Millionaire DEBUNKS MONEY MYTHS that Keep You BROKE! | Money Revealed Ep. 2

Financial Myths and Truths

There are nine really subtle financial myths or financial lies that are super hard to detect. Like “it takes money to make money” or “you’re in it for the long haul.” There are so many memes or kind of philosophies or myths that so many people still adopt because they just don’t know any better. If I have the right work ethic or I work hard enough, I’ll be better off. Hard work with the wrong philosophy still equals bankruptcy. That thinks they have a money problem; that’s just a symptom. That’s a symptom of the problem. Money is the receipt; it’s on the other side of the equation. It’s a byproduct. What drives money is we have to understand what it is we can provide that’s valuable to others that we’re capable of doing.

I know people that preach the word passion all the time, and the problem is passion alone can lead to bitterness. Passion can lead you astray or even make you broke. It’s kind of like putting fuel in the wrong place without a tank, and then everything bursts into flames and crashes. That happens if people are in a hobby that they’re passionate about, thinking it’s a business. The toughest part and the Crux of society comes down to this thing right here.

Money Field is an exclusive video series where self-made millionaires share their secrets on how they got rich. In this episode, you’ll learn how to invest your hard-earned dollars, what is the right amount you need to retire, and how to fix your limited beliefs around money. These are the lessons that they don’t teach you in school about making money, and we partnered with the series Creator Jeff Hayes to bring it to you on my YouTube channel.

Enjoy, welcome to episode two of Money Revealed. We’ve got a great lineup for you today. Momentum is building, excitement is building, and I want you to remember you should share this with other people. This free viewing is up right now. Share it with other people that you think can benefit from this information, and let’s just dive right into episode two.

Interview with Garrett Gunderson

When I think of our next guest, I think of the term Maverick. Garrett Gunderson is a maverick in the financial industry. He wrote a book called “Killing Sacred Cows,” and let me tell you, he’s got some really strong opinions that are at variance with conventional thinking when it comes to your finances and how to invest your finances and how to create a better future for yourself. His energy is inescapable; his brilliance will shine. You’re going to love this content; it has had a major impact on my life, and now I’m excited because it’s going to have a major impact on yours.

Enjoy my interview with Garrett Gunderson.

Garrett, thanks so much for taking some time out of your day to be with us. Give us a little background on you. You grew up in a small coal mining town, started my first business when I was 15 years old, nothing too innovative, just detailing cars, named it Garrett Gunderson’s Car Care. My dad being a coal miner and my mom working in a credit union. I started detailing the repossessed vehicles. I started cleaning the surface vehicles for the mine, and then I went out and did a business competition with only $600 in net income in the business. I made $500 for being the rural young entrepreneur of the year, and I got pretty fascinated by just conveying messages and teaching.

Since it was really hard to kind of scrub bugs and tar and buff cars, but yeah, then I ended up winning $5,000 for being a young entrepreneur of the year for the state of Utah, and unlike most teenagers, I actually decided I want to invest that money. You know, I want to get out of the small little town of Price and hit the big city of Salt Lake City, the thriving Financial Metropol. So I went on a path trying to figure out how to invest that money. The first time I invested, complete mistake, 18 years old, because before I was 18, my mom, as an Italian, wasn’t willing to sign off as a custodian. Their money management method was folders, coffee cans, put cash in that thing and put it in the cellar, right, and just forget about it, which for a lot of people, that’s probably a better money management method than what I’ve seen, but for me, I wanted to do something.

Financial Myths and Truths (Continued)

bigger, and so when I was 18, I finally made my first investment. They promised me 18% return returns, and if I just put a mere $70 a month away, I was going to be a multi-millionaire 40 years from then. Took an econometrics course in college and figured out there was no chance that was going to happen. In figuring that out, started asking more questions, and ironically, in asking the questions, got led into the financial industry when I was 19 years old, which may sound really cool, but I was just a product peddler. I sold life insurance; I sold mutual funds, and my job was to bring warm bodies into the firm so they could sell them something while I sat there and so-called learned. But that got me my start.

So, you say you were a product peddler?

Um, yeah, but that’s kind of masquerades as a financial planner. I said that I was too embarrassed to admit I was a life insurance salesman at the time. My tie wasn’t short enough; my belly wasn’t big enough in my mind. I mean, I wanted to sound really cool. And the first two years were 98 and 99. I was a genius; I was a financial Einstein in my community because they’re cashing out double E bonds and putting in mutual funds, and everybody made money in those two years. And so, they’re like, “Wow, this is great!” Until 2000 came around, and that started to change. And that’s when I began to ask questions, and that’s where I got rid of kind of these cliches that indoctrinated my mind, like “it takes money to make money” or “you’re in it for the long haul” or “the Market’s on sale now is a good time to buy.” Well, it was a bad time to buy when most people bought.

You know, there are so many memes or kind of philosophies or myths that so many people still adopt because they just don’t know any better. It’s just what they’re trained, taught, and educated to do. And it’s questioned, even though there’s been a massive failure rate, and we’ve watched this great financial experiment absolutely be decimated, yet people are still taking part in the experiment of buying and holding, setting money aside, hoping that it works out, budgeting to the point where they stop producing value because they’re in a restrictive mindset, buying into scarcity thinking that anyone that’s wealthy has done something wrong. I mean, there’s so many misnomers that lead people astray.

And I think it comes from perspective first because our perspective determines our action. And if people are in a perspective of scarcity, that there’s not enough, and look, let’s face it, there’s times where when you look at people’s environment where they’re born, they’re born in a third world country, they’re just trying to struggle to get food, they’re trying to deal with crazy diseases like maybe ringworm or issues that are coming up. Man, that’s all they’re trying to do is survive. But there’s other people that aren’t under that same survival circumstance, but their mentality doesn’t change. And because they’re in survival, it becomes a selfish state of existence. That selfish state of existence is “what can I do for me,” neglecting the thought of “what can I do for others.” And because of that, they stay stuck, they stay poor, or maybe middle class at best with Herculean effort, to say, “if I have the right work ethic or I work hard enough, I’ll be better off.” Hard work with the wrong philosophy still equals bankruptcy.

So, based on what you’re saying, and you know, kind of as you’re portraying all this, do we have, especially in North America right now, do we have a crisis as far as people moving toward retirement?

Rethinking Retirement

Redefine it. If we think about retirement, it means to take out of service, and the notion came up from the Industrial Age where people were working tirelessly; they’re dying early because they’ve worked themselves to death, literally. And now we’re thinking, “Oh, let’s retire.” Retirement age, 65, and now people are living 30 years past 65 instead of dying at age 60. And now they’re supposed to live off their investment and Social Security and other programs like that while they still have the ability to produce. They’re not producing anymore, and they actually start to tax society. And even worse, the number one fear of a retiree is their fear of running out of money according to USA Today.

So, think about this; there’s this dream sold to them. One day, someday you can finally go on these trips; you can finally live the life you’ve always dreamed of. You could spend time with family; you know, let’s dream big about it. And the planners get them thinking about that. Then they’re told, “Yeah, just set your money aside, scrimp, pinch pennies, how to get blisters on your fingers,” not knowing that no one shrinks their way to wealth. But they just hand the money over to people they’ve never met because even the fund manager is more a different person than the product peddler, right, with stocks that they don’t even know what those stocks are, what’s happening in those boardrooms, the fees that are coming out of that, why they would make money, why they would lose money. They just kind of go through that process in hopes that one day it’s going to work out.

Yet, 98% of them, when they turn 65, they’re not economically independent, meaning if they stop working, they don’t have enough income coming in from all of their Investments and Social Security or whatever programs are out there to cover their basic expenses. So now what do they do, especially if they were looking forward to stopping at age 65? They stopped building skills; they stopped moving forward in growing. They thought maybe College was their only way to grow, and then afterward, it’s just get a job and work hard, and then one day you’ll have a pension that takes care of you. We’ve watched pensions collapse, partially because they were supposed to earn 8% a year because we’ve been taught that the stock market’s going to earn 8% a year since the year 2000 BC. But the reality is it hasn’t done that, and when it doesn’t do that, just 1% makes an exponential difference, and all of a sudden, they thought they were heading to one destination; they’re not even close to that. But at the same time, they’re ill-equipped, ill-prepared, and unfortunately, they haven’t been trained in how to produce more cash flow, how to expand their means, to be more productive. They’re not thinking in the world of value creation. If they’re in the retirement mindset, they’re thinking in the thought process of preservation when they get there.

And all that it was supposed to be, it’s not. But now they’re in a scary world, and it’s a really difficult time because it’s taxing the system. So here’s kind of the ultimate irony here. It seems like a huge contradiction. The big unknown is when am I going to die? Nobody knows that. I mean, that’s kind of like you’re trying to calibrate to this unknown, which is a major variable in this equation, completely.

So, I’m hearing what you’re saying now, and I’m starting to add it up in my own mind. Wait a minute, I’m going to retire at a certain age, and then I want to have a certain lifestyle beyond that retirement to last me the rest of my life, but we don’t know what the rest of your life is. So, how do you calibrate to that? So suddenly, there’s people who are trying to act morally, meaning, “I’m doing the right thing. I’m putting away the money as I’m told to do. I’m putting it into places; yeah, I’m actually one of these people who actually isn’t being a mindless consumer that just throws caution to the wind. I’m putting the structure in place. I’m delaying gratification because I’m going to do the right thing.” But it’s all based on a pack of lies. This is the contradiction at the heart of the matter. Everyone’s hearing about this term, this phrase, “Financial Freedom,” right? What is Financial Freedom? My definition of Financial Freedom is when money is not the primary reason or excuse why we do or don’t do something. It’s still consideration but not the primary consideration. When it’s someone’s primary consideration, they destroy all opportunity. They go, you say, “Hey, would you like to do this?” “I can’t afford it.” That’s the mantra. “I don’t have the time. I can’t afford it.” They’re almost kind of cousins, but there’s no freedom in that. And yet, we think that if there’s a certain amount of money in a bank…

Money as a Tool and Philosophical Perspectives

account, that that’s going to create Freedom, that doesn’t create freedom because there are people with a lot of money that are just afraid that they’re going to lose that money. We’ve seen a situation unprecedented over the last couple of decades; interest rates have been so low that retirees are not generating the income that they expected. So great, if you’re in business right now, you’re borrowing money; rates have been great, you know, that’s awesome for you. Not such good news for the people that need to create that income because they haven’t really been trained in how to produce cash flow. They went their entire life just accumulating net worth, and net worth is relatively worthless if it can’t be converted to cash.

So here’s the contradiction. Financial Freedom is professed. That’s what’s being professed; that’s what’s being taught. But let’s examine the reality of that. It’s actually Financial bondage because we hand our money over; we wait; we get there, and now our entire future is in the hands of a market that we don’t control, people that are managing it that we don’t know how they manage it, who’s even managing it, what the fees are that are coming out, what’s going to happen because that dictates our income. And these are the three things that enslave retirees.

Number one is interest rates; we’ve already talked about that. They remain low; your income remains low. Number two, taxes; we have a $20 trillion debt in the United States; how are we going to pay for that? One way might be taxes. If taxes go up when you’re on a fixed income, your net income goes down. That means you have to start cutting things out of your life. I’ve met people that were multi-millionaires on paper, million-dollar paid-off home, million and a half in their retirement. They’re eating two meals a day, and not because they’re intermittent fasting, simply because they’re afraid if they spend too much on all these trips they had planned, no, they’re cutting that back; they’re cutting that out, all these relationships they were going to go cultivate and spend time with. You know what? When they’re not in control of their money and when all of a sudden that money starts to infringe upon their relationships because they don’t choose to do things in the name of saving money. And most importantly, they’ve lost purpose. I think, other than poor health, there’s nothing that will help someone die faster than losing control of those three things.

And the third thing, why they’re in financial bondage, is inflation. Inflation has continued to exist. If we went back to the 1980s, we interviewed everyone; hey, what’s a good amount of money to have a retirement plan? We might hear a quarter of a million dollars from most people, maybe half a million dollars for people that were really kind of out there, and those people that were really forward-thinking might say a million dollars. Yet today, that’s not going to get you economically independent. A million dollars will produce less in today’s interest rate environment than the lower end of income earners. So now all of a sudden, you’re a millionaire on paper but living like a pauper. That’s financial bondage. Financial Freedom comes from a completely different place.

So, this seems to all boil down to the philosophy of money, right? What’s your view of reality relative to money? Why do you think that, and then what should you do? Those are the three foundational philosophical questions. It has to go all the way back to what we learn in childhood from our mothers, fathers, teachers, preachers, etc. So you’ve had such context on this because you’ve made it the study of your life. How do you see it?

So, money is a tool, and it was invented as an efficient way to exchange. But with that efficiency came complexity for people because there are times where people are given something for nothing, slot machines or just enough of a reward or a story of someone that bought a stock and made it big. So we have to go to the foundational premise to begin, and that foundational piece is that there are two factions. One faction is people believe there’s a finite amount of money, so if anyone has more money, that’s less for me. MH, okay. But here’s the paradox, and let’s go to the other side. Even if there were a finite amount of money, which they’re printing it as you watch this, but even if there were a finite amount of money, there’s an infinite number of times that money can exchange hands and exchange hands because of goods, services, or experience. And if I said that more…

The Power of Value Creation and Exchange

it simply, it’s really a matter of value creation. Value creation is the engine for exchange. M, when we stop creating value for one another—let me get even more raw than this—there’s a Divinity to diversity, meaning that we all have different abilities, skills, preferences, talents. If we all could do all the same things, we wouldn’t even exchange with one another. But wealth is actually built through unequal exchange.

So, for example, I wrote a book, right? And if I were to sell you that book for $20, you would only give me that $20 if you felt like the book was worth more, more than $20. I would only sell you that book if I felt like the book was worth less than $20 for me. So we actually could both walk away from that exchange wealthier. But most people don’t believe that you could end up wealthier through exchange. They think that it’s a win-lose zero-sum game. So it’s a competitive nature, it’s a jealous nature, that’s where scarcity becomes the rule, and entitlement becomes the crux of society—feeling entitled to something else or feeling jealous.

So instead of driving from what can I do to serve others? What can I do to solve problems? And, by the way, the bigger the problem, the bigger the payoff. And if someone in scarcity sees a problem, they usually complain about it, they point it out, they talk about why it’s going to ruin their lives or other people’s lives, and they get caught up in this really complicated place called the external economy. The external economy, one thought isn’t going to solve that entire thing, one motion isn’t going to solve the entire economy. But what I like to look at instead is our personal economy. We all have our own personal economy, our own network, our own relationships, our own ideas, and our own actions that we have control over on a day-to-day basis.

So if, instead of getting caught up in the overwhelming nature of everything that’s going wrong in the world and complaining about it, we picked one area that we saw more clearly than everyone else, that we had a lesson or an ability to solve that structure or that issue, and we were willing to exchange with other people that were fantastic in that, if all of a sudden we started to focus there instead of just pointing out the problem, coming up with the solution for the problem, there would be more wealth that’s created because there would be more exchange that’s facilitated. So think of it this way: exchange creates wealth. The more we exchange with one another, the more wealth is created, and a dollar doesn’t end because I spend it; you take that dollar, then you get to use that dollar again, and then someone else uses the dollar. The more times that exchange changes hands, the more what we call in economics velocity happens. So quick economics lesson without getting complicated or putting anyone to sleep: it’s just gross domestic product. That’s the output of a country divided by its money supply equals its velocity.

So if we want to increase velocity, it’s simply with the same amount of dollars, how can we get that to circulate more often amongst each other because we’re creating value for one another, doing things that someone else isn’t good at? I’m not good at organizing my garage. I found someone that loves it. They’re passionate about it. They actually always work extra time there because like, oh, I got a couple more things I want to work on. They love it. I once got a review in the New York Post. They were saying, you know, Gunderson’s book talks about people doing things that they enjoy, but there’s plenty of work that no one enjoys, and we see programs like dirty jobs and all this kind of stuff, and I kind of thought about that for a minute. And then I met a guy from Brigham City, Utah, who ran a sewage treatment plant, and he loved it. He was lit up by it. So there are sick enough people to love the things that we hate.

And I think this is how we redefine retirement. We retire from the things that we hate and embrace the things that we’re very best at. And rather than thinking it takes money to make money and using that as a defeating declaration like I don’t have money, I’m never going to make money, it doesn’t take money to make money. It takes value. It takes two other forms of capital: mental Capital, which is our ideas, our knowledge, our wisdom, it’s systems, it’s tools, it’s our unique insights, times relationship Capital, people, networks, organizations, mentors, family, friends, and all we’re doing in business is just the bridge between those two things, our mental capital or ideas to relationship Capital. So how can our ideas impact someone’s life for the positive? So anyone that thinks they have a money problem, that’s just a symptom, that’s a symptom of the problem. Money is the receipt; it’s on the other side of the equation; it’s a byproduct. What drives…

have technology at their fingertips and they don’t even realize it. I mean, you have a smartphone, you have access to the internet, you have access to information, and you can start something from scratch. I’ve seen people start small businesses online with very little initial investment. It’s about understanding what value you can provide to others and finding a way to deliver that value.

Now, for those who have a steady job and want to think more entrepreneurially within their organization, it’s about looking at your role and seeing how you can contribute to the success of the company. It’s not just about trading time for a paycheck; it’s about identifying opportunities to make the company more efficient, improve processes, and ultimately contribute to its profitability.

Many successful entrepreneurs started within organizations, learned valuable skills, and then took those skills to start their own ventures later on. So, even if you’re in a job, you can still cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset by constantly seeking ways to add value, learn new skills, and position yourself for future opportunities.

The key is to shift from a mindset of “How can I make more money?” to “How can I create more value?” When you focus on creating value, the money will follow because people are willing to pay for solutions to their problems and valuable services.

And remember, the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t limited to starting your own business; it’s a mindset that can be applied within any organization to drive personal and professional growth.

Side Hustles and Expanding Means

I have side hustles right I mean I have people I know that they rented out two rooms in their house through Airbnb and that started cash flowing, and they bought their first real estate property that was for a rental. I know other people that said hey I have good artistic, you know, quality so I’m going to go and put my services on different online platforms, and all of a sudden they’re getting clients, and they do that work graphic work at night. So there’s so many things and platforms that great entrepreneurs have brought to us that an entrepreneur or someone that doesn’t have the stomach to just take all that responsibility on themselves can now participate in to increase their income because all the financial books in the world try to get you to save, sacrifice, delay, defer, budget, and that just takes extraordinary amounts of discipline and energy. And if we’re in shrinking-based thinking that’s about restriction instead of production, that is a harmful place to be.

Instead, I’d like people to think about how they can expand their means because we’ve all heard to live within our means which usually thinks, oh let’s have life suck, let’s cut out good things that we enjoy. And you know what, after meeting you, I just enjoy Finer Things in life. My dad showed me boxed wine when I was young, you showed me bottled wine, and not only just any bottles, you know, and then you showed me dark chocolate. I grew up on milk chocolate. All of a sudden, those things, a luxury once enjoyed, becomes a necessity.

But the key is, yes, it’s important to live within your means, but continually seek to expand your means because if I’m telling you to pinch pennies to save 10% of your income and then try to get through Herculean efforts once again, 10% return, which is really hard to get for the majority of people in today’s world that don’t own a business, that’s 10% of 10%. But if instead we figure out what are your best qualities, what are the things and skills and abilities you have that you could cultivate and grow, and then you invest back into yourself, it doesn’t show up on a piece of paper initially. And that’s the tough thing. When I put money in an investment like a mutual fund or a savings account or a certificate of deposit, I get a statement. When I invest into my own skills, my own abilities, I’m now relying more on myself, which can be a scary thing. But at the same time, it’s going to take a little bit longer to pay off. But if it does, imagine if I increase my income by 25%. That’s 25% of 100%. Expanding our means is so critical.

And as soon as we forget to do that or we start shrinking because retirement’s around the corner, or we stop thinking about enhancing our skills, we are in a disruptive time and place. Before you could have the same skill for 20, 30 years. Now there are people that maybe learn to drive, but now there’s driverless vehicles coming out. They’re going to have to have a new set of skills. And this is the toughest part. The toughest part and the Crux of society comes down to this thing right here that if we are dependent upon an income and that is what’s going to put food on the table or take care of our family, it is super difficult to make decisions that are the right decisions in the long term due to that scarce feeling in the short term. As a matter of fact, to go deeper into this, this is why great and even good people do bad things because they’re so concerned about their family, which is Noble. But at the same time, they don’t see the outcomes and what they’re creating in the world that could be destructive, and they don’t want to question it because it could jeopardize the very nature of their.

Financial Independence and Detecting Financial Myths

Income, what I want to see is people liberated where they create economic independence as their foundational piece, get there in 3 years or seven years, not wait for 30 years, have enough cash flow coming in that they have choice, they have options, they have an inkling of what that freedom feels like, and now they can make more powerful choices, swing for the fence in what they’re up to, choose not to do something if it’s not ethical or moral for themselves or if they see something that excites them, they have a permission slip to go for it.

You wrote a New York Times bestselling book, “Killing Sacred Cows,” and it created quite a stir, quite a controversy. What’s the theme of the book?

That there are nine really subtle Financial myths or financial lies that are super hard to detect. The reason they’re difficult to detect is because we look through the lens of the myth, we look through the lens of the lie, and there’s a lot of marketing to support that. So if we continue to follow these things, the first one is the myth of the finite pie, there’s only so much to go around, and if someone else has something, there’s less for us. And we can go hundreds of years back and Thomas Malthus would say we’re going to run out of food, we’re going to run out of land, but he didn’t consider innovation; he didn’t consider other factors that came up. And so that’s the first chapter. But there are things in there like, you know, unfit for the long haul, or it takes money to make money, or a penny saved is a penny earned that are so common that they’re memes within society that just go unquestioned beliefs that we go, “Oh yeah, you just are supposed to save early, you’re supposed to save often, you’re supposed to save regardless of what happens,” and in the long haul, it’ll all be okay. And we get convinced of that, and if we follow it, it starts to slowly rob and confiscate our well-being, our financial lives, and most importantly, it has people abdicate responsibility which leaves them in a dangerous place financially.

And so that book helps them to detect, understand, and avoid the subtle lies that are hard to see because obvious lies pretty easy for us to avoid. I said, “Oh, I live on Mars,” we just laugh, right? But if, on the other hand, I’m like, “No, the market goes up and down, and it’s averaged 10%,” but then we just look, where’s that a subtle lie? Well, let’s look at averages for a minute. If I had 100 grand and it loses 10%, we know that becomes 90 grand, but the next year, if it gains 10%, and we turn on the news, they’re like, “Good news, the markets rallied, we’re back up, we’ve recovered.” We didn’t recover the time that was lost. That’s the first subtle lie. The second is, if we earned 10% on 90 grand, we’re only at 99 grand if there were no fees, right? Right. And those fees come out whether you make money or not, so our average return was zero, but our actual return was negative, and this is a subtle lie that most people don’t recognize.

Here’s another subtle lie using the same analogy: if you have your money in an Index Fund like the S&P 500 and one of these companies in the S&P 500 gets disrupted by a new technology and it goes out of business, you lost that money on that portion forevermore. They’re just going to plug another company in the S&P 500 and tell you the average is what the new 500 companies did, not the companies you had at the time you were invested. Another subtle lie that has a big impact because you go, “Oh, well, that’s a minor,” well, this is how minor it isn’t, it’s pretty major. If I have money and I’m investing, and I can earn this great rate of return, if I can get that 10%, I have 100 grand over 30 years, it grows to $1.74 million, that’s…

401(k) and Economic Independence

Awesome, but if you have a 0.85% fee, so less than 1%, it doesn’t grow to 1.74 million; it grows to 1.4 million. That’s a $340,000 difference for less than 1% because it’s exponential, it’s logarithmic, and when we think in percentages, it doesn’t mean dollar for dollar because of the compounding effect. So these are the types of things that end up where people are disappointed at retirement. They’re not as far along as they thought, and they follow this kind of equation, like the old belief of wealth, the Industrial Age belief that is still kind of the financial experiment that’s still harming people, is that wealth is a function of three things: how much money you’re willing to put away (so that’s the “it takes money to make money”), what kind of return you can get, and I’m sure everyone’s heard “high risk equals high return.” That’s so funny; the people telling us “high risk equals high return” are taking no risk because they’re making money on our money whether we make it or not. As a matter of fact, look at the industry giants that lost almost everything, and the government bailed them out. How does the government bail them out? Our tax dollars. It was our money that was lost, and guess what, some of them still got their pensions, or still got their parachutes, or still got their bonuses even though they didn’t perform. This is where money becomes confusing, where people start thinking about, “I get mine regardless of what happens to anyone else,” that is a cloudy level of thinking.

So, you know when we start to examine this just a little bit closer, there’s a huge impact on just a few minor things. So I one time went to ABC Studios in New York City, and you were being interviewed on a new show on money, right?

Yeah, at ABC, and they wanted to dig into the 401(k) issue, right, which I think is a part of your book, right?

So, talk about your perceptions of 401(k) because it is a sacred cow. I mean, that is the vehicle that’s supposed to, you know, for the working person that’s getting a paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, they’re putting pieces away over time, and that’s how they’re supposed to be accumulating for retirement, and of course, it’s celebrated, it’s promoted by employers, etc., and you come in and in your book, you say it’s a horrible idea, yeah?

I put on the cover, “401(k) Hoax.” Yes, not just any horrible idea, I just went after it. And by the way, when I first did that and hired a PR firm, they were having a hard time booking me on anything because it was at a time that 401(k)s were still heralded as the great retirement plan. But you know what? Retirement plans actually slow down the process of achieving economic independence or what some people might call retirement. Now it’s maybe faster than doing nothing, but it’s slower than focusing on cash flow. And part of the reason I said 401(k)s were problematic, and by the way, that was the 11th time I was on that program. The first time I was on it was during a recession. So what was the reaction of the host in this first show?

Oh yeah, when I said, “Stop funding the 401(k),” these were her exact words: “We usually don’t get that kind of advice around here.” And I said, “Right, that’s why you have me on as a guest. We’re going to get somewhere today.” And then I said, instead of funding that, they should do two other things because this was a business program. I said they should give their best employees raises because what will that say to someone during a recession? And this is in a recession. In a recession. And they said, “Well, how would they do that?” I said, “Remember, they’re not funding their retirement plan.

They’re going to fund their most important asset because the only assets in this world are people. Everything else is stuff to serve people. So let’s go directly to the source.” And then I said the second thing is they should go back to school, was kind of how I said it. But what I meant was find an area where they could really dial in one of their major skill sets because everyone else is going to be shrinking and recessing because a recession means we stop exchanging with one another.

That’s what a recession is. We lose consumer confidence or is what they would call it on the news. And it means people start exchanging more slowly, that slows down velocity. So the economy means we have less output going back to the original equation of GDP divided by money supply equals velocity. When we slow down exchange, it means people aren’t serving each other as much. And unfortunately, a recession becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because some people don’t even know there’s a recession till they turn on the news.

Concerns About 401(k) and Tax Implications

They’re like, “Oh my God, we’re in a recession,” then they act recessionary. They call their family, they call their friends, their conversations change, and wealth is actually built through conversation. I mean, some of the people that have built the most magnificent things, they didn’t lift anything, they didn’t do anything; they thought with their mind and created a vision, right? Vision is the rarest commodity on the planet. It’s not vision meaning some mission statement on a wall that means nothing, right? Those mission statements say, “We’re good with customer service, and we care about our customers, we put them first.” That’s not a vision. A vision is putting the man on the moon and returning them safely home within the decade. For me, it’s 1 million people freed where they are economically independent by the time I hit the grave. That’s a vision. And if we spend time focused on our vision, that creates the context or that creates the container in which the value that we’re going to build.

So some people, they just say wild and crazy things, but they’re committed to it, so they get other people excited, enrolled, and then they’re like, “This is like a miracle that ever came about.” When I’m in New York City, I’m like, “This is a freaking miracle. How did this city get built? Someone thought of the idea first.” People that are poor, though, don’t even have the inkling or the vision or the abundance to think about that vision because they’re in survival. That’s their container, just to survive. So this implies that we, as we discussed, there’s a philosophy of money, there’s a psychology that trails that philosophy also because you’re talking about consumer confidence, for example, right? I mean, why is it important that people have to… You know, isn’t it just a factual, black and white thing? Why is it that consumer confidence should be important? But literally, the psychology of the marketplace exchange gets slowed down.

And so, you know, here’s why I’m not a big fan of 401(k)s or, you know, RSps for the Canadians or superannuation plans in Australia, like, we go through it, just government-qualified plans, is because it has us fund other people’s dreams and visions before we’ve even figured out the best that we have to offer the world yet. That somehow, college is when it ends, or high school or that school is only when we’re in a classroom, rather than a daily learning lab that we go through life continuing to figure out, looking at the end of the day and saying, “What could I have done that would have allowed me to learn more, to impact more?” And I just use a simple impact equation. These are my two questions: How could I have reached more people? How could I have impacted those people more deeply?

That’s the question I’m asking on a regular basis. And that comes down to collaboration, that comes down to cooperative competition, and not just trying to put other people out of business. I mean, a lot of my business grows because I actually support the industry rather than just building something to myself and holding it secret. I mean, I had this company early on where I would allow financial people to come and shadow me, see exactly how I was doing what I was doing because I was in my 20s and they didn’t know how I was doing this at such a young age. I’m like, “Just pay me, come and watch.”

Then I put together study groups, and I used to give all the secrets. I didn’t hold anything back. I wasn’t like, “I’m not going to tell them this one thing that I do because then I have that secret.” I just told them everything. And you know what happened? They would come to me and say, “I’ve got a client; I really think you could help me out with. How did you figure this out?” That’s awesome. And then we would talk, and then in talking, I would think of more ideas. And they’d say, “Have you ever thought about doing it this way?” And see, scarcity has us stop sharing our ideas in fear that someone’s going to steal it from us, but we actually rob ourselves by not sharing them.

There’s one thing, a data point, that you told me when we met earlier on about 401(k)s that literally caused me, within the week, I think, to liquidate mine.

Yeah, pay the penalty, just get out.

And that was the idea that, uh, I’m not really personally holding those funds.

Yeah, talk about that.

So it’s a tax code. So the government actually owns the plan, and you’re the beneficiary of the plan. So it’ll say “FBO,” that’s the three words, the three letters, “for benefit of.” So it’s the 401(k) plan for the benefit of Patrick Gentempo. So if they want to change the code, they want to change the rules, they’re fine to do that. If the government doesn’t feel like they’ve got enough tax income coming in, they could add a sunray tax to that, and they could just do that with the stroke of a pen. It’s not a private contract. It’s not really, you know, it’s not like private property. This is the government saying, “Yeah, we’ve created this provision, and the IRS allows this, but they could change that. You don’t get a vote in that; you don’t get a say in that.” So that really concerns me to give 100% control.

Because I’m a business guy, and for me, if someone said, “Hey, I want to be in a partnership with you; here’s the rules of the partnership: you put in the money, and then I’ll take a percentage. But if you want out of the partnership early, I want 10% more than our agreed-upon percentage. And in the future, when we sell the company or you go to liquidate any of this, my percentage partnership will depend upon my economic condition, not yours.” So the government can say, “Hey, in 30 years, the tax rates might be 60%, 70%. If that seems high, realize this little thing that came out in 1913, the US Revenue Act, was going to be temporary. You’d have to earn quite a bit of money, adjusted for inflation, to even get hit with the 6% or 8% tax. But eventually, there was a time where we had over a 90% top tax rate in the United States on the marginal side, and on average, it’s been well over 50%. So historically, at the time of this filming, we’re in a historically low tax bracket. So what if we’re deferring that tax into the future and simply because of inflation, we have to have a lot more money in the future just to live the same lifestyle? Inflation actually hurts us from a tax perspective because we have to have more dollars, but those dollars are now taxed at a higher level when we’d have more money in the future. But someone that’s

a millionaire today, that’s a different thing than in 1913; a millionaire in 1913 could buy 10 times, 20 times more than a millionaire today with the same dollars, yeah.

And what’s interesting is that I have, at least for me, no problem imagining that if the government gets itself into financial trouble, which it does, it’s almost unavoidable that they’ll look at such assets and say, you know, because this is the conversation, yeah, yeah, they’re just like, “Oh, you got more than this amount; we’re just taking it.”

Yeah, and that’s exactly what… What almost has to happen in a sense to solve the problem. Well, we have all this 401(k) money here, uh, you know, we will add some kind of a tax, an addition tax is what they’ll probably call it. People will take a haircut, but everybody will share the burden, etc., etc., after all the toil, all the fees you paid from what you’re invested in in that 401(k), the years you put into it, etc., you finally get to the point you’re saying, “Hey, I deferred my gratification all these years, didn’t do certain things for my children, didn’t do certain things for my spouse or myself, but I was morally doing the right thing to be able to create a future of independence so other I wouldn’t have to depend on other people.” And then what happens? You’re at the risk or you’re at the mercy, basically, to say, “Well, this is held for your benefit, and we know that in the beginning when you signed up for it, these were the terms. But hey, we screwed up the last 20 or 30 years; we’re going to take a bigger chunk out than what you thought we might.” And here’s my bigger concern: yeah, did you know that the majority of 401(k)s now, when you’re an employee, you’re automatically enrolled; you have to opt out. You don’t have to sign to get in; it’s just automatic enrollment because taking care, and look, 401(k)s are far inferior than the pensions were. It’s just that pensions didn’t make it, right? And this took the burden of responsibility off the employer, but this is the big lie. People are being told, “This will save you tax; you put in $10,000 to this plan, you’ll pay $3,000 less this year.” But the tax savings isn’t in your pocket; no, it’s stuck inside of the plan, and you’re at a disadvantage because if you take that $10,000 out the next day, it’s not a $3,000 cost; it’s a $4,000 cost. And if you take it out 30 years from now, what if taxes had gone up? It could be a $6,000 cost. And so it is not a tax savings; it is a tax deferral.

Right.

And you didn’t have the use of the capital in the meantime, which is the big deal.

Right. So let’s say a good opportunity comes along. Like, this is where I get frustrated. I see people trying to do the right things; they’re working hard, and then they’re setting money aside. And then they confide in me with their finances, and when I talk to them, I see these really high-interest rate loans, and I’m like, “Well, what did your 401(k) do in the last few years?” And the 401(k)…

Introduction

The banner BTS had no clue, I mean, they knew how to make money. They had more money than the US Treasury. But it was 50 some years after Cornelius died that the first Vanderbilt died broke. And by the way, Cornelius’s first son actually took and grew that wealth for nine years, so they actually doubled their estate. But then it destroyed, and then they went and bought real estate they knew nothing about and mansions, and there were no buyers for it. You know, if you’ve heard of the Breakers and their mansions in Manhattan got torn down. Rhode Island, they have one that’s now like, you know, something you go see as a Museum tour. And Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt who didn’t even receive money as an heir because they destroyed that wealth because they didn’t understand it takes a team. No one can be an expert in everything. We have to utilize people and understand so it’s customized and tailored so we can make more informed decisions. But never give up control of the final choice. Utilize these people to give you the options, stay in the driver’s seat because if you do, you’ll have three feelings: peace of mind because you know what you’re doing, financial clarity so that you can move forward powerfully, and more confidence so you can focus on other things that are really important in driving value and building wealth.

Investment Challenges

When people invest in things they don’t know, it’s a distraction. When they invest in things that are risky and it doesn’t work out, it derails them for a time. It starts to actually chip away at their legacy, and even worse, sometimes it destroys their faith in investing altogether. So they just say, “I’m never doing anything again. I’m just stuffing it under my bed.” And for some people, I guess that actually becomes a better thing than losing over and over again. This infuriates me to watch financial professionals say things like dollar cost average, like you’re in it for the long haul, like don’t worry, the market goes up, the market goes down, all those kind of things. That’s crazy. We would never run a business like that.

If we’re a good business owner, we would never say we’re putting money into marketing no matter what happens, we’re not going to measure that, hopefully, it works out, you just go bankrupt. And that’s the same level of financial intelligence most people have. It’s on the level of an economic toddler. We never mature past that because in school, we’re not given a money manual. You know, it’s like we’re taking money home, and we just got to navigate and figure that out on our own. And for some people, it just feels confusing, it feels overwhelming. They feel like there’s a lot of sharks, there’s a lot of shysters. They make mistakes, so they get more closely guarded, and they just get confused. And that leads to inaction, that leads to scarcity, that destroys wealth, it destroys velocity, value exchange.

Retirement and Financial Intelligence

And here’s the situation we face today, all that, let’s wrap that around retirement, where you might live for 30 years after you’re no longer in control over your life. So the term “Financial intelligence” is literally what Money Revealed is all about because if you look at the enormous effort spent over a lifetime to generate money, to make a living, if you will, to plan for a future, which is retirement or whatever else you think your future plan is, can you imagine that people go through the education they need, the vocation, getting into a job or owning a business, they do all this work to start generating money, but then the sum total is they don’t do the extra 10% of effort to now figure out, okay, maybe I need to get some intelligence around this. And everything goes to a point, and the wheels come off because you never bothered to educate yourself. Right? And to think through these things. And this is the thing, and I’m guilty as charged on this. And this was the, you know, literally a financial miracle in my life in meeting you is that I am a thinker, and I really think through everything. I take my intellectual life is maybe one of the most important categories of my life, and I spent so much time thinking about life in every dimension. But I delegated this to the people who said, “I am an expert in these areas.”

Well, it’s out of term. We relegate it, yeah, and that’s actually exactly, you, to me, I was being a good executive and delegate. It was a relegation, though, right? And the upshot was, as I sat with you the first time when we met, and you started to communicate to me the premises around money from which you operated because we shared so many other aspects of philosophy together, what you did is you took that and applied it to money and went deep with it. And with an enormous amount of passion, I said, you know what, I’m passionate about what I do in the world and the businesses that I build and develop, and relegated this part just automatically because, oh, there’s a structure in place in the world. And I cannot believe the Dogma that I embrace. I’m embarrassed to actually tell you. I mean, I embraced Dogma around this, and I felt like you took blinders off of me and had me see the light around this. So Money Revealed is a byproduct of the realization that if someone like me can be hypnotized and be unaware or blinded to reality here, well then I’m not the only one. And quite frankly, for many people, it became too late when they found out, and we’re hoping to reach many people now where it’s not too late so they can have a transformation in their life in this very important category called your financial life.

Investment Mistakes and Learning

Yeah, when I was 18, making a financial mistake investing 70 bucks a month, and three months later figuring out it wasn’t going to work out. Not only did it have no chance, 0%, no statistical relevance of actually being a multi-millionaire from it, had a 98.7% chance of failing altogether based upon the fee structure and the actual performance from previous years. So it was a huge Awakening, so I lost money, but that wasn’t the last of my mistakes. I just made the mistakes quicker. I met financial people that tell me, “I’ve been in the business for 40 years.” After asking three or four questions, I realized they’ve been in the business for one year, and they’ve done the same thing for 40 times over. They never question it. I admit I’ve lost money in real estate, oil and gas. I’ve made the mistakes. The difference was I asked, “What can I learn from these mistakes? What are the biggest lessons? And what could I do to help other people not make the same mistakes and give them tools and strategies?” And, you know, you’ve referred me people that have been with me six, seven years. It’s the first seven-year period of life where they didn’t lose money because we’re protecting the downside. We’re thinking about risk management. But

All of this said, you know, if there’s 10% of money that people think, “Okay, I got to save 10% where I’m going to find that money.” When I lost money in the stock market for my clients in the year 2000, fortunately, I got all but one of their money completely out of the market by May of 2000, with help and guidance from a great mentor, Steven Harup, who was a money manager, now my professor while I’m at school. We get their money out. They avoid two more years, two and a half more years of downturn, and we figure out a lot during that time.

Realizing the Game

I remember just being treated differently because I was all of a sudden losing family’s money, right? All my family became clients just out of, “Hey, this is our nephew, this is our grandson,” you know? And I and you could tell they were uneasy about it, but they love me, so I was like, I’ve got to figure out something better than looking them in the eye and saying, “You’re in for the Long Haul, hey, the Market’s on sale, buy more.” Like, well, that sale kind of sucked, ’cause they had already bought, and they couldn’t trade it in for the new price. That’s the thing that’s so stupid about the markets on sale.

Asking the Unpopular Question

So I asked a question that I don’t even think you’re allowed to say out loud in the world of Finance. I said, “What is guaranteed?” Because almost everything they say around guarantees is past performance not an indicator of future results. There are no guarantees. But by asking that question, it changed the game for me. First off, I recognized the game was rigged against people. Here’s how it’s rigged against them. If you’re a financial institution, what do you want from people? Their money. How often? As often as possible. How long do you want to hold on to it? For as long as possible. How much do you want to give them back if they want to take a withdraw? As little as possible. That’s why people are not being wealthy. They’re in the money times rate times time. I left out time earlier. Money times rate times time, just set money aside, take a bunch of risk and wait for a long period of time. This is why 401ks are so effective. Automatically being taken from your paycheck. Not just your money, the government’s money that they’re getting a fee off of as the financial adviser, penalties if you want to get to your money early. And when you finally get to so-called retirement, leave the nest egg there, just take the interest. You see that?

The Four C’s: Credit, Collateral, Cash Flow Reporting, Connections

So when I said, “What’s guaranteed,” this was the epiphany. I was like, “What’s guaranteed is if we could figure out inefficiencies in someone’s plan on insurance if they have duplicate coverages and costs and improper structure.” You introduced me to someone years and years ago. I sat down with them in Chicago. What I found out was, keeping the same insurance company, we changed some things, just tweak their deductibles, coordinated a couple pieces, increased their umbrella policy, and lowered their limits on other things. This was just their car, home, and liability policies. We saved them 250 bucks a year. Not too bad. Paid for brunch at the Four Seasons for us that day, though. But here’s what was great. I got him $10 million more of liability coverage just by having that intelligence. So that was one area. That’s a guaranteed savings, 250 bucks. What’s a bigger one? Investment fees. A lot of managed funds don’t outperform the index funds. So just to say, let’s have accountability around our management fees because we talked about going from 10% to 9.15% and having it be hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference over 30 years, that’s a big deal.

Interest and the Four C’s

But here’s two other areas where I saw the biggest guarantees. One was interest. Most people overpay interest because they don’t know the four C’s. One, you’ve got to have a good credit score. Get above 780. If you get a good credit score, you can then renegotiate interest rates. Get good collateral. If you finance a car instead of just using a credit card, you can go from 1.9% rather than 8, 10, 15, 17%. So we’ve got credit, we’ve got collateral that could improve it, we’ve got cash flow reporting, just knowing how to report to the bank. And the fourth C is the right connections. Someone you referred to me once again. They ended up buying a building with 10% down rather than 20% down. That was more cash in their hand rather than paying 6%, they got 4.125%. It was the four C’s, that last one being the connection. So imagine if you could have the exact same loans restructured, renegotiated, and identifying how to pay them off more efficiently, you could end up shaving off a third of the interest you pay and keeping that money rather than giving it to an institution that’s guaranteed.

The Fourth “I”: The IRS

But the fourth I is the big one, the IRS. I know there’s people watching this from all over the world, so I’m just using the I to keep it eyes, you know? Insurance, Investments, interest, and now IRS. But in our estimation, after meeting with thousands of people, we believe 93% of business owners specifically are overpaying tax and not by a little, by a lot. We’ve had people overpay their taxes over a million dollars a year. We’ve had people overpay their taxes by $951 a year. We’ve had people go back three years and have the IRS cut them a check by amending their returns. But all this pay yourself first doesn’t mean you have to cut back and sacrifice. It means with a little bit of insight and framework, you can reclaim cash that’s rightfully yours, put it back into your pocket, get Wall Street out of your pocket, get the IRS out of your pocket. You’ll still pay your fair share. There’s no evasion here whatsoever. It’s just simply stop tipping the government, give them what’s required, and keep the rest. And when you do that, you can start automatically saving. And then when that starts building up and you figure out your investor DNA and you know what investments make sense for who you are, instead of always being invested like we’ve always been taught, I believe in something different. I read an article called predatory investing, don’t love the name of the title, but predatory investing talked about Ted Turner sitting in massive amounts of cash and then when the economy changed, when times were tight, when people were just needing a bailout, he bought companies, he bought sports teams, he bought land, and then he’d move back into cash, and he would just wait.

Recessions and Wealth Transfer

And you know what? During recessionary times are the biggest opportunities to grow your wealth if you have liquid money. If you’re illiquid, recessions transfer wealth. I know when we turn on the news, the news says, “Oh, there’s been billions of dollars lost in retirement plans.” Money isn’t lost. No one’s burning the money up. It’s transferred. This is a deception. The world feels like, “Oh, we lost. Everybody else lost.” No, no, no. You transferred your money to someone who was in the know because you paid the ignorance tax. We’re here to make sure the ignorance tax goes away as much as possible so that people could have a better life. They could become economically independent, not waiting 30 years

. But I’ve disseminated. I’ve studied since 1998. I said, “What’s the simplest framework that is not only predictable, it’s inevitable that if someone follows it, they can achieve economic independence? And how long would that take?” I met a few insane people that got there within a year. You know, I think of people that have done that because they just work 20 extra hours a week. They lived off food storage. They just did what it took. But there’s people that are frugal right now that can get economically independent in 3 years where most people wait till they’re 65 or 30 years from now. Maybe like me, it took 7 years. It was because I just think luxuries are now necessities. You know, and I like the finer things even though I grew up in this coal mining town, so part of that is just you begin by reclaiming your cash. So you boost your profits, keep more of the dollars you make. Then second, you figure out what that number is per month that you have to get an income that comes in if you don’t show up to the job or to the business. So that could be investment income, that could be entrepreneurial income that is because of a team, but it still means that you need to monitor it and manage it. But once you identify that number, then you reverse engineer and say,

Achieving the Vision

What’s our plan to get there? Then the third step is you actually convert your lazy assets to accelerate investment income. So, accelerating investment income means don’t let any asset just sit there and accumulate. Turn it on like cash flow. Banks, when they borrow your money, they’re trying to create cash flow. They want you to pay monthly. They don’t ask you to pay 30 years from now; they ask you to pay monthly. Start thinking more like that. How can I create cash flow? Because if I can create that cash flow, I can get economically independent faster.

Scaling Revenue and Making It Count

Then the fourth thing is to scale revenue. This is where investing in yourself comes into the plan. You need to be an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur, and if you’re willing to do that, you can grow wealth because you can produce more. Financial books miss that far too often. And then the fifth one was the hardest one for me to figure out because in my 20s, if someone said, “Oh, you up in the mountains, do you ski?” I own a business. What are your hobbies? Business. What do you do for fun? Business. I mean, it was the same answer. I just was going to outwork everyone. I remember telling my dad that, I’m like, “I’m going to work like no one else will work so one day, someday I could live like no one else could live.” And he goes, “Son, what about the memories you miss out on along the way?” It’s like, damn, that’s a good point, dad. Right? But the fifth one, Make It Count.

Have a scorecard that’s not just financially related. Finance is one of your scorecards, but have a second scorecard of what matters most in life. What engages you? What helps you build the life that you love? What are the things that you enjoy? Maybe it’s taking trips, maybe it’s having hobbies, maybe it’s getting together with friends, but actually enjoying life. Because if you’re the greatest asset and you take care of yourself, you’ve got more to give. I’ve met full-time stay-at-home parents that never leave their kids’ side, they do everything for them to the point of exhaustion. They stop doing things for themselves, and they think that that’s the right way of doing it. And look, I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, I’m just saying that sometimes if you get worn out, quantity doesn’t beat quality. And if you all of a sudden do something for everyone else and never do anything for yourself, there’s not enough gas in the tank. So Make It Count is about relaxation, rejuvenation, so that you can come back creative, productive, and come back solving those problems.

The Vision for the Future

Now, you keep going through these five levers. I call them levers because it’s these five things: boost profits or keep more of what you make, strategically engineer wealth, which is finding out that number and reverse engineering to build cash flow, take your existing resources and make them cash flow rather than just accumulate, because there’s this huge, huge misnomer out there in the world that Einstein said that compound interest was the eighth wonder of the world. He said compound numbers in the 1920s. Security National Life lied through their marketing instead. He said compound interest through a misquote, which has had people hand their money over to the institutions, wait forever to get a measly, tiny bit off their retirement. I don’t want people to do that. I want them to Take Back Control of their finances. I

want them to utilize this methodology, and they can go through the four eyes to reclaim cash, they could learn that it’s not just about cutting back, it’s about efficiency and more production, they could even figure out that all expenses aren’t created equal, there’s some expenses are destructive, let’s get rid of those destructive expenses, you know, let’s just eliminate that, instead, pay cash for lifestyle expenses, F focus on protective expenses the Rockefellers did, that’s why they’re sixth generation strong and they keep growing their wealth, for the Vanderbilts didn’t have protective expenses, the Rockefellers created a family office, meaning they had an office of financial professionals managing just their family that helped them perpetuate wealth, the Vanderbilts didn’t have that, it was loose.

That’s where the point you brought up, having a financial team, and not just a financial team, just having people that are there to mentor, to coach, to support, not just sell, not people that are just getting paid a commission, not people that are just paying, you know, assets under management getting a fee, but if we focus on the fourth type of expense, it’s the game-changer, it’s the solution to this, a productive expense. We learn to invest in people, we learn to invest in ideas that we’re part of, that we have a contribution to. This is an investment for you, right? This is an investment of time for me. We cash in on relationship Capital to do this. We’ve spent a lot of money in mental Capital to even share these types of things. We’re being a product of the very product that we’re talking about.

So people are drinking through a fire hose right now, obviously, a ton coming at them, especially, what does it do? It opens your eyes, said, “Oh my God, there’s so much here to think about, so much here to consider,” and I’ve been kind of living in a blind habit, you know, as compared to saying, there’s a whole world here worth exploring, and the psychology can be, “Oh my God, I feel overwhelmed,” or, “Oh my God, this is amazing that I have all this new world to explore that could be a really interesting world to explore,” and certainly, I’m the beneficiary of that exploration. Right? So now, sum that up a bit and say, “What is the Garrick Gunderson vision for the future? How do you want to see the world as a result of your efforts?”

Shaping the Future

Well, I see a world where people live their sole purpose, which is the best of who they are. It’s really their abilities and it’s their passions and their values combined for the highest context of living where money is not their primary reason or excuse. Where they can actually have generational wealth that isn’t just money that passes On to the Next Generation, it’s ideas, it’s contribution, it’s those values, it’s the signposts and philosophies that were so helpful, and the lessons that they learned along the way that can help people to go further and live the life that they want without being born into Financial bondage again, without creating entitled kids. So, to me, this is a chance for people to change their family’s financial future and overall their family’s Destiny.

I think with a business, I want it to be an ongoing concern that when I’m gone, it still exists, it still contributes to the world. But I look at the Gunderson family the same way, when I’m gone, I don’t want the Gunderson family to be something that I had

no impact or influence over or contribution. I want people to figure out their own path in my family, but I want to have symbols, I want to have rituals, I want to have traditions, I want to have philosophies. I have a 52-page philosophy that goes into my estate plan that says, whether there’s money left in this plan or not, this is a book I want my great, great, great grandkids to read to say, “How did we navigate life knowing that there’s certain things that are going to adopt and change, but there’s certain timeless principles that we could share, that we spent millions of dollars painstakingly figuring out from either mistakes or masterminds or great conversations.” And it’s everything from who we spent. Like, here’s, I’ll just give one simple example from that, one of the biggest ways I’ve lost wealth over time was not being more selective with relationships. So inside of my trust, inside of what’s so-called our statement of purpose, I put, “Hey, we suggest that you create two categories for people: friends and friendly. We don’t think that you need to have massive blow-ups or push your values onto someone else or tell them why they’re wrong and spend all this energy and getting involved in that drama.

Just be friendly with those people. Don’t share your vision, listen to them, don’t commit to anything you’re not truly wanting to do, so just say no to their invites and stop inviting them, and then take that extra time and invest it into friends.” When I first met you, I knew we would be friends. I knew so much that when you said, “Oh, I’ve got this thing coming up,” I knew it’s a week and a half from today, you’d never be able to fly out and make it. I made it because I saw that because I didn’t have to spend time with all the drama people or all the people that don’t want to see me succeed or hate my vision or judge me in a negative way. I wanted people I could celebrate with. I wanted people that when they call me on the phone, I want to answer that call rather than begrudgingly start draining my energy.

And it’s simple things like that that I want to share with my family because the two worst relationships I let in my life, they were more damaging than the 100 productive relationships in my life during two major events. And you know what? I learned lessons that I wanted to teach my family. Like just because someone does a favor for you once doesn’t mean that you are enslaved to them for the rest of your life and they can abuse you. Just because someone says that you’re out of Integrity, if Integrity was broken because they broke the agreement, you don’t have to hold up your end of the bargain anymore. They’ve already… Things like that that I want to contribute that I think will impact their wealth. But most importantly, I think it could save them some of the time.

Now what I do want for them too is a little bit of struggle. What I do want for them is making mistakes, but I want them to make it when there’s less at stake and with someone to support them and help pick them up, so they could learn a lesson in a more efficient manner. And to me, if I can help people discover that money isn’t as complicated as they think, I could simplify it to the point where they’re only focused on things that matter to them, and they’re not spending time on options trading if that’s not their thing or tax liens if they don’t understand that, where they could dial it in so that they could actually have more memories along the way and that they could enjoy life and live and express because I think all the problems we’re facing right now, we have the solutions within people’s sole purpose, but money is clouding them from living that because if your money ain’t right, it’s hard to join that fight. You know, if you’re not in a good place, there…

Ray Blanco’s Background and Interests

Ray, I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation. There are a lot of people saying really nice and great inspiring things about you, so I’m looking forward to interacting and finding out more about what you’re doing.

Ray Blanco: Great, it’s great to be here.

Interviewer: So, tell us your background, kind of where you came from, and how you ended up being the editor for Seven Figure Publishing that you are today.

Ray Blanco: Sure. Even as a kid, I was kind of a geeky kid, I guess you might say, a big sci-fi buff. I grew up in a world where Star Trek represented the future, you know, humanity’s made all these amazing discoveries, remade economies, going out to the stars. There’s no scarcity or want among the human species. Later on, I went into computer science, and I worked in both the public and private sectors. I got to know a little bit about the ins and outs of those things, how Wall Street works on the technological level. I started looking at the stock market, technology stocks. As a cancer survivor, I was always interested in emerging biotechnologies and pharmaceutical discoveries. I mean, if not for discoveries of the past, I would not be here today.

Interviewer: Could you maybe give us a little bit more about that? What was your situation?

Ray Blanco: I was very young. I mean, I had a rough time. I think my mother really had it rough. I was about 19, 20 years old, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Not sure why I got it at such a young age, although it does tend to be one of the more prevalent cancers in young males. But I went through surgery, and I went through radiation, and knock on wood, it’s been almost 25 years now.

Interviewer: That’s great.

Ray Blanco: Yeah.

Interviewer: So, that got you interested in investigating and understanding Biotech a little bit more?

Ray Blanco: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting how sometimes personal life experiences can lead you on a career path.

Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely, give you a purpose.

Transition to Editing Newsletters

Interviewer: So, you had a technology background and an interest in this. Obviously, what was the path that got you into editing these newsletters and getting into the work you’re doing today?

Ray Blanco: Well, it’s like anything else, you meet people along the way in life, and you make a favorable impression on a person. Sometimes opportunity comes from that. I ended up working with a person who was a very good friend of mine. He thought I could help him with analyzing technology and biotech stocks and things of that nature, help him with that process. I did that for a while and ended up gravitating towards writing about things myself under my own name, and well, it’s been a few years now, and it’s been a great experience.

Ray Blanco’s Current Activities

Interviewer: What are your activities today? What are you mostly doing?

Ray Blanco: So, I’m mostly involved in biotechnology and tech. The last few years, we’ve been…

Introduction

We’ve been talking a lot about investment opportunities in the Cannabis space, which is emerging as a global thing now. We’re just in a time of incredible change, amazing things are happening, there’s so much promise for the future. What I help my readers with is finding those opportunities in a way that they can act and benefit, and it’s a two-way street. Investors enable these new technologies, these world-changing technologies. So, at the same time, they can profit from it. You get to do well by doing good, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Passion for the Industry

That’s an interesting question because basically, you have a passion for this world, and you’re seeing it having some sort of a beneficial effect on humanity and creating this brighter future, absolutely. At the same time, by investing in it, people can benefit not only from the technology as it emerges but also from the return on their investment they can make on it, right?

Investing Strategy

Our thesis has been from the beginning if you invest in a basket of some of the companies participating in some of the biggest trends in technology or some of the most promising technologies, you’re going to have market-beating performance. What do you mean by a basket? Well, you want to spread your bets around because not every good idea works or, you know, it’s a good idea, but there’s competition that emerges. In biotechnology, not every plausible theory of how to heal a disease survives, you know, the cold hard truth of reality in clinical trials. A lot of drugs never make it. So, there’s stuff like that. But if you spread your bets around a bit, the winners will by far eclipse your losers, and you’re going to end up ahead of the game.

Example of Spreading Bets

And, you know, that’s what we’ve seen for many years now. So, this is part ’cause I want to dig into some of the things you’re, you know, you are betting on or think people should bet on right now. But the strategy is basically take almost like a, maybe a sector or sub-sector and say, “Hey, there’s three or four or five or seven players in it,” and really kind of spread bets around all of them as compared to picking one, right? Can you give an example of that? Well, you know, that might be current. Sure, so biotechnology is a good example. You don’t want to put all your money in one early-stage company working on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. You want to look at, and you’ve got to get them at the right time too. You want to look at a number of them and invest a number of them. Maybe half of them might not result in what you wanted, but the other ones, especially if they’re at the proper stage of development, you know, they’re not a huge pharmaceutical company, they’re a small cap, and they’re still not on the market with any products, maybe half of them will make it. Their late-stage phase three, and they’ll have good results, and you’ll end up, you know, triple quadruple digit gains on those kinds of companies. And the ones that were failures, you know, you’re offset there, right?

Cell Therapies

And, and we’re talking about the late stage, talking about where they are in FDA as far as the trials and trial process, and you’re kind of tracking this whole process as it moves along, right? Now, this is interesting because if you look at the whole area of cell therapy and stem cells and other types of cell therapies, it’s kind of the Wild Wild West right now. So, have you been analyzing this and giving some opinions on this? Yeah, so there’s a lot of stuff that gets touted that, in my opinion, after following the space for many years, it’s probably never going to yield any benefit. But that doesn’t preclude stem cells, stem cell therapies themselves from having a lot of therapeutic promise. So, you know, there’s companies out there that do have platforms that show a lot of promise. We’ve already seen some cell-based therapies. They’re not stem cells, but in 2017, the FDA approved two cell-based therapies for treating cancer. They’re some of the first that we’ve ever had. We’ve got emerging cell therapies for regenerative medicine to rebuild tissues that are damaged by disease or aging or things of that nature. So, you know, there’s a lot of promise in that area. It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s finally starting to mature, and we’re starting to get some results in terms of these therapies getting into the market.

Regulatory Challenges

Well, what’s interesting is a lot of these therapies are in the market, and there’s companies that are blossoming and growing out of it. But they’re not necessarily FDA clearance for doing it. How do you think this is all going to shake out? Well, the US has been difficult for these kinds of therapies. The FDA wants something that you can replicate very deterministically. The problem with cell therapies, there’s a lot of variance from person to person. Everybody’s genome is different. How you know if you give somebody stem cells for rebuilding their cardiovascular system, you know, how those cells multiply, divide, and do their thing is very variable. So, we need different metrics. The way we’ve, you know, the FDA has analyzed new therapies in the past, it’s kind of a one-size-fits-all sort of a Model T Ford medicine approach. We have large numbers of people, but as we’ve learned more about the human genome and epigenetics, we’re all snowflakes in a way. We need to be able to have a regulatory framework that can allow these more tailored therapies to emerge. You know, but the US isn’t the whole world. There’s other parts of the world that have their own regulatory frameworks. Japan has been a lot more flexible in this. Now, you know, the FDA is moving in the right direction under its new director, Scott Gottlieb. It’s been doing that under his predecessors as well. We’re seeing an FDA that’s working a lot more with developers with these kinds of new therapies and making it easier for them to bring them to market, you know, make a lot of money but also help people in need.

Recommended Companies

So right now, have you been recommending certain stocks or certain companies, saying, “Hey, we think they’re on the right path”? Yes, relatively. So can you talk about those or what you’ve been writing about? Well, there’s one company I like a lot. It’s based out of Alameda, California, Biotime. The man that founded the company, Dr. Michael West, you could say he’s the father of regenerative medicine. He wrote the book on stem cells. He’s spent many years, he’s accumulated a lot of intellectual property. He’s figured out one of the difficulties of stem cells is how do you manufacture them and with high-quality consistency. The cell culture that you’re going to give this person is precise. Those cells are going to differentiate into the right types of adult cells and not the wrong type. That’s a big deal. So, he’s built this whole cell

manufacturing platform. He spun out the technology out of Biotime. We just had an IPO a few months ago using Biotime’s technology. The name of the company is Ajax Therapeutics. Dr. West is heading that company now, along with world-famous anti-aging researcher.

Gene Editing and Zinc Finger Nucleases

Aubrey de Grey, he’s got a big role there, and they’ve made some discoveries. They ran an analysis using basically supercomputers. They ran an analysis of all the changes in the genome as it passes through the embryonic through to the fetal stage, everything that changes. And they found this one switch, which is pretty amazing, mind-blowing. Some forms of animals like a lizard lose its tail, it can grow it back, right? A crab can lose its claw, it can grow it back. Certain lower forms of life have high power of regeneration. If you go even lower, a flatworm, a planaria flatworm, you can cut it up into 50 pieces, and you’re going to end up with 50 flatworms; they all grow back into full-grown worms. What is this mechanism that they have that we don’t? Because, you know, you lose a limb, that’s it for life. You cut your spinal cord in an accident, and you’re paralyzed for life. So, they’ve identified the molecular switch, so to speak, that gets flipped.

Molecular Switch for Regeneration

Because when we humans are at the embryonic stage of development, we do have this infinite regenerative power. An embryo can lose a limb, and it can regrow it. Whereas, once you get to the fetal stage, we don’t regenerate anymore; we heal. So you get injured, you heal, but it’s not the same again; you get a scar. They’re developing drugs that flip the switch on in different disease states. Imagine you have your heart damaged from a heart attack, and you can flip that switch, and the heart will heal again; it’ll be like a new heart.

Brown Adipose Tissue Cell Lines

They’re also working on cell-based therapies. They’re working on brown adipose tissue cell lines right from Biotime’s original tissue cells. So this is not a very old discovery. A few years ago, they found out that everyone has white adipose tissue. Brown adipose tissue is actually found in the upper part of your back behind your shoulder blades. When you’re very young, you have a lot of it, and it secretes certain substances into the body that regulate your metabolism. The reason they’re brown is they have a lot of mitochondria, the power plants of cells, and they burn a lot of calories. However, as you age, you start to lose these cells, and older people have more metabolic problems like diabetes. So, this could be a cell therapy that would help restore a healthy youthful metabolism.

Investing in Cell Therapy Companies

So, are these companies, or this company in particular, going through FDA trials or are they offering it in the market already? So, they do have some stuff. Ajax is getting there; they’re working on getting an investigational new drug into the clinic through the FDA. This is pretty early stage stuff, a kind of moonshot type of stuff. But if you want to have access to some of these revolutionary technologies as part of a long-term strategy, this is the kind of stuff that you want to invest in.

Investing in Cell Therapy Companies

Is it a good idea to have a basket of cell therapy companies at varying stages and spread some money around because it’s going somewhere? Yes, that’s interesting, and the different aspects that you have, the manufacturing side, you said, who’s creating the cells and distributing them, and then I guess you have the clinical application side, who’s delivering them to actual patients. Are you a believer in both sides of this from an investment perspective? Yes, both sides are going to be valuable; you can’t have one without the other. Why have the cells if you don’t have anything to use them for, right? And you can’t have the application without the cells, so you need both sides of it, and both of them are important.

Gene Editing and Gene Therapies

There’s other stuff going on, and this all involves gene editing as well, and we’re seeing some of the first gene therapies hit the market. Gene editing is another thing that holds a lot of promise. Earlier this month, we had some early evidence of in vivo gene editing possibly having curative properties in humans. Sango Biosciences has a different technology called zinc finger nucleases. It has the advantage; you can go in with great accuracy and edit a gene or insert a gene.

Timing of Investment

At what point, when you’re seeing technologies like this, which are basically the research getting published, they’re trying to move it on a track to get it out for commercial use, at what point do you think people should be saying it’s a good time to invest in it? There are different ways to invest; you can invest early and write it out for a long time, or you can trade, which is not quite the same thing as investing. A company’s got a major catalyst coming up; it could be a real big binary event, clinical data, FDA decision. You can do an analysis of what they’ve got going on and decide, “Oh, this is a good one to go long on.” You’re placing a bet before an event, yes, and hoping that it comes out in your favor. Now, do you, when you do something like that, do you hedge it somehow or do you basically just say, “Okay, I’m pushing these chips onto this bet”? You can, yeah, and there are strategies to do so. Generally, we don’t do that in our services, although that’s something that we may be considering in the future. There are different option strategies that you can use to hedge upside and downside, which are a bit more complex and for more sophisticated people.

Audience for Investment Advice

Know your research and information and what you’re putting out into the world. Who are they typically? Are they people with discretionary income and an interest in investing in the areas or sectors you talk about? Who’s your audience? My audience is generally people who have worked very hard all their lives, done all the right things, and have a little bit of discretionary income. They want to use that to have a bit more money, perhaps to send their kids to a better school or secure their own retirement. They also enjoy the excitement of investing.

Who Shouldn’t Invest

So, who shouldn’t be doing this? Who shouldn’t be saying, “I’m reading your stuff, and I want to put money into this”? When is that a bad idea? Well, you shouldn’t invest your nest egg or anything you can’t afford to lose in some of these ideas because they’re speculative and high-risk. But if you have discretionary funds, mad money, go for it.

Cannabis Industry

Now, one of the things you’ve been writing about that’s pretty big is the whole cannabis thing, right? This is exploding on the scene. It’s multifaceted, with moral issues, medical marijuana, CBD oil, hemp oil, federal vs. state regulations, etc. How do you handle writing about it in such a green field opportunity? It’s ground-level, closest to when the internet was just starting out. We’re still at that stage. Some companies won’t make it, but others will be the next Amazon and Google of cannabis.

Changing Views on Cannabis

On the moral side, I’m a big proponent of liberty. Alcohol and tobacco are legal, not necessarily good for you in excess. Cannabis is probably in the same camp, not truly dangerous. It’s been a travesty putting people in prison. We’ve spent billions fighting the market, which always wins. Now, we’ve had a dedicated group of people pushing the issue for years, and the majority’s opinion is changing.

Legalization of Cannabis

We’ve seen ballot initiatives in many states allowing medical and recreational use. Implementation is challenging, especially at the federal level, where it’s still highly restricted. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) holds patents on cannabinoids, and they can license them, but they usually require pharmaceutical companies to do the hard work.

Exclusivity in IP

In a perfect world, anyone could use the IP, but without exclusivity, it’s unlikely anyone will invest the money needed to bring it to market. More than 90% of ideas in the Discovery stage never make it through the market, so there’s a high risk.

The Financial and Investment Environment

This, uh, and I’m talking about the financial or investment, uh, environment. You’ve got literally a federal government who’s had this great opposition to marijuana now but, but yet the federal government holds patents on, on uses. It’s like one hand and the other not knowing what they’re doing, right? Opposing independently. So, the DEA says this is a highly dangerous, uh, uh, substance with no known medical applications, right? And then you got the NIH holds a patent on the neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids, right? So it’s just bizarre, yeah, it’s bizarre. So we can go with the people who’ve done the science. We can go with the people who just have hysteria that they’ve inherited. And the thing is, you know, government bureaucracies, after a while, they become self-serving, right? And their biggest job is to continue to exist and to grow, yeah. And for, you know, the DEA to, uh, willingly, uh, you know, reschedule or remove marijuana is listed up there with heroin and cocaine, crazy, all this kind of stuff.

Investment in Cannabis

So now I’m the investor. I’m excited about the prospects, yet you know, we’ve spent a few minutes here talking about how crazy, you know, it’s like crazy land here, you know, as far as the regulatory side of this and state governments, federal governments, federal, federal government contradiction and all that kind of stuff. So now, but I, I’m excited. Let’s say I’m excited about this. I’ve got some discretionary money. I want to put some money into this. Place some bets on this. How do I sort this out? Or when you’re writing about this, where are you guiding people?

Investing in Cannabis Companies

Well, I mean, I’m taking the approach, uh, and we take both the long and short-term approach in different publications. Um, the long-term approach I think is to invest in the best quality cannabis companies out there, which have tended to be Canadian. And even that’s not perfect. There’s been some stuff that’s gone on. Um, you know, uh, Canada’s been a really early frontier. They were early at the national level with medical. And you know, uh, they were, they’ve been early also with the adult use and, you know, the implementation has been bumpy, but they’ve got the most mature, well-capitalized companies there. Uh, you can speculate on some of these itty bitty ones, uh, and that’s fine, but on the long-term side, I think that’s the best way to go. There’s opportunities emerging, uh, all over the world. Uh, I don’t necessarily think Canada is going to be the epicenter of cannabis production. Um, I mean, they’re not the epicenter of banana production for a reason; they don’t have the climate for it, right? Although you can grow bananas in Canada if you want to spend the money on a greenhouse and climate control. Um, so there’s going to be other parts of the world that are going to, to I think eventually be the leaders.

Investing in Cannabis Companies (Continued)

Have you recommended any, uh, particular companies or initiatives, uh, in the Cannabis world for investment thus far?

Late last year, I visited, um, Columbia and I’m a little bit familiar with what’s been going on over there. So I was in the Medellin area, which is very famous if you watch Narcos on Netflix and Pablo Escobar and all that, right? Uh, so you know that place is somewhat infamous, undeservedly so because it’s a beautiful city and it’s a beautiful area, um, so but that area and also around, but the proper elevations, it’s a, uh, cut flower powerhouse. So we used to grow a lot of flowers in North America; we don’t grow quite as many as we used to, uh, just because, you know, climate is king over there, uh, you’re in the tropics, so you don’t get a lot of seasonal variation in sunlight. And, uh, at the right altitude, you have the perfect temperature for chrysanthemums. A little bit higher, you have the perfect temperature for roses year-round. And, you know, all you need is a very simple open-air, uh, clear plastic greenhouse to keep the rain from hitting the plants and causing mold or mildew on the leaves and the flowers. And, you know, they’ve already got an established, uh, labor base expert in working flowers and is there. But are they taking investment in these particular, they’re going, they’re flipping, they’re starting to flip into the cannabis, my understanding is it was an obscure law on the books; cannabis is not legal in Colombia, but it’s only legal for medical. But there was no regulatory framework, so they worked and they created regulatory framework and just like they took over.

Investing in Cannabis Companies (Continued)

I’m not, maybe not the majority of the world’s flower production, but I think pretty close to it. I think, uh, they’re going to be pretty big in cannabis production, able to do it a lot cheaper than than in some other places. And at the end of the day, as the industry matures, if you can be a low-cost, high-quality producer, much better than others, then you’re going to be, you know, the, the mass, the, the mass-market winner.

Investing in Cannabis Companies (Continued)

We’ve got, so you’re talking about the farming side right now, right? So then you got farming, you probably have, uh, you know, wholesale distribution, and then you’ve got, uh, the retail side of it, you know, and I’m, I’m probably in the recreational space more than the medical space speaking to this. Um, so do you think, uh, where do you think the best place is to go invest? Is it on the farming production side, the wholesale retail, all the above?

The thing is, a lot of the really good companies, even a lot of the not-so-strong companies are pretty much trying to be completely vertical, where they have production, where they transform the product into oils or tinctures and extracts, right? And then their own, um, retail. They want to be completely vertically integrated, yeah, they want to have the whole vertical. So a lot of them will have that; some are, are specializing in just either production or just branding and retail and stuff like that. Yeah, ’cause I’m seeing now some there’s some, uh, people buying for, you know, brand development and brand awareness, and that’s starting to emerge now. Like I’m hearing a lot of commercials for Coca-Cola and they exactly, and that’s going to happen eventually, and do you think that’s a good place to place a bet, saying, hey, these people are starting to develop a known brand, and so they’re you want to spread the bets around, yeah, kind of like Bitcoin might be to crypto in general. It’s like, you know

, you want to spread around; you want spr around. It’s really hard to say who’s ultimately going to be the Amazon of this or the Coca-Cola, um, although that’s you know as the industry matures, they always tend to consolidate into a few big players, and then you might have a few bit players doing, you know, you’ve got Budweiser and Miller and all this stuff and beer, but then you got the little microbreweries, you know, you’ve got that, it’s like specialty coffee versus Starbucks or something, yeah, yeah.

Investing in Cannabis Companies (Continued)

But I think the most also a very exciting thing is, is the medical side, um, believe it or not, there’s going to be a big market, and there is is a big market for, um, cannabis-derived pharmaceuticals that will be covered by insurance, will be a very pure proven product. Um, there’s, there’s a lot of work there. Last year we saw the first-ever FDA approval, uh, of a directly cannabis-derived therapy. British company GW Pharmaceuticals, mhm, they, they uh, got the FDA to approve Epidiolex is the name of the product. It’s for children with certain rather rare forms of epilepsy, MH, so you know, they had clinical data showing that they could cut seizures down in half. These kids are getting everything we’ve already got, and I have to imagine that the adverse effects are nil because it’s derived from, you know, plant and such a way as compared to something that might be more toxic, well, yeah, it’s not toxic, I mean, the deadly dose of cannabis would is incredibly, incredibly high, much higher than the therapeutic dose, so it’s inherently safe, right? So, um, you know, they developed this therapy for, I mean, they’ve got other stuff going on at this company, I mean, they’ve got some really tantalizing early-stage data, they’ve got another cannabis extract that, um, showing, and I hope they take it further in trials, it can make a real difference in brain cancer, MH, wow, yeah, so there’s a lot of stuff going on there.

The Nature of Investment

So what is it about your writing or you do why you, why are you so popular? Why, why, why is your newsletter, yeah, why are they so popular, you, and I know it might seem like you don’t want to self-aggrandize, but, but I’m, I’m literally, you know, like saying there seems to be this sort of like your, I don’t know if it’s your style, your content, a combination, but people really love what you write.

Well, objectively, we do really well. Our averages, every year at the end of the year, I, uh, I calculate our average, uh, gain, and I mean, we just do really well, uh, so there’s that. And I love what I do. I mean, this job is just amazing. I get to talk to amazing people every day, um, learn new things. It’s, there’s just so much cool stuff going on, and you see so many people, uh, just dedicating, uh, you know, dedicating their lives to, you know, healing disease or managing new technologies and things like this, you know, it really gives you hope in humanity. There’s, there’s we’re pretty, you know, there’s a lot of good stuff out there, a lot of good people. So, I’m wondering like how you see this because, uh, you know, a lot of times when people think about investment and, or even trading in the market and and doing these types of things, it’s a, it’s almost very mercenary in its feel. It’s like, you know, I just want to go make money, but you seem to have this sort of Hope For Humanity in the work that you’re doing. It’s not, you know, I mean, obviously, yes, you’re, you’re talking about, hey, we we do well, we get we get great returns, you know, we calculate our advice and see what the impact is for people who follow it, and that that’s the money side, but there seems to be a spiritual nature to this with with you, so tell me tell me how you experience it, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I get to be immersed in and document human progress, you know, it’s this, you know, long story we’ve had we as a as a species, we, you know, we take two steps forward, we go one step back, bad things happen, but as a general rule, things have just been getting better and better, um, you know, compared to our grandparents and great-grandparents lived, as society becomes wealthier, um, there’s things that are not so great, but I mean, I think we’re more free to have empathy for each other because we’re not so scared about our own personal survival that we’re more free to to reach our individual potential. Plus, it’s just as fascination, finding out how the world works, you know, you know, human biology, we’ve been talking about that a bit today, right? It’s just such a fascinating, intricate piece. If you look at it as a as a machine, I don’t know if that’s that’s exactly right, but, um, it’s just so cool. I mean, how did this all, this come about? It’s just amazing. And we’re learning new stuff all the time. I mean, the nice thing about what I do is it’s never boring. M, um, and I get to learn new stuff every day and I get to share it with other people. So pretty lucky guy right here.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

We’ve certainly have had uh a lot of conversations in this uh documentary series around uh cryptocurrency and blockchain and spent a lot of time at overstock.com now that’s a pick that you had early on uh that seemed to go very well with you what what’s your view on the whole crypto blockchain thing, so I am quite skeptical on cryptocurrency, uh, I like the idea of an alternative monetary system that can’t be manipulated by the central banks, um, so I like the idea. I’m just somewhat skeptical about the implementation. Now the foundational technology of crypto, you know, is blockchain, uh, this mysterious person invented it back in, I think it was 2009 when everything was melting down, he invented it to enable cryptocurrency, uh, I think blockchain, you know, and there’s derivatives of that, uh, is a, a world-changing idea because it’s decentralizing and it makes trust between two people that don’t know each other possible without an intermediary, MH, so what I liked about Overstock was, um, their involvement with, uh, medici ventures and all of the startups that they were funding, uh, they were building, um, an exchange t0 MH, which was going to be the, uh, the world’s first SEC-compliant, um, secure distributed, you know, blockchain-based equities and securities exchange, right?