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The Shawn Ryan Show
#161 Rob Luna - 2025's Million-Dollar Question: Where to Invest & Will DOGE Trim the Fat?
01:25:07
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- [00:01]
A
Shake, shake, shake. Sinora, shake it all the time. When you add a shake of Frank's Red Hot, you open a world of better. A world where wings bring out the flavor of game day any day. Where buffalo chicken dip takes any party up a notch. And where any slice of pizza instantly becomes the world's best slice of pizza. At least until the next slice bring every bite to life with the perfect blend of flavor and heat. Frank's Red Hot. I put that S on everything foreign. Thanks for having me back, man.
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B
It's an honor.
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A
It's an honor, man. I. When I came on episode 42, your show was already crushing it. Now it's 100 something that the people that you've had here over the last year just absolutely legendary. So it's very humbling. It's also a little bit nerve wracking to sit in the seat today considering how far the show's come and how far it's spread. And congratulations on all the success, man.
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B
Man, thank you. Thank you. Episode 42.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Damn. We're at like 152 now.
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A
It's crazy. It was just, just over two years ago.
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B
Wow.
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A
Yeah. Wow.
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B
It does, man. Well, quick, quick intro. You've already been on, so I'm not going to give you the long introduction, but number one ranked wealth strategist in the country. And since you've been on the show, the author of Closure, Wealth Gap.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So how'd the book do?
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A
Book did pretty good. It wasn't a new New York Times bestseller, so I guess I'm a failure by all counts when you look at that way. But. But it's the New York Times, so I'm not going to take it too personally. But that's not why I wrote it, though. You know, I wrote it to be able to provide information to people who didn't have what I felt was the right information to take control over their finances. And from that aspect, the people that are reading it are saying it's changing their lives. So. And from that standpoint, I think it's a winner.
- [01:57]
B
Well, a lot has happened in those two years. You moved to Franklin. You finally got out of California. Somebody, somebody talked some sense finally. But, but, Rob, I just, you know, I want you here because we're going into a new year. We've. It's a big year, 2025. We got a new administration coming in. Old ones.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Got the boot. And so a lot of people are wondering, you know, what's the economy going to do everything from interest rates to the stock market. To real estate, to just starting your own business. And so I want to dive into all of that because I'm super interested and you're the most knowledgeable person I know on the subject. So figured we'd get you back in here, but real quick, before we get in the weeds with everything. We got a Patreon account, you know that. And they're our top supporters. I wouldn't be here, and neither would you be if it wasn't for them. And so I give them the opportunity to ask each guest a question. And this one, there were some good questions, but this, I want to pick a personal one because we got a future entrepreneur here.
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A
Nice.
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B
This is from Jules. She says, I am debt free. I work for a nonprofit, and I have about 500 to 1,000 surplus dollars. A. I'd like to open a coffee shop eventually and buy a house. Where should I start? With the house or with the business?
- [03:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I look, at the end of the day, this is probably one of the most controversial topics out there of whether you should buy a home, rent a home. And, and I think, Sean, like, quite honestly, it doesn't just come down to numbers. So, you know, I know if. If you've got a family, I think being able to put your head down at night, knowing that you're gonna be able to be in that house for a year, two years, five years, 10 years, whatever it is, your kids can grow up in that home. It creates a sense of community with the people in your neighborhood. There's some consistency there. You don't have to worry about calling the landlord and saying, hey, my kid wants a dog, Can I have a dog? All those types of things. I don't think you could really put a dollar amount on that from my opinion. You know, I rented for. I went through a divorce. I rented for about three years. It was really the worst experience of my life, considering I owned my first home when I years of age. So I think from that standpoint, I don't know about Jules. If she has a family. I think making that investment in a home is super important. When you look at the average net worth of people who own their own home versus renting, by the time they're 60 years of age, it's 135,000 for renters versus over 1.2 million for homeowners. And why we were just talking about that before I got on here. It's that for savings, right? If you're going to pay rent every. Every month, you're not thinking about it. You're making that rent payment, but you're not building anything up where if you're built, making that payment into your home over 10, 20, 30 years, you're building real equity because real estate goes up over time. You're paying down that mortgage. And then when you get to retirement, one of the biggest differences I've seen working with individuals is do you have a mortgage payment versus no mortgage payment. So if you have to get to retirement and still pay rent, which is going up every single year, versus having that paid off and not having that expense, that is also the difference between having a much more comfortable retirement. So I would say if you can try to get that home as soon as possible, I would do that. But I love the idea of being an entrepreneur. I think especially. We'll talk about it. With this new administration, the wind is finally at your back. I think there's going to be a lot of incentive for people to go out there and build their own business. But why not do both? I mean, a lot of times you can get into some of these homes 3 to 5% down, get in there for the same price, maybe a little bit more than rent, and then start that business as well. I know that's not. I know it was one or the other, but I would try to do both, but definitely get that home.
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B
You know, I think we talk a lot about this with my team.
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A
Yeah.
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B
I try to convince everybody to. To buy a home.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And, you know, one of the things that I feel like, especially in this area, middle Tennessee, it's grow. It's growing because it's growing at a. In a. Yeah. At a very rapid pace. And so, I mean, would it be. Would it be. But a lot of. A lot of the. A lot of people feel like the interest rates are still a little too high. I don't know if those are going to fluctuate or not. I want to ask you, but.
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A
Sure.
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B
But just from what I've seen in the seven years that I've been here, prices have just. They've never leveled off. They just keep going up, up, up, up, up. And so I feel like it would be better to buy right now, no matter what the interest rate is, because the equity is going up so fast. I mean, would it. Am I on the money with that or.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah, I think it's a great point, and I'm one. Like you said, I moved from Southern California here two years ago. I looked at the price increase of the previous two years, kind of like when you came out here, and I was like, Damn, I really missed the boat. And I figured, look, the money I'm going to save on taxes, all these things I may be buying at the top, but at the end of the day, two, three, four years, it'll all even out. Well, I think the house is up another 10 to 15%. So had I have not done it, I would have missed out. And when you look at, I think real estate in general, everyone wants to say real estate. Well, up until 2008, real estate is how it should be, was independent markets. You know, 2008, we saw this crash. Everything went down in the same time. There was never a nationwide housing decline in the history of the United states. Up until 0809, you had certain markets that went down when some went up. So I think it's going to be a little bit area specific. You talk about Tennessee, you talk about North Carolina, you talk about Texas, you talk about Florida. This is the area where all the growth is coming, jobs are being created. It doesn't really surprise me that if you look at the administration, if you look at these are red states that support business, have zero to low taxes, there's incentive for small businesses. If you are looking to buy a home in one of those areas, which is where I think you should be buying, I think it goes up over the next two, three, five, 10 years. And that's going to continue to happen because when you look at areas like California, you know, I was just out in Newport beach. Literally what we bought our home here for, which is almost $7,000, you've been to our house. It's a, it's a nice house, beautiful home. You can get a 3,000 square foot lot, not a house tear down for about the same price. So it's absolutely, you know, when you look at the value you get in somewhere like Tennessee, it's huge. And by the way, no state income taxes. So I think the advice that you're giving to people is if you're buying in some of those areas that I mentioned, I think it's spot on. Now California, places like Seattle, places like New York, I think those areas are going to continue to come down. You've seen some of those prices come down. Unless you're getting into the upstate New York and things like that. So I wouldn't be buying there. But all those areas that I mentioned, I think you're right on in the point. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about interest rates, but 7% interest rates, that's kind of historic. Norm, we're looking at these 10, 15 years where we had abnormally low interest rates. Rates. And people have kind of gravitated towards that and say, oh, I'm going to stay on the sidelines. I don't think that's the thing to do. 80s you had 20, 23% interest rates and you know, the pros and cons of a booming economy. If the economy does do well, which I believe it's going to be doing under this incoming administration, I don't think interest rates are going to be coming down anytime soon. So I wouldn't be on the sidelines.
- [09:17]
B
You don't think they're going to come down?
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A
No, no.
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B
A lot of people are waiting for that.
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A
Yeah, they're going to be waiting a long time. I think so.
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B
I mean the country is, it is what it is. The country's been very divided. It has been for some time now. And we are seeing this massive influx of people from California moving into, into red states, especially the tax free states. But it. So our prices in California, are they, are they dropping? Because what I've heard from the rumor mill is they're actually staying the same if not going up.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at them relative to other states, they're doing is nearly as well when you look at some of the higher priced homes. The thing is about California, I mean an average home, let's look at Orange county for example. An average home is going to be somewhere around 1.8 to 2 million dollars. Nothing super exceptional. So when you look at it from that standpoint, they're kind of hanging in there. You're not seeing the increases like you're seeing in North Carolina or Texas or Florida. However, you know, the thing that I would say California has going for it is there's nowhere else to build in these areas. There's no open land like you have in Texas and Tennessee. So prices are going to somewhat stabilize. However, the catalyst for them to go up I don't think is going to happen. And when you look at, you know, some of the big producing areas in California, these over the last five to six years, like Newport beach area, like Huntington beach and these are kind of, they actually call these the Red Republic. These are the areas within Southern California that have different politics and people who couldn't have necessarily left California to come to Tennessee, move from Los Angeles into some of these counties over there, those areas are going to continue to, I think, hold their value. But the catalyst for them to go up, I don't, I don't think is really going to be there. Sean okay.
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B
And places like Washington, I mean, that's. Those are coming down.
- [11:07]
A
Those are coming down as well for some of the same reasons we're seeing in areas like California now. The hope is, and we had this last election in California, we've seen a much larger movement politically than we've ever seen in the last. I think it was 20 or 30 years. And I think. Look, Sean, people are sick and tired of what's been going on. The crime that's been going on there. You're gonna pay $2 million for home. You can't send your kids to the school. You can't wear a watch out without worrying about getting carjacked. Somebody I know was followed home, you know, three months ago in front of his family, was shot in his face. He just passed away two, three days ago in an area of Bel Air. Like we've heard of the fresh pincer Bel Air. This is outside of Beverly Hills, one of the nicest areas out there. And you know, it's really because of the politics and what's been going on. Like I've seen since COVID I lived in Southern California for 20 years. It became almost like a third world country in some of these places. In terms of the crime, I'm absolutely horrible.
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B
Geez. What about. What about land? Yeah, me and you go back and forth on land all the time. Yeah, I know you're right. But I just. I love land. Yeah, but what. What are some of the. I mean, what do you expect land to do in the upcoming year?
- [12:18]
A
Yeah, well, look, I think that the challenge. I like land also. The challenge with land is if you're someone who. Two things. Number one, I would say the. The tough part about land is you don't get an immediate income from land. So if you buy raw land, you can't rent it out to somebody. Like you could apartment or even a single family house or a commercial building. There's no tax Inc. As you know, unfortunately, when you go to buy land because the tax incentives come from a depreciating asset, which is a building on. On top of the land. So when you buy land, what you're doing is buying that land for future appreciation, which isn't a bad thing, but you have to have the money to be able to wait for that. So, for example, if you're looking to buy. We were just talking about Tennessee's booming right now. And so all the development is starting to go further south because the areas north are starting to get towards Nashville are starting to get more expensive. So the builders. Everybody's starting to move further south. That path of progress, if you want to get ahead of that, because you know developers are going to be buying that land. You know, people are going to be going out there, investors, Vanguard BlackRock are going to be buying KKR. I think buying that with the idea if you can wait seven to 10 years, it's probably going to be a good investment. But just know during a certain period of time, there's not going to be any income coming from that. And you don't want to buy any investment, whether it's land or stocks or a private business, with the idea that I might have to pull money out in a year or two years because that could become a time where the market isn't doing too well and you don't want to have to sell at a loss. So if you've got the money, you don't need the tax incentives right away and you can wait for that progress to happen. I think land's a decent investment.
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B
What did you say? Kkr?
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A
Yeah. KKR is a private equity company. So you're starting to see a lot of these private equity companies buying raw land, doing developments, you know, and this is one of the problems, actually, probably the biggest problem, I believe, and I don't think enough people talk about it in terms of housing inflation. So when you think about the big money, the pensions, the endowments that are investing billions and billions of dollars in different asset classes, stocks and real estate, they all have something called an investment policy statement, which kind of governs how they can invest their money. And up until 2008, 2009, while they invested in real estate, commercial real estate was self storage, multifamily, these big, you know, skyscrapers, class A commercial types of buildings. That's where all of their money was going. Then in 2008, 2009, Blackstone was one of the first ones KKR came in. You remember, especially areas like Arizona, you saw 70, 80% declines in home prices. You saw communities where the average home was being built and sold for 6, 700,000 come down to 150, $200,000. A lot of these homes were being short sold because if you remember at that time, one of the things that fueled the housing crisis was, yeah, not only low interest rates, but these liar loans where you could say, hey, I make a million dollars a year. And as long as you had a decent credit score, there was no verification of tax returns, there was no verification of your income. So people were able to go in and get these houses with little to no down payment. So they had no skin in the game. And what was happening during this 2, 3 year period leading up to 0809, people were just flipping these, making money, and they're like, oh, why wouldn't I do this? Well, because they didn't realize that home prices can come down. When all those home prices came down, what did they do? They went to the bank, they gave them the keys and said, hey, I'm walking away. And the ultimate wisdom of the administration at that time actually changed the tax code to give them forgiveness of indebtedness. Which means if you bought a home for $500,000, the bank wrote it off for $200,000. That 300,000 difference that you would have been liable for. If the bank allowed you to walk away from that, you would have actually had to pay the taxes on that or they could have came after you. Well, during that time, the administration let that go. So there was absolutely no recourse for people. Everyone turned in the keys. Prices crashed, but there was money out there for the big guys, the pension endowments. And they said, look at these prices. If we came in when they did the calculations, if we buy these homes and rent them out, we can actually get a really good return.
- [16:41]
B
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- [18:59]
A
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A
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A
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- [19:24]
B
I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth in what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Shawn Ryan show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show, and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's gonna be all things terrorists. How terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free. We're not gonna spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two. If we release two shows the only other thing that's gonna be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up links in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter. Thank you for listening to the Shawn Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to itunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.
- [21:27]
A
So, as you know and I know they're not going to buy one off homes or two off homes. They were buying entire communities at a time. And what they started doing, and now you're seeing multiple publicly traded companies come in 15, 16 years later is they're buying thousands and thousands of single family homes, turning these into rental units. And now what's happened is the single family home has become what's called an institutional asset class. So now it's just not mom and pop that are bidding for these homes. It's Blackstone and kkr and I can't remember some of the other names. Some of these big companies that have come in over the last two to three years that are also putting bids. So every time you see homes come down a little bit, well, that kind of triggers their model to go off and they come back in and buy. And remember, the difference between you and I is endowments, pension funds, their timeline is perpetual, right, because they're always going to be in business. They're always going to have people retiring where you and I are going to, we're not going to live past 100. So they can take longer term bets. They don't have to make money on this real estate right away. So they're in here. These are long term investors. And so that's the challenge, right, is all these people with big deep pockets now are competing against everyone else and they've kind of put a floor. Now they're not buying to the point In California the three, $4 million homes, which actually wouldn't be a bad thing. What they're buying is the 250 to $600,000 homes, which is really what middle America needs to be going after. And so what this has created now is what I believe is a detriment and I think is going to be a headwind to the traditional apartment complexes, which are called multifamily housing. Because, you know, I think why a lot of people rented apartments is like, hey, if I get an Apartment, I can stay there two years, three years, five years. I've got some stability where if I rent somebody's house, there's a lot of things I got to worry about. 0809 I rented your house. You're the landlord, you just short sold. Guess who got kicked out. Me and my family, we've got to go find somewhere else. You might decide, hey, I want to move back in there after a certain period of time. My brother in law just lost a job, I'm going to move him back in. When your guys lease is up in six months, you got to get out. So there's not a lot of stability. But these new buyers are now creating that stability to where you can now have a single family house. You could have the backyard, put the dog in the backyard. They're creating community projects, parks around there. So it's really what people who can't as a housing gets less affordable if you can't afford a house. I think most families would rather rent these single family homes than they would apartment complexes. So that kind of changes. And these are the things as an investor you always want to think, what is the thesis over the next five to 10 years? While multifamily used to be great, do I want to invest as much as in apartments? If now people are starting to go into homes, is that going to cost, you know, a little bit of a hiccup in multifamily? Which I think it will. But I think the bigger problem and the bigger issue there is the average American who's bidding for these homes. I don't think it's going to be getting a discount anytime soon. And I don't think these players are going anywhere because when you look at occupancy rates of these communities, they're 95, 100%. They're, they're. Because housing is not affordable, they're able to find renters pretty easy.
- [24:37]
B
Wow. You know I get a question that doesn't relate to 2025, but I mean you know the baby boomer generation, biggest generation of all time I believe the.
- [24:45]
A
Millennial generation is now. They surpassed it. It was up until then.
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B
Okay. My question was, I mean you see all these 50 plus retirement communities coming, coming around even here in middle Tennessee. It's massive. Massive in Florida. I mean they got the villages.
- [25:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
You know, which most people know about the villages but I mean is that generation. And people aren't having as many kids as they used to either. And so we see it here in middle Tennessee. It's like every time I Leave the house. There's another development going up. Is this going to implode? Is there going to be an overabundance of housing within the next 20 to 30 years?
- [25:27]
A
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A
Get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. Yeah, well, I think, look, I mean, the thing about the baby boomer generation now is, I mean, they're getting older. I mean, I think they're, I forget 50s, like I'm 50. My, my dad was a baby boomer, right? So I think they're definitely getting older. So I think what you're seeing with that generation, and like you said up until now they were the largest generation, is they're downsizing, right? And a lot of the baby boomers, right, they were the children of the greatest generation, the greatest generation who actually saved and did all these things. The baby boomers are kind of, they're criticized for not being great savers, right? They live beyond their means. They're the children of the 60s. They weren't super responsible. And they might be some of these people who were smart enough to baby buy a home, they built equity in their home, but that's all they have now. They get to retirement. They didn't save anything outside of their home. So what they're doing is selling the home, taking the cash out so that they can live off of it, and then they're downsizing or then switching from being an owner into a renter. In some of these 55 plus communities, however, we don't, as we said, we don't live till ever. So forever. So the next 10, 15 years, as they start dying off, that could create a surplus. But we're seeing that, you know, real estate, the great thing about real estate, it doesn't just go away. So for example, class A commercial office buildings that you would see in Los Angeles, in New York, that all these companies were renting. And then when Covid came a couple of things. Well, number one, people couldn't be in offices. But what I always say about COVID if it would have been two months, three months, I think people would have went back to business as usual. But when it's over a year, there was a huge mindset shift in the way that things were done. So for example, previous firm I had, we had offices in the best areas in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona, High rise class A buildings that were hundreds of thousands of dollars to build out. And then during COVID actually no one came into those. But then our clients got used to zoom meetings, especially in Los Angeles. They didn't want to drive two hours to come into our office. They said, you know what, I think I'd rather do that zoom meeting quarterly than drive two hours roundtrip to get in and see you guys for 45 minutes to an hour. And then obviously the younger generation kind of demanded this flexible environment. So corporations, while they're not getting rid of office space, they're all downsizing. No one's taking as much space as they did before. You don't need to do that. You have inflex environments so you can share a desk between two employees. Employees. So that's a structural shift that's happened in real estate. So what's happened though? Well, I was just reading in, for example, in Newport Beach, California, where there's not a lot of apartments, they have some of these class A office buildings that occupancy rates have come down significantly. So what they're doing now is converting those to mixed use where there's going to be apartment complexes in there. And so you're seeing that with a lot of the office space is now in New York because there's just every time I go there and every three, four months there's more and more vacancy. No one's taking that space. So they're now converting those to residential units. I think the same thing could happen there. I personally the case for investing in them, like you said, the demographic is aging. I think they're getting overbuilt. I wouldn't be investing in any of those areas. I would avoid them. But I think eventually they'll flip and they'll do something else with them because there's still. Because the millennial generation, the younger generation now they're the, they're the new home buyers. And because they are the largest generation and housing is not affordable, the country's trying to find ways to make homes more affordable. And every time something is built or there's a discount on something, everybody's out there looking to pick it up. So I think, you know, it's not going to be a huge problem like commercial real estate that's heavily levered that I'm still very concerned about, but it's something I'd probably steer of if it's an investment case.
- [29:19]
B
Let's move into stock market.
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A
Yeah.
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B
What can we expect in 2025 in the stock market?
- [29:25]
A
Yeah, that's a million dollar question. Well, what I didn't expect was 29 in 2024. Right. It was a huge year. It was an election year which historically is very volatile. People don't know what's going to be going on. And when you look at what has happened since November in the stock market, it's been, and I've been in the market since 1998, I've never seen anything like this. Now, people thought, you know, maybe Trump gets in. And then we called it the Trump rally. Some things were rallying up and usually there's, there's a saying, buy on the rumor, sell on the news. So what I thought was gonna happen, you see this little bit of a run up into the, into the election, Trump gets elected, you have a couple of days of euphoria, then things kind of sell off and people start worrying about things, things again. Well, that hasn't happened. We're, you know, routing right now. At the end of the year, we've seen a little bit of a pullback, but largely we've just seen rotation where you might see tech do great and then the market doesn't crash, it just shifts to industrials and then it just shifts to healthcare. So the resiliency of this market, I think, based off of what's going to be happening with the new administration, in my view, has been shocking. So what you always want to think about is you're asking me about 2025. Well, 2024, we just did 30% historically over a long period of time. The S and p average is nine and a half to 10%. So that's gotta get you a little bit worried when you see something rally. The year before was actually a pretty good year. So now you're looking at like 40% in two years. Does that necessarily mean the stock market's gonna crash? No, it doesn't. But what I would expect is a lot more volatility. So there's a lot of things, there's a lot of heavy expectations on this new administration. We've got Doge, we got all these people coming in, we've got Elon Musk, we've got Trump, and everybody is super euphoric about what's going to happen. I'm optimistic, but I'm also cautiously optimistic. And I don't expect all these things to happen overnight. So what I would say is I believe the market will do well. I don't think it's Going to be straight up like it was before. And so I would use something called dollar cost averaging. If you've got some money you want to put in the market, don't dump it all in right away. Use some of these pullbacks, use some of the scare, use some of the fear, use some of the disappointments which we're bound to get with some of the new administration like we would with everywhere. Use those as opportunities to buy, but don't go all in after we've had this huge run.
- [31:45]
B
What sectors do you think are going to do the best?
- [31:48]
A
I think technology is going to continue to lead because technology is what is creating. Technology is a double edged sword. It's creating the increased productivity, meaning efficiency for businesses. At the end of the day, when we're buying stocks, what we're doing is we're buying the future profits of a company. And the more consistent, the faster growing, the more reliable those profits are, the more that stock is going to continue to go up. And so when you look at technology, there's no industry that I know well, let's take one sector of technology, cybersecurity. Well, everything's going to the cloud, everything's going to AI. If you were a large corporation or small corporation, like my businesses, your businesses, no matter how bad the economy is, are you going to cut your budget for cybersecurity? Are you going to tell your customers, hey, you know, things aren't quite good, we're going to, we're going to make your data a little bit riskier? Of course not. So there's going to be increased investment there, artificial intelligence, other things that are going to increase productivity, to make companies more efficient and more profitable are going to continue to do well. The downside of that obviously is there's going to be less people needed to be able to create those jobs. So technology, I believe is the number one sector out there. Everything is going to be AI driven, robotics driven. That's where the economy in the future is going. That's been really, that painter's picture has been painted for the last five to six years. And that's where you're seeing the money start to go. Now you look at other areas where it's almost like when you think about the gold rush back in California. You can invest in the gold in the mine itself, or you could invest in the picks and shovels, the things that they're going to be out there to be able to work and create and mine that gold. So you think about energy, for example. Well, all this data, like we Saw with bitcoin mining everything, it takes a lot of data and power and energy to be able to power this new economy. Which is why you've seen in the last year to two years, utility companies, which are traditionally, they say utilities are what widows and orphans buy. Right. Because they're stodgy companies. They don't grow really fast. You know, they're what puts the lights on, literally. They pay good dividends historically. So you start to, you look at those as more conservative investments. But we've seen utility companies go up 50, 60, 70% for precisely the reason. I'm talking about the need to be able to power these supercomputers and generators and everything to be able to create this new economy. So that's, that's another way that I would look at playing it. What I'd be a little bit more leery of when we were talking about this is areas like health care. There's so many questions around that. The health care system is clearly broken. We don't know what that's going to look at. There's not a lot of predictability. And the way Wall street prices stocks is when there's a high degree of uncertainty, there needs to be a high discount associated with it. So the more certainty, the more people are willing to pay up for it. There's a pretty high degree of certainty that Apple's going to be around in a few years, Google's going to be around in a few years. But what does UnitedHealthcare look like? Not mentioning everything that just went on with that company, Pfizer, what do those companies look like with the new administration? We see RFK talking about some different things. We know the system is broken. Clearly we don't believe in it, we don't trust it, we don't think it's efficient. That's probably an area I would be avoiding. I would be heavy in technology, I would be heavy in energy. You know, I think some of the real estate investment trusts that own the right type of property or another area. So another thing is if you don't have money to buy a home or invest in commercial real estate someplace, sometimes the cheapest place to buy real estate is actually on Wall Street. You can buy something that's called a real estate investment trust that owns self storage units, that own single family homes, that owns raw land, that owns commercial units, whatever it is you want to buy. And you get a lot of the same benefits, depreciation, you get income that comes from them. So some real estate investment trust had been really beaten up over the last year, year and a half. Why? Because traditionally, as interest rates go up, areas that pay you a dividend or income, like real estate, investment trust, or as interest rates go up, it's not easy to borrow to buy. Real estate tend to come down. So some of those areas have pulled back. But I think there's going to be a stabilization. I do believe in real estate. So real estate investment trusts are another area that I'd be looking at.
- [36:17]
B
Back to the RFK thing that you brought that up, because I wanted to specifically ask that. He's got a lot of plans about, you know, kind of going after big pharma, going after the food companies, you know, but there's got to be a counter to that. We can't just get rid of all of that. So is there anything in health care or in food or. Or that we should be looking at? One thing that comes to my mind is psychedelics.
- [36:42]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [36:42]
B
Psychedelics just keeps getting more and more popular. More and more people are hearing about it and figuring out all the positive aspects of going through some psychedelic therapy. I know that. I don't know. I've heard rumors of publicly traded companies kind of rising up within that space. Are you tracking any of that at all?
- [37:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, the thing to be a little bit leery of with a lot of these companies, some of them, most of them don't have earnings yet. Right. So they're investing in R and D, which in itself isn't a bad thing. Right. Because as you mentioned, it's been kind of like a backdoor type of thing. Psychedelics, it hasn't hit mainstream yet. I mean, it was the same thing with alcohol back before Prohibition, right before Budweiser and Coors became these big stocks. So I do think there's some validity to your thinking. I do think that those things could get. Get a light shone on them. And when you start looking at some of the independent research out there, you've talked about it on your show a lot with different people. There's actually a lot of positives that surround it, more so than what's happening with barbiturates and all these other things that are out there that are harming people. So I think what I would say about those types of investments, the same thing I talk about crypto and all these other areas that are a lot more speculative, that had a lot of degree of uncertainty with them. I don't think you should avoid them, because if you're not participating, participating in those, those are the areas which we call them 10 baggers, right. Those could be the things that do a 10x return, 20x 30x return. So you miss out on them because of fear. What I would say is though, those are the areas to maybe sprinkle a little bit of money in. So if it goes down and you lose something, it's okay. And I would also say don't try to pick one stock. Spread it out across 10 to 20 stocks. This is like what the big boys do. Andreessen Horowitz the private equity companies, when they're investing in small private companies companies, they invest over 100, 200 companies. Why? Because they know 50, 60% of them are going to shit the bed, they're going to go to zero. But the rest or one or two or three of them could be that home run that more than makes up for it. So I would say start doing the research. I think it's promising. Not too long ago we saw something similar a few years ago with marijuana stocks. Some of the psychedelics actually had big runs during that period of time. I do think the, in this administration though could create a narrative that actually supports a thesis for those types of things. And one thing I've learned Sean, for being in the market for over 26 years, you know, I'm trained to be a fundamental analyst. But what I've realized, and I also have a degree in psychology, the psychology of people sometimes is a lot more important than what the actual fundamental numbers believe. And so if somebody believes in something and enough people believe in something, the power for those stocks to skyrocket well ahead of what the valuation model is going to show is going to happen. So I do think those are areas people should be looking at this year.
- [39:31]
B
Does seem like there's a big wave of people a lot more interested in homeopathy type type care and, and natural medicines. And so yeah, I was just curious and I'm sure there's tons of companies, only probably a couple will survive. I mean is that, is that.
- [39:48]
A
Yeah, more than likely. I mean it's the same thing we saw with the Internet. I joke about this all the time and I got in the market it professionally in 1998. And so at the time this is when Amazon went public and there was also, which is still around, just not as big as it used to be was Barnes and Noble. Right. And so remember, I mean Amazon started with books. Now the vision from Bezos was way bigger than books but he knew if I could start with books, that's something I can deliver on. I could over under promise, over deliver I can create trust. And everything that he's doing today, maybe not 100% of it, but he had a vision of the vast majority of that. 25, 30 years ago, Wall street didn't quite get that. And so we literally used to argue with other analysts about should you buy Amazon or Barnes and Noble. People didn't quite get it. And that was kind of the thing. Right. And Google for example, just came out during that time. Should you invest in Google or ask Jeeves? That was the other search engine that was. People were going. So to your point, there's some that went by the wayside, but there's a lot that won. And then the other thing that you also could have the benefit in with, I think some of these psychedelic companies, some of the artificial intelligence companies, some of the computing companies, is the big behemoths out there, the Microsofts, the Metas, the Googles. X, like all these companies, they're trillion dollar companies to continue to double and triple and have 20 and 30% organization organic growth, meaning just more advertising and more clients. Like that's not going to be able to happen. So as companies get bigger, what they tend to do is instead of investing in their own R and D or trying to advertise more or do anything, they start growing through acquisition. So what you'll see is some of these smaller companies, if you can invest them at the right time, they can get bought out 2, 3, 4x of what they're trading at. So you've got the catalyst of hey, if that company can do it on their own, great. But I've got a lot of big buyers out there in these spaces. Like, you know, I was reading this morning that, you know, Meta and Microsoft and I believe Alphabet are all looking into potentially buying into nuclear power plants. Right. Because again, they're going to need to make some of these investments everywhere. So these big technology companies don't just think about them as tech. Why won't. And I mean you've already seen Amazon get into pharmaceuticals and Meta. Like these companies are giants that could get into the food industry, that can get into health care, that are trying to get into energy with big deep pockets that could be buying some of these smaller companies. So as an investor, I like investing in those big names, but I think in trying to pick some of these smaller names, there's a lot of catalysts that could be coming up. And by the way, all the regulatory burden that you have to get over to be able to do M and A, that's probably going to be put aside for the next four years with this incoming administration. And you haven't really seen a lot of M and A based off of historic norms over the last four years. I think that's going to be coming back, which is another callus for some of these stocks to do better.
- [42:46]
B
Back to tech, I mean there's. We're on the. Seems like we're on the brink of World War three.
- [42:54]
A
Yeah.
- [42:54]
B
And so with that being said, I just interviewed this guy, Joe Lonsdale, he was the founder of the company called Palantir. And it seems like there's all these, I don't want to call them mini, but there's a new wave of military industrial complex type companies coming about. They're a lot more efficient than the old ones. I think it's Anduril. They have the missile instead of, you know, instead of firing these million dollar missiles to take out a drone. These things, if they miss, they come back and they land. We don't lose. I mean, is that something to be thinking about, investing in companies like those?
- [43:35]
A
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
- [43:37]
B
Especially with the, with the, with the new landscape of the world being on the brink of.
- [43:42]
A
Yeah.
- [43:43]
B
All these different complex.
- [43:44]
A
I mean even if it wasn't, these big companies still exist, the Halliburtons and everything of the world that are fat happy, they're doing business the old way. There's not those efficiencies. So the thing about it is, even if we're not on the brink, which, you know, I agree with you, things don't obviously look great right now. The ability to change things, make things better, look at things from a different light, come from the technology space and get like I was just saying, right. It's not technology companies just competing with each other. They're trying to get into every area now that they see inefficiencies, especially with artificial intelligence that they think they can improve on. So at the end of the day, even if that's not the case, if there is a company that, that could come in and do it better, cheaper or faster, that's something that you want to get in and invest on. And so you know what I tell people all the time is, and Warren Buffett is really well known for saying invest in the things that you use. Right. So if you drink Coca Cola, he invests in Coca Cola. He bought McDonald's and he bought Apple after he got drug into saying he would never invest in technology stocks. But I would also say some of the best investments that I ever found came from things that I saw my daughter and her friends buying before they were talked about on Wall street or, you know, listening to your show, I mean, you're bringing in some experts. From what I love about it is all over the world, all different industries, different mindsets. And what you really need to do to be a great investor is go against the herd, think differently. Don't think like the masses. Don't be following the sheep. The sheep, what they do is they're constantly buying high and selling low. Oh, technology ran up, let me buy it went down. Somebody knows something that I don't know, time to sell, right? So they're just constantly following the herd. They don't want to do what Gretzky said is skate to where the puck is going, not to where it's been. So when you start hearing ideas like that, if it makes sense to where, hey, this could be done better, like you're saying, and I don't know, I'm not a military expert, obviously, but hey, if it's going to cost a million dollars to shoot this or 20,000 to shoot this, I think this is more than likely where it's going to be going. And again, you start talking about things like government efficiency and there's a huge amount of waste in the government and what the military is spending. And if we really can get the right players on board to say, hey, why are we spending money over here with a company like this when there's this new upstart that we can invest in, cut the budget by 20 to 30%, because it's going to have to be with Doge and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It can't be more than just pointing out problems and saying, here's the problem. To your point, there has to be something to replace it. Same thing with healthcare. So if these companies are now starting up a viable alternative to be able to compete with those, I think there's gonna really be some time and space for some money to flow into those. So, again, don't bet the farm, don't bet money that you can't afford to lose. But if you can find some of these things early, the great thing about Google, ChatGPT, start putting some things in there. It'll bring you back some of the companies. If you could see some of these that are trading public, identify those and put a little bit of money in them, follow them, do some research. Don't wait for your stock broker to tell you about it. Don't wait for it to be on the front page of Yahoo Finance, because that by that Time, the stocks are going to be much higher. So I think it's a great way to do it.
- [46:57]
B
Speaking of Doge, I mean, a lot of people are excited about this. A lot of people are excited about the government trimming the fat. Seems like there's a lot of fat to be trimmed now. This goes the way everybody kind of hopes it. It, it goes. And, and there's this massive reform in government spending and Sounds like even laying off a lot of jobs.
- [47:21]
A
Yeah.
- [47:22]
B
What does that do for our economy?
- [47:25]
A
Well, I mean, I think the big thing is when we look at this budget deficit, right. That is getting out of hand. I mean, and I think. I don't look. I think most people that are listening to this, they know it's a problem. Right. They understand that if you're an individual, you can't live off of credit card debt and not have any savings. Right. So everyone, I think, is aware enough to know that we can't continue to spend. I think the biggest risk to that is a few things. Number one, all this spending is tied to the currency, tied to the dollar, which we try to diversify away from the dollar with Bitcoin or with real estate or other things, but at the end of the day, we're all pretty beholden to the dollar. If the dollar crashes, the vast majority of us are going to be in trouble. And the problem is the dollar no longer is backed by the gold standard or anything else. The dollar is backed by the belief that the US Is always going to make its debt payments on time, that it's always going to be able to do that, and the rest of the world looks at it as the reserve currency. When you start talking about World War III and everything, you got people like Putin out there and say, hey, we're going to get away from the dollar. And so. So I don't think people understand really how dangerous that could be if your dollar all of a sudden went to zero. Now, people in third world countries who've seen 200, 300% inflation happen overnight understand how detrimental that could be. So I think the idea of having a balanced budget, right. And trying to understand that we have to make more money than we're spending, which I think is good about this administration also, because it can't just be to your point, we can't just cut everything and save our way to prosperity. We also have to grow. And that was the one thing I would say about the Democrats. It was about, okay, let's spend, spend, spend. But even the things that they talked about cutting, I Never heard out of their agenda what they're going to actually do to grow businesses. I heard $25,000 for first home buyers. I heard we'd give you 20 grand. I never heard anything that was going to incentivize businesses to grow. And the truth is the size of the hole that we've dug ourselves, we can't cut our way out of it. We need to grow, we need to increase gdp. So I think, look, I think everything that they're going to be doing in terms of looking to cut, I think that's great. There's going to be some things that obviously there's a lot of fat in the system that low hanging fruit could be taken out. But what I'm a little bit more interested in is what are they going to really do to spark small businesses. The vast majority of this country is made up by small businesses. We see a lot of, of incentives and benefits for the big, huge corporations. But the small business owner, like you myself, 90% of the people that I deal with, those are the people that are kind of stuck in the middle, right? They're not making enough money to get the huge benefits. They don't, they're not poor enough to get all the free handouts. They don't get their credit card debt paid off, they don't get their student loans paid off. They get to pay for everybody else's shit though. Like what are those people going to be getting? How are they going to be incentivized to grow? So if it's tariffs, okay, great, let's do tariffs. But what incentive do I now have to keep my business here? Hire more people, pay people. Well, are there going to be benefits to me? So that's, I mean, everyone's interested in doge. I'm more interested in what are the growth policies that are going to be put in place by this new administration.
- [50:43]
B
Are there any yet?
- [50:45]
A
I mean, nothing's definitive, right? They haven't got in there. There's a lot of talk out there right now and I think that's around everything. It's going to be around real estate, which is obviously a big part of the economy, small businesses. You know, one thing, you know, talking about real estate, for example, which I think was probably one of the examples of the type of smart policy that I really hope this new administration comes in with, was something called opportunity zones. And so Trump put this in place to where, when you looked at some of the underperforming demographic areas where maybe there's a high unemployment area, you had high minority area and instead of just saying, okay, let's give them more welfare checks, or let's get, you know, put up another community center. What the Trump administration said was, if you develop real estate in these areas, if you move businesses and offices into these areas, we're going to give you huge tax incentives to be able to do that. Now those things have started to wear off because they were put in place at the beginning of this administration, and they pretty much go to zero over the next year to two years. This is the old adage of like, let's start investing in teaching people how to fish instead of just giving them fish. So I think things like that for real estate investors, I believe things like opportunity zones, things like accelerated depreciation to where you're able to buy a new building, like you're building a new building, right? You can go out there, incentivize somebody to create a business, build a building that they're going to house new employees with, and instead of having to write that building off over 28 years, they could take a huge percentage of that in year one. Things like this that are looking at what is the goal we're trying to achieve and how do we create policy to incentivize that? The truth is, Sean, the things that we need to turn this economy around are, are. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. The vast majority of Americans could figure out what they need to do. They do it. Most people have a balanced budget in their own house. The problem is, as you mentioned at the beginning, this polarizing politics that we have to be able to create a bill that solves a problem for unemployment, now, has healthcare tied to it, it has military things tied to it. So there's so much fat around it. The bill is not actually put in place to solve the true problem. So what I'm hoping is there's going to be more than that. And like I said at the beginning, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm also a realist. I know a lot of these things aren't going to happen overnight. They're not going to be super easy. What I would also say about this new administration is the people that think they're going to work less and all of a sudden this rising tide is going to float all boats, everybody to prosperity are going to be sadly mistaken. I think the only thing that's going to happen is there's going to be some, probably some tax incentives. I think the biggest thing for small businesses that I'm looking forward to is lower regulation. And I think That's a big area that people talk about on both sides is regulation and the problem that regulation causes. And you talk about fat in the system that Doge is going to be cutting out. And what I'll tell you someone who's been in financial services for 25 years, and I'll give you an example. I probably shouldn't do it on camera, but I will. In financial services. I'm all for protecting investors. Obviously, there's a lot of crooks out there in my industry. I've talked about this before. To call yourself a financial advisor, you don't even need a high school diploma. You don't need to do anything. You could say, I'm a financial advisor and literally within days advise people on their life savings. And if you are some slick talking person, you put on a good suit and you get in front of the average American who we know the reason I wrote this book, financial literacy. And this, this country is at an all time low. The vast majority of people know nothing about the stock market or real estate or anything that's going on. You can convince them to do things that are going to be detrimental to their future, right? And so all this is going on. So if you're a regulatory authority, why not say, hey, why don't we require some type of minimum requirement of college or testing or something before someone calls themselves a financial advisor and people have forced their life savings over to them. We looked at the Madoff scandal where he scammed hundreds and hundreds of people. I mean thousands, I think it was, of people where the SEC went into his office time and time again and nothing happened to this guy. He was literally stealing money. We see that people who aren't registered but are doing crypto scams and all these things that I see on a daily basis, that people are getting caught up. Nothing's being done to them. Instead what they're focused on is, hey, we've taken this 52 page document. You have to give your investors to a 56 page document which we know they're not going to read anyway. And this I needs to be dotted twice. And this T needs to, not to protect investors, but to create jobs for regulatory guys to come in and have more jobs and come in and create fines. And if you look at companies like people think, oh, Chase and Morgan Stanley and these guys are getting fined every single month hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why? Because they're stealing from people. We know Chase isn't stealing from people, right? We know Merrill lynch isn't stealing from people. However, they might not be dotting that I cross. Meanwhile, we've got people literally stealing from people that nothing's getting done. We launched a new firm, Real Talk Capital. I left my old wealth management firm. I sold that a few years ago, and I said, hey, we were only working with the ultra high net worth. We want to be able to expand and offer our services to more people. In order to do that, we need to think differently. Differently. We need to create different pricing models. We need to think outside of the box of this 1% management fee that everybody's charging across the board. And so we created a way to say, hey, let's do some flat fees. Let's, you know, create some things that are going to enhance people's lives at an earlier age versus having to wait till they have a million or $2 million. And so the short of it, and I won't talk about the different regulatory authorities, but regulators came in, looked at things, and because we weren't following this boilerplate template until we actually increased prices on some of our services, and I mean significantly, they wouldn't leave us alone. And so until we increase prices. So they could check the box, right? Because people don't want to think it's just like policy. It's not like what's right for the person. This doesn't fit the mold that we've had for 25 or 30 years when we increase prices, because they forced us to do that, then they were okay with it. And so this is the shit that goes on. That doesn't protect investors, it doesn't protect small business owners. It creates more jobs for regulators, and it's not helping the average American get to where they need to go. That's just from my own industry. But you see it in energy, you see it in healthcare. So why, you know, if you talk about psychedelics, why would you treat a new upstart psychedelic company who's trying to really provide value and opportunity and options and choice to people the same as you would treat Pfizer, yet they do it right. Same thing with a financial services company. Why would you create the same regulatory burden on a new upstart financial services company that you do for Chase that we know is too big to fail, that we know the government's gonna come in and support them anyway if anything is going wrong, but that's the way things are being done. Nobody's talking about this stuff, Sean. And so when you hear this incoming administration saying we're taking down regulatory burdens, you're gonna hear the left scream about, oh, it's gonna be 2008 again. Well, you know, let's remember 2008. And a lot of that shit that happened was because Barney Frank and saying everybody should be a homeowner and liar loans and a lot of stuff that were created to get into everybody being a homeowner. Regardless of whether you have a job, let's remember that some of the liability belongs to there. And just because of the fact that we're talking about smart regulation and reducing regulatory barriers doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the wild west. And what I believe it's going to be able to do is allow small businesses to actually be able to compete, to create new products, alternative services, and not have to spend 100% of their time on compliance and going through audits and actually working on creating solutions for people. And that regulatory burden, Sean, is probably the single biggest tax that a lot of small businesses have because they're constantly having to pay for more compliance officers and more attorneys. And I look at just our small financial services firm, the amount of money that we're spending on legal fees to meet things that aren't even helping our clients, that's a huge tax. So if you can minimize that burden, that's money that I could actually employ more people for, buy more technology for. And so I think this new administration, and so I'm just trying to paint the picture for the average person who doesn't understand why regulation is such a bad thing. Regulation in itself is not a bad thing, but regulation for the self sake of regulation is just a lot of fat that doesn't help anybody except regulatory. Interesting.
- [59:36]
B
I never would have thought of that. God, let's move into crypto.
- [59:39]
A
Yeah.
- [59:40]
B
Bitcoin just hit, what was it, 100,000, 6,000?
- [59:44]
A
Yeah.
- [59:45]
B
Where's that going?
- [59:47]
A
Yeah, I, I wish I knew exactly where it was going. One thing I will say about bitcoin, cryptocurrency, alternative currencies in general, is it, it goes back to this faith in the dollar. I think a lot of people are losing faith in the dollar because a lot, a lot of people have lost faith in politicians. And unfortunately, in this country there's two things we have fiscal policy and monetary policy that kind of rule our economy. Now, monetary policy is what we see the Fed doing, right? And monetary policy, they only have one tool. So Jerome Powell and all these guys, they sit around, they look at all the problems, they have one tool for a dual mandate. Dual mandate meaning they have to do two things. They have to keep a lid on inflation, their numbers about 2 to 3%. We know we're like at 7, 8% before, but that's not the real numbers. If you look at housing and all those things like 12, 13%, and they need to maintain full unemployment, so they want to have unemployment somewhere around 3 now 4%. So that's two pretty big tasks, right? Control inflation and make sure people have jobs. Oh, and you got one tool, it's monetary policy, meaning interest rates. That's all you can do to control this. So no matter what they see, that's all they can do. And so what the Fed tries to do is control the economy by either lowering interest rates or raising interest rates. So when they raise interest rates, they're trying to slow the economy down. Why? Well, makes sense if you're going to go and buy a house, well, that house payment today is going to cost you a lot more. A lot of people have credit card debt. So your credit card interest payments this month or this year might be 500 bucks, where three years ago they're only $200. So when interest rates go up, it stymies the economy. There's more money that has to go to debt service than can go out to buy goods and services. And that's why the economy slows down, that's why inflation comes down. The opposite is when they see things and right now they're in a period of lowering interest rates, which is relatively controversial because when you look at the economy, it's actually doing pretty well. And so people are wondering like why are they lowering interest rates? So when they lower interest rates, the idea is, well, what we're going to do is give more stimulus into the economy. So the opposite, if home prices are lower now, right, because of the fact that their payment is lower, more money to the economy, less money is going to pay off your student loan or assuming you still have student loans or your credit card debt. So more money goes into the economy. So that's the only tool. The problem is though that the Fed can only control the overnight lending rate, which is short term interest rates. So we've seen the Fed cut rates twice now, but actually long term rates have gone up. And so like the 10 year treasury actually controls the 30 year mortgage. So mortgage rates were in the sixes, now they're back above 7%. So people are kind of scratching their head because at the end of the day, no matter what they do, it's the free world market economy that's going to dictate what they believe in. People do not believe that they're going to cut interest rates much more. They don't believe that the economy is going to go to a point where it dictates rates going lower. And so that's not really working. And so I'm kind of, I'm getting to your question about Bitcoin, but that, so then that relies on the bigger lever to move the economy, and that's fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is things like tax cuts. It's things like changing regulation. It's everything else except for monetary policy, which I would argue is the more important thing. Right. I want, I don't want to pay. I don't want to build a business and have to pay 40 or 50% when I sell it in taxes to the government. Government who's not efficient with it. I don't want to pay the highest tax rates in the country. I don't want to have ridiculous regulation that's not helping anybody. And it's causing us to hire 22 attorneys every single year. Those are the things that we're hoping that have not. We had no fiscal policy for the last five, six years because everybody's locked up, nothing's changing. So we're lying on the Fed to move everything. So everyone's blaming the Fed for everything. And meanwhile, it's really Congress that can't decide on anything that's going to actually help the economy. And so what I'm saying here is all these things, the ability for Congress to act on fiscal policy, for us to have smart monetary policy that dictates what's going to happen with the dollar. And unless people feel like there's some security and stability around the US Economy, there's not going to be security and stability around the US Dollar. And so what people start saying then is, well, what can we believe in what currency? Now, it's not going to be like the US Dollar loses reserve currency overnight. It's not going to happen. However, what people are starting to now look at is alternatives. And how do I hedge against that? How do I make sure I'm not Argentina or Russia where overnight my dollar is not worth anything. So they're looking at things like Bitcoin as a hedge to that. And, you know, Bitcoin obviously kind of, you know, it's, it's an unscrewable ledger. There's a finite amount of supply in terms of using it as a currency. It's not going to happen. It's not efficient enough to happen. But people are using it as a store of value. Arguably, when things really go bad, I don't know that it's going to be the best store of value. I think I'd probably have rather have land and maybe even gold in that sense. But they're using it as a store of value and also a hedge. Now again, remember I told you narrative is super important though. So why I talked about investing in psychedelics makes more sense now than if the Harris administration were to get into there. All these things are based off of narrative. So stocks need a catalyst and they need a story to support it. So I think this new incoming administration really kind of lit a fire under crypto. Why? Because you have Doge. Why did everyone get excited? Doge. It was Dogecoin that Elon Musk Musk took from a fraction of a penny to 40 cents. He's obviously pro crypto. You've seen Trump out at some of the crypto conventions out there. So this administration seems pretty crypto friendly. What does that mean? I don't know. However, there's a narrative there for people to speculate and bet on it more. And you're starting to see other countries adopt it. Maybe does it become, you know, if they start talking about, hey, we need to have a certain amount of crypto to kind of secure the dollar. I mean you're going to see. Or bitcoin, you're going to see things absolutely rally. So it goes back to, we don't know enough about it yet. But should you have a small amount of money invested in these things, more than likely you should just don't go all in on it because if it doesn't happen, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. But I think there's enough now with this new. If this administration didn't get in, I think I would say don't touch it. But I think there's enough out there to where we could hear something kind of shocking that gets it to skyrocket. So I think having a little bit of an element allocation to it's pretty good.
- [66:17]
B
What about precious metals? Yeah, I mean gold is. It's close to $3,000 an ounce down, correct?
- [66:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [66:25]
B
It really jumped.
- [66:27]
A
Yeah. So gold, it's all the same reason.
- [66:29]
B
Because of fear of the dollar.
- [66:30]
A
It's exactly what it is. So whenever look, when you look at, there's a few what I would say old school hedges against the dollar. Gold's probably one of the oldest. Right. We used to be on the gold standard, which means we had to have a certain amount of gold and supply for every dollar. And then we got off the gold standard because we wanted to be able to create the deficits that we have without any accountability. And that was probably one of the worst things that could have happened to the US dollar. But gold is one of those things. Land is one of those things. Oil, what they say is if you drop it on your foot and it hurts, that's probably one of the things that you want to have to hedge against the dollar. Now Bitcoin obviously isn't that, but I guess they're saying that that's kind of the new cyber hedge against that. But I think a little bit of gold is fine. But, but you know, I mean, let me tell you my honest opinion about all this stuff, right? A lot of people will say stocks are also a good hedge against inflation. Why? Well, we just went through a good period of inflation. Stocks did really well. Why? Well, let's look at Procter and Gamble, who makes a lot of food and diapers and all this stuff, things that we all need to buy. So what did they do? Inflation came, they increased prices, which, hey, you still need to eat and you still need to put diapers on your kid. They did something called shrinkflation which they just gave you less cereal in the box but you paid the same, same price. So companies will not just sit back and not be profitable, they will pass along ways to be profitable to the company. So stocks do tend to be a good hedge against inflation. But here's the way I look at it over the long run. Like what are we really trying? So you buy stocks, what are you trying to hedge against? A hedge in general is against catastrophe, right? So when you think about hedges like the dollar crashing and World War iii, you know, I would argue if some of the worst case scenarios that you've talked about on your show, we've talked about it for, actually come to play, you're going to have a lot bigger worries about than your stock portfolio. So we've talked about this before, like I'm kind of all in on stocks and small businesses and I've got a little bit of crypto and. But I tend to invest in businesses and American entrepreneurs because I think American entrepreneurs are always going to find a way to make money, right? And it's proven itself. Even the S&P 500, we're always talking it down, it can. Last time I was on your show, almost two years ago, if you're not going to do anything, buy the S&P 500. It's up 40 something percent versus trying to be all over the place, work by the S&P 500. But what I would say is, if you're really worried about the proverbial shit hitting the fan, I like things like farmland, I like things like ammunition, I like things like weapons. I like things where at the end of the day, if things really get that bad, there's been some shows on Netflix like, who wants your block of gold? Like, people want medicine, they want food, they want running water, they want ammunition. And I don't want to scare anybody or anything like that, but in terms of the hedges that I advise people against, the hedges that I have, it's more leaning towards that. Like, I don't want bitcoin. If things really get bad, I don't want your bitcoin. I don't really want your gold chips. I need your food, I need your energy, I need land, I need ammunition. I need those things. Things. And it might be kind of a morbid or scary way to think about it, but at the end of the day, it's either stocks and companies and America is always going to find a way. It always has to continue to do better and do well and prosper, and real estate I love, or things are going to go really bad. And the alternative probably doesn't look like you're going to be protected by bitcoin. That's just my view.
- [69:50]
B
Makes sense. Makes sense. So let's start to wrap it up here. But snapshot, what should the. A lot of people are making New Year's resolutions right now or have by the time this comes out. Getting out of debt, investing in the 401k, putting money into IRAs, buying a home. What are your top couple things that the new investors should be doing with their money this year?
- [70:19]
A
Yeah, look, I think there's a few things and I'll tell you my New Year's resolutions for the last two years, and it'll probably be for the next 10 years, are. This isn't really an investment question, but my healthcare, like I said, I think we're all being lied to about our healthcare. And it's getting better and greater control over that. And that comes from knowledge. People like your show and other people out there, they're trying to educate people on that because I think we're all being lied to. And I think at the end of the day, the system is not set up for people to be healthy. It's set up to create profits for drug companies and hospitals and these other things. And I think. I think when you think about that in general, it's really the same thing with your money. Unfortunately, the financial Service industry was not set up to give people the knowledge and information to become wealthy. The financial service industry was set up to gather the money from wealthy people, put it in their own coffers and then earn a percentage of that by doing nothing. That's just the truth. And I've been in this industry my whole life, I've tried to change that. So the way people invest, the knowledge that they have, the advice that they'll be giving by big institutions, I think it's all wrong. I think it's all self serving. It's not helping them, it's helping these financial institutions stay in place. And the problem is Sean, they're still managing money, they're still giving advice based off of data and information that came from the 1960s and 1970s that haven't changed. And they've created financial institutions around this that protect themselves if they're ever sued or anything. So there's no incentive for them them to change. So the same thing I would say with healthcare is start educating on yourself. You're educating yourself on how do people really get wealthy. What are people who have really made money doing? Are they following the 9 to 5 work there and put 5% in your 401k and get there or are they thinking outside the box? And I'll tell you, I've had the opportunity. We've talked about my story on the previous show. I grew up super poor. My family didn't have of stocks or own real estate or anything like that. I was the first to go to college, first owned stocks, first to buy a home. And so I'm the average American who's first generation trying to get it and create it themselves. And unfortunately the information if I would have taken of just get out of school and work for the rest of your life, I never would have had the same opportunities that I'm having I have right now. I think the best thing, and I was talking about this with one of your staff members for young people at the beginning of this is what people need to do going into this new year, especially younger people where it's not too late. And even if you're in your 40s, early 50s, there's people that start businesses is figure out what is a problem in society that I believe I could, I could solve better than anybody else. How do I create a skill set, whether that's going to medical school when you're young or hey, I'm an H Vac guy. Let me think of how do I create my own H Vac? There's so Many private equity companies out there that are buying these companies. How do I create something of value where I can secure my own income, create my own income, control my own future? I would encourage everybody to start thinking that way because when you think about artificial intelligence and robotics, all these things are job killers, right? And I could tell you, as somebody who's worked with hundreds and hundreds of very successful people, the more money you start to make in an organization, the more vulnerable you become when there's cutbacks. So if artificial intelligence takes jobs and they shrink, guess where they start? They start at the top. And if you're someone who's 40 years old and you're earning 300, $400,000 a year and you get laid off, you're at a point where you probably didn't make enough money over the previous 10 years to where you're financially set. You're probably at the point of ultimate vulnerability where now you get laid off. Where do you go replace that income? You didn't start working on creating your own job. Somebody else isn't going to hire you for three or four hundred thousand dollars. What you do is you have to take a step back. So what I would encourage everyone in this new year is start focusing on how do I become an entrepreneur. Over 90% of businesses in America are small businesses. How do I create my own income? Or how do I get in with a company where I might not be an entrepreneur, but they're going to give me an opportunity to be part, earn some equity in that business? Because again, I've earned all my money, yeah, through investing. But the vast majority of my businesses, I bought, sold businesses, built businesses, and I've earned it from there. But I've also worked with wealthy people since 1998. Professional athletes, entrepreneurs, corporate level executives, all of them, all of them made money from a single skill set that they were able to monetize over a period of time. I never worked with anyone super wealthy that 9 to 5 their way and 401k it. They took significant risks. They did it when they were younger. They started their own businesses. They took extreme leverage. I think I talked about this before. One of my largest clients I ever had that invested over $120 million with me the year before. He had like 2 or $300,000 in his 401k, no other assets, had a little bit of debt. All the value was locked up in his business until he was 39 years of age. He went all in on this. He took an extreme amount of risk, but he sold that business for almost $200 million. Right? So I would say is start talking to people who understand the blueprint of how to get there. And I don't think, unfortunately, it's in the traditional colleges anymore, but there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there. There's YouTube, there's your show, there's other shows where there's the information out there, Sean. But the one thing I'll say is like, don't procrastinate, right? Don't wait till it's too late. Don't not believe in yourself. Don't think that everybody else that's starting business is so much smarter than me. I, you know, I've talked about, at the time, one of my biggest, other, biggest clients was pest control guy. He just bought, he started his own pest control company, started buying other routes, built it up to where he then wind up selling that to a publicly traded press control company. It could be literally anything out there. But you have to start thinking, just like I said, about owning a home, don't rent, don't rent a job. How do I own my own income? I think that's the number one thing that you want to do. And then when you get to that, that point where you have the extra cash flow coming from that business, that's when you start to do the things like invest in stocks, invest in real estate. But until then, focus on that business or focus on becoming a doctor or something that's going to guarantee you a decent amount of income where you could put away 20 or 30,000 or $40,000 a year every way. Or, or, you know, whatever it is. I, I would say this new year's resolution, how do you get greater control of your income?
- [76:42]
B
That's great advice, Rob. Well, thank you for, thank you for coming out and thanks for all the insight into the oncoming economy this year and see you soon.
- [76:54]
A
Appreciate it, John. Thank you. All right, thanks.
- [77:09]
B
No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this, please, like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.
- [77:27]
A
Hi, I'm Joe Sal Sehe, host of the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Every week we talk to experts about saving, investing, personal finance trends, crypto. Can't do it. You could have done all that research.
- [77:37]
B
All the breadcrumbs, and thought, this company's never going bankrupt.
- [77:40]
A
Foiled again. You never knew personal finance could be this fun. Throwing down the gauntlet.
- [77:46]
B
I'm bringing it today. I'm only going to be off by six figures instead of seven.
- [77:50]
A
Every boy has a dream, Doc. Every boy has a dream, for sure. Stacking Benjamins Follow and listen on your favorite platform.