Shawn Ryan Show - #42 Rob Luna - Wealth Strategist on the Recession and Inflation

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Rob Luna is confirmation that the American Dream is alive. He went from growing up hungry and battling the tough streets of Los Angeles, to becoming an Ivy League Alumnus and earning MBA degrees in two countries. His 25 years of experience includes consulting with companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, managing money for some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, and building a multimillion-dollar business that was sold to a publicly-traded company. Today Rob oversees his group of companies focused on helping people build, grow, protect, and enjoy their wealth. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www.mudwtr.com/shawn (USE CODE SHAWNMUD) https://www.bubsnaturals.com (USE CODE SHAWN) https://blackbuffalo.com/discount/SRS https://bullionmax.com/srs https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.vigilanceelite.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Rob Luna Links: Website: https://robluna.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelunarob/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelunarob Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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this way, housing market, this way. So, we brought in an expert on the economy. We brought in one of the top wealth strategists in the country. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rob Luna to the show. He's gonna tell us everything about what's going on, where we can put our money, how we can keep our money safe,

and believe it or not, it's not all doom and gloom. There's actually some hope. So everybody, enjoy the show, and if you can, head over to iTunes and Spotify, leave us a review, let us know what you think of this episode, and if you would like, we've got a pretty damn good newsletter coming out about twice a month. Tell us what's going on with Vigilance Elite, the Sean Ryan show, when the guests are coming on, all kinds of good stuff. So go down in the description, click the link, sign up for the email newsletter. All right, love you all. I hope you have a great Christmas. Tis the season. Cheers.

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Rob Luna. Sean. What's going on with the show, man? I'm excited to be here, man. Great day to be here, too. Thanks for making the trip. So, what, like a month ago, almost to the day, we're sharing a bus

to pause up in Montana, not saying a word to each other, just the little head nod. The courtesy I'd love, yeah. Spend about a week out there and never saying hi. And sure of shit, now you're sitting here right front of me.

On the show, life works in mysterious ways, but I think like we both said, if we knew how much we had in common, we both had our wives on that trip, just husband and wife trip. It probably would have been a bad thing. I don't think our wives would have liked that much. It's a good thing we found out about

how much we had in common after that trip, I think. Yeah, small world, small world. We did, we had that much. So it's a good thing we found out about how much we had in common after that trip, I think. Yeah, small world, small world. We had that photographer. I checked his, I saw him post together. Is that what it was? Yeah, we took his class, yeah. And I was like, who is this guy? He looks familiar and then like, oh shit,

he's one of the top wealth strippers in some country and he's on Fox Business and everything else. And so. You weren't too shabby business and everything else. And so you were into Shabby yourself. Thank you. Quite honestly, Sean, I am a little bit intimidated by all the accomplishments you've had in your life and how successful this show has been. I want to make sure I don't screw it up for you, but I'm super excited to be here and I'll feel like I can give the audience a lot of value today.

Well, I appreciate that. Just for the record, I'm nervous too. I always get intimidated talking about things that I know nothing about in the economy and inflation. That's not my strong suit. We'll get through it together. But just a brief introduction. So, man, looking into, I honestly thought we were just going to talk about the economy and inflation and investing and all that kind of stuff. And then I started researching in and you grew up on the streets of LA. Sounds like you had a really rough childhood. Had a very entrepreneurial type of mind at a very young age to survive.

Took a job as a stock broker, trainee, that eventually what led you to Wharton Business School. Now you're a top ranked wealth strategist, CEO of Sure Vest, you're on CNBC, Fox Business, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, you name it, you're on it, so you're definitely overqualified. And I can't wait to dive into all this stuff. So kind of where I'd like to start is your childhood. But real quick, everybody gets a kill. I heard about these gummy bears. That's the one thing when I found you, I started here.

And I said, I hope by the time I get there, he's not out of gummy bears. So I'm gonna have you sign this though. I don't think I'm gonna eat this. I'll put this up on my shelf. Those are legal and all fifths. Yes, that's good. You can take them back to California with it.

Yeah, but yeah, I thought bearers might be kind of fitting for this bear market. Perfect, yeah, exactly. It's been better up. But. So I like to start every show off with a question from my Patreon. Yeah. We have a the Vigilance lead Sean Ryan show community over there. I give them insight on who's coming on the show. Told them you were coming on and I had a slew of questions. So if we do have time, I'd like to get like a second

exclusive interview with you. Sure. Just for Patreon. But this is from Justin Perry and I actually have the same question. What percentage of total investment should be distributed amongst hard assets like land, gold, silver, pressure metals, and how much in stocks and cryptos. He goes on to say that he's scared to basically invest in non-tangible assets, because he can't hold them. He doesn't trust them. I'm with them on that. I get intimidated by that.

I feel like the stock market is manipulated. Even starting to see that. I don't know if you know about this, but there was a precious metals thing going on with nickel and I think it was in England. I heard something about it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

You know, it's a question that a lot of people have and I don't want to, you know, shortcut it or dismiss it, but, you know, the truth is everybody's situation is different. You know when you think about hard assets for example raw land. You know the problem with raw land is it's not liquid. It doesn't produce any income. Over time it you know it does obviously have value and it's good you'd be able to hold on to it but if you get into a situation where you have a 2008, 2009 or a situation even like we're heading today and maybe a potential recession going into

next year, it's pretty tough to get rid of it. You're not getting paid to have it. And so if all of your assets are tied up and something that's illiquid, that's a little bit of a challenge. Where if you have, let's say when you talk about real estate, multi-family apartment complexes, for example, that's something you got people paying your rent every single month. You're gonna have that cash flow.

More than likely, that's not gonna drop down as much as something like raw land. But I think what you have to figure out first when you invest is what are you trying to accomplish? How much of that needs to cash flow to be able to pay your bills? How much are you just banking and you're sending away for five to 10 years?

So, you know, when people came into my wealth management firm, there's everyone's so used to me giving them the prescription. Here's what you need to do, where I really have no idea what to recommend until I understand what people are trying to do. So, you know, what I would say is first figure out where are you in your life. So if you're someone who's just retiring,

I would first secure cash flow through things like bonds, high quality dividend paying companies, like your Johnson and Johnson's and Coca-Cola's, maybe some multi-family real estate, really safe, secure stuff that you can get a check from every month. And then once you've got that paid, then you can see, okay, well, what's left? So let's just say I've got a million bucks and I've

got 500, I need to distribute towards these cash flow assets, right? Now I've got my bills paid for, I feel secure. Then you can start to take some risk with the rest of it. So if you want to speculate on some raw land, if you want to buy some cryptocurrency, if you want to have things like gold, if you want some more speculative stocks, that's what I always tell people to do. So I know everyone wants up, put 20% in crypto, 20% in gold. But remember, we're investing because we're trying to either obtain a lifestyle that we don't yet have, and we're trying to invest for that, or we're trying to use our investments to secure our future, to secure our current lifestyle. So that, or we're trying to use our investments to secure our current lifestyle.

So that, you know, I don't think people, most people think about that, it's just a potful of things that we think about it more, but more think about what are you trying to accomplish, create an asset basket that's going to first secure your lifestyle, then you can be a little bit more speculative on other types of assets. What is your favorite type of investment? Yeah, I personally like private equity companies. I like companies that I know are going somewhere that I can get in there.

You know, a lot of people like Real Estate because they can get in there maybe fix something up at value. I don't know how to even hang a picture, let alone get in there and fix Real Estate. So I think it goes down to what can you add value to. So I think a lot of people can buy distressed properties, fix them up cheaper than a contractor could sell them. For me, it's companies.

I can go and identify companies that maybe don't have good management. Maybe they're not using the right systems. I could add value to them. And I like businesses because business is cash flow. If you've got a good product. So if your Coca-Cola is always gonna sell Coca-Cola products, general, I'm sorry, proctor and gamble

is always gonna sell toothpaste, they're always gonna sell paper towels and rather what the economy is, and they're able, as we've seen, with an inflationary environment, they've done one or two things, they've raised prices or they've shrunk packages. Either one of them, they've been able to keep up with inflation really about 150% of the rise of inflation.

So it's a misnomer that stocks don't keep up inflation with inflation. They're actually one of the best assets to do that. But the problem with stocks, Sean, is people treat it like a casino, they treat it like gambling. And if you do it that way, it could be very speculative, but stocks over the long run have been the single greatest asset to invest in. There's been a lot of wealth created. And if you do it the right way, it could be very speculative, but stocks over the long run have been the single greatest

asset to invest in. There's been a lot of wealth created. And if you do it the right way, I think everybody should have a good percentage of their portfolio in the stock market. Interesting. You brought up people treating the stock market like a casino. And that actually sparks question for me. So you see all these people like me, who don't know what the hell they're doing. And they're on these things like Robin Hood, Cash App, I'm not on there, but you see a lot of them,

and it seems like it's like these moffias of novice investors, just throw money at whatever Reddit tells them to throw money. What is that like, does that make your job more difficult when that amount of people are engaging in the markets like that? You know, Sean, I mean, I actually welcomed it because I think what Reddit's done, what you're seeing with things like AMC and they call it the hate movement, all this. It's actually creating awareness for the stock market and investing that maybe wasn't there before.

You know, I think the information that's been out there prior to that is a bunch of talking heads, talking over people, people don't really understand what's going on. And I think at the end of the day, people think that there's these guys on Wall Street that's so much smarter than the average person. And it's really not true.

I think the average person, if they spend a little bit of time educating themself can just do just as good a job as anybody else out there. So I don't want to call that the dumb money, like other people do. What I would caution though is using chat boards, talking to your neighbor, that's not a substitute for educating yourself. So I think it's good in a sense, as long as you're not short-cutting things, even like politics, why do politicians put out 20, 30 second ads because they know that's how people

make decisions? But you really should be looking at the issues. It's the same thing with investing. Yeah, maybe you can get an idea from Reddit, but do you have the fundamental knowledge to then go back there and do the research to your own decide whether or not it's good for you. So I think it's good in a sense, but I also want to caution people out there that it takes a little bit more to put together a good stock portfolio than just a tip that you might get off of a chat board. Interesting. And I thought that

would have been a big pain for you guys in this industry with all those people. But anyways, let's get into your childhood. That sounds, I love it when I see people that come from a childhood like that, make it big like you have. I think it gives a lot of people that come from a background like that, a lot of hope. And it proves that hard work and some drive

will take you very far in life. And so where'd you grow up? Yeah. The funny part talking about this is we were just talking about this before we started the show is this is a part of my life for the vast majority of my career up until, you know, just about a year or two ago

that I really didn't let anybody know. Because, you know, I spent most of my career working with ultra-high network people. A lot of them, like I was telling you, the average 65 year old white person, a lot of them with Ivy League backgrounds. And where I grew up was probably the last marketing effort that I wanted to use and everyone probably went around the way, the other way if they knew the true story of that.

So, you know, now I've had a decent amount of success to where, you know, what I've found just kind of a mistake is by telling the story, it's inspired and motivated other people. So, I'm kind of happy to share it. You know, I grew up, well, I was born in New Jersey originally, moved out to Southern California when I was, you know, very young. I grew up initially with a single mother. My dad kind of left at a very early age. The challenge was my mother was drug addict.

She was an alcoholic and kind of in and out of rehab. And I had this period of time, we moved back to, we were in New Jersey before, I should back up before we moved to California, where I spent about three years living with my grandfather in a town called Westfield, New Jersey, which ironically is on, I think a Hulu show right now, they're doing some show about it.

It's blown up a little town called Westfield New Jersey. It was kind of, you know, American dream type of town. My, I'm Cuban and Italian. My grandfather immigrated through Ellis Island. He was a masonry and he actually started with his brother, a gravestone business, making gravestones kind of an unusual business, but bought a house in the 1940s and able to give my uncles my mama pretty good upbringing.

But it didn't really work out too good for her. Reason I bring that up is I spent three years living with him when my mom was kind of in and out of rehab or just kind of disappearing. From age six to nine, I still remember that. I really consider that my childhood and that was kind of a really good part of my time. But my grandfather died when I was nine. The house got sold and brothers and sisters split up assets.

And so my mom then moved us out to Southern California. She had a boyfriend out there at the time. And as I said, hooked on drugs. Who kind of drugs, you know, as I said, you know, hooked on drugs. What kind of drugs, you know? Cocaine, primarily, I eventually got into heroin, vodka bottles all over the place all time. You know, very, very abusive and pretty much every different way that you can imagine, different guys,

in and out of the house. Yeah, we lived in an area in Southern California during that time where 80s and 90s, heavy gang violence. It really isn't going on here now, but just some of the stupidest shit you could imagine. You know, neighborhood by neighborhood, like just to put an in perspective here,

like, you know, within two to three miles of a boarding neighborhood, because you were born in that neighborhood, like just to put an in perspective here, like, you know, within two to three miles of a boarding neighborhood, because you were born in that neighborhood, there was these gang territories where there was drive-by shootings going on every day. You know, people were being killed. I remember just about, you know, every two to three weeks hearing about either someone I went to school with or a friend being shot due to just senseless being violence. I had a half brother who was out there at the time who was involved with gangs, I'm being carcerated for life in prison for triple homicide during that period of time.

Triple homicide? Yeah, triple homicide. How old? He was 22 at the time, 10 years older than me. Wow. He was 22 at the time, 10 years older than me. Wow. And, you know, it was really at that point in time, the Mexican mafia that was controlling the gangs, primarily from inside the prison during that time.

And to the best of my knowledge, what happened was, in the late 90s, that all kind of stopped because they started to realize there's huge cracks that crackdowns and people that look like, you know, look like gang members, graffiti, all that stuff kind of stopped because they started to realize there's huge cracks that crack downs and people that look like, you know, look like gang members graffiti, all that stuff kind of stopped and they realized like, hey, this isn't good for business and the whole neighborhood gang stuff went away but it wasn't before, you know, a lot of people were killed, you know, I remember dodging bullets again the back window of a car shot out and not necessarily because you're a

gang member but because you lived in that neighborhood. That was really the kind of shit that was going on during that time. And it was just, it was a tough time. And I didn't, you know, Sean, I was telling you, I didn't realize it was a tough up ring until I was a dad myself. And you kind of look back, you're like, holy shit. Like, you know, and people ask where were you poor? I like, yeah, we were poor in a sense that my mom was like so strong out on drugs sometimes

that she didn't even remember from month to month the file for food stamps or whatever it is you need to do. So I remember, and I think one of the toughest things, like as a kid looking in the refrigerator, no food there, and you know, I was just telling my wife this story the other day, I used to, we'd go to McDonald's or Arbys and we'd get barbecue sauce,

ketchup packets, and we'd eat those. And I think of anything, but it was, yeah, it was a pretty tough time, but in the same sense, I think everybody has a path in life, right? And so, a path in life, right? And so, you learn how to be resourceful when there's no food in the refrigerator. And so I became a people person at a pretty early age. I would get in really good with my friends and their parents, get invited over to dinner and to eat. And I learned how to become an entrepreneur at an early age.

I mean, one of the first things I started doing, I would see when a friend would get a new bike. You have an extra bike and I'd say, hey, what are you going to do with that? I don't know. I said, well, don't you let me sell it for you and I'll give you a percentage. I started cutting the consignment business with bicycles. How old were you? I was maybe 11 years old, 12 years old at that time when I first started doing that.

And started doing okay with that. Obviously the job was like washing people's cars, cutting lawns. There was this thing called the Student Work Program in LA, which is a total scam, I think. This guy would pick us up after school in a van. We'd get a box of candy We'd sell basically at the time in the late 80s $12 snickers bars and $10 Reese's and it was you know supposed to go to some student program I think it was the guy in his van who was getting you know 80% of it But but you know it was funny. So I was I was telling a friend about this the other day and people were like

You're you're a great salesman. I said, well, I don't really think I sell. I just listen to people and I try to give them what they need. And I tell the story of going door to door when I was 13, 14 years old, selling candy. That was super expensive. And if you never have sold door to door, it's probably one of the telemarketing which I've done is tough, but going door to door and knocking on somebody's door during dinner with a box of candy you're trying to sell, isn't the easiest thing.

But they'd come out and I'd have my pitch from the student work program and I'd show them a Snickers bar and, well, we don't eat candy, but good thing I had tea in there and I had coloring books, whatever it was. And so, you know, it taught me, I guess, in my first early economic lessons, how do you price things? How do you sell things? How do you relate and understand with people and value people? Became very important.

But, you know, kind of fast forwarded a little bit. You know, did a lot of those things to kind of get through You know my mom was kind of in and out of my life. I slept on I don't know more couches than I could remember I spent the last year and a half Of high school living with my girlfriends parents. So yeah, it was a pretty A pretty shitty life I would say being a dad now and looking back and obviously like you are realizing shit, I would never want my kids to go through it, but I don't regret any of it.

I got involved with sports during that period of time and it was really, I think that that provided me an opportunity to get out of this situation because I think if I wouldn't have gotten out of LA when I did to go to college and I was 18, I'd either be in jail, dead, or I don't really know what would be happening. You know, one story I never told, and this is kind of what was the catalyst for me

to get out of Southern California. Now 17 years old, we were at a high school football game and kind of a big fight broke out after that rival gang members and everything that I was caught up in the middle of. And somebody there next to me, everyone was kind of fighting, it was like 50 people fist fighting at the same time. One of the guys who we were fighting with, somebody else who I knew from the neighborhood and older guy came and stabbed this kid like three times in front of me.

Yeah, and it was like shit. Like, first time I saw, and I'd seen these things, but right next to me, and everyone ran at that time. We took off, and about maybe 20 minutes later, police, LAPD came, 10 cop cars, chopper and everything, and about 20 of us in front of a house got pulled over to the side. They took all of us in, I was 17 years old.

They took all of us in to the holding tank and started questioning us one by one over about a five or six hour period of time. And at the end, it was myself and one of my friends left. Everyone else had been released. And I said, Quay, what's going on here? Why don't we go and I'm like, you're not going home. And they took us to juvenile hall. This was 17 years old. This is in San Bernardino, California.

And put us into, I'm like, what are we, what's going on? Well, we'll let you know they put us into a holding tank. Look up in the morning, they pulled us in. Put a red band on my wrist. I'd never been in juvenile hall never been arrested before. And they said, you're going to go to unit eight because you're being charged with attempted murder. I said, wow. And kind of fast forward the story a little bit. The short of it was,

they're questioning this kid had come by, identified. He didn't know exactly who it would have, but he thought it was my friend or I who stabbed him. And he probably didn't know exactly who it was because what was going on. And I clearly didn't do it. I knew who did it. But kind of the code was at that time, you don't tell who did it. Right? And this was a 23, 24 year old guy at the time and he would have been sent,

you know, a gang member had been in and out of prison and you don't tell. And if you do, your family's gonna be killed, you'll be killed, and so you'd rather just go to jail at that time, and so didn't say anything, just saying, I didn't know who did it, and kind of took the rap and proceeded through the system. And then in about 60 days, my public defender,

they're great, they were able to get it down to kind of an assault charge with the misdemeanor and said, hey, you're going to be on probation for a year. Do you want to take it? And I said, yeah, I want to take it. It's better than getting sentenced as an adult, which they were thinking of doing. And I would have never obviously been in the career that I'm at. So got released and went back, finished my last few months of high school. And my wrestling coach said, hey, I've got an opportunity for you to go out there. I was on a wrestle. I've got a job set up with you.

I started at JC and going to Arizona State. And he goes, I suggest you take it. And I said, I think you're right. And I took it and kind of the rest of the story is, we can get into, but. Let's go back real quick. Yeah, yeah. So growing up in an area like that,

I could, and being surrounded in that kind of an environment, I would think it would be really hard to find a positive role model. Yeah, obviously you found somebody who was that role model. Yeah, I think it was coaches that I had a few different coaches during the time, my baseball coach, my wrestling coach. And you know, and a few people have asked me this in terms of like, who is that one person who really turned you around?

Well, I think a lot of it was myself. Like, I don't want to take it where he credit, but it's like, yeah, they were there, but there's a lot of other people, and it wasn't like they were sitting me down, an hour or two hours a day. I just always thought, Sean, I'm better than the situation that I'm in. Not to disrespect her, but I would always look around the room,

and say, God, I'm way smarter than these guys, but I just didn't see a clear path out, but I always kind of felt like that would happen. And I always managed to, you know, that was one situation I got myself in a little bit of trouble, but I always managed to avoid, like I never stole from anybody, I never heard anybody, even though I saw that stuff going on, I always managed to just be a little bit too late to something or not show up. I always kind of keep myself in sports to just barely skirt those types of

situations. But there was one thing after that arrest, there was a police officer actually that came to me, knew me from the neighborhood. And just kind of what I always believed at what I was telling you that I was a little bit, you know, just better than that. That really wasn't where I belonged. He pulled me aside when I was released, and he said, you got to get the F out of here. He goes, you were too good for these guys. You were too smart. And he just said exactly what I told you. And it was the first time in my life that anyone had ever told me that.

And mind you, you know, if you look at me, I'm like I said, I'm Cuban and Italian, but I'm pretty racially ambiguous. No one knows exactly what are you, are you Arab or you Mexican? No, I really know this. I growing up in an Hispanic neighborhood during that period of time, because of every gang violence,

I started driving right at 16, between 16 to 17, I was probably pulled over in my neighborhood within a three mile vicinity, 60, 70 times, normally at gunpoint. Wow. Because just what police did during that period of time because they were afraid, like police were being shot at during that period of time.

So if anyone would have had hatred for the police and I wasn't doing anything, and never in trouble, it wasn't carrying weapons or drugs, like, you know, they were looking for, it would have been me, but it was that police officer, which is why I respect them so much today for various other reasons besides that. But that just was the first person to ever tell me that. And it was just, that was kind of all I needed. And so that's why us doing things like this. Sometimes person just needs to hear, you can do it. I can't hear a gun from that. Yeah, it's because my parents and I father you can do it. I can't be here. I'm confident in that.

Yeah, it was because my parents and my father never told me that, oh, I saw a few times in my life. My mother never told me that it was always the opposite. You're such a piece of shit. You're never gonna be anything. That's what I heard my whole life. So was that one thing right before I left, and then literally a week later,

this opportunity came, I took it, and just all that shit, I said, once I had an opportunity to get into the industry I said I'm gonna be the best I can I'm gonna outwork everybody I'm gonna put everything into it because this is probably the one shot I Haven't left to make something out of myself and it wound up working out. Okay, man. That's amazing. That is amazing Yeah, I mean Damn, you know, yeah, I look back and we were talking earlier, like everyone's got a cross, right?

You know, what you've gone through and other veterans have gone through, other people that have grown up and other countries, like, way, you think you know, you think poverty in the US, go to somewhere like India or some of these other countries and you see what, so everyone's got their own cross to bear. And I never look at it, like, oh, poor me, at all. And like I said, I didn't even realize it was bad

so I was older and I was like, shit, I won't even let my daughter cross the street by herself, right? So, I didn't realize it was that bad, but in the same sense, whether it was my situation or anything else, I think it's one or two things. People could either use that as a catalyst, which is what I did, and I'd look at my mother and my family and my situation,

realize, should I never want to do this in my life, and I'm gonna do everything the opposite, and motivation, or you can use it as an excuse, right? And I think more people, unfortunately, use it as an excuse, right? And I think more people, unfortunately, use it as an excuse, and it prevents them from ever doing anything in life. And so that's why only reason I'm sharing this now is because I'm just hoping where someone says,

well, yeah, that's me, or maybe, well, maybe I wasn't that bad. And maybe I can use that as a catalyst instead of using that as a continued crutch. I mean, now it's like, people can't deal with any adversity these days. Like they go to Starbucks instead of getting oatmeal, they get almond milk and they're latte and they can

days ruined, you know? So it's just like, you know, that's why I share it just to say like, look, no matter where you came from, no matter how hard it is, if you let that be an excuse and you let that be the roadblock from success, it's definitely gonna do that. Or if you lose it as the opposite to where I'm like, bear market, well shit, I've been shot at.

I haven't eaten a day, like losing 20% of my stock portfolio, I think I'll get past this. Like, you know, the adversity I deal with today is much easier than the diversity I grew up with. Well, I'm glad we're talking about this because you don't know what you don't know. And so everybody that is stuck in a situation like that right now, and even beyond that,

even Gen Z and a lot of millennials think that the system's out to get them and they can't buy house and there's this huge movement now to just if it's a little bit hard to get done then let's just victimize ourselves and come up with an excuse and then to hear a story like that where you've made it completely out of that and you're really you're on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Now that's amazing. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I agree. And I think it's some, you know, one of these things, our system, our government has all wrong today, right? It's the old adage of teaching man the fit to fish versus giving the fish. And we're so focused on

giving people the fish that, you know, they don't know how to fish versus give them the fish, and we're so focused on giving people the fish that they don't know how to fish for themselves anymore. It's one of those things, just like when I was a little kid, I realized I was better than that situation. When I first started working when I was 19, 20 years old in a real job, I remember people complaining about the rich and taxes and everything. A lot of people were against, people that were millionaires or whatever in this whole movement of like, well, let's tax them. I always said, well, no, I'm eventually going to be there. I just

want the opportunity to get there. When I get there, I don't want the government taking half my money, right? And it's just like when I, you said I, I sure of us, I sold my business a few years ago. And you know, this is a business I started with no money. I worked out in my bedroom. I couldn't afford a, it's a rental place. I worked out in my bedroom. The first year I started, I couldn't afford to pay my bills.

So my friend had a detail business. I was washing cars on the weekend at the golf course. I was doing different jobs. I was buying stuff and selling it on eBay. This is with a college degree and I was a stock broker at the time, but I couldn't afford to pay my bills. I had credit card debt at the time.

The reason I tell you this, but I built this business up to where I sold it for several millions of dollars. And when I saw the check that I had to write to the state of California and the federal government. Like I just couldn't believe it, you know, because they were never there for me the years where I couldn't afford to pay my bills. And then when you see what they do

with the money is even worse. Right. And so, yeah. So now you're looking to get out of California. So now, yeah, that's where, yeah, outside of obviously doing your show, we're looking at some real estate while we're here this weekend because, yeah, I just, I can't continue to pay them the money I can and you can't even send your kids to the schools. You don't even feel safe on the streets anymore.

I talked about gas over there being almost $3 a gallon more, with half of that just going to special interest taxes as nothing to do with the price of a barrel of crude oil. It's about special interest in Californians. And you know, capital goes where capital is appreciated, and I think the state of Tennessee gets it a little bit better right now than COVID. We do.

We love to have you. I'm not gonna lie, I was a little worried when, the last couple of years I've been worried seeing all the people from California moving here. Yep. But, I'm not going to import down from the politics.

We're just taking all the best ones and bringing them over. So it's working out pretty damn good, to be honest with you. But let's go back to school a little bit. So you went to Arizona State. Yeah, did you continue on with that entrepreneurial mindset? Yeah, I went to Arizona State. I started with a firm called Waterhouse Securities. They were a Newark-based firm out in Arizona during the time,

worked for them while I was going through college. They then were bought out by TD Ameritrade and they moved their operations to California. And I actually bought my first home in a place called Mesa, Arizona when I was 19 years old in college. 19? I was 19. I was working at telemarketing jobs, two telemarketing jobs after school.

And I bought my first home, $56,000 and Mace Arizona was a two bedroom one bath. I think it was about 900 square feet. But I learned really early on, I wanted to be an investor. I wanted to own property. And when they came and said, hey, we can give you a job out in San Diego if you want to move. I said, that might be nice. I was from Southern California by that time. I'm like, I may be safe to go back.

It looked like it was getting a little better out there until I looked at what the price of real estate was. And I realized that to rent an apartment out there, it was going to be twice the price of what my mortgage payment was. So decided to stay out there. And then I wound up getting a job for a hedge fund during that time. And then with the hedge fund, I was working on the institutional side, but in 2001, 2002,

the market, that was the previous market crash of the technology bust, we started getting a lot of individuals that wanted their money managed. So I realized, okay, why don't we start a private wealth management side where we deal with individuals? And so I wanted to do a designation program specific towards that. And there was a program through Wharton at the time that I applied for, got accepted to that. And then from there, it went out to Wharton.

I met Jeremy Siegel, who was the offer of stocks for the long run, just kind of life-changing meeting with him and decided a couple of things. First of all, Wharton was a little bit different than some of the stuff I did at Arizona State. And the level of education there was just amazing and realized it's something I wanted to be a part of. Applied for their advanced management program, which I graduated from, got a, became an alumni,

which then allowed me to become a fellow, which I was a fellow there for about four years. I spent about five years with Warden and just some of the greatest experience in my life, really changed my life and it's what inspired me to leave the hedge fund in 2002 and start my own firm. You know, first year wasn't that easy but ultimately wound up being a success of mine and then towards the end of the firm went back to school again did a dual MBA program in Singapore and in California UCLA Anderson the National University of Singapore, where it was an executive program where I took my business into the classroom, built it up,

learned how to scale it, and you know, left in 2016, we were growing 10, 12% a year, 16 to 19, we tripled revenue year after year after year and I learned, okay, I finally understand what scaling means. All these things that I've been practicing and learning for, you know, last 10, 15 years came into play and was able to sell that business. So education, like I say, and investing is just absolutely saved my life. It's been a game changer and what I love about it, it's a skill set that's allowing me to help change other people's lives

because there's so much misinformation, so much abuse out there of what's going on in the financial services industry. So, you know, if you hear about how I grew up and then what, from 18 to, you know, now I'm 48 years old, what my life's looked like, it's been the absolute opposite, exactly not the path I was supposed to be on, but tremendously bad bless.

And as we're talking, I'm now at a point in my career where I'm looking to give back. And kind of, you know, there's no such thing it really is true altruism, I guess. It's not that I don't get paid for what I do, but I'm able to work with someone whether they've got two dollars or they've got a bunch of debt now to where whatever it is they have to kind of give back and help other people put them on the same path that I was able to fortunately find myself on. That's got to be pretty rewarding. It's amazing. It's really good. Some of the things we're doing today and I've got another analyst that works with me because, you know, I just helped a family open up their first brokerage account with $200 and I feel better than some of the things we've done with families for a hundred million plus that we've been managing for the last 15 years. It's

much more rewarding. Wow. And I agree with that. That's awesome to hear. So you built, you basically built your business in school. I did, well, so I built it about seven years before I went to school, but you know, it's one of these things where I always tell people it's pretty easy in the U.S. to take a business and go from zero to a million. Like I hit a million dollar at my first million dollars

in income in my early 30s and I just did that by just bust in my ass My working seven days a week Calling people all the time bugging people showing up Five minutes early at everywhere staying 20 minutes later where I think if you just bust your ass and work hard because Fortunately for people who want to do that most most people don't, you stand out in a sea of mediocrity, and you're able to do pretty good, and you can just get yourself there. But to take your business past that,

like I said, I hit that ceiling about seven years into the business where I couldn't grow because I couldn't scale. I couldn't get beyond myself, and I didn't necessarily create a business like a lot of people I tell them you know, I really just bought myself a job Yeah, I probably could have been doing the same thing in Maryland or UBS I wouldn't be able to do it under my own terms but it wasn't a scalable business people were buying me and so the problem was I

Couldn't spend any more time with anyone else. I was maxed out. I couldn't work more than 12 hours a day, 13 hours a day. I couldn't work more than seven days a week. And that's where I really got frustrated is like, how do I get to that next level? And so a lot of people were confused because I was 38 when I went back to school. Like, why are you doing an MBA? Spending 150,000 in another two years.

And I said, because I just don't know how to, everyone keeps telling me scale. That's like the buzz word, because I just don't know how to, everyone keeps telling me scale. That's like the buzz word, scale, scale. I don't know what that means. You know, I'd been out of school for a while and I learned a little bit about an awarding but I said, like, I need to spend a little bit more time in the classroom, spoke focus specifically on this

and so I look for programs. And so this was an executive MBA where you had to have at least 10 years of work experience. And so it was an executive MBA where you had to have at least 10 years of work experience in it. And so it was really geared towards people to where the last three years in my business, I basically went into the classroom and took my business model, pressed other students, pressed professors, and got them to help me rework a plan to really learn how to scale it. And once I implemented that, I was able to see just tremendous growth. How do you hire? How do you create systems? How do you create processes? And as I said,

like, I was growing 8, 10 percent, the previous four or five years. We grew 100 percent year over year over year to the third year until we were bought. And, you know, I worked with entrepreneurs during that period of time as clients. And I started implementing those same things into their business, saw someone's business go from a $5 million valuation to about a $80 million valuation in two years, and I realized, shit, I've got something here. And so for me, when I sold to a publicly traded company,

so you get the big, when you're selling, whenever I tell people, when you sell your business where let's say $8 million in above, it's not like Joe below the accountant coming in to do the due diligence. They're sending the big accounting firms in there. They're doing heavy due diligence, a publicly treated company, turning over all rocks. When they bought my company from me, I could help other people buy, sell businesses, but when you're doing it yourself, it's a little bit different.

When they're checking under the hood, when it's your money, that's at stake. And I was 100% over on or on or the business at that time. When I sold the business and I saw what I was able to do, and this was in 2019, that was really the validation to where, okay, I got it, I got it figured out now. I know what I'm doing. I've done it for other people. Now I've done it for myself. And I realized I wanna show other people

how to do that on scale. Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are working really, really hard, but they're not working smart. There's things that they can do to change it. And it's the same thing with the investing, Sean. And why you ask about this red at movement, the shit's not really that hard.

What's, it's just, like there's things that you do, right? To where it's like, well, how do you do that? And it's really not that hard, but our industry, big, consultant firms like Accenture McKinsey, everyone wants to just keep this stuff a secret so they can charge people thousands of dollars a year, but it's like, if you're willing to work with me

and put in some effort for a year year to years, your life will change. Because you're going to learn off mistakes that clients in my life have made, I've made for 20 years, I'm going to alumnus of four different schools that I've gone through to create this row map. Shit, I'm going to be 50 in a couple years. I wish I would have learned this 20 years ago, but at least I finally got it. Now I'm trying to teach younger people how to do that themselves. That's awesome. Who, can you say who bought your company?

Yeah, the company's called CI Financial. So they were a Canadian company at the time, traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They wanted to get into the US market. So I, and they were gonna do that through M&A. So I was the first business they bought in the US, and they kinda used that and scaled it up. We're just under a billion dollars.

And over the last three years, they've scaled it up. So there are about 150 billion in the US. And they're now, they went public on the New York Stock Exchange about a year and a half ago, also. So a very fast growing company. Wow. How did you get that deal in front of them? Yeah, so everything, I'll tell you,

like one of the keys to success, Sean, just like how we met is relationships. You could be the smartest person in the world, but if you don't have somebody that's willing to open and adore for you, it's not gonna really mean anything to you. So going back to Wharton, Jeremy Siegel was involved with a company called Wisdom Tree. It's a big ETF fund, which is a mutual fund type of deal.

They asked me to go and sit on the board over there. I sat on the board for about a year of Wisdom Tree, and the guy, his name is Kurt McCalpine, who was kind of next to be CEO of a company, was recruited away by CI to be the CEO of CI financially was 38 at the time. The youngest CEO ever of a publicly trading company over there. So he had to sell them pretty hard of how they were going to grow. They'd always hired from within. This is the first time they looked outward. He said, I'm going to grow your business into the US. And we're going to grow in scale.

The RA business, which means registered investment advisor, which firms that give advice for a fee. And he said, I'm going to grow and scale that business. And two weeks after he was hired from what he tells me, I was the first call that he made here in the US. And he said, hey, I want to talk to you about something and we sat down and I had no idea who the hell C.I.F. financial was.

But I'm a, why going back to why I like investing in businesses? I like people. I invest in people. And I knew Kurt was going to be a rock star. And so my bet was on Kurt and kind of went in and sold to him. I said, hey, I'll give you three years, Kurt. I don't know that I'm going to survive well on the world of publicly traded companies, but I'll give you three years and wind up selling to him. It's been a good run, but I've

realized I'm not a publicly traded kind of guy. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. This next month will be my last month there. Was it hard for you to sell your baby like that? You know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't Sean because a couple of things. I realized, even though I was able to grow the business exponentially for the last three years, I realized there was a lot of legacy issues

that I didn't like. And I also realized in that business that we were overcharging people. Right? I realized as I was able to scale, these certain things can be done a lot more efficiently, a lot leaner than what we're doing before. And at the end of the day, what I wanted to do was create a system and a model that was way cheaper than what we were doing, but the problem was, if I'm going to charge 20 to 30% more, less, I'm sorry, 20 to 30% of what I was charging, but my cost structure to advisors, for example, is way higher than that.

Well, I can't charge my top line less than what I'm paying my advisors. That's not going to work. So I had set up a business model that I was pretty much trapped into. And so when they came along, I said, this is probably a time to get out. And I negotiated, obviously, to where I said, if I could just get enough money to kind of take care of myself and my family, spend these three years, that'll allow me to then go and maybe not build the business that I had, but the business that I want to build. And that's kind of what this gave me the opportunity to do, because I just think the traditional wealth management model, the way Wall Street does things right now, it's just broken, it's too expensive, it's too slow, it's not giving people what they need, but it's kind of hard

to disrupt yourself, right? You got to be able to feed yourself. And so it was kind of the right opportunity to allow me to kind of get out of a model I didn't believe in any longer. Interesting, very interesting. Let's take a quick break. Yep. Sirius question, who wants to take the best shit of their entire life?

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tribute company to Glenn Bubs Dordy who is a Navy SEAL and a CIA contractor who died defending American freedom in Benghazi, Libya. Bubs donates 10% of all proceeds to veteran organizations like the Glenn Dirty Foundation and 100% of all proceeds on Veterans Day. Let me tell you about Bubs' latest product that helps with energy, healthy digestion, your immune system, and your metabolism. Bub's natural apple cider vinegar gummies, which actually tastes so damn good that I ate all 60 of them the first night I got them.

They taste amazing and man, I got a lot of energy now. Anyways, go to bobsnatrals.com, use promo code Sean to take 20% off your order. Thank you, bobsnatrals, for being a sponsor of the Sean Ryan Show. All right, Rob, we covered a lot of your background, except a couple of questions. Yeah. How long did it take you to make your first million doing that?

My first million in the industry is I started my early 20s, probably about my first year, I mean a million, I think it was 32, so probably about 12 years. 12 years? Yeah, 12 years. Twelve years? Yeah, 12 years. And that's another point. It was a tough industry, but I think there's a lot of tough industries to where I think

people give up a little bit too soon on things. I've got a buddy who I always talk about. I use him as an example, unfortunately, but he was in that same training class at Waterhouse that I was in. We had the same opportunity. But when things got tough in 2000, we weren't making any money. He decided to go to leave the industry and do some sales job.

I forgot where. But I didn't talk to him in a few years. And then it was, you know, made public when I sold my business. He called me up and took a gradually, and he said, you know what, man, I wish I would have, I wish I would have stuck it out. I wish I would have stayed in the industry and he said, you know, I'd mean a mistake, he

goes job, job, job hopping, this to that, to this to that, trying to catch the next trend, selling solar, doing all these things. And he said, dude, I'll be lucky if I could even pay my mortgage this year, barely scrape them by, but it's two situations we both had this. And he had a pretty easy childhood unlike me. And maybe that was part of the problem, right? As things are a little bit too easy. But yeah, you took me, I tell people,

before I knew what I was doing as a financial advisor, and before I made any money, it was over a decade that I had to stick through it. When you hit your first million, did you feel this huge sense of accomplishment or was it that's great let's get back to work. Reason I ask is because a lot of high performers a lot of very driven people that never I'm one of them. Yeah I never take the time to celebrate the wins it's always I'll get all pissed off about the losses. Yeah yeah yeah I never take the time to celebrate the wins. It's always, I'll get all pissed off about the losses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I never take time to celebrate the wins.

It drives my wife crazy. Well, as you said that, I'm thinking, my wife's trying to give me the change that a little bit. You know, I'm just trying to remember back how I felt, I didn't give you an honest answer, but yeah, to that point, I don't think so because my whole idea is where I knew where I wanted to go and I was still so far. And one of the blessings and curses about my business, I was working with people that were

worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? So it's all relative to where I mean a million, but this guy's tax bill last year was three and a half for a million, but that's not even, this guy's tax bill last year was three and a half, four million bucks. So yeah, I'd ever consent in today, by no means do I consider myself wealthy. So I just say that because people want to know, like for some reason that's the mystery number, how long did it take you to get to a million bucks?

I think it was, I was 31, 32, so about 11 to 12 years before I made my first million. Okay, yeah. When you started, how were you Mark? How were you getting in with these people? I was 31, 32, so about 11 to 12 years before I made my first million. Okay. Yeah. When you started, how were you Mark? How were you getting in with these people? Yeah, so great question. So when I first started, when I first started in the industry,

you know, they told me Sean was, write down a list of all the people, you know, that have money. And then, and give them, that's the thing, the guys on the street, then give them, give them a call and see if they'll invest with you. So that took me about 14 seconds to act like I was gonna write something down. No, I didn't.

So I started cold calling. I started calling people out of the yellow pages back then when people used to do that. And I brought a few clients on, but I think going back to relationships, I had one opportunity, a guy named Anthony Pinto, early on in my career, my first year, he was a CPA from Brooklyn, he was out in Arizona at the time, and met him and asked him to manage some money for

him. I didn't even know he was a CPA at the time, he said, yeah, to me, what he did, he said, look, I'll give you one of my accounts and one of my family's accounts. And you manage it for a year. And if you do a good job, I'll then refer you to some of my clients. And people who don't know for financial advisors, the best place to get business or referrals is from a CPA because the CPA is looking at how much money they make, what type of things they should be doing on the investment side, and a lot of people trust their CPA, so for recommendation comes from him, it's usually pretty good.

So I credit Anthony, this was back in 0203, for really kind of putting me on the map, with my first million dollar types of clients, before then I was working with just about anybody, 20 grand, whatever it is you want to invest, I was doing it. That was my first time. Now that I was excited about because the first time someone gave me a million dollars to invest I was like, okay, finally, I was 27 years old and I came from nothing and I was said, okay, and that person is still a client today. I think she's 81 years old now that person is still a client today. I think she's 81 years old now. She's been a client of mine for almost 20 years.

And she is out in New York. My wife and I just went ahead lunch with her out in New York a couple of weeks ago. Just a great woman. And that's one thing you gotta just appreciate the people that gave you your start. And so, yeah, without her and that's what, you know, one thing you gotta just appreciate the people that gave you your start. And so, yeah, without her and people like Anthony, it never would have opened the door.

And it's just one of those things that's like, what is it, Roger Battister? Once he broke the, was it three minute mile or whatever, all of a sudden, everybody started to do it. Like, no one believed they could do it. So once I broke that, it gave me the confidence to where,

yeah, my men own is a million, of course. course. You know, so just one million dollar plus client came and then it was five million minimum, ten million dollar. And when I finished, it was twenty five million dollar minimum just a few years ago. Well, coming from the background and the childhood that you came from, were you intimidated by the... Yeah, I was... I was well I was super intimidated for probably the first 13 to 14 years and I and I had especially you know I made you know I first million dollars and so yeah I guess

now that I'm thinking about it I had impostor syndrome right I was thinking like I shouldn't be making you start guilty or like am I telling people the right thing? Am I putting them in something that I shouldn't be? Like I really started worrying about like, why am I making a million dollars? So when I think I never really congratulated myself, I was just worried that it could end.

You know, because I knew where I came from and I never wanted to be poor again. And again, I was dealing with people that were just so far away from what I grew up with and out of my league. And so outside of learning finance, I was going to first growth wineries and I was learning about fine art and I was learning how to tie a double winzer knot. And so I was trying to immerse myself into that culture.

And so with a genuine interest and I wanted to learn it, but in a way, you feel like a little bit of an imposter. And quite honestly, I started to learn so much that I had people that were 65 years old coming ask me about what wine to buy when I was 30 or 31 years of age. So yeah, I mean, I felt a little bit guilty, a little bit worried.

But then say, and definitely intimidated until I became an alumnus awarding. And so that's why I even, like, Wharton doesn't need any money, but I give them money just because they bet on me, right? They gave me a chance. And then I even bought the big book, right? For Wharton the year that I got alumnus status and my name was in there. And I had no family members even book for Wharton the year that I got to love my status.

And my name was in there. And I had no family members even knew what Wharton was or anything. I don't have one family member that I talked to now. But the sense of pride and accomplishment that I had. And I started to realize about 10 years ago that I was pretty good at what I was doing. And I started learning that when I would go away from the people that I listened to on

television, books that I read, and did things the way I thought they should be that the results were actually better. And so I had, you know, it took me about 15 years before I was in the industry. I started doing things on my own to where I started to believe in my own opinion, my own credibility, because I saw it. And I saw things I was doing on the side of my own money versus what I was doing more industry specific and status quo for my clients that was what everyone should be doing.

And I was making two to three times more money. There's something wrong with, you know, this, it's called modern portfolio theory that's been taught since the 1950s. Everyone just kind of follows. And I don't believe in it. I'm doing different things with my, different things with my money. And then that's why I started working with higher net worth clients because they had, you know, when you deal with higher net worth clients in my business, you could take on some

more risk with them. They have money that doesn't have to be in the traditional types of models. And so I started implementing those strategies with them. And that in terms of my career in business I started getting me working with the ultra-high network celebrity athletes. That's what did it is when I started delivering returns to them. And that's I think the point in time where I realized,

okay, I deserve to be at this table. And now I'm at a point where I feel like I could sit with anybody as long as I'm talking about, economics or finance, and I deserve to be at that table, we might have a difference of opinion, but it's really good when you know you can't be discredited.

Yeah. But that takes a long time. And I still have a long way to go, but it takes a long time to feel that level of confidence. I think once you do that, that's really when you feel freedom as a person and what you're doing. Not covered in the impostor, Central.

Scale in your business. Yeah. How did you scale it? So you went to school to learn how to scale it. Actually, what is your definition of scaling the business? Yeah, so the definition of scaling the business is, you know, what I always ask people, right? I can ask you is,

the business is, you know what I always ask people, right? I could ask you is, if can your business function without you? No, yeah. So first I think I ask entrepreneurs and most of them will tell me no. I said, okay. And then some of them will tell me, yeah, probably I said, okay. Second question, can your business grow without you? And then most of them will then say no. And so the idea is how do you create a business that is able to function first and then grow without you being in there? Because if you haven't done that,

you really just bought yourself a job. And so the whole idea about creating a business that has enterprise value is it becomes your largest asset when you do it correctly. Right? So I've done a lot of investing, real estate, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency. That hasn't worked out so good so far. But baseball cards, nothing, nothing, and it's some really home runs that I've made, but nothing nearly as much as money I made in selling my business.

And remember, I didn't put any money into my business. I started it with credit cards. And the multiple that I got in the absolute dollar amount I got was higher than anything else. And that's the power of building a business, right? And that's why I try to teach everyone entrepreneurship. You built a business off credit card? Oh yeah, off credit card debt.

Yeah, I started with, it would be a last of all, how much money do you start? off credit card debt? Yeah, I started with it. It would be a lot of how much money you started, but I didn't have any money. I borrowed money. I had credit card debt to start the business. I couldn't pay for the licensing. I couldn't pay for the software. I didn't have any, I had a few thousand bucks saved, but I had expenses. And so credit card debts and at the time my wife was working and I was washing cars on the weekend. That's how I started my business. And so when I sold it for, I can't say the number, but it was several millions of dollars that I sold it for.

That was, you know, it was life-changing money for me that I sold. And that's what I try to teach people because everyone wants to know, hey Rob, how do I get wealthy? How do I make money? And everyone wants me to, you know, they see me on TV, like what stock? What stock or when it was crypto as high? What coin do I buy?

Or where should I buy real estate? And the truth is, that's not gonna get you wealthy because if you got five grand, and I tell you something that's gonna even go up 20 something percent a year, well what are you gonna turn that five grand into? 20 grand, 30 grand, it's not gonna be enough, right? And so again, back to when they came to me and said,

hey, call the people you know without money. Well, shit, I don't know anybody without money. What else do I do? So I tell people who don't have money to make more money is you got to start a business, dude. And you got to first get that business to where it's making enough money to pay your bills. Okay, job number one, number two,

to where it's making excess money. And to where that excess money is what you send start putting away. And gradually every year, now you're investing, your business first makes an extra 10 grand invested, then 20 grand and you invest it, and 40 grand. You don't keep upping your lifestyle in excess of your business. You keep that behind there. But then what you need to focus on is how you make this business your biggest asset.

So how do you take some of that money, put systems in place, put processes in place, put people in place to where eventually that business can grow and operate without you, and that's when you've created a business that has enterprise value. And I told people if you can do that, that's what's going to create real wealth for you. I don't know how to create wealth any other way. I'm sure there's ways to do it, but that's what I did. That's what I've helped other people do. And you can only teach what you know yourself so people who invest in real estate because they know what I get that.'s what I've helped other people do. And you can only teach what you know yourself so people who invest in real estate because they know what I get that.

If you're able to become a multi-millionaire billionaire just in real estate, shit, you don't need stocks. There's no one way to do it, so I teach people what I know how to do. And so why do I love stocks? It's not necessarily stocks. Take away stock market, take away stocks. I love businesses that I can understand.

And I love even more private businesses because you don't have to deal with some of the reporting and all that nonsense that I can get in there and actually add value to. And if you could solve a problem in this world and there's a lot of problems, better than anyone else, on scale, you're gonna make a lot of money.

And then that's really what a business's ultimate goal is whether it's your business or a manufacturing business or an advice business, it's about solving a problem better than anyone else and making a bigger impact in people's lives than anyone else on scale. That's what we're all trying to do. Yeah. I mean, I've been trying to scale my business, but I can't find somebody to conduct these damn interviews. There's other ways to do it. We can kind of talk about that, right? I would love to talk to you about that.

Yeah, yeah. So what did you do to scale yours? And with scaling, it sounds like that's for languishing a lot of control, which is very hard to do from. It's very, it's the toughest thing to do, especially when it's an advice business, right? Because what people, especially early on,

what people were in buying is like, I could have what people, especially early on, what people were in buying is like, I could have been in Merrill Lynch more than like, people don't give us shit about that. People were buying Rob Luna. They were buying me and at the end of the day, people buy two things who they like and who they trust, right? I never took that for granted. You know, one of the things that I'm, I forget about money that I'm most proud of in the industry is, you know, in our industry, it's very regulated. Everything's disclosed. So even if you said, hey, I don't like the stocks Rob put on me in our lost five bucks.

If you say that publicly, it goes on my public record. You can see that on the SEC website every complaint. You look at the big firms that are literally getting complaints every week. So it doesn't necessarily make an advisor bad. It's, if he's had a complaint because people complain about anything these days, but in 25 years of being registered, I never had one complaint. That's through 2000, 2008, 2009,

where shit went down because it's about under promising and over delivering, being completely transparent, doing what you say you're gonna do. And just again, back to being an entrepreneur and being successful, all those things sound simple, but the most people don't really do that. And just to hear you say that is refreshing.

Yeah, but you're promised over deliver. It's nobody has that concept. Nobody, and especially, I don't know, my wife and I've been talking like since COVID, it just seems like I don't know if the people's brains got messes up, but it just seems like the last few years, every business idea was just got progressively worse, and the bar is set so low,

which is good news for entrepreneurs, because there's more problems than ever that have to be solved out there right now, and there's not a lot of people that seems apparently that are able to execute on them. They've all victimized. Yeah, they're all exactly. They're waiting for the check to show up.

But another question, just I'm curious. Yeah. We all see social media, we see the lambo's, the frarers, the private jets, the I have all of this, look at how magnificent I am. Yeah. You get to see behind the curtain. Yeah. Yeah. You get to see behind the curtain. How many people, like when you wrote down all the people that you knew that had money, if there was any, how many did you call or have you called along the way where you thought, oh man, this person's crushing it. Oh man, turns out it's all debt.

Yeah, you know what's funny? Like you said, in my business, I get to see everything because if you're gonna work with me, you gotta show me everything. You gotta show me work with me, you gotta show me everything, you gotta show me your tax returns, you gotta show me your assets, your whole balance sheet, your whole life, or I can't really help you.

And so especially when I was younger, what did I do? I chased after the people that looked wealthy, the people that had the nice cars, that had the nice, so whatever it was. And at the end of the day, and look, you can't over generalize everything, but I'll tell you this, a lot of my wealthiest clients drove Ford pickup trucks.

They paid cash for their homes, they didn't have fancy cars. Not, I mean, I drive nice guy, I like nice things, but you can't, from the outside in, determine, because that person might be one Lambo lease payment away from going bankrupt. And I've seen that. I've seen that from time to time.

So there's just no, I've learned long time ago. You look at somebody, you look at some of my clients that are literally worth three, four hundred, one that's worth eight hundred million dollars. And you'll think he's just, you know, he can work at Costco, right? You just don't know. So it doesn't, and everyone's definition of success,

what wealth is, what matters is completely different. What's it mean to you? It means choice. It means having choice. I mean, that's what money provides is choice. And I think the thing about wealthy, financial freedom for me is having choice because I grew up with no choice. And I think the thing about wealthy financial freedom for me is having choice because I grew up with no choice. I had to create my own choice, feed myself, put my stuff into a better situation. I just took what was given to me in my whole life.

And that was the end of last year when I sold my business. I even, early on in my whole life, right? And so, and as I, you know, that was even like kind of lasting when I sold my business, like I even, you know, early on in my career, I had to work with people I didn't like. I couldn't stand. I didn't agree with, right? Because I didn't have any choice. I had to pay my bills.

So we do shit. And like, the good thing for young people, like, look, you're, like, prides a good thing, but sometimes you gotta swallow your pride to pay your bills, especially if you have kids. You gotta keep a roof over their head, right? So I've done a lot of things in my life that I didn't want to do, but would financial free, and like, no, I don't work with people I don't like.

If I don't like you, I'm not gonna work with you, just because you're gonna make my fucking life miserable, and it's just not worth it, right? No dollar amount. That's truth, truth, I mean a lot of people are like, oh bullshit, there's not, you know, because at the end of the day, the other thing I've realized, life's, I'm no dollar amount. That's truth, truth, I thought. I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, bullshit. There's not. Yeah. You know, because at the end of the day, the other thing I've realized, like I've said, I'm nowhere near

worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Like I'm okay, but what I've realized is, you know, once you hit a certain amount, like say you got 15, 20 million, not that that, that's a lot of money, right? But 15, 20 million, like you're not doing stuff different than someone with 400 million or 800. It's just a lot of money, right? But 15, 20 million, like you're not doing stuff different than someone with 400 million or 800. It's just a lot more zeros, right?

And I don't care about a lot more zeros. I just care about I want to live where I want. I want to say what I want. I want to be around people what I want. I want to eat what I want. I want to wear what I want. I want to shoot what I want. I want to do whatever I want to do.

And not have to worry about backlash that I won't be able to pay my bills or anything like that. That's to me, that's what wealth is to me. I think that's a damn good definition. And sometimes it changes. I used to like frories. I'm selling a fray, I'm done with them.

I don't like it. I'm more into trucks now in land. That's why I'm out here. I used to be really in the high end, I'm coming back, it's just, it depends on where you're at in life, right? Yeah. But yeah, and that's what I tell people that I worked with. And I don't care what your definition of wealth is. You tell me what it is to you. And let's get there. Let's forget what everyone else is telling you to do.

Right on. For everyday investors, what are some of the mistakes that you just keep seeing over and over? What are the most common mistakes that every day investors make? They have no plan. That's the biggest thing, Sean, is that I was seeing earlier. You should be investing with purpose. Every dollar that you invest should have a very specific purpose. It should have a time specific purpose. It should have a timeframe associated with it. It should have a rate of return that's associated with it.

Whether that's a piece of raw land that you're looking to buy for 100,000 now and sell it 15 years for 300,000, or it should have an income stream associated with it. So when I'm buying a bond, I'm buying it for that coupon that it's paying me, or I'm buying a apartment because it's paying me rental income every month. People don't have a plan. They don't have, you know, you, when you hear an investment portfolio, like a lot of people say, I have an investment portfolio. Okay, what does that mean? What an investment portfolio should mean is a group of assets that are strategically working together to achieve one common goal. And that common goal for most individuals should be to support their lifestyle.

Right. And so what I try to get people to do is first, post focus on where are you at today? Right. Everything. Do you have debt? Do you have some money in stocks? Do you have some money in real estate?

I got to understand that. Figure in where you're at. And you should figure out where that is. And then let's paint your ideal lifestyle. What do you want that to look like? Do you wanna house some five acres or you wanna brand new truck every five, let's paint what that looks like,

and let's quantify that, right? And so when I can quantify the dollar amount that it's gonna take to get there and support that in terms of cash flow, and I see where we're at right now, that leaves a deficit. So it's just called reverse engineering. And then I know, based off of how much I could save,

how much I could realistically earn, how long it's gonna take to get there. And so everything that I start investing in has the strategic purpose to get me from A to B. Okay. Because I'm investing for financial freedom. I'm investing for what I, because I worked with a lot of athletes

who had the money they needed by the time they were 30, so I hate the word retirement. I call it work optional. I'm investing to where I'm working, because I want to work, not because I have to work. And I think that back to the definition of freedom, I think that's what everybody wants. They want to work, because they're doing stuff,

they like, they like being involved, and I could tell you, Sean, like, most successful people, they cannot retire. They can't retire and just sit around and do nothing. They'll always be working and doing something no matter how much money I have. So I think most, for going back to your question, I'm starting to get off the topic a little bit,

is you've got to create that plan. And if you don't know how to do that, that's what you've got to find an advisor to do. And you don't need to give somebody, find a good certified financial planner out there, tell them that's what know how to do that, that's what you've got to find an advisor to do. You don't need to give somebody, find a good certified financial planner out there, tell them, that's what I want to do, help me quantify that what that looks like, and that's the real map you need to get on. You need to start investing towards that.

That'll kind of tell you how much in real estate, how much in stocks, how much of those things that you need to do. The biggest mistake is, people don't have an investment portfolio. They just bought a bunch of different shit, and're hoping it goes up. Like there's no strategy behind it. So that's the mistake is they're investing in things that aren't consistent with what their goals are. That makes sense. Going back to land, I'm bouncing around here because I just have some more of a pick your brain. But at the beginning, I asked that question about tangible versus non-tangible assets.

And I did get into the crypto game way late. A lot of people do. Yeah. And it didn't work out for me. And I don't know anything about the stock market. When I see the things like AMC and whatever the other ones were, you know, the back when they were whatever the short, yeah. That makes me very skeptical.

I can't touch it. I feel like the market is super manipulated by the world banks and stuff like that. So I like precious metals. I like land. I like pauses, property. Not that I have a ton of it, but that's just, and when I think about land, we talked about how it's not a tangent, it's not a liquid asset. But what I do like about land is you can put a house

on it, you can run it, you could farm it, you could run it out as a hunting complex. You could, there's a lot of different things you could try to flip it, you can hold it. With a stock, I feel like I don't have any options, it's all my options either to sell or to hold. And that's it. Yep, yep. Yeah, so I think it goes back to understanding again, where you're at and what you're trying to accomplish, right?

Because so, you know, stocks, you know, there's two ways to make money in stocks. Number one's through capital gains by low cell high, right? The second way is through dividend income streams, right? And so, let's use Procter & Gamble, for example. If I show you, everyone's used Procter & Gamble, toothpaste, toilet paper, all these things, right? They've been around for 100 years. Procter & Gamble, if I showed you the last 70 years

of a stock chart, right? And one thing that we'll agree on just because it's one simple fact, is over the long run the stock market always goes up. Every single correction has been a buying opportunity up until this last one. We're hitting new highs two years ago. So every single correction, so that we can't argue that

that stocks over the long run go up. Now you have three, five year periods where they go sideways and down, but they always go up over time because the things that we buy from Procter and Gamble aren't the same price. They raise prices over time, so they're able to keep up with inflation,

because we need to or the paper, we need to toothpaste and all those things. But if I showed you a stock chart of it over 70 years, yes, it's from the left to upper right, it's gone up over time, but then there's been periods where it's down 25, 30%, 40%, and that's what scares everybody. Right? But if I showed you a chart of their dividend,

meaning quarterly, they pay you income for owning the stock. And right now it's probably about 3.0 something percent, which doesn't sound great anymore, but that was really good when bank was paying you like one. If I show you that chart, it goes from the left to the right, just like the stock, but without any downturn. And what that means is over the last 70 years, not only have they paid you that income, they increased it every year. They gave you at raise, so it's 3% today, but they've raised it

every single year over 70 years. And there's dozens and dozens of companies. You can google the dividend aristocrats. You could actually buy an ETF that invests just in companies that for a minimum of 20 years have not only maintained but increased their dividends. That's an easy way that people could do that, right? And that's income that, because if you buy a bond, the problem with bonds is they don't give you a raise. It's 3% for 10 straight years

where these dividend income-producing high quality companies have paid you that income stream. And I have clients that have enough in just dividends that they're able to pay their bills off of and they're diversified. So again, there's not one size fits all. I personally believe people should have real estate, people should have stocks, people should have bonds. You know, 5% in some of these speculative assets like crypto currency, the other things

that you want to do. And one reason I say 5% is because if it goes to zero, you don't miss a beat. Your portfolio can make that back up in six months, 12 months, where people get hurt in any asset class, real estate, crypto, gold precious metals, stocks is when they go all in, they're levered, and they don't have time for it to recover.

I saw this in Arizona in 2007, 2008, when the market crashed, stock, I'm sorry, real estate market crashed, stocks also, obviously. I knew clients at the time that a 20, 30 million equity in real estate deals, we encouraged them to sell, didn't sell, and they thought they were okay because they said, hey, we've got 70% loan to value, meaning they had 30%

equity. So if they bought a million dollar property, they put 300,000 down, they borrowed 700,000. And they said, we got 70% loan to value, we couldn't handle it. Well, what they didn't count on is real estate prices go down 40%, 45%. And then they were under water. And then they had revolving notes for the bank said, yeah, you can keep the real estate, but we needed to bring in another $10 million to increase your equity back up. And when they couldn't do that, they were forced to sell it at liquidation value. And they lost $20, $20, $30 million in equity. Does that make real estate a bad investment? Or is that mean they were just over-levered? That they didn't have the timing right, that they didn't have it allocated the right way.

It's the same thing with stocks when people buy on margin or they buy stocks that they need to pay their bills within six months and they go down 20% and now they need to sell it a loss and now stock suck. So you know, it's all these things are good, but it's how do they work in consistent with your plan? Most importantly, and are you proportionately How do they work in consistent with your plan, most importantly, and are you proportionately dividing your assets in the right way? Are you giving them enough time? Or because any of these things,

crypto, gold, land, stocks, you can gamble with them also. And you can get really lucky and do really well, or you can lose everything. And that's just a game I don't play. I have no idea I tell people, if you're coming to me thinking that I know what's gonna happen in the next 90 days, no idea.

But I could tell you I've been doing this for 25 years, and if you give me three years, you'll make money. But I don't know what's gonna happen if you're telling, if you want me to tell you, because if I could tell you what's gonna happen in the next six days, I'd be on some islands somewhere, just cash it in. I wouldn't be charging you to tell you what to do with your money.

Good point. Well, let's take another break. And then when we come back, we'll dive into the economy. The economy. All right. I don't know much, but what I do know is my audience. And I know a lot of you are similar to me and you probably chew tobacco. I used to chew tobacco too. I chewed it in Afghanistan, I chewed it

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I'm not sure if you're not sure if you're not sure. All right Rob, the economy. What the hell is going on? I thought precious metals were supposed to track inflation. They're just going down. It seems like stock markets going down, real estate seemed like, at least here in Tennessee, it seemed like it was a light switch.

Before it was, pauses were selling 24 hours on the market for over-asking cash buyers. Now it's like, just, it's, literally was like a light switch, like crickets. No more cash buyers, nobody's buying anything over-asking anymore. What the hell is going on? Yeah, I mean, it's a different market, especially for,

and I say market, just everything, stocks, bonds, real estate, especially for younger investors who haven't seen a bear market in anything, right? This is their first stock bear market, and now there's some challenges in real estate. Cryptocurrency, which a lot of younger investors ran, was just an absolute free fall. And it's been tough and the economic lesson of the day is interest rates matter. And interest rates are probably the single if you're going to point to one factor of what controls our economy more than anything else, it's interest rates. And so when I talk about that, just one thing that anyone could look at economics kind of 101

is if you look at the 10-year government bond, 10-year treasury right now is paying, well, it's come down over the last couple days, but let's say it's paying about 4%. If you look about a year and a half, two years ago, that was under 1% 80 basis points. So we've had a huge run up. And why is that so important for everything?

Well, the 10-year bond, when you're a pension fund, you're a big investor, when we're investing for people, that's taught in economics and it's used in the real world. One of the few things that everyone uses is called the risk-free rate. And so what that means is, when you have a long-term investment, 10 years, let's call it, whether it's real estate, stocks, pension funds and downmints,

that move a lot of money, always have at least a 10-year time horizon, what you need to do in every investment you make. So if it's stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, you need to compare that to the risk-free rate. Well, why if I'm going to invest for 10 years, I know the US government who's never defaulted is going to pay me 4% on that money, without any risk at all. So your brother wants to borrow money for your at 10 years at 3%, you're probably not going to do that, right?

Because he's obviously a higher credit risk than the US government and he's paying lower. So that's just a simplistic version of you should compare everything that you're going to do over the 10 years against the risk-free rate. You're not going to take on any greater risk without at least a 4% rate of return. So incrementally, how much more risk you take above that, you should be compensated for that risk. So again, one of the biggest, you asked me a question earlier about what mistakes do investors do is they take on uncompensated risk a lot of times.

They're taking on a tremendous amount of risk without a potential reward for it. And so what you've seen happen, we have been in a bull market for bonds now since my career started. So in the late 90s, interest rates have been going down, right? So we're back about where close to where we were then, in the late 90s, we're mortgages we're about 7, 7 and a half percent. But if you think back it started well before then,

a lot of people's parents could tell them in the 70, 80s, you had super high inflation. People were paying 18, 19% for their mortgage, right? So interest rates have been coming down for a few decades now. And so what happens with that is a couple of things. Number one, when you talk about bonds as an asset class as an investor, there's an inverse correlation.

When rates go down, bond prices go up. Simple reason why? Because if you buy a bond that is, every bond's 100 bucks. If you buy one that pays you 7% today. If yields go down to three, well, instead of getting seven bucks on that 100, you get three.

What does that mean? The guy who bought it at seven, his bond is worth more. So you have to pay a premium to get that. So as rates go down, bond prices go up. So bonds have done well every single year, and why people always tell you when you buy, put together a portfolio, put stocks with bonds, because when you buy stocks, they're aggressive, but bonds are always conservative, they're going to hold up. Well, that's worked for 30 years. What I've been on TV telling everybody is it's not going to work anymore

because I've been saying for the last three years I said the next stock market decline more than likely is going to be because of interest rates. And what happens is when interest rates go up, bonds go down and what you saw this year in 2022 is that bonds on aggregate are down about 18, 19%. People that were in the 2023 target retirement date fund at Vanguard, meaning they're getting ready to retire next year and Vanguard moves you to the more conservative stuff.

That fund was down about a week ago, 21%. So how about that? You're getting ready to retire. You got a million bucks finally. Now it's $ how about that? You're getting ready to retire. You got a million bucks finally. Now it's $790,000 on your getting ready to retire. That doesn't feel too good, right? And so that's the problem with one size fits all,

sticking to one thing and thinking that's gonna work forever. So back to that interest rates going up now, that's a problem for people that were holding bonds. Who's, who's setting, the federal reserve sets the interest rates yeah yeah so they should short-term interest rates so who sets so you as government doesn't own the federal reserve no so so that so they're there's separate they're supposed to be independent now so a lot of people say are they persuaded

sometimes by politics do they want to you know be raising rates right before election period to where because raising rates are going to slow down the economy? But essentially, they're supposed to be separate. So let's just go under the idea that they're separate. So they set short-term overnight lending rates. But what happens is that reverberates across everything. When short-term rates go up, long-term rates are impacted by that. Ultimately, it's the free market supply and demand that dictate what's going to be happening

with longer-term rates. The more supply that you have, the less demand that you have, that's going to impact in the correlation. Bond's market is actually larger than the stock market. They trade on a minute-by-minute basis just like stocks. It can be very volatile in periods of time like this. But ultimately, for simplicity, the Federal Reserve is going to really dictate what happens with rates.

Now, the Federal Reserve, just to give you a little background on them, I think everyone should know this, they have a dual mandate. And that mandate says that they have to be responsible for price stability, meaning inflation, right? They need to make sure that our dollar doesn't become, you know, worth nothing, like Argentina or something like that. And they're also responsible for employment. So making sure that employment rates don't skyrocket, right?

And so that's kind of a tough dual mandate. And right now, that's kind of what they're dealing with is this balancing act. And so kind of bring this back to the economy and why interest rates matter is, why are they raising interest rates? Well, they're raising interest rates because employment's great right now.

So no matter what everyone's said, we're at three points, something, percent unemployment. If you want a job today, you can get a job. There's no reason why you can't work today. One of the biggest challenges I see with small business owners I work with, we were talking to before, you can't find good people. People don't want to work, especially when it's minimum wage or lower wage types of jobs.

No one wants to do those things anymore because they can just grab an Uber. Oh, by the way, that wasn't available five or six years ago. So there's a lot more options for people to be employed today. And so when you look at employment, they're not worried there. So they don't have to worry about selling things down there. Their major focus today is inflation. And we saw inflation 8.0 something percent.

We've been at, since I've been in the financial markets 20 something years, 2, 3%, 1%, we don't know our age. Unless you're in your 50-something plus. You don't really know what inflation looks like. We haven't really dealt with high inflationary periods. So everything we're doing is based off of what we heard. We heard that gold works out during an inflationary period. And maybe you did, but when the economy was different, maybe bonds did work good when

interest rates were different, but everything is a little bit different this time, so they're really focused on breaking the back of inflation, because you don't want spending power to be a really, that's a huge, huge problem, right? And so, well, let's talk about, you know, what is inflation? Well, it's a definition is too much money chasing too few goods and services, right? Everybody's got money, but there's not enough shit to buy. And that's everything. We saw that with houses, we saw that with cars, you saw watches, everything was going up.

Why? And why did this whole situation happen? Well, let's talk about it. During COVID, the global supply chain got shut down. Mm-hmm. Everywhere. That was on no one's, right? I don't care who you are, right? Talk about a black swan event. the global supply chain got shut down everywhere. That was on no one's,

right, on care who you are, right? Talk about a black swan event. Nobody expected that to happen. The global supply chain was shut down. Oh, and we couldn't leave our house. So the whole economy was shut down, right? So nothing was happening. And then the government decided, well, hey,

let's give people money. Let's do that through playcheck supplemental loans. The biggest scam out there was PPP loans that people were getting. Look, the vast majority of businesses or small businesses, so a lot of small businesses qualified for PPP loans. A lot of people, clients that I had, there were multi-millionaires that got money thrown at them, that they didn't have to pay back, that were investing that money, not really doing what they needed to do. And good luck with the government auditing these

things and all that. That'll never happen. So there was tons of money that got put in people's pockets. Right? And so let's think about that. The supply chain shutdown, people can't go out of their house. Most people are still making money. A lot of people started working remotely, right? So people were making money, then they're being supplemented. Okay, so savings rates we saw during COVID when sky high. And then nobody can do anything with their money. And so, and interest rates were essentially zero at that time.

Okay, so when interest rates, let's talk about interest rates at zero and the investment side of that first. Well, interest rates at zero, we talked about the risk-free rate. When I invest in something in the 10-year bonds at four, five, six, or seven percent, there's a hurdle there that I have to get.

But when it's zero, it's like, my money isn't gonna earn anything anyway if I put it in savings, is I could earn anything if I put it's zero, it's like, my money isn't going to earn anything anyway if I put it in savings. If I could earn anything if I put it in bonds, I might as well buy cryptocurrency. I might as well buy tech stocks. I might as well buy real estate and other things because I'm not getting any return here. But when the government starts raising that rate, that becomes competition for those assets. And not to get into a total economics lesson, but there's something called a discount

cash flow model to where, when're a growth company, like Amazon, for the first several years, and they still, they don't pay any dividends. So you're not getting money back as an investor. You're betting on future growth. And the return that you need as interest rates go up becomes much higher. And the multiple that you're willing to pay becomes much lower. And so what that you're willing to pay becomes much lower. And so what you really saw was people said, okay, on growth assets, now that these rates are high, we're going to contract that multiple. We're not willing to pay 25 times earnings because we can get money now. We're willing to only pay 12 times earnings. So even if

companies were making the same, the multiple at which they were bought at shrunk, and that always happens in this environment, a lot of this is not new, people just never saw it. So that's why tech stocks in general in the stock market got hit hard. Those dividend stocks that I told you about, you're today they're only down about 78%. So they held up pretty well. Why? Because you have the safety of that cash show that's coming in. So all stocks in this market were not created equal. ultra-ultra-growth tech stocks are down 70-80% this year, high-quality dividend stocks, 78% this year. So there's a differentiation there, and that's what happened with the stock market. Real estate is a little bit different, well, because a couple things, we said people got

money put into their pocket, they're saving skyrocketing because they had nowhere to save money, so their personal balance sheet looked a lot better. And then real estate, especially in places like Nashville, Montana, Idaho, places where there's fresh air. You can get out, you have open space, you're not in the city. Unlike places like Los Angeles and New York, those became very desirable because people didn't know. Like, I think if this would have been three, six months, like I thought, ah, this could be over three. And then it's like two years later, you're like, holy shit, three, six months, it would have been a blip. But behavior changed after a year and a half, two years.

People think, okay, this might be a new lifestyle. And even though a lot of people are going back into the office now, I personally don't think it'll ever be the same. There'll be some flexible type of work environment going forward. And really, a lot of companies saw you could actually be more profitable. If you're not setting people traveling around the world unnecessarily during COVID, you saw corporate margins actually spike for a lot of companies during that time.

But what you saw is people had money now, interest rates, meaning the price to pay a mortgage was very low because you could get a house for like 2.0 something percent, right? So now you have a lot of money. Homes can go up in price because the payment is very low, even though the price is high. And so you saw these areas really go up. So that's why real estate was going up during that time. Stocks were going up because companies were actually making,

like especially stocks like Amazon, Chlorox, anything that was really benefiting from COVID during that time. Crypto was going up because people had a lot of money and they didn't have the 10 year wasn't paying anything. And it's like, okay, greater fool theory with crypto. And I think crypto will be around just like tech stocks in the 90s. They got decimated. 90% of them went away,

but the ones that stuck around like Google and Amazon did really well, and that'll probably happen with Bitcoin and things, but it takes a long time for that to happen. Those things got decimated, but the problem with what created this inflation was savings rates went high. We put money into the pockets of people and the supply chain got shut down.

So even now, like the markets rallied a little bit here the last day or two because there's talk that COVID, sorry, China might be getting rid of their zero COVID policy. And zero COVID means basically you can't do shit. You can't go out of your house. They've been very, very strict, way more strict than we were even in Los Angeles with COVID. And a large percentage, no shock of our supply chain comes from China.

And so that's been shut down. Try to know my wife does some things in fashion and she's trying to source these hats. You can't find hats, you can't get anything. And if they do, they're charging you two to three times why more, because there's no supply, and people still need these things. And so that's really what's created inflation,

is people have more money, the supply chain has got shut down. And so, a few things with that. A lot of people were thinking that this would happen in 08.09. Do you remember how much money we pumped in to the government pumped into our economy during that period of time?

A lot of people were telling me the dollar is gonna be devalue, inflation is going through the roof during that period of time, and that never materialized why. Well, that money actually went into the banks, and the banks essentially used that money to write off bad loans. Remember, most banks were insol solvent during that period of time.

We had to marry banks together, we had to pad their balance sheets, and the financial system itself was basically bankrupt with the exception of a couple of different names out there. And so the government not only did banks use that money to get back to even from the right right office that they had from the housing market. But also what happened is the government at that time said, we don't want this to happen again. Let's raise reserve requirements. So for every dollar that's on deposit instead of 20 cents,

we want you to have 40 cents. So not only did they have to get back to even, but they had to have a greater buffer to make sure that there was a crisis again that they were going to be able to withstand it. So that money never got out into the real economy. It stayed with the banks. And for inflation, what you need is you need both supply and velocity, meaning, yeah, the government has to put it into the banks, but then the banks need to lend it out to people and they didn't do that.

They increased lending standards. They increased their own balance sheets during that period of time. This time was different because banks were super strong, but the government bypassed the banks this time with PPP and everything like that and they put their money directly into the hands of the consumer. So the velocity was much higher. So in short, we have inflation because you couldn't buy anything. People say money because they couldn't spend the money and the government gave people extra money during that period of time. And we're still two and a half years later, not back into a normal functioning supply chain.

So anything that you wanna buy is still at a deficit. You're still have a shortage on just about everything. And that was even with housing because you weren't building houses during that period of time. And then also you have a millennial generation, you know, the late 20s, early 30s now in the US, that's the largest generation in US history. So you have a huge amount of demand now

from people that are now getting of home buying age and there wasn't a lot of homes being built. And you had low interest rates and you had extra money. So we really created this perfect storm for assets to go up and that's the perfect storm that created inflation. So now what you have to ask yourself, though, is this all sustainable? Is inflation gonna stay this way?

Is this gonna continue to be this way? Can home prices continue to stay where they're at? I would say no. And the reason I say that is, well, a couple things. And why I tell people, whether or not you invest about the stock market, you need to care about it because it's a leading indicator. It's like tell people whether or not you invest about the stock market, you need to care about it because it's a leading indicator. It's like the canary in the coal mine. It's going to tell you something is wrong before anything else does. Why? Because

it's liquid. It's one of the most liquid assets. If I want to sell this building, it takes me a while. If I want to sell my stock portfolio, hold on, I'll be right back with you and I'm done, right? It's liquid. It's cash. So it's very quick. And you'll hold on. I'll be right back with you. I'm done right it's liquid. It's cash So it's very quick and you'll also see corporate CEOs You'll start to see people talk about a slow you'll start to see things happen way be up well before And you can go back a hundred years and look at this well the stock market started going down in About October of 2021 right it started going down and now the stock market's gone down and the NASDAQ down like 40 something percent S&P was went down close to you know 24 25 percent But real estate just started showing cracks about 90 days ago. Yeah, right?

And so why does that happen? Well What happens is stocks? When I said forget stock market their companies So companies when things slow down what do they do? They lay people off? What happens is stocks, whenever I said forget stock market, they're companies. So companies when things slow down, what do they do, they lay people off. When people get laid off, they don't feel quite as confident about buying a home or a second home especially, right?

So stocks started going down, and then because stocks are going down, corporate CEOs have to do something to pad their balance, to get their balance sheet better, to get more earnings, they lay people off, people get laid off, that's when it hits the real economy. That's when stock markets paper until it's not, right? Because stock markets telling you things are happening

against stock market as companies, and when those people, and we're hearing it, the last, you know, Facebook now, all these companies, general owners, laying off, laying off, laying off, laying off. And so that means people aren't as, not only are people that are losing their jobs in a situation where they can't afford homes,

if you hear your buddy just lost his job, you're seeing it in the news, don't underestimate the behavioral component of the economy. People tighten in their belt and sometimes just saying there's gonna be a recession causes a recession because people start thinking differently. They say there's gonna be a recession,

maybe I shouldn't buy that car. Maybe I shouldn't take that vacation. Maybe we should stop eating out honey for nights a week, right? So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so we're at a situation in the economy now where the stock market, I think the worst of it's been done. Stock market's gone down and it's gotten crushed already, right? So would it be a good time to invest?

Yeah, yeah, if you've got, again, three to five years, if you've got a three to five year time horizon, it's a great time to buy stocks. In particular though, you want to buy the stocks that were hit the hardest, the growth names. Right, you want to buy the smaller companies, right? So you can buy in index, the Russell 2000. There's a lot of different ETFs out there that you can buy that.

These are the smaller companies that are faster growers, but they get hit the hardest in a slowdown. But they're also the first to recover when things turn back around. And so I say, look at the things that are, you know, don't buy garbage. Don't sift through the rubble, buy indexes. When everything's going gonna hit this hard, people make the mistake of trying to pick one or two stocks. Don't do that here because everything's so cheap. Just buy the index itself,

particularly those ones that got hit hard. You can buy a technology index. If you got three to five years, I recommend buying the smaller stocks because those are really underperformed. What is an index? Is that like a mutual thought? Yeah, so the Russell 2000, for example,

it's 2000 of the smaller companies, three to five billion versus trillion dollar companies like Amazon, that trade on the stock exchange. Okay. So you can buy, it's called an ETF, which is called Exchange Trade, is it Exchange Trade Fund? You can go to I shares, for example, or Vanguard.

They both have them. If you just put small cap ETF in there, it'll show you what it is. Very cheap. And what you're doing is you're just buying that basket of 2,000 stocks. So you're getting ownership in all of those names. You don't have to worry about picking the three.

Because there's times people will try to pick three stocks. The index rallies, and they pick the three dogs, and they don't want to participate in that. So by the index, because those are the things that got beat up, always own high quality dividend paying stocks, always, I always own them, I always own small cap stocks, but in terms of being opportunistic, that's what you want to do now. Don't make the mistake, like I learned from an O8 or O9, because I was so scared, because I saw Lehman Brothers break, and I saw people around the corner

worried if banks were going to be there. I was a financial professional, but I was scared. I didn't think Lehman Brothers was going to go under and then bear stirons and then you're just like, holy shit. Clearly, there's not somebody smarter in the government that's going to protect us right now. That's the... At that point, you know, it's pretty young still.

I was like, they're smarter guys and they're like, they got this, they got, they don't have this. So once I saw that, I was like, wow, they really don't have this. And a lot of people changed their whole risk philosophy at that period of time. But when I started getting back in, I bought the really safe names.

Everything got hurt. But what I should have bought was the names that got beaten up the most, like the economically sensitive names like Google or Disney even got beaten up 70, but I was afraid to buy those. I went back and I bought the recession names, the proctoring gambles and the Kimberly Cargs, because I just wanted to buy, you know, like buy people invest in real estate because they could touch it. I felt like, hey, people are always going to brush their teeth and wipe their like, hey, people are always gonna brush their teeth and wipe their ass, hopefully, I'll buy a procter and gamble.

But no stocks went up, but not nearly as much as the stocks that got hit hardest. So again, most of my value, yeah, education's great, but there's no substitute for experience. Similar situation now, if you're going back in with dry powder, don't buy the dividend stocks that are only down 78%, buy some of those baskets that are down 30, 40% because three to five years, that's what you're going to get your best return today in the stock market.

Okay. But if you want to talk about real estate market for a second because a lot of people want to invest in real estate, I think we're at the beginning of the downfall. You're seeing the mark down now, but I think, and I don't think for a lot of reasons that this will be in 0809. we won't see 50, 60%. We will see on average about 10%. But I think areas like Texas, Florida, Nashville, unfortunately, will probably see 15 to 20%.

Because they, again, going back to, how did they perform going into this? They did a lot better than Los Angeles and New York and, you know, prices absolutely skyrocketed. So to see what we talked about, you're asked, have you see 15% down, nobody likes it, but you're still well ahead of where you were

a couple of few years ago. And so why is that gonna happen? Why do home prices have to come down? Well, a couple of reasons. One is, I think people are, people did by second homes in places like Florida and Texas. Well, if the economy is gonna get into a position where it's a little bit tighter,

people sell their second homes first. So you'll start to see those homes get sold off. Also, people bought in areas that they never really knew anything about Montana and Idaho. Beautiful areas. They're like, hey, it's COVID. I just want to be fresh air. We're off to wear a mask. So they bought out there, but now I'm like, I don't know if I can support myself here now that the PPP money's gone. So they have to, they have to move back to the to the set. That's a good thing about Nashville as they've got real industry and healthcare here and they provide jobs. But some of these places, unless you're already wealthy, you can't stay there. So it's going to hit those areas. But the primary

driver, remember I said the most important thing to any asset is bonds. Interest rates are so high right now. Your mortgage is 7, 7 and a quarter percent. So what does that mean in general? The same million dollar house where let's say your payment was roughly $6,000 for right? At a million dollars, well now at 7% that payment is 9,000. So here's the challenge where we got to a year ago in housing affordability was stretched. You know, so usually, how do you look at that, Rob? Well, I look at average household income.

So if you look at average household income and let's just say it's $100,000 average household income, you're usually at about three and a half times that for medium home price. So, $350,000. That's always been a good indicator. Just look at what is average household income across the nation and then what is medium home price. So you can Google that at any time those two data points. And whenever you see that data point more than three times, that means it's a little bit frothy, right? And that makes sense, because if the average household income can't support the average mortgage payment,

it's not sustainable. Okay. And so that's kind of what happened. And at the end of the day, yeah. The rich will always be rich, but a guy of Pymco told me a long time ago, Paul McColley said, you can't starve the plankton. Because if you start the plankton in the ocean, the big whales die, right? They're eating those little tiny plankton. So if you don't let the little tiny plankton

survive, the big whales can't survive. And so the vast majority of homes are not built by, bought by billionaires that are built by the average working person. And so when you take those prices to affordable levels, they're not sustainable. So we were there when we were at 2.5% mortgage rates, not extreme, but we were to a point where I didn't really see any future growth going on. But then we had this COVID pop, a lot of money, interest rates came crashing down,

but now that interest rates have normalized to buy that same house, you need a 50% higher payment. It's not sustainable. So what happens in the market like this, one or two things have to happen. Infrastrates need to crash back down to where we were. So we're back down to that same payment. Or you have to see housing prices adjust to where we get that to a point to where maybe it was 6,000 before.

It's now 9,000. It doesn't have to go back to 6, but if rates are going to stay 6, 6, and a quarter, maybe that million dollar house, it doesn't need to go to 600 or 700, but maybe it needs to go to 8, 8, 25, because that's back to where that payment is maybe 63 or 64 hundred bucks. Okay. Because Americans don't pay cash for houses, right? They buy the payment. They buy the payment, so now you need to get that payment back to where it's affordable. And I don't think interest rates are gonna come back down quick enough.

The Fed saying they probably won't cut rates till sometime late next year. So that's why I believe personally, the real estate market's gonna come down, but because supply is still short, we still don't have a huge amount of supply unlike we had in Noe 809. And because supply is still short, we still don't have a huge amount of supply, unlike we had in Noe 109, and because demand is higher now, that's going to buffer that a little bit.

That's why I don't think it's going to be a crash, but if you're looking to buy, I think next year is probably going to be the time to buy a real estate. But real estate now, again, lagging indicator, that will bottom last. Stocks bottom first, stocks go down first, bottom first, real estate goes down last, bottoms last. Okay. Yeah. Back to inflation.

Yeah. I know it's because you said a lot of money has been pumped out of the economy. What about printing money? A lot of people were worried that the dollar's gonna collapse. Yeah. Everybody that talks about it, I don't trust anything, it comes out of the mouth when it comes to finances.

Yeah. But it gets my attention. A lot of people talk about it. It gets a lot of clicks. I used to be super scared about it when I first got into the industry. This has been going, I've been in the industry since 1998 and it's been the same story in terms of the dollar printing money and all these things and and they couldn't even get to three per they could they're trying to create inflation and couldn't do it printing record amounts of money.

And so there's a few things number one in terms of inflation just a short outlook on this I think things come down. We've already hit peak inflation in my view. If you look at oil prices, they're coming down, shipping prices are coming down, and we just had a print recently where CPI, consumer price index came down greater than what people were thinking. I think we peaked and I said this about three or four months ago. Doesn't mean we're gonna go back to two or three, but I don't think we're gonna go any higher

than eight and a half, nine percent. Why? Because everything that I said, supply demand, supply chain, money being included in the consumer's pockets, people having more liquid cash, that needs to be sustainable for a longer period of time to keep inflation high. I don't see that happening. The supply chain is opening back up, so they're going to start to make more of everything.

We started at least hopefully stopped putting more people money from the government into people's pockets. And in absent of that, I don't see any new industry that's creating super high-paying jobs where people are going to be able to sustain that level of spending on their own. As a matter of fact, technology is probably the biggest disruptor of that. The problem with technology it actually reduces jobs. I mean, think about your business that you run today, right?

You're able to have employees remote, you're able to use technology for things that you used to have people. So technology actually makes businesses more profitable and efficient, but it actually takes less people to be able to do that. And I think that's going to continue

to grow in that direction. So I think longer term, we get back to a more normalized inflation number. So in terms of inflation, that's why I don't think it's going to stay there forever. I think in two, three years, we'll be back to kind of where we were that 3% type of number. That's my view. Now, to your question, though, in terms of, okay, what about printing money and what we're doing there? Well, it's all relative, right?

And that's the thing because we are a global economy right now. At the end of the day, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency. And I think what happened was with Bitcoin, and there was because of this whole narrative of printing money, government's gone wild, which I don't disagree with. I mean, that's happening. Bitcoin sounded kind of cool, right? It's like this unscrupible ledger. There's accountability, there's transparency with what's going on. There's a finite amount.

It was almost like the gold standards, right? It's like, okay, for every dollar that you print, you have to have some certain amount of ounce of gold backed up to be able to do that. You can't print more dollars than you have to have some certain amount of ounce of gold backed up to be able to do that. You can't print more dollars than you have in gold. Well, the government a long time ago got away from the gold standard, why? So just like every other central bank,

they can manipulate their currency, they can do whatever they want. When you have accountability to your currency, you can't do that, right? And so we started to print money, and so a lot of people thought, well, because you're printing money, that's going to create a situation where we have superflation. The problem is everybody around the world, Europe, parts of it, they all started doing the same thing. And what we've seen during

every crisis that we've lived through is when the shit hits the fan, the thing that you want to be in more than anything else is the US dollar. I'm not saying that can't change. And I think conceptually everything that everyone talks about I completely agree with. As a matter of fact, one of my first million dollar plus clients came into me about 20 years ago. He owned copper stocks. He owned gold, the gold gold ETF, he owned water companies. And he, and I basically said, I said, look, let me tell you what your belief is about the US economy. We're printing too much money, the dollar's going to zero.

He's like, how do you know? Because you're portfolio reflects your opinion. And I said, here's the problem, you might be 100% right. And it's a superarticulate case. Like, that's why people, yeah, we are. Like, I don't disagree with any of it, but any of it. But what I said is the problem is, with opinions is what is the actionable strategy on that?

Your actionable strategy today is investing gold in all these things, right? And that might be the right strategy, but that's based off of one outcome. And if that outcome doesn't play out, meaning runaway inflation, sinking dollar, you're going to go broke. Thankfully, I was able to talk him into diversifying because 20 years later, he'd probably have the same amount of money versus a significant multiple over that because that hasn't played out. The US dollar hasn't crashed. We haven't had runaway inflation. And so that's the

challenge that you have to be careful, even when it is a very well-educated opinion. I've never had the opinion of having an opinion without having to time money to it. So whenever I make an opinion or I make a statement, I actually have to make a move with real money. I managed almost a billion dollars that I have to put beyond that of people's real-earned money. Right? So I could say the market's gonna crash, and let's sit in cash and earn zero what if it's skyrockets? I remember when clients went,

Obama got elected, oh, I got out, Obama's elected. Trump got elected, oh, I got out, Trump, none of that shit worked out. So if you were to just sat in cash and on the sideline, you would have missed out on 100% rate of return. And so the problem is, I agree with all those things, but as of right now, it's not playing out.

The US dollar is still the reserve currency. We even saw that would go, it didn't do anything. The dollar has skyrocketed, right? That hurts the economy also, right? Because we do rely on a certain percentage of our economy for exports. And so for exporting anything, well, that's gonna become more expensive, so people aren't gonna be able to buy that quite for exporting anything, well, that's gonna become more expensive,

so people aren't gonna be able to buy that quite as much, right? So that's gonna become a challenge. People aren't gonna come in and go to Disneyland if the price of Disney lands 80% higher. And so we are printing too much money. Governments have gone wild. There's no accountability. I agree with all that.

But I'm gonna wait for the market to tell me that they don't buy it anymore. Okay. I don't know when that's gonna be. Are you worried at all that, of course, something else is gonna become a world's reserve currency, like Saudi Arabia's taking pay your money and send the yen or that.

Or I don't think so. I think quite honestly, the best bet for that to happen is something like Bitcoin, where all these countries adopt a standard like, I don't think it's gonna be China. I don't think, you think people are gonna trust Saudi Arabia or China or Europe more than that. I don't personally believe it. That's what I like conceptually Bitcoin.

I don't think just because it's crashed, you'd Amazon, I've owned Amazon forever. Amazon from 1990 to 2000 went down 90%, 90%. So yeah, if you had $100,000, it was worth 10 at one point. But then $100,000 became worth millions and millions of dollars if you held it for another 10 to 15 years. Just because we're having a correction in cryptocurrency,

does not, no, there's doge, there's all this crap that was just, you know, I don't know if you remember little younger than I am, but I remember in the 90s, there was Google, but there was also Ask Jeaves. There was Lycos, there was these other search engines where you didn't know, like they're all the same to you,

but you know, they had just as much of a chance. And then obviously we saw what happened, those other ones went bankrupt. It's the same thing with crypto, but when you think about blockchain and what that's gonna do for our economy, and you think about crypto being able to create a decentralized financial system,

because there's a lot of unbanked people around the world. And if we truly are a global economy, which we were, we were becoming, and we're gonna be even more as time goes on like it or not, you really need things like blockchain and cryptocurrency. So I believe, I don't know if it's Bitcoin, I don't know what it's going to be, and that's why you're probably better off buying a basket of whether it's Ethereum and Bitcoin and all those things. But I wouldn't write it off yet.

I think it's, I'd put my money more on something like a cryptocurrency than I would on another country's currency, being the replacement for the US dollar. Okay. Well, that's good to know. Because I've been working on it. Doesn't feel like it when you're on Bitcoin though, it's down to $16,000, $17,000. Yeah.

Well, I'm holding some of that. And I haven't, what a disaster. I haven't sold it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, if you haven't done it now, it's not the time to do it. Okay. That's the other thing. People make that mistake or they buy it high. They love it. And I talked about the emotional biases. You know, people love buying things when other people are. It just feels better. Even though that's probably the worst time to do it because prices are usually at an all-time high But then when they get down to these levels everybody wants to head for the X because they think oh maybe someone knew something that I And I and I used to be that person too, and then I realized like I know all these other people

And I know they don't know anything more than me That's the benefit I had right I got to meet all the people on television behind the scenes and doing policy for the government people They don't know any more than me. So no one knows any more than you. And so the whole thing about Bitcoin, nobody knows conceptually, though, is the government what they're doing and printing a problem? Absolutely. Do we need something to offer that?

Absolutely. For me, blockchain, cryptocurrency makes the most sense. It probably will happen. Nobody knows how long, what it's going to take. And that's when I, I said Sean, it comes down to the beginning. You asked me, what are you investing? Put some there, but don't put enough where it's a singular outcome to where Bitcoin has to go

to four million for you to be able to pay your bills. Put three, five percent in there. And if it takes off, like, hey, if you put in Bitcoin, three percent of your net worth, you know, at the beginning, you'd still have a lot of money even after it went down, right? So you can put a small amount into those things, but if it doesn't work out, you still keep the lights on, you still put food on the table, right? So you just got to make sure, you know, and that's the problem most people make is they go all in on these ideas or like that client

I talked you about. He lets his opinion of what's going to happen, dictate his investment, And I learned a long time ago that even when it seems crazy, markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent. It's the truth. So you don't, it doesn't sound like you think this recession is gonna turn into the great depression part too. I just don't see why or how. I mean, people are still employed, they still have jobs.

I mean, if someone showed me data to say why that was going to happen, I would say, okay, maybe, but I just don't see data. I mean, people are still getting jobs. That employment number has actually been going down. And like I said, the economy is different. You know, because 10 years ago, there wasn't Uber, there wasn't DoorDash, there wasn't this gig economy where there's a lot of people in the shadows that are doing little things, they're supplementing their income by driving for Uber. We've heard now even more so,

where you've got people that work from home, but they're taking on second jobs, the newer thing that they're coming on. So I think it's just a little bit different today. I think there's just a lot more opportunity for people to make money than there was before. And I don't see the economy crashing. That being said, there can, there can, recessions are a normal part of taking excess. So I think yeah, a recession. I don't think it'll be 08 or 9 though. You don't think it'll be 08 or 9.

No, because if you just look at all the numbers, if you look at the 08 or 9 was primarily because our financial institution was bankrupt. That's a problem. The only thing we've seen, and I haven't seen it, prior to 0809, there was anywhere close, was the Great Depression. And that was the thing, in 090, the stock market bottomed, ironically, 666 was the number. Within 90 days, there was up like 50%. And so why did it come back so quick if it was really such a problem? It wasn't a valuation problem or an economic problem. It was a liquidity crisis. That's what caused assets to get flushed.

It was a liquidity and a leverage problem. So especially leverage, way over leverage in real estate, like I told you, someone had $20 million in equity wiped out because it was over leveraged. Long-term capital management, if you Google them in 1998, there were a hedge fund that traded currencies. Nobel Prize laureates, super smart people, huge institutions were invested in them, tons and tons of money.

They were betting on currencies. The strategy went really bad with Russia when they devalued their currency. They were levered in this and they were basically forced to wipe out the fun banks had to step in. It was a huge, it became a huge national economic issue. Well, the truth is if they were able to keep that strategy on a little bit longer without leverage, they would have made a ton of money. The problem is they were flushed out of it. Same thing with my client who sold and took a 20 million dollar loss. If you could have waited five more years, he would have made money on it, but he was flushed out of it. Stocks were sold. All those things were still in the way to online because when you need to raise cash to put up money for real estate

or whatever it is, you don't sell what you want to sell necessarily, you sell what you can sell. And stocks are the easiest thing. So it was a huge liquidity problem in the banks where financially bankrupt. We saw that happen. The government had to come in and save them. And now though the financial systems, the strongest I've seen it since I've been in the market since 1998, their balance sheets are way better, their lending standards are way tighter than they were before.

So I don't see a financial system that's corrupt. I don't see super huge excess. I see it's still a supply demand issue. There's still not enough homes being built out there for the amount of people that want to buy them. People are still working. So I'm just asking like, what's gonna create this huge depression?

Yeah. I just don't, I'm not against it. You know, in my opinion, I'll change my mind as soon as I see more data. I just don't see the data that supports that. That being said, for your listeners, the bearish case, meaning the negative case, is always, always the most articulate. Because the idea, when you can quantify in psychology, the emotion of fear is three times

greater than greed. Okay. So that's why they say stocks take the stairs up, but the elevator down. Okay. You know, so they go up over time, but when they come down, boy, or cryptocurrency, it comes down fast and hard, because when people get scared,

they get really, really scared. And so, and I never do this. If I, even in my, in the industry, if I would have always just played on people's fear, I probably would have been worth three X of what I was today. And you see people do that all the time. The market's gonna cry. Always, doesn't matter if we're in a bull market,

it's just a consistent story. And those are the guys that you see him in and out of the media, because they're the bear guys all the time. And when there's a bear market, they show up, and then they're gone for four or five years, then they bring, they dust them off, and they bring them back.

Because playing on people's, like I could make so much money, if I tell you how corrupt the government, how much money we're printing, how our political systems bankrupt, how the stock market is rigged, all of this shit, I would bring so much money in to hear that. I don't know how to make, and some of it's true, but at the end of the day I don't know how to make money off of that because none of that stuff's crashing. So if I short it or if we just sit in cash because we're so worried and I can't know how to make money off of that because none of that stuff's crashing So if I short it or if we just sit in cash because

We're so worried and I can't make money off of it other than charging you a subscription to feed to hear how bad the world is And I just refuse to do that so be careful of the bear case It always sounds really articulate and smart because like I said I can make a really smart case where I could scare the shit out of everybody today also But it's just not there. It's not an actionable strategy. Maybe someday it will be but right now that's not the plan Well, that's refreshing because that's all I hear is yeah is We're doomed. Yep. Yeah, so I and I've been hearing that for 20 something years, you know And I've still made money in stocks. I've still made money in real estate I've still made money in oil. I've still made money in real estate. I've still made money in oil. I've still made money in all these things,

despite how they said you can never make money in and again. Do you think that it seems like this could be the fear of machine too, but it seems like Europe's collapsing. Yeah, is it? It is. Because they, I mean, you talk about political issues over there and you talk about socialism and some of the things

that are driving that economy down the toilet. It is, but it's a very small part of the US economy. Right, we're still, we're still very, very, first of all, we're a very domestic economy. About 80% of our GDP is goods and services here in the US. China's a bigger deal. China's a much bigger deal in their economy for us than Europe is.

Well, they're collapsing too, correct? Well, they've been collapsing for a while, but now, and that's why that's another reason outside of interest rates, why the stock market's been going down because China, they haven't been coming in the high end of real estate, it's actually being in hurt for about a year right now because Chinese have been coming in and buying the high end of real estate. They're putting money in into our stock market. They're visiting things here. They're bringing money into the US. And then also, by the way, a large part of our supply chain is heavy.

Like, everyone I know that's in Garbim, any of those things, they're all sourcing from China. And so that got shut down in the factories that were still open in China. We're charging two to three times the amount. And so now, and it's really because the COVID shutdown, that's a singular issue. And so now that they're opening back up, that's actually becoming a catalyst for our economy because things are gonna come down,

supply chains gonna open back up. You're just now, I just told you, a friend of mine sold a $60 million house in Los Angeles just a week ago to a billionaire from China. So those things are starting to actually open up and those are now a catalyst. That's the thing you have to be careful is timing doesn't matter. Right. So and the thing is you going back to what mistakes do people make.

People hear something and they act. Well, again, stock market, a lot of asset classes are leading indicators. So by the time you hear it, it's probably already happened. So yes, true. But Chinese stocks are down 60, 70%. Starbucks is down 50%. Because a large part of its income and growth strategy comes from stores in China. So when they can't develop and open stores in China, the stock got hit 50%. Oh, I don't want to buy Starbucks because China, yeah, dude, but it's down 50%. It's already priced into it. So it's like, you're bringing out the water hose when the house has already been burned down. So that's the whole thing you want to think

about what don't people know or expect to happen today. And so that's why the stock market right now today, it's like the start and go, start like, it's like are we at a bottom or are we not at a bottom because what they're trying to do is determine when, and this is everything, if I knew when the Fed was gonna stop raising interest rates and start cutting them, I'd be a billionaire.

And that's what everyone's trying to do is because you have to get ahead of that. Once they start cutting rates, it's too late. Things have already moved up. So what everyone's doing is when the Fed comes out every month and talks about it, they're parsing every word, like, oh, I think they're gonna slow down because they want to jump ahead of that.

Because stocks are gonna move in advance of that, just like they moved down in advance of them, of them raising interest rates. Okay. So what everyone's trying to do is jockey for positions. So to make money in everything, you gotta like, when they asked when in Gretzky why was he so great, he said, I skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been. It's the same thing in investing, you got to figure where is the putt going. So what everyone's trying to do now is they're saying,

okay, Starbucks, all these things, they've been crushed 60, 70%. Right, and when a stock goes down 50%, you know, simple rule of numbers. If you put a thousand dollars into a stock and it goes down 50%, it doesn't take 50% to get back to even. It takes 100%.

Because if 100 cut to 50, you now need to get another 50 bucks to get back to even. It takes 100%. Because if 100 cut to 50, you now need to get another 50 bucks to get back to 100. So now you need a 100% rate of return. So what you're doing now looking at saying, well, shit, if I can get Starbucks now in five years, it just gets back to where it was two years ago for the people who paid that price. I actually get a 100% rate of return on my money.

So now what you're doing is trying to find these, like Starbucks isn't going on, but you're trying to timing matters. You don't want to get in and catch a falling knife. So what everyone's trying to determine myself included now is how much do we put in. So that's why I've been telling people when I'm on, you know, Fox, like, okay, we should people buy.

I said, look, we're getting close. Can we go down another 10 to 15 cent? You present, yes, don't go all in, but start putting some money in here. It's called dollar cost averaging. If you're gonna invest a thousand bucks, maybe put 200 now. Okay.

Wait and kind of see what happens, but don't wait until now the Fed says we're cutting interest rates because then Starbucks isn't gonna be 50% lower. It's gonna be 50% higher than it is now. Okay. You see, so that's be careful of finding this narrative, oh, Europe's bad, China's bad.

Let's short Europe, people do that. Like they get this information and it's like, dude, that's already priced in. You know, so you're trying to, that's the tough part, right? Is you're trying to make investments based off of things that may or may not happen. And that's why you want to take a broad-based approach.

So if you think China's gonna recover, cool. Maybe put 5% in the China. If you think tech's like, again, don't like going back to my client who was all in on the dollar crashing and super high inflation, may happen and he'll be a billionaire, but if it doesn't, he's broke.

So don't even know you have all the data on your side. Again, I've seen, they's, they are printing my, they're all doing all these things, but it hasn't occurred. And the problem is we're not pension funds or endowments. We're not investing for a thousand years. We live to a hundred at most. So I maybe got another 50 years, probably not that long, 30 years. I need shit to happen now.

Like, if it happens in 30 or 40 years, yeah, that's great. Maybe my errors will take advantage of it. But I have to invest for today. Most people that of it. But I have to invest for today. Most people that are listening to the show have to invest for today. So be careful of letting your opinion 100% guide your investment decisions. Okay.

When do you think the markets are very volatile, right? Yeah, it seems like. When do you think these are gonna calm down? I think it's gonna calm down once we get more certainty around interest rates. And so what, and how do you look at that? Well, you look at a print that just came out on CPI. Why the stock market is just recently rallying is because, again, everything is based off

of expectations. So the consumer price index, which gives us our measure of inflation, whether 3% or 8% comes out monthly. But there's economists that are predicting what that number is going to look like. So again, it's all the expectations. So if the prediction is 8%, and it comes in at 7.5, markets are alley. It's actually better than we expected.

So inflation is coming down. What does that mean? Well, if inflation is coming down, the Fed can start stop raising rates and cut rates. And we said, remember, rates are the most important thing for the economy invested because because when that tenure, well, what happens if the tenure bond goes to 8%, we're in a lot of trouble.

I'm not investing in stocks if I could put my money in 10-year bond and get 8%. So when those things come down, that's great. And so what did we say about the Fed? They don't care about employment right now because it's fine, they care about inflation. So what I'm watching right now is inflation because inflation is gonna tell me what the Fed says

because the Fed's watching inflation. So I'll watch inflation numbers. So again, we're trying to jockey for a position. I'm watching inflation numbers because if those are cool, I'm not gonna wait three weeks for the Fed to tell me they're cool. But that's another mistake you'll make

always for what the Fed says. Yeah, but a lot of people made that decision based off of what the data was at the Fed's looking at. Okay. You see, so as soon as we have a little bit more confirmation, and we're seeing it, so there's something called the VIX index, VIX, you can Google it, it's on Fox Business, on CNBC, Yahoo Finance, it says the VIX index, that normal numbers around 17, it's a normal measurement.

We've been in about 4550 super high. Sometimes we'll get eight or nine when there's no volatility. We've gone from about 40 something, we're down to about 25 now. So volatility's been coming out of the market. If you notice, we hit a low a few months ago, we haven't penetrated that low.

We've just been bouncing around. And that's the thing about the market. It's kind of cool. And you understand that. Well, the market is just basically articulating its opinion of what we're talking about. We probably hit peak inflation. We probably still have a little further to go on. Real estate. So if you look at real estate stocks, they're actually starting to do worse now. Maybe tech stocks at bottom, but we're not quite sure. We're looking week to week on data. So once we know that the, and that's why we're listening to the Fed every month, once they come out and say, yeah,

we're done using interest rates, things are gonna be off to the races of all until they're gonna come out of the market. We're getting close to that. If I had to bet, we'll probably bottom, I think we've already bottomed, but I think we'll stop having this huge volatility sometime around the first quarter next year,

especially as we start to hear that the Fed might start cutting rates in the second half of next year. Also, what I would tell you is we just had a midterm election. If you look six months out of the midterm election since the 1950s, 100% of the time, the market's been positive. Does it mean it's gonna happen this time? No, but 100% of the time it's been positive. When you look at a year where the market's down 20% or more,

the rate of return is huge one year out. So now we're in a situation where midterm, we still don't know technically what's going on where there are things, but we have a year where we might finish down 18 to 20% on the S&P 500. We've got supply chain opening back up, Fed should be getting done with what's going on. And so now people are starting to think the opposite.

Okay, interest rates going up, inflation, everything that would kill assets, we're gonna get to the inverse of that. And just one other thing, I said interest rates are the most important thing we talked about assets, but think about the consumer. We all have a lot of debt still. Some people buy floating rate mortgages

where they have to refinance. We, we we don't have that. Everyone else has debt. But credit cards, credit cards, right? Those are super high rates. But what happens when rates go up? Credit cards don't stay at 16 percent. They go to 24 percent, 25 percent. When people buy homes, they're not at 2 percent. They're at 7 percent. When people have student loans, those are revolving debt. So instead of $300 a month payment, it's $400 a month payment. So why does that cause a recession when rates go up?

Forget about asset prices. The average person has debt payments. They're credit cards, they're car payment. Everything goes up. So now if they had an extra thousand bucks a month after they paid all their bills, but now their student loan rate went, their student loan payment went up,

their credit card went up, they have to refinance their house now because it's due after their five-year arm. Instead of a thousand bucks extra that they had to spend, now it's 200 bucks. So now the average household, that again we said 70% of the US economy is based off of the consumer spending. If they can only spend 200 bucks in the economy versus a thousand, that's going to have a hit, that's what causes recessions. So we need to get, not just asset prices, but to get more money back into the consumers pocket

because if more money goes to debt service, less that goes to buy a new car, less that goes out to eat, less that goes to buy a new shirt, new tie. Okay, this is a lot simpler than I was thinking. It's all real simple, that's what I'm telling you. Like as soon as you start to get the correlations, it starts to demystify what's going on out there.

Like you don't learn it overnight. But that's why I say, if people just spend a year listening to me, try to make it as simple as possible. It's not that difficult. And like I said, once you get a baseline level of knowledge, no one really knows more. And we're all just trying to guess at what's gonna happen.

No one really knows exactly what's gonna happen. It sounds like it's a lot of just cutting through the bullshit. It's cutting through the bullshit. But it's all basic. It's like it's a lot of just cutting through the bullshit. It's cutting through the bullshit. But it's all basic. It's all basic at the end of the day. Higher interest rates suck because it makes things more expensive. And unless you're making a lot more money when things are more expensive,

you have a lot less to spend. With inflation that I've heard the numbers, it's what, eight, nine percent right now. Yeah, it's about, yeah, eight point four. A lot of people are saying that it's actually what, 18, 19% is there any truth to that, or is that fear of murdering? Yeah, I'm either, they're murdering.

There's, you know, when you're talking about X food and energy, you start, you start taking off things of different, depending on what inflation report you're looking at. Yeah, and then you look at things like, okay, well, there's not just inflation from Procter and Gamble that I'm paying, you know, 8% more for my paper towels or my box of cereal, but that box shrunk by e-dances, right?

So, so now, those are the certain things that they start thinking about because, yeah, if you had a 12 ounce box of cereal, that was 10 bucks, but now it's an eight box, eight ounce box of cereal, that's 11 bucks, it's not just that 10% increase from 10 to 11, it's actually much greater than that because now I'm getting a lot less in terms of volume. And that's a trick a lot of people, and that's the stuff we have to spend money on. We have to buy milk, we have to buy cereal,

we have to buy diapers, all those things. So they call it shrink flation. So that's what's happened with a lot of the things that we're doing as well. Okay, yeah. What about gas, is gas? Yeah, so in the traditional, you go X food and energy. So you're taking those things out of the report.

So gas for a lot of people is a real expense. And the thing about gas and why I said, when I'm looking at oil prices, when we're skyrocketing, now we're back down below $100 a barrel. When you think about gas, gas is one of the major inputs,, gas is one of the major inputs, fuel oil is one of the major inputs into inflation.

Why? Well, because everything has to be transported, either by ship, by truck, by plane. And so what's happening is if oil prices are high to transport cargo is gonna be more expensive. So everything starts getting more expensive, so it's a major input into that. And that's why you see even locally, in places like California, some of the same

things you buy at the store are more expensive than they are here in Tennessee. Why? Because I'm paying seven bucks a gallon for gas in California versus four bucks a gallon here. Why? Because they have certain taxes that are that are tacked on the price of gas over there. Okay. So there's local economics and there's national economics. That's something, I didn't even put that together. Yeah, you know, to be honest with you. But let's take a quick break. Yeah.

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That's mudwater.com slash Sean, use code Sean for 15% off. That's mubwater.com slash Sean, use code Sean for 15% off. That's Mubwater.com slash Sean. All right Rob, we're back from the break. Wanna wrap this up, but I did have one, I did have a question. You've been talking about the best thing for entrepreneurs to do is invest in themselves.

If you want to get wealthy, start a business. I heard you say in another podcast that people that start their own business, I remember you talking about one guy who he was worth about $120,000 and invested everything he had into his business. That's why it was worth $120,000. Then he came out worth, I don't know, 10 million or whatever, some substantial amount of money. What are most entrepreneurs investing in other than themselves? I pretty much invest just in my company. But I'm always looking for other ways to invest. And one thing that I have been thinking about investing in, I love real estate. I love looking at it. Me and my wife love looking at real estate. Would it be

advantageous for me to buy a studio versus rent? Yeah. So I think one thing about entrepreneurs is, when you take a look at what you're doing in terms of investing, either way, when you're an entrepreneur, you're making a big investment in yourself, either way, because if it doesn't work out, you're screwed. So you're all in on yourself,

and essentially, you're taking a tremendous amount of risk with your future income because you're baking on yourself to be able to provide that not only today, but hopefully grow that income over time. And so when you think about it from that perspective, there's already a big risk investment in your portfolio and that's in your business. So what I try to do is have most, and I don't think you should not be that way

because I think, and you talked about it, you've really narrowed in and focused what you're doing right now, where you're all in on one thing, all effort, energy, and resources, and that's a double-ed in and focused what you're doing right now, where you're all in on one thing, all effort, energy, and resources, and that's a double-edged sword to where, because you're all in on that, if that doesn't work out, you're kind of screwed,

but because now you're putting yourself all in, you're giving yourself the greatest opportunity of exponential success, okay? But because you're doing that also, you have to think, okay, if I'm taking risk with my business, do I wanna be coupling coupling that with risking my portfolio on cryptocurrency and venture capital

and some of the riskiest investments out there, or do I want to look for ways to kind of stable and buffer that? And that's the whole idea about putting an investment portfolio together is your strategically putting together assets that are going to buffer each other, meaning when one goes up, one is going down,

or the corollary, if everything in your portfolio goes up and down at the same time, you're not really diversified. And that's really why we diversified to kind of even out that ride. So what I would say is start to focus on going back to where what you wanna be doing simultaneously is building

an investment portfolio that one day is able to replace the income that you're achieving for your active job. For various reasons, number one, no matter what we all do, we don't all want to do it forever, no matter how much we love it. So you want to be able to take that off. But also, like I've had people to where they get the portfolio in three, four years where maybe they're working six days a week, they still love what they're doing, but they want to work three days a week. And now they've got enough supplemental income that's coming in where they're able to do that.

So what I would really focus on as an entrepreneur are what are income-producing assets. What are assets that are going to generate passive income that are going to allow me, maybe at some point in time, where if I have a bad month or two months, I might not be taking the money out today. I might be reinvesting it, but if I needed to, I have somewhere, do I can get passive income. You know, one thing I always did for myself as an entrepreneur, if I had a payment on something, like a car payment, for example, I would look at one of my accounts that's not an IRA

account, just a taxable account, I have dividend income that comes out. Dividends are paid every quarter, and what I normally do is reinvest that, but then when I said, okay, what I wanna start doing now is I'm only gonna buy a car if my dividends that come out every month are enough to pay for that car payment.

So I just have those dividends come in and transfer, and I started doing that with other payments, so I wasn't yet to that point where my portfolio covered all my expenses, but I started one expense at a time. And then you get it to where your mortgage could do it. And then it's kind of cool, right? Because I was like, hey, my car is paid by this portfolio. My mortgage is now paid for this.

And once that's doing simultaneously, it's taking pressure and stress off of you as a business owner to have to go out there and crush it every month. And one thing I noticed as being a financial advisor early on, people could smell and that you feel desperation. When you really need the money and you're out there for some reason, you know, call whatever it is, it doesn't happen. But when you get to a point, I got to a point where I didn't have to work with people I didn't want to. Low and big hole, I have more people that wanted to work with me than ever before. And so that's what I tell entrepreneurs, you're going to start making decisions that are the most strategic decisions for your business when you're not worrying every month about paying

the bills. And so if you could start building a portfolio that allows you to be more strategic and make decisions in your business that are longer-term, growth-oriented versus, how do I make a dollar today? Because I have to pay my bills and we all start there when you're an entrepreneur. That's what I would recommend.

So what do you do? Dividend paying stocks. Look, bonds. There's some good bonds out there right now. I bought some corporate bonds that are paying me seven, eight percent interest a year. You can buy cash flowing, real estate, the challenge, and I love real estate, the challenge now though, the interest that comes off of a piece of property is called a caprate. So your three, cap, four cap.

The problem is now a lot of caprates because interest rate got so high from multi-family units I'm seeing are three and a half, four percent. So remember going back to that 10 year bond, it's like, why am I gonna take that risk at three percent if I could just clip the coupons in a government bond for four? So I'd rather see real estate, I love as part of the portfolio, I love self storage

because that's easy, someone moves out, you just hose it out, you're not rebuilding, someone else in, I love apartment complexes. I love industrial warehouse space. I love lower maintenance. Really, I love self-storage and industrial warehouse because you're not worrying about tenants or anything like that, destroying anything,

and they cast roll a lot. So I would be more focused if I'm an entrepreneur investor on cash flowing versus growth. The corollary is, if you're a doctor, right, well, I worked with a lot of physicians and earlier in my career, they're not, they're not, you know, unless they screw something up,

they're gonna have a job forever, they're making a half a million bucks plus a year, they're maxing out their 401k. For them, but there's no surprise at the end of the day. They're not gonna build a business that's worth a hundred million dollars. They're not going to build a business that's worth $100 million. They're not going to generate cash flow from their business. If everything takes off of $34 million a year,

they never have that opportunity. So what I tell them is, like, max out your 401k, do what you're doing, like, have that stuff, you're doing all that, you're always going to be able to pay your bills. You're not going to have to touch your portfolio until you're done practicing. But be in some of those speculative investments. Buy some raw land out where I think

they might start building in five, 10 years. Buy some of those smaller, more speculative companies that they might not work out, but they could 10x, 100x your money over time. So again, remember back when you asked me about, what do I invest in? It's a very important question to understand what are you trying to accomplish.

And so the doctor might be, in your investment portfolio, be super speculative and aggressive because that's your chance to like change your life, right? With your investments, your business isn't gonna do that. But for you what I would say is, hey, you've got a lot or any entrepreneur,

if you do it right, you've got a lot of upward momentum toward your income, can significantly increase, you can be a lot of upward momentum toward your income, can significantly increase, you can be able to build value in the business that you might not totally sell like I did to a company, but you might have junior partners that buy from you, it might be other people,

there's many ways to exit. So what I would say for you is get that portfolio becoming your stability, your source of income, and take that, because being an entrepreneur is very, very stressful. When you're thinking like, hey, the only way this is gonna work out if I go and get new subs, or I go get a new client, or I go do one of those things when you can do that, and you've got three or four months of not doing that,

you start to second guess yourself. And especially when money's not coming in, but when you've got money flowing in and you can rely on that again, you're not panicked as much. And what does that all do? You have better relationships, you're nice to your kids. You become a better person.

Money's a serious issue. So I would invest in more of those passive income types of things. This is probably a very elementary question, but is can I buy stocks, crypto through my business or do I need to transfer money crypto through my business, or don't need to transfer money out of my business into my personal account? You can, but there's really no personal advantage to do that.

You're taxed differently. So the only time you should be buying stocks through your business is if you create a 401k plan or a sub plan or retirement plan that's specifically for the business. Because then depending on what that plan is, it's gonna allow you to take some of the money from your business, put that into that account,

and it's pre-tax, so you won't be taxed on that money. Okay, so let's just say if you do a defined benefit plan, depending on your income, it might allow you to put away, say you make 200,000 a year, it might allow you to put 40,000 away. It goes into this investment account, you can invest in whatever you want, crypto, stocks, real estate investment trust.

On that $40,000, you wouldn't pay income tax, though. You'd only pay on the other. So there is a benefit. But if it's money outside of that, you have greater benefits in terms of cost-basis and things you can do as investing as an individual. So only invest in your business. If you have a business retirement plan, there's easy way you could do solo 401K, you could do SAP, you could do a defined benefit plan.

There's things that you can do. Just Google business retirement plans, call Schwab, call TD Ameritrade, you could set that up, even put it in an index fund, something really simple. Do that, but if you're gonna invest outside of that, just open up an account in the name of your trust, if you have it, or in your own name,

or in a joint name with your wife, you're married or husband if you're married. Okay. What do you think about paying off debt like mortgages? Yeah. So, again, financial planning is a little bit of art and a little bit of science and it's getting to know the person. And so there's certain people who, they can handle stress really, really well. And they don't necessarily mind having some debt

if it makes economic sense. Because here's the thing, when I, when you look at someone's mortgage, for example, a lot of people will come in and say they've got a million dollar home, they've got a $300,000 mortgage, and they're saying, hey, should I just pay this off Rob and I'll look at it and I'll say, well, let's do a simple analysis. You're paying 3% interest rate right now.

What if the rest of your investment portfolio done over the last five years, let's say, they'll say, well, 9%. I said, okay, then we've got some tax advantage. So let's take that three to four percent. You still have 500 basis points or 5% difference between what you're paying there and what you can earn. So on $300,000, that's about, let's call it $15,000 a year more. So the right financial decision is, don't pay off that mortgage,

invest it because you're gonna make $15,000 a year. But then there's the other thing of like I was telling you as an entrepreneur, well, if I pay off that mortgage, invest it because you're gonna make $15,000 a year. But then there's the other thing of like I was telling you as an entrepreneur, well, if I pay off that mortgage, there's a lot less stress on cash flow that I have to pay out. And it's where I live. I could put my head down at night. I know nobody's gonna take it away from me.

So how do you quantify that? And so what I would say is like, it's really understanding the person. So I've had a lot of people, I talked about an athlete that moved out to maybe it was off-care, we were talking about an athlete client of mine who moved out to Texas. And he was just wanting, you had a ton of money and he was just one of those people where I just knew he felt better if he had no debt. And so for him, it would have made more economic sense to put debt on it, but he liked the fact that he was in the

NFL, he retired, he was able to pay off everything that he had, zero debt, and he was able to take the cash flow from his portfolio, and that cash flow generated about 300% what he needed to pay all the taxes and bills on that. So for him, that was his definition of financial success, right? He didn't want to have to worry about interest rates

or anything like that. So again, it goes back to that plan and it's really dialing in, who am I? What's important to me? Where am I at today? Putting a clear concise roadmap of where you're trying to go and just doing everything consistent with that. So if you know you want to retire at 60 and you don't want to have a mortgage, well then maybe doubling up on your mortgage payment

makes a lot of sense, right? Those things. There's no, there's everyone wants like, buy this, do it this way, do it that way. Like I said, buy stocks and bonds because I'd always helps you until it doesn't. There's just no one way I wish there was because it'd be a lot easier for me.

But it's just like, that's why I always talk to people about just understand a little bit about bonds, understand a little bit about stocks, a little bit about real estate, and more importantly, understand about yourself and where you're trying to go because no one else could do that for you. You could always call Rob or anyone else that if you need to, hey, I'm doing this, if you know where you're trying to go, I can give you specific advice based off of that. So that's what I would encourage everyone out there. And you can find good certified financial planners that are fee-only.

They'll charge you a little bit of money to just put the plan together. They don't have to invest your money in anything, pay them a thousand bucks or whatever it is, put the plan together so you know where you're trying to go. And then start educating yourself on those things. One thing at a time. Okay. For the average American, let's say they have $10,000 or less to invest. Yeah.

Where would you tell them to put the money? So if they have $10,000 to invest, and let's just assume this is long-term money that they don't need a way and they can put that away, I mean, I think the best thing for most people, quite honestly, is just to buy an index fund. So you can buy the US, S&P 500 index fund, you buy the 500 biggest companies out there. And if you look at that over the last 20 years, it does about nine to nine and a half percent a year. There's no management fees on that. You

don't need to think about it. You don't need to do anything. You just put it away in a nine percent rate of return as a pretty good rate of return if you're able to continue to feed that over a period of time. So a lot of people will tell you to buy this thing or buy that thing, they're trying to make a commission and do that just buy an index fund, super low cost. It's free, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, whatever it is you wanna go, buy, it's SPY is the symbol

or you can buy the ETF. It's like 100th of a percent to own it and just put it away for 20 years, 15 years, you'll be fine. Perfect. Well Rob, it sounds like this is great news. I was really expecting you to say that we're going into the great depression. And so yeah, sorry, I couldn't deliver worse news. So, so this is a refreshing interview. And, but what do you, what do you have coming up? Anything?

Yeah, well, you know, I'm, I'm a transition out of my wealth manager firm at the end of the year. I've got an academy where I've been helping educate people on stuff like this. How do you create your own plan? How do you put that in place? Because look at the end of the day, I think there's some great financial advisors and you could still work with them,

but no one's gonna care more about your money than you do. And so educating yourself, at least to a position where no one you can take and take advantage of you, I think is a super important thing to do because it is your livelihood, it is your life savings that you're talking about investing. So that's the academy that we're working on.

We're launching a new firm, Real Talk Capital, to give people access to a certified financial planner anywhere from 500 bucks a year, to get a plan to put those things in place, to kind of work alongside them versus handing it over to someone we're launching down in January. And I'm just signed a book deal with Wiley. I'm gonna be writing a book closing the wealth gap,

teaching people some of these things of how they can do it. That should be out. I was hoping the way how quick I write I was going to get it done by February. They told me it won't be done until next fall. So I guess next fall, people don't move fast these days anymore. So next fall that will probably be out. But yeah, people could always go to my website robloona.com. We post there what's going on. And yeah, email me whatever it is always willing to you know give people advice and perfectly get them in a position where they're controlling their own financial line.

I think I'm going to join your wealth academy. So but everything will be linked below in the description your website all your social media your phone number. I'm just kidding. I just put my address if you're going to be there. Yeah I'll put your address out there. But hey man I just I want to, I'll put your address out there. But hey, man, I just, I wanna say, I really appreciate you coming out here.

I learned a ton. I know the audience learned a ton, and I just, I hope to see you again. It was great, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity, Sean. Cheers. Thanks, man.

Thanks, man. The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of day jubbs sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way all of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding.

Principles over partisanship. The Bullwalk Podcast. Wherever you listen.