened. But Bitcoin business is moving out of China and Bitcoin adoption among regular Chinese people going up. They can hinder businesses and large like entities that have big presences. They can hinder that certainly. But Bitcoin is global. It'll just go where it's treated best. It's like water. It'll just move to wherever it's treated best. I always say this too. So even if like the northern hemisphere disappeared, let's say there's an all out nuclear war between Russia and the US that will basically wipe out the northern hemisphere. You know what? Bitcoin won't miss a beat in the southern hemisphere. It'll still keep going in the southern hemisphere because it is decentralized and un over tens of thousands of computers around the world. And if even one of those computers survives Bitcoin lives on. So I think this is a very, very hard I wouldn't want to be trying to ban this thing because it's not practical.   Keith Weinhold (00:33:56) - Other critics say, all right, if the government can't ban it, well, the government can just then allow it make it be legal, but they can regulate the heck out of it and they can tax it at really high rates. What are your thoughts there?   Nick Giambruno (00:34:11) - Well, the government can do whatever it wants, but I think, yes, it can do all of those things. But I think here's the main point is that Bitcoin is we talked about economic incentives. Economic incentives are more powerful than politicians. And I think that's a truism. So as more people become holders of bitcoin aware of bitcoin, I don't think restricting bitcoin or banning bitcoin or adding regulations to Bitcoin or adding taxation to it, I don't think that's going to help anybody win an election. Is that going to help anybody win an election? I don't think so. That would be extremely politically unpopular. Yeah, that could happen. It would be bad news for the people who live in that jersey. But you know what? It's not going to kill bitcoin.   Nick Giambruno (00:34:52) - It's going to just be a hindrance for the people who live under these Luddite politicians who would do such a thing. But I don't think they're going to do such a thing. They just approve the ETF. I think Bitcoin has reached escape velocity in terms of its political popularity. I don't think anybody is going to win an election by being tough on Bitcoin.   Keith Weinhold (00:35:11) - A number of congresspeople hold bitcoin, Cynthia Loomis being one of the more prominent ones. And then you and I talked about the SEC spot Bitcoin ETF approval earlier. Well, that's a bit of a de facto stamp of approval on bitcoin really in a sense. And I think another criticism Nick, in my opinion this is easy to dispel. But some people will say, well, there are tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies out there. This stuff's just junk. There's something like hump coin that a prominent rapper promotes. I mean, all this stuff is just a bunch of junk. When all these cryptocurrencies come out. And I tend to think that's very different than Bitcoin.   Keith Weinhold (00:35:50) - Just like if there's some new stock IPO with zero fundamentals that comes out, I mean that doesn't diminish blue chippers like Apple or Microsoft at all. So I think of Bitcoin as the first or one of the first cryptocurrencies with a finite supply. So these overnight fly by night new cryptos I don't think that's really a very good criticism of Bitcoin.   Nick Giambruno (00:36:12) - No, I think this is one of the most popular misconceptions is that there is this crypto asset class and that Bitcoin is just one of 20,000 cryptocurrencies. And I think this is transparently false. It's like saying, oh, you know an increase in the pyrite supply is going to, you know, dilute the gold or something right. So it's kind of ridiculous. And the reason behind this is very simple. Bitcoin is the only one that nobody controls. Nobody can change bitcoin. It's the only one that is like that from Ethereum which is number two on down. They can be changed. A group of people can get together and change it. And in fact, Ethereum's monetary policy has been changed more often than the Federal Reserve's monetary policy.   Nick Giambruno (00:36:54) - It's just instead of the FOMC getting together and deciding what we should do with the money supply, it's a group of Ethereum developers and insiders that get together and change it. And the same thing is true of every other cryptocurrency. So that's the very defining feature of Bitcoin is that nobody can change it. That's what makes it interesting. If somebody could change Bitcoin, it wouldn't be interesting. And we don't need to get into the weeds of that. But needless to say, Bitcoin is the only one where the supply has credibility. We all know the bitcoin supply is 21 million. Nobody can do anything to change that. What is the Bitcoin supply going to be in five years? I could tell you with precision what it will be in five years. I can tell you with precision what it'll be in ten years. And you tell me what the Ethereum supply is going to be in five years. Can you tell me what the supply is going to be in ten years? You tell me what any cryptocurrency aside from Bitcoin supply is going to be in five years.   Nick Giambruno (00:37:41) - No you can't because it depends on how the developers are going to change it. So it's quite ridiculous to lump these two things together. They're entirely separate. Crypto is a cesspool. Quite frankly. Bitcoin is the real innovation.   Keith Weinhold (00:37:55) - And immutable protocol as they call it. Nick, I think one criticism is to pull back. We all know that money is three things. It's a store of value. It's a medium of exchange and it's a unit of account. And a lot of people say, I don't think Bitcoin can be a legitimate currency because all people do is store it. So it might meet the store of value criterion of those three. But I don't know about its legitimacy as a currency. Does that matter? I mean, people kind of use gold as a store of value, but not a currency. What are your thoughts?   Nick Giambruno (00:38:25) - Yes, it does matter. And it's a good question. The answer is is Bitcoin is not an established money. Take gold for example. Gold has been around for thousands of years.   Nick Giambruno (00:38:34) - It is an established form of money. Bitcoin is an emerging form of money. It's a very big distinction. So I personally think the way this will go and you know people disagree. But I think just logically, if you look at it, yes, story of value comes first. Why. Because once people store their value in Bitcoin, the monetary network of people who will be willing to exchange that bitcoin for something else grows and you can't have one before the other in terms of like nobody's going to exchange bitcoin if they're not already storing bitcoin. So the more people that store bitcoin have it available to exchange it for other people, it's like a network effect, any kind of network effect. That's a monetary network effect. And that's time to build further Bitcoin related misunderstanding is you kind of view Bitcoin in a different lens than just paying for like a cup of coffee, because that's really not what it's made for. The Bitcoin network has a hard limit on the number of transactions that I can process every day in order to keep it decentralized, because if it processed everybody's coffee transaction, you would need huge data centers to run the Bitcoin software.   Nick Giambruno (00:39:37) - The matter is, is that the Bitcoin software needs to be decentralized. So right now, anybody who has an average laptop, an average Raspberry Pi can run Bitcoin. That is very important for its decentralization. And if you were putting everybody's retail transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain would be impossible. You need large data centers. Now does that mean Bitcoin can't scale to become a medium of exchange? Absolutely not. You have to just think of bitcoin. What is a Bitcoin transaction represents. It represents final international settlement and clearance. So it's more akin to an international wire transfer. You wouldn't pay for a cup of coffee with from a Swiss bank account to Starbucks in New York. That's basically what you're talking about. What you do is you build layers. There are different layers that are built on top of that bedrock, which is the Bitcoin network that is immutable, unchangeable, and then you build transaction networks on top of that. So what we have with Bitcoin, the most prominent one right now is called the Lightning Network, which is another network that's built on top of Bitcoin that is really more suitable for smaller day to day coffee transactions.   Nick Giambruno (00:40:43) - You can actually send about 1/32 of a penny over lightning. So you can do all sorts of micro-transactions. Very interesting. So that's akin to, you know, like a credit card or a credit card is kind of like a layer two network that's built on top of central banks, which do international clearing and settling, and credit cards are built on top of that. And you can think of the same kind of solutions that are going to be built on Bitcoin. You're going to have different layers for different applications. And in terms of these medium of exchange and transaction network in Bitcoin it's the Lightning Network. And it's very exciting to use.   Keith Weinhold (00:41:19) - Yeah the Lightning Network it's been around for a while. It's been getting more adoption to help promote payments through Bitcoin. Being a real estate investing show here, oftentimes our listeners are interested in buying a property that will produce income from a tenant that's in that property. Can Bitcoin produce income?   Nick Giambruno (00:41:40) - Bitcoin itself cannot produce income because it's just simply money. It's simply an asset in the same sense that gold doesn't produce income.   Nick Giambruno (00:41:47) - If you want to earn income from Bitcoin, invest in Bitcoin related companies and Bitcoin related businesses that pay dividends. There are some and there is going to be many more. There are Bitcoin mining companies. These are companies I specialize in covering. In my financial research. They're relatively new. They don't pay dividends yet, but there are several that are looking to establish dividends. You can also lend your bitcoin I mean that's not bitcoin giving you a yield. That's you earning a yield from lending your bitcoin. I would caution you because there's been a lot of these kinds of bitcoin lending services that have gone bankrupt. BlockFi Celsius I'd be. And so whenever I hear about Bitcoin yields I caution people to be not just vigilant, be double vigilant of how you would normally be because there's been so many scams in this area and bad companies that have gone bankrupt. Taking advantage of people looking to earn a yield on their bitcoin. It's really a nascent industry. And you know what? Look at Bitcoin's compounded annual growth rate over any period of time for years.   Nick Giambruno (00:42:50) - You don't need a yield. It's going up if the trends continue. And I always tell people if you're going to invest in Bitcoin, have at least a four year time horizon, because that's a long time horizon. But the reason is, is because that gives you through one halving cycle, these having cycles go every four years. It's almost impossible. There's maybe a couple of instances, a couple of days where the bitcoin price wasn't higher than it was four years ago. So I always tell people have a four year time horizon when you're dealing with Bitcoin. And when you look at the returns, that could be possible. And I think the pastor. Returns. Past performance doesn't guarantee anything in the future, but I think that being said, we can expect this cycle to be similar to the other cycles. When you see that kind of potential, it should really make you not interested in these yield products.   Keith Weinhold (00:43:39) - You mentioned a couple of bankrupt crypto exchanges there, BlockFi and Celsius. I got caught up in some of that.   Keith Weinhold (00:43:48) - Now I keep all of mine on a hard wallet because really what these exchanges do is they're centralize something that's supposed to be decentralized like Bitcoin, and it gives Bitcoin a really bad name. Nick, I had some people reach out to me when FTX imploded and people said, this proves that Bitcoin is a scam. And I had to gently explain to people, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Just because Wells Fargo or Chase fails. We didn't say the dollar failed. It wasn't a failure in Bitcoin. It was a failure in these exchanges.   Nick Giambruno (00:44:20) - Oh, yes. This has been going on for a long time. And before FTX, there's Mt. Gox. There's a lot of these things. So I think the underlying lesson here in all of these examples is that don't trust third parties. And with Bitcoin you don't need to trust their authorities because if you can learn to custody your own Bitcoin, you are totally responsible, totally in control of your destiny. You don't have to worry about one of these bitcoin companies going bankrupt because you hold it and only you hold it.   Nick Giambruno (00:44:48) - And I think that's what makes it special.   Keith Weinhold (00:44:51) - This has been a great chat and I think a really good Bitcoin 101 for a person that still doesn't understand very much about it. And you help people understand Bitcoin, you do an awful lot of other things, including informing people about global trends and macroeconomics. So if someone wants to connect with you and learn more from you, what's the best way for them to do that?   Nick Giambruno (00:45:13) - The best place is Financial Underground Comm. I have a really helpful Bitcoin guide that shows people how to use it in the most sovereign and the most private ways possible, and I keep that guide up to date with the current best practices, because these things change very frequently. Like what is the best wallet, what is the best hardware wallet, and so forth. So I keep this guide alive with the best current practices. I think that would be a big help for people. Could definitely save them many, many hours of time by simply just identifying today's best practices. So I think that would be very helpful.   Nick Giambruno (00:45:45) - You can find all that at Financial underground.com.   Keith Weinhold (00:45:49) - Nick Bruno has been super informative. Thanks so much for coming on to the show.   Nick Giambruno (00:45:54) - Thank you Keith, great to be with you.   Keith Weinhold (00:46:01) - Another Bitcoin criticism is its energy use. Oh, look at all the electricity that mining consumes. What a waste. But the more you learn, you find that Bitcoin miners, they often use stranded energy sources that might not get used otherwise. In fact, miners have an economic incentive to use stranded and low cost energy. Volatility in Bitcoin's price has been a real problem if you want to use it as a currency. The price for one Bitcoin peaked at almost $70,000 in late 2021, and just a year later it was under 16 K, and now the price has swelled up a lot again from that recent low. In any case, if you choose to own Bitcoin or any other crypto, please store it on a cold wallet for security. It's a small device. It's about three times the size of a thumb drive. It looks like a thumb drive, and there is a learning curve that you have to meet in order to use one.   Keith Weinhold (00:47:04) - I don't own much gold or bitcoin, just a little. They both have their merits and risks like we've discussed. I'm a real estate guy. Even most gold and bitcoin proponents that I've talked with seem to agree with me that real estate is the proven wealth builder. I'm not sure if we'll ever devote another episode to Bitcoin here. I hope that today's episode at least equipped you to ask better questions, in case you want to know more about it. Today's episode had a more international than usual feel. Bitcoin has no boundaries. I'm in Ecuador and our guest Nick joined us from Argentina today. I'll be back in the US next week when I have some really important real estate trends to tell you about. Until then, I'm Keith Reinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 7 (00:47:54) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss.   Speaker 7 (00:48:09) - The host is operating on behalf of get Rich education LLC exclusively.   Keith Weinhold (00:48:22) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.com.