I know you won't leave me.

For the listeners, though, but I refuse to let you go.

We did karaoke night with all of his cousins, and I refused.

I refused.

And finally I. I suggest.

Okay, I'll go.

Because whoever went got to choose the next person to do the next song.

And I only did it just so that I can hand select the next song, which was a 50 Cent song.

And I just wanted to hear Odun say, so seductive.

And that's evidence, everybody, for Saeed Omar.

Being a terrible human.

Welcome back to the number one financial literacy podcast in the world.

This is the higher standard sitting in front of me in the same merch as the last episode.

It's so seductive.

It's so seductive.

A partner in crime, Christopher Nahibi.

And sitting across from me, my man, the myth, the legend, the quarter zip king.

Let's go.

Side Omar, everybody.

Thank you, my man.

And sitting behind the desk in the production suite, Rajille the Fighting Fajian.

What's up, my guy?

Hello, again.

Hello again.

You know, the irony of calling him the Fighting Fijian is that Regil has never fought.

He's never fought, but that was actually a lover, not a fight.

It was actually.

It was actually a term coined by one of our listeners.

Okay.

That's right.

And he actually, like, reached out to me again.

He, like, I really appreciate that you guys, like, kept that going, and I feel like I'm, like, a part of the show now.

Let the record show that that description was not presented by Chris.

All right, this is our end of the year episode, ladies and gents.

It's been.

It's been a Fun ride for 2025.

It's been really difficult for some of us.

This has been professionally probably the most difficult year of my profession.

Do you think that's a prisoner of the moment, or do you really think that you're giving that proper reflection?

I don't know what you mean by that statement, so I'm gonna take it as an insult.

Too many big words at me.

Watch your mouth and help me with the sale.

Yeah, there you go.

40 over.

Yeah.

Can't make that movie anymore.

No, you can't make it anymore.

No.

I think this is probably one of those years where you deal with a lot from a personal, professional capacity.

And I think that anybody who changes their career midlife is going to feel that.

That pain, particularly when you're starting new companies and.

And a creative endeavor like this.

It's.

It has been a very emotionally taxing year.

I'll never forget the.

The thought of Trying to figure out, okay, I need to get insurance in place because I don't want my wife and my son not to have health care like that.

That was very scary.

Right?

And that, and that's actually a big draw for a lot of people to stay right where they're at.

Because that's, it's scary, right?

Because there's new laws in place now where your new employer doesn't have to give you insurance for what, 60, 90 days?

No, it's not the new laws.

It's that there's no law for this.

I think this is just them hedging their bets.

They're shifting the risk of you not being.

So this is just a new standard.

Yeah, it's a new standard.

At least someone's probably going to correct me on this.

But really, if you want to, if you want to search it, I'm not aware there is a new law.

I think it's just companies are passing on the risk of you being the wrong hire onto you.

We don't know if you're the right fit.

So we're gonna give you like a 60, 90 day probation in which time you're not gonna get any healthcare coverage until we go, you know what?

Okay, he's a nice enough guy, right?

Then you get your benefits.

Yeah, I don't like that.

There, there is a federal law, the ACA mandates the 90 day maximum for full time employees.

So they have maximum, they have up until 90 days.

And some companies will literally say 60 days or 90 days.

That, that bothers me a great deal because I understand health care is expensive and I understand that putting somebody on health care has got windows and enrollment periods.

But if somebody's going from job to job, healthy transitory migration from job to job is somewhere around 4.5 to 5% unemployment.

You don't think people are going to think twice about moving jobs because you're not going to give them health care for 60 days.

That definitely hurts migration.

Yeah.

So, you know, I think that's one of those things where that's a variable that's impacts unemployment that we never really think about.

Yeah, I agree.

Sorry to get off topic.

No, it's not, it's all, it's all on topic because this episode actually right now, today, what we're going to be doing as we wrap up 2025, today's episode is about reflection.

Something that we've done a lot over the last, you know, couple of weeks, couple months and something that I actually do every year on my birthday.

I like something, I like to literally, literally carve out time to just reflect on, you know, the last year, things that I like, things that I don't like, things that I want to improve on.

Right.

And this episode is going to be about that.

No predictions, no hype, just real financial lessons that we all live through this past year.

Right?

And there's going to be some, some themes that you've, you've heard us discuss in the past too, right?

So some of these lessons were uncomfortable, some of them were expensive, but a lot of them made us smarter.

Lesson number one that we're going to get into tonight.

High interest rates change the rules.

Cheap money is no longer the default, and planning has to adjust.

I almost want to back that one off a little bit and say that interest rate volatility is normal and that we live through.

And it's easy because you forget you live through year after year and think about it in the context of, like, your life as you get older.

It's true.

It feels like time is moving faster.

And I know it makes you sound like an old guy, Fine, so be it.

But we live through almost 20 years of artificial interest rate deflation.

What does that mean for people?

That's, that's a, that's something that we've been saying, and I think for some people, they just thought that was normal.

I don't, I don't understand.

What do you mean, an artificial interest rate?

Yeah, and this confusion has created big, big ass egos.

That's all I can say.

Oh, yeah.

For a long period of time, it was normal to have rates change at a pretty regular cadence.

So much so I know this is gonna be shocking to a lot of listeners that nobody gave a damn what the FOMC said.

We're gonna raise interest rates, we're gonna cut insurance.

Everyone's like, bro, who cares.

Right?

Like, why are you on tv?

Why are you holding a press conference?

Seriously?

But now we're at this point, we've sensationalized it toward the FOMC's press conference and I cover it live on the show.

So don't get me wrong, I'm part of the problem.

Well, we need to, though.

Yeah, we need to because it's where we are today.

And extremism, sensationalism, it's all out there.

And this is all under the auspice of being more communicative.

I get that.

But for a long period of time, volatility was normal.

Quarter point up, quarter point down.

These weren't meaningful things unless you were worried about some other, like, large economic problem.

And you find yourself in the situation today where rates were held down by the government holding it down for a prolonged period of time.

Then you had a really weird one time anomalous situations, that is a pandemic come around.

People like, oh my God, let's give people money.

And you just held interest rates low for an artificial period of time, which has ramifications on building wealth, on buying property, on inflation, and for our, for.

Our listening base, our demographics, a lot, a huge portion of that, you know, they've just, you know, entered into their professional careers at a time when, you know, borrowing money was super cheap and they don't know anything else.

My favorite thing to do when I see a younger entrepreneur come through and I this is going to wrap me out a little bit is I like to kind of talk to them and kind of challenge them a little bit on like interest rate environments.

So think about it this way.

Let's say you started a company, any company you want, you got a line of credit.

Line of credit is an index plus a margin, right?

That index didn't have a whole lot of movement in the last couple years, and now you've seen that go up.

So a lot of people with lines of credit for businesses are now having to pay higher payments on their lines of credit because the index plus margin has increased at a cadence they've never seen in their adult lives.

You started a business when you were 20 and now you're 34, 35.

You're like, I'm a great businessman, I'm a successful businessman.

Yeah, you didn't have to pay higher payments.

You didn't have this volatility.

Kudos to you for even taking the risk.

Taking the risk.

All your clients had liquidity in their pockets.

I mean, there's a whole group of people in the mortgage space that have never experienced how difficult it's going to be in 2026.

I remember a time when I was in, in college and, you know, at the time working for Wells Fargo and I was on the teller side, right?

And the bankers on the other side, they were literally referring people over to get home equity lines of credits, windows literally just like, like, hey, you should get this just in case, like you'll, you'll prove real quick.

And it's everybody, it was a slam dunk.

Hey, man, pull out some money.

The rate's low.

Go put that money into something to make money.

Yeah, it's good for 10 years.

You know, it was such an easy sell.

And I know someone's gonna listen to this and go, Wells Fargo got punt.

Yeah.

Put all that aside.

Everybody, everybody was doing it, right?

And it was like, hey.

And I still, to this day, I still believe that having home equity line of credit is important.

But do I think that you should use it to buy an investment in arbitrage?

No, I don't think you should do that.

And that's the reserve you tap into when you need it, if you need it, use it as a casual tool.

But yeah, and I think that that changing landscape of rates has really scared a lot of people.

And now they're looking at things in the market going like, oh, my God, like, this is crazy.

When you think about it, when you pull out to a 30,000 foot elevation and you look at kind of the economic climate, it's not just this component.

That component is one meaningful one that in and of itself, rates and volatility and rates and the instability in the market would be enough to put challenging times ahead of us.

But then you layer in all these complexities.

You got social media, you got AI, you've got the S&P 500 being led by seven to 10 stocks, you've got all this consternation, You've got a political zeitgeist which is very clouded.

You've got all sorts of things happening worldwide.

And then you go, okay, how am I supposed to feel confident in the future?

Yeah.

And things, things started becoming so expensive that people had to start planning out and really factoring in and being forced to consider, can I actually afford this?

Right.

And the idea of having patience again was a newfound skill for a lot of people that they had to start adopting.

Right.

I mean, we, you had, we had an episode, I remember not too long ago with Adam from Mind Pump.

Mind pump.

Mind pump, right.

And not for everyday small things, but he said for like big ticket items that he wants to purchase, like a test that he likes to run.

And something kind of resonated with me that I like.

He likes to hold off on it for six months.

Do I still want it in six months?

I do that a lot.

You know, I do that not only for six months, but like even Amazon purchases.

I'll put it in my cart and wait a couple days.

Yeah.

Do I really want this?

It's very rare that I go, I want this.

Buy it.

Yeah.

Very, very rare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, all right, move on.

Moving on to lesson number two, something that we've said for a long time, not just in 2025, but I think something that a lot of people have had to consider.

Cash flow is king, not just your net worth.

Right.

Cash isn't king, but we've always said cash flow should be king.

Paper wealth means nothing if monthly cash flow is tight.

Yeah, but I would also argue that depending on what kind of assets you've been able to accumulate, that they may offset some of that.

Okay, but that is a.

Depending on how many assets you have.

And for most Americans, it's not enough.

That's a game of limited resources.

There's a finite end to that statement.

So for a lot of people, though, like, they.

They experience a lot of appreciation in the homes that, that they lived in over the past couple years.

Right.

And you can tap into that, but then you lose your home at the end of the equation.

So you have to have an alternative plan.

So you either selling their home to tap into it, or they're.

They are tapping into those, you know, home equity lines.

Right.

Which gives you another payment.

So you got to be able to pay that from cash flow.

From your cash flow.

A lot of people will borrow on the home equity line to pay for the home equity line.

And then this is a perpetual parasitic cycle.

It's very, very sad.

Yeah.

And something that, unfortunately for a lot of people this past year they've experienced was, as Of November in 2025, 12 million student loan borrowers are now behind on their student loans.

Yeah.

I don't know what the government was thinking, putting everybody in forbearance all at the same time and then promising this possible forgiveness.

Like, what did you think the consumer was going to do?

I mean, it was so on its face.

But also unconstitutional.

Yeah.

Honest.

And also a way that.

Another way, one of many ways that they were able to skew the numbers.

Right.

Imagine making everybody stop paying their student loan payments.

And they weren't just in forbearance, where, forbearance, you still get hit with the interest.

Right.

No, they.

They stopped on the interest as well.

So they were actually.

They were actually deferred.

Right.

And so you had.

Now, people who have obviously proven right, they have a track record of not being able to manage their finances or have, you know, bad economic behavior.

Right.

Um, and they're not saving that money or they're not paying.

Paying the principal down every month.

What they're doing is, oh, I have extra money, I can go spend it.

Well, keep in mind, this is also happening at the same time that you're seeing this pervasive narrative on social media that school and education that you're paying for isn't really valued.

You've got Lots of people who are making money in front of you on social media all day long, some of which don't have a traditional education, most of which, frankly, were on social media, don't have a traditional education, they don't work in traditional jobs, and you're envious of all those things.

So what do you do?

You try to use that extra excess cash flow.

You have to live a little bit of that lifestyle because you have a little bit of fomo and FOMO causes that.

And now you can throw in AI and you start finding out people have fake weights on, weightlifting stuff, fake vacations, all this.

Yeah.

You know, there's a whole bunch of it that's fake, but people took it all as face value and started to compete.

And.

And when people had a little bit of extra cash in their savings they didn't normally have, they have to make the payments, and they were told these payments would be forgiven.

Not just forbeared, but forgiven.

People were like, I'm going to spend the money and I'm going to enjoy life because life's too short.

And I can't say that I blame them.

I heard a really interesting theory of the day, which I thought was curious.

I don't know that it's true.

I'd have to go.

I have to really dive into it to find the answer.

But when I was arguing with somebody, a real estate pundit, that home values had increased at a cadence that didn't.

That outpaced salaries, his argument, responsive argument, was, well, yeah, but the things we expect from a home are very different today than what they were in 1920.

And I said, well, what do you mean?

Yeah, the ac, central air conditioning, more insulation.

They used to be basically just these, like, you know, wood houses that were propped up.

And now you have all these features, you know, tech LEDs, pools, hardscaping.

You know what I mean?

Your plaza, bigger homes.

Right.

Palazzos.

Exactly.

But it's.

It's a lot.

And I don't know if there's an answer, but I can tell you that it doesn't change the difference.

It doesn't change the facts that you can't really afford a home for most Americans these days.

I mean, and the truth of the matter is, if you are able to put yourself.

We had a listener reach out to us and say, you know, you guys have been ringing this bell now for the greater portion of over a year, and I don't know, we have no.

Just to.

Just to prepare yourselves.

Right.

We were sounding the alarms.

There are way worse doomers Than you and me, for sure.

Remember, we were sounding the alarms.

Everyone should prepare.

You know, there was the inverted yield curve that we'd been talking about.

We were sounding the alarms on that.

We've been signing the numbers, sounding the alarms on the job data.

The job numbers are inaccurate.

Look, they're being revised downward every month or two.

And look, we're still seeing that.

And now layoffs are picking up.

I'm still going to go out on a record and say that I know that that sounds like we were doom and gloom, that we were negative.

We were pointing all these facts.

To be clear, recessions are not declared during them, they're declared at the end of them.

The National Bureau of Economic Research will come out and declare, typically after a recession ends months afterward, that what you just lived through was a recession.

After 14 years of artificial interest rate deflation, that first thing we talked about, it would not be irrational to expect that you would have a prolonged period of recession unlike any recession that we had before, because we came out of this weird economic time unlike any time we had before.

So I'm not entirely convinced that we've not been in a recession this last year.

Yeah.

And frankly, longer since we came out of the yield curve inversion.

We might look back in a couple years from now and go, you know what?

We were in a recession for 2005, 2025-20, 26, 27.

You might get that.

And, and I'm not saying that, that it's always got to be gumdrops and lollipops out there.

I'm not saying that it's doom and gloom.

Not all housing recessions are stock market recessions.

Not all housing recessions are, are housing recessions.

You know, so you just gotta be a little bit more open minded to the idea that recession doesn't equal poverty.

Being prepared is not a bad thing.

And just because people warn you about things they're concerned about doesn't make them doomers.

Right?

Exactly.

The extra cash flow that you do have or you are able to obtain, that should be just providing you more flexibility.

And that flexibility ultimately should just be providing you and your family peace, peace of mind.

Right?

Shouldn't be.

We say routinely on the show, don't increase your lifestyle, increase your investments, increase your savings accounts.

Which leads us right into lesson number three for the year, which emergency funds are not optional.

Now, they should have never been optional for some people, but we do.

I do know for a fact that people dipped into their emergency funds in order to get a down payment.

You know, on On a home or to buy that car that they wanted.

Right?

Because for various reasons, but unexpected expenses weren't rare.

They actually were very normal.

We've talked about this on the show.

It feels like every month I got an unexpected expense.

Right.

Whether that's in a medical bill, whether that's something to do with my car.

Right.

I think we all talked about it.

Rajeel and I both today, coincidentally, both had our cars fixed.

You know, tires, battery, oil change, you name it.

Right now there's gonna be listeners out there that bro, you don't do those yourselves.

Like, come on.

But still there are unexpected expenses.

Insurance going up, home insurance is going up.

So we need to.

You need to be able to account for that.

I have every single month something that comes up.

My wife and I have talked about this almost sarcastically at this point that, that every month I hope that I'm gonna have a couple grand, that that's just excess cash flow that I would didn't have the month before.

Like there's always something.

Like a couple months ago, I was paid 3,300 bucks for tires.

The Rivian 22 inch tires.

Unique Pirelli.

It's the whole thing.

It's just stuff comes up, man.

And, but this is where like I, I look at that traditional advice and I go, yeah, that, that's good, sound traditional advice.

But is it really feasible for most Americans these days with the.

This is why Dave Ramsey is so attractive to most Americans.

I can tell you, listener, go make more money.

Yeah.

And you're gonna be like, okay, great.

How I give you some ideas and you're like, okay, I don't know that I can do that.

And you talk yourself out of it and you're like, I don't know.

And then even then there's ramp up time.

I can get a second job and then I'm sacrificing time.

But you know what's really easy to tell people?

Okay, if you can't make more money to increase your cash flow, let's cut back on expenses, stop spending.

Every single person can do that.

That's what makes him so attractive.

It isn't that his advice is that revolutionary or that amazing.

He's just telling you the one thing that he knows every single person, regardless of your financial position can do.

Yeah.

And if he has a sit down conversation with anybody, he can talk to you long enough to figure out you're overspending.

Here, here and here.

Watch this.

Hey, Regiel, you want to make more money?

Stop spending so much.

Enlightened.

That dude makes $33 million a year.

So profound.

Wow.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Emergency funds aren't an investment.

It was just the insurance to maintain our life.

And something that.

I get it.

It's tough.

It's tough for us to build towards right now for a lot of people, because a lot of people have been stretched thin.

We've talked about this year, the numbers on Buy Now, Pay later services.

People are financing groceries.

Right.

It's not lost on us.

Those numbers have gone up every single year since we started talking about it on the show, which has been multiple years now.

And I saw the CEO, one of the Buy Now, Pay later services talking about this recently, and he was so defensive.

But what struck me was he was so young.

He was of the age demographic that hasn't experienced interest rate volatility.

And he was asked if his fees were usurious, punitive to people and takes advantage of them.

And he was vehemently against the idea that they were.

And I'm sitting here thinking, okay, well, one fee, maybe.

What about three?

What about four?

What about five months of late payments?

When does it become punitive?

At some point they got to know that you're not going to be able to recoup on any of this.

Yeah.

You know, which makes it even that much more predatory.

Yeah.

It's questionable.

I'm not a fan of Buy Now, Pay later services, and I've heard the pitch that, oh, you know, Chris, if you manage the cash flow, this net.

Yeah, that's great.

And if I invested in Bitcoin when it first started, I'd made a lot of money, but I can't go back and change that.

And I don't think that's a sound investment strategy for most Americans.

You know, if you have the excess money and you're willing to lose it.

Great.

Well, if you have the excess money and you're willing to lose it on Buy Now, Pay later, go for it.

Yeah.

So it's not lost on us.

And I think there should be small goals set aside if you can pay down the high interest debt first and then slowly start building towards an emergency fund.

Everyone's heard the rule of thumb, like six months at least, of expenses.

And that might seem like Mount Everest, and that might be very daunting for a lot of people.

Right.

You don't look at it like that.

You look at it, okay, can I save enough to where it equals the same amount as one paycheck, and then you start building it from there slowly, slowly over time.

Right.

Somebody once asked Me, if, if a home equity line of credit was tantamount to having a reserve.

And I thought my original knee jerk reaction was no, that's my knee jerk reaction.

But then I thought about it, I was like, well, do you have investments?

And he goes, yeah, I've got stock, I've got this, I've got that.

He goes, well, why would I sell my stock which is earning me money to pay down an expense which I have the discipline to pay down over time.

So what I'll do is over the next couple months, if this unexpected expense comes up and it's significant enough to tap through my reserve, I'll use my home equity line of credit and then when I'm done paying for it, I'll have a payment that's principal plus interest.

And I'll pay the principal and interest with the money that I otherwise would invest every single month.

Yeah, I know, in theory, right.

Over time, because that should be making you more money as far as return, I mean that's just arbitrage.

But that's also somebody who's probably got more financial discipline and home owns a home.

Yeah, right.

Most Americans, something that they could tap into.

Right?

Lesson number four, lifestyle Inflation is silent, but it is dangerous.

Raises didn't always lead to progress.

Unfortunately, wages didn't grow as fast as inflation.

Employees essentially, look, took a pay cut and accepted a lower standard of living.

The fastest way to move up at any company is to change companies.

I know, and this has changed a great deal over the last 10 to 15 years.

When you compare to like historically what it was, it was almost you were idolized for staying at a company for 10 years.

You'd be gifted a watch.

Oh yeah, right.

I just left the company I was at for nearly 20 years and I heard people during my tenure there criticize me, saying, well, you probably can't get a job somewhere else because you otherwise you would have left and went up and got made more money.

And that was to me was such a eye opening comment.

It was like, okay, wait, wait, if you're talented, you're expected to leave quickly.

Like where did that come from?

And then you start talking to recruiters and HR professionals and they say, well, we like somebody who's been around the block a couple times because they've seen other companies had exposure to other cultures.

There's less likely to leave because they're going to quote, appreciate what we have, or they're not going to see the grassy girl was green on the other side.

They're going to see that you know, there's other issues there.

You know, I look at the employment zeitgeist right now and maybe we should have seen it as humanity where corporations are this unemotional business that panels of people make decisions for.

The board of directors are in charge of strategy.

The management team is in charge of execution.

That's a soulless process.

They're going to do what's in the best interest of the company.

And very, very, very rarely does somebody go, well, how is this going to make our employees feel?

Mm, very, very rarely.

Yeah.

And because of that you get people going like, you know what guys?

Especially if it's publicly traded.

Yeah, I don't care.

You guys are coming back to work.

No.

Well, they have a fiduciary.

They're.

What they're going to rest on is we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders.

So we have to keep our shareholders happy.

Right.

Well, and then the natural question is, well, why do you care so much for the shareholders?

Bill, your board of directors is also personally liable.

They can be sued personally.

Now they have insurance.

They have insurance to cover them.

And there's indemnity and you know, and all that other fun stuff, but from the company.

But you have personal liability.

If you've ever been in a lawsuit where you're held personally liable or someone's trying to sue you personally, you know that that's a very painful process and very nerve wracking.

So the board is thinking about themselves in some capacity when they're like, hey, I am going to do the right thing for this company, whether it's human or not, because my job is do the right thing for this company and the shareholders.

So there's pressure on them.

The management team generally doesn't have the same personal liability.

But generally speaking, your CEO is also on the board.

Yeah.

And most cases the chairman of the board as well.

So there's lots of reasons why, why those things happen.

And the pressures that are there are going to continue to be pressures.

Right.

So.

And for a lot of people, they actually did make more money in 2025.

But unfortunately, because.

And inflation was what it was.

Right.

You have, that's what, that's what we meant by, you know, the inflation lifestyle quietly showed up.

You had bigger payments towards things like that carried interest rate, more subscriptions.

We're seeing more like in order just to live a standard living now, how many subscriptions do you think the average person probably has?

Yeah, people often overlook this.

We moved a while ago.

A few companies figured out that subscription models paid More over time to them.

But more importantly, it paid regularly.

Mm.

They could say, we have X amount of subscribers and they pay every single month this month.

That allowed them to better forecast and predict their profits.

And they weren't based on consumption.

Think about it this way.

If you, the listener, have a $20 a month subscription that you're paying every single month because you use it occasionally, you're gonna pay that 20 bucks every single month.

You're not gonna think about just drafts out of your accounts.

If you have to pay for it whenever you want to use it.

But you only pay two or three bucks.

Right.

Some months you might pay 40, but a lot of months you might not pay at all.

Well, that's very irregular revenue for these companies.

So these companies are like, okay, we're going to adopt this model where we get consistent revenue and then we're going to focus on subscriber growth and only subscriber growth.

Yeah.

And they know your.

Your consumer behavior.

Right.

That now is a baseline of necessity for you.

You're going to treat that as a necessity and you're going to be more reluctant to cancel that subscription.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I canceled my cable, Cox cable subscription.

I think at the time I was paying up to almost 300 for cable, Internet and the whole thing.

I got Google Fiber for 70 bucks.

I got, you know, subscription services.

I'm almost up to 200 again with all my subscriptions.

And we officially cancel YouTube TV because we're like, dude, we don't even use this.

Really?

I use it every day.

Really?

I use it for CNBC in the studio.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But we don't.

I mean, at the house.

No.

Nobody watches tv.

Only the only person that watched TV was me.

And it was like live sporting events.

There's no time for that either.

Right.

So it's like we just canceled it.

And my kids are on either Netflix or, you know, some kid friendly, like, YouTube channel that we approve that they have to sit down and watch with us or a movie that they like.

Otherwise they're not on the screens they're playing.

They're doing something else.

Right?

So they're completely off all that.

And it's like there's.

There's no point in keeping it around anymore.

Is this the way that.

So then I think the traditional media dies at some point in time.

Right.

It's all going to move to on demand product.

Right?

Dude, we literally sat down and we were watching.

When we still had YouTube TV, we were watching.

The kids started getting into like Our family TV time was like game shows.

So they're really getting into game shows.

Like Wheel of Fortune, things like that.

Right.

What was the other one?

The.

The pyramid.

$100,000 pyramid or something like that.

Anyways, they were getting into that, and it was on the Game show Network, and they blown away by the idea of having to watch commercials.

Like, what is this?

The.

What do you mean, what.

This is what I had to deal with.

But you watch it on YouTube all the time.

YouTube is a minute commercial, and then you could, like, Skip after like, five, 10 seconds.

Yeah.

Television.

You're talking about 10 minutes commercials in aggregate, right?

In aggregate.

For one.

For one show.

And they're like, well, I don't want it.

They're literally wanting to pull their hair out.

Like, this is not worth it for me.

Like, I kind of get it.

Like, you're right.

It's not worth it anymore.

So anyways, lesson number five.

Home ownership is a strategy, not a status symbol.

We covered this on the Last episode.

Episode 314.

Right.

I don't know that it's an effective strategy anymore.

And I never thought that I would say that, but I'm not saying in perpetuity, but certainly right now it's going to be a buyer's market in 2026, I think, and I think that we're going to see some leveling off of home prices.

Is there something that's going to cause a crash on the horizon?

Not that I can see right now, but, I mean, we're also not through 2025 yet.

But I do think there are other products in the market that are going to return much more.

Mm.

And that's unfortunate because the American dream is evolving in a way that we don't really see how that benefits everybody yet.

And we're in this gray area.

So the uncertainty that people feel about wanting to buy a home and feeling left behind is real.

And I get it.

Yeah.

But.

But Bitcoin, the qqq.

There are places you can put your money that are going to return better than inflationary benefits for you.

And I think that's probably the best bet you can get right now.

So you figure out more about how to increase your cash flow.

Yeah, I think for Mo.

For.

I want to say for most people, yes, it's like an added benefit that they get the equity appreciation over time.

Owning a home for some people is more so also about, like, the lifestyle.

Right.

And.

It.

In this past year, I think there was an.

The beginning of an honest conversation.

We talked about on the Last episode for you, it was a clear cut decision.

It was now officially cheaper for me to buy than it was than it is to rent.

That's when ultimately you decided that's no longer even a possibility to consider anymore.

But buying a home isn't automatically winning and renting isn't automatically failing anymore.

Right.

The stigma attached to it needs to go away.

Absolutely, it needs to go away.

And you could honestly, you, if taking the right investment advice and the right investment strategy, you might be able to come out on top, you know, way, way better than if you were to have to be strapped in and locked into a home and ultimately feeling trapped like most people right now are.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a fair statement.

Yeah.

All right, Lesson number six, long term investing still beats short term noise.

I think that will always be the case, even for stuff like the QQQ and Bitcoin that we talked about in the last episode.

That was really a long term strategy.

And then when I say long term, I'll give you a good proxy for this.

So you think about, do the mental gymnastics here.

If I'm talking about in lieu of buying a home, that means you need to hold these investments for at least the length of time you would have held a home.

So in the historical context, it's five to seven years in my mind.

So if you're not investing with at least that time horizon as the useful shelf life of that investment, I would say you're probably cutting yourself short of where you could be.

And also you should expect to experience volatility in that time the same way your home would.

So you'll look at your home's value on Zillow and you'll see home values went up or down.

But it doesn't mean anything to you to sell it.

If you're investing the QQQ or you're investing in Bitcoin, even though they're much more liquid and you just sell them in the markets immediately, that doesn't mean that you should, you should treat them as a liquid investments in your mind until you have a better strategy to deploy that money into something else.

And keep in mind you also have taxes.

The problem for most Americans with this strategy is they don't get the tax deferred benefit as you would get on a home where you got a 1031 tax deferred exchange benefit.

If you sold it, you can go into another home, you wouldn't pay capital gains taxes.

Yeah.

So there is something to think about there.

And that's why some of these strategies.

For A married couple things like 500 grand, right?

I don't even know.

I don't.

I don't have a plot so like you.

So I have much less capital at work.

I don't even know.

It's the appreciation, right?

Yeah, the appreciation of capital gains for.

The capital gains on.

On selling your home.

Like two things.

250 per.

Per person.

So if married is 500, why would.

You know that saying?

Because I saw.

I've already sold my home on my home in Riverside.

Damn ball so hard side 500,000 cerebellum.

So here we go.

Let's read this here.

Married couples have specific capital gain tax rules that include a larger home sale exclusion of up to 500000 on a primary residence in combined income brackets for other assets.

Home sale exclusion.

Married couples finally jolly may exclude up to 500000 of the capital gain from the sale of their main home, provided they meet certain criteria.

Yeah, but that's not.

You could exclude all of that if you 1031 into a property you live in, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So what say it is saying is if you wanted to pay the capital gains, take the money out, that's what you would pay.

Most Americans will 1031 exchange into another property so that when they sell their property goes in, the equity goes into the new property and never actually physically touch it.

So therefore you don't pay any capital gains on it because you do not gain on it.

Right, and yeah, exactly.

Because there's, there's such thing as obviously we can get into.

That's a whole nother conversation for another episode.

What, what part of it is short term capital gains versus long term capital gains and the difference between the two and tax rates.

Yeah, tax rates.

And you know we can get into that.

Tax rules are going to change dynamically in 2026 too.

That's a whole different conversation that this administration is.

Has been really wonky around some of the tax laws, not all of which I fully understand and appreciate.

So that's probably going to be a future episode.

I've had time to sit down and really read it right.

You know, but the market rewarded patience this past year.

No panic.

There was a lot of volatility throughout the year.

There was fear, there were headlines screaming for attention.

But once again long term investors who stayed disciplined were rewarded.

Like I for this episode I just tapped into my 401k benefits and so far year to date it's up 16%.

You know and like yeah, that's with all the headline risks, all the Volatility, Volatility that's out there.

Not saying it's going to remain that way always.

Like there are going to be years where it corrects and it goes down.

But it still proves that you don't want to panic when you start reading some of these headlines and pull out because you could be missing out on some of the biggest gains.

Yeah.

But I would also say that fear and volatility are kind of a natural, I guess, warning sign of recessions.

And that again, people keep.

Every time I say, hey, oh recession or worry about recession, people go, oh great financial crisis.

And I go, no, let's not forget the pandemic was technically a recession.

Okay?

We lived through that.

Everybody, nobody died because of the recession.

They died because of the pandemic.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

And it could rebound quickly.

It could rebound quickly.

But they're not, they're all very different.

They're, they're we, we tend to look at.

Like when you talk about earthquakes, people think about the last earthquake they live through.

Right.

Think about tornadoes and hurricanes.

Same thing.

The last one, they lived through the last one that was close to them in proximity.

They'll always remember that one.

And recessions have different size, scope, magnitude.

They can be very, very unique.

So I think for people to, to get like all worked up and like the economy pundits are like, ha, ha ha, no, let me see your model.

And it's like, okay, I don't care about the models.

I had this conversation with Logan from Housingwire not too long ago.

I commented on what was post.

He didn't respond.

I wouldn't respond to me, I'm a terrible human.

But he was talking about how like all these housing doomers, you know, never have models and that they're not economists.

And that's probably true.

But there's something to be said for the fact that if a housing doomer or somebody who's very dark and gloomy on the economy is out there saying stuff on social media, they're doing it because people respond to it.

Other people like you who are pundits who hate it, or the entire group of people who are in the segment of.

I agree with this person because I feel that way.

And there has been a polarization of data as much as there's been a polarization of anything else in the political zeitgeist where you're seeing this divide because people want clicks, I hope that goes away.

But I think that fear and volatility in the market are going to be pretty common until such time as people get used to the volatility and are less afraid and the volatility remains.

Yeah, that's where that winds up.

And the last lesson that I have here before we get into maybe some of the headlines that we saw throughout the year or things that we remember was financial literacy is a requirement, not a luxury.

Obviously something that is very passionate to us here on the show.

Not.

Not enough is taught or talked about in schools or at home in a.

As a, Like a safe place environment.

Right.

This is safe place.

This is safe.

Yes.

You're welcome.

Hold my hands further.

Put your little nub.

No, we can't start any fires with these fuzzy knuckles uppies.

No, I'm not doing this with you.

Come on.

Not understanding interest rates or debt or what was likely to come after things like Fed speed or the jobs report, or understanding the basic meanings to things like the Treasuries cost people real money.

Jill, you see these not holding my hand.

The people who.

Who did weren't lucky.

They were well informed.

Having knowledge of these things didn't make life perfect, but it made making decisions much clearer.

Right.

Like, this is all, I think a lot of this current cycle that we're in.

Granted, I haven't been plugged in the way I am now in previous cycles, but this feels different than what people have experienced before.

You don't need to be plugged in historically.

All you got to do is go, okay, what does the data say?

And why didn't it do this before?

Right, Exactly.

What's a simple question that nobody ever wants to address?

Why.

Why are things so different now?

Because we are different now.

We.

Exactly.

And why are so many people trying to control the narrative?

Right.

Why are you trying to control my level of optimism versus pessimism?

Here's the problem.

It has always been that way.

We have just been ignorant to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because when it was the traditional media.

And I want to.

I want to talk a little bit about.

And I'm going to take a little sidebar here about why we started this show.

I think this is the right time to do it.

Do it, but I'll get there in a second.

But the traditional media had always had an interest in the narrative.

On my.

And you know this on the wall of my house, I have the New York Times from October 30, 1929.

The Great Depression was October 29, 1929.

Why I have the October 30 is it's a constant reminder that the next day all the headlines were positive about how everything had Changed and it's the original copy.

It's encased in this like glass, you know, thing.

It's really nice.

Airtight.

Yeah, airtight.

Airtight tiger.

Oh yeah.

Awesome powers.

It's a constant reminder to me that the worst economic times can be followed by unbelievable positivity.

Whether it's real positivity or intentionally designed to change the narrative positivity, that remains to be seen.

But I think social media has exposed the intention behind those positivity swings.

Yeah, that was the reason for the show.

That was the reason.

And I'm going to give everybody an example.

They can, they can just, you know, imagine in their head you turn the television on, you see Jim Cramer at the end of the market close every day on cnbc.

If you don't know who Jim Cramer is, God bless your little heart.

Older gentleman, he does like this rapid fire show, sleeves rolled up.

To the moon, baby.

To the moon.

He's notorious for making the worst possible calls and there's an entire reverse Kramer fund which does pretty well betting against his bets in the market.

But Jim is not indicative of the average investor anymore.

He may have been at some time and he was what the average investor wanted.

He has an entire people who subscribe to his, you know, his groups, his clubs, whatever the hell it is.

And they call into his show.

First time caller, long time listener.

There he is.

Look at.

I'm not, I don't have a problem with Jim.

Jim, Jim's a stud and he's a legend by all outward measures, but he is often wrong.

But that is a man who identifies with an aging demographic.

This is not the value add and he's not there to teach you financial literacy.

He's there to give you his opinion on whether to invest or not.

And when we built the show we wanted a place where a younger, more sophisticated, more tapped in technologically generation could come to and talk.

And it's not supposed to feel like we're preaching to you, right?

It's not supposed to feel like Dave Ramsey's, you know, beating you down side.

Why are you spending so much money?

Yeah, I like, I love, you know.

Was it Hammer?

Caleb Hammer from, from Financial Audit.

That's entertaining, but I also find it offensive.

I don't think a lot of people need to be yelled at.

And don't get me wrong, I get he's doing what he's doing and he actually has a very caring component.

If you watch the show and it's not a knock on him at all.

I think what he's doing is brilliant media work.

That being said, we wanted to approach this from a very cerebral, thoughtful process to teach people financial literacy when it felt like listening to friends talk.

And I often find myself and you and I do this a lot and rail.

You get some of these messages too, where I'm hyper focused on the data points of our show.

My personal channel, which I haven't posted to on Instagram, sorry, on YouTube in a long time, still gets 4x the amount of views than our channel.

On our YouTube channel.

On this doesn't.

This doesn't count for all the other platforms we downloaded.

Spotify's wrapped for the show and we were in the top 96 percentile.

Top 97 percentile, top 94, 99, 99 percentile.

Another one.

In a lot of things, our growth was 765% year over year in some.

In some categories, 367% in other categories.

This is amazing growth.

And it speaks to the show really resonating with a tight niche that wants to be treated like adults.

Yeah.

And it's.

It speaks to the listeners that believe in us and think that this is, you know, a show that worth listening to, that should be shared with other listeners.

I mean, I think the 99 percentile one was.

We were like one of the.

In the top 1% of shared shows.

Yeah.

Which is really crazy when you think about it because we don't say anything extreme, but we're.

This is only on Spotify, just for the record.

So if you added all of our metrics and it's even.

It's even more than that.

Yeah.

But what's really interesting to me and fascinating is our retention rates.

This show.

Normally in the podcast space, if someone listens to about 60, 65% of your show, you're doing well.

Our retention is notoriously over 85% and oftentimes over 90%.

Anything over 60%, I think, is considered good.

Yeah.

I think it's because people identify with us as friends.

I still get DMs to this day from.

And I try to respond to everybody and some.

Some weeks I'm better, some weeks I'm worse.

But from people who talk to me like a friend.

Yeah.

And I'll never forget, I was outside of my house one day, I'm walking into the garage, something.

Hey, man, are you Chris?

I was like, yeah, what's up?

He's like, bro, I listen to podcasts.

And I was like, no way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why would you do that?

That's weird.

Silly boy, right?

But yeah, it happens.

I'VE been spotted at the gym.

And if they don't think that I'm Adam Schaefer, they think that I'm.

I'm the guy who has the podcast.

Yeah, it's.

It's a really strange dynamic.

It speaks to.

I hope that people feel like we're their friends and we're trying to be helpful and that we're being genuine.

Yeah.

Because I do think the media world is changing, and I think that shows like this, particularly those that can be done live, are going to be with the future.

Nobody cares about your scripted bullshit anymore.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, first of all, they shouldn't.

Right.

And they should really do.

I. I feel like what really separates us from.

From a lot of people.

Right.

You're right.

It's like, it's like being a fly on the wall listening to two friends talk.

But also, at least one of us carries the credentials to really be able to, like, speak about this.

Julie.

Talk about you.

Yeah, you.

YouTube University.

YouTube University in the house, baby.

I've learned more on YouTube.

I want to talk about chat GPT for a little bit, too.

Yes.

The new image, the new image modeling, that's that they got going on.

Dude, I think they're starting to panic over Google, bro.

They should.

Nana Banana is phenomenal.

Yeah, you.

You can't even.

You can't even distinguish between that and real life anymore.

This is the problem.

Like, I've given up.

Like, I've seen these videos of crocodiles attacking, attacking people.

I've seen polar bears getting on boats with people.

I mean, I've seen some stuff that looks so hyper real.

I'm like, it's just.

It's just all AI now.

Yeah, it's all AI.

I literally saw.

This is terrible because I know I was going to get us banned from advertising this.

I saw a picture of Trump the other day with, like, super white raccoon, like, eyes, and his tan was, like, more pronounced than before.

And I thought it was AI.

It wasn't.

It was.

It wasn't AI.

And I was like, oh, my bad.

Like, I didn't know.

Right, right.

But it was on cnbc and I'm like, this is AI.

This is AI.

Right, That's.

That's too.

I hope they're fact checking.

Yeah, but fascinating thing.

So a buddy of mine that I went to elementary school with found me anecdotally and he.

And he has such a vivid memory.

He remembered everything from our childhood.

He's been listening to the show and he wanted to correct me on a few things.

On AI and I'm going to read it.

I haven't had the chance to read it because I've been so.

I love that.

I love.

If we're wrong about something, hit us up, let us know.

And we have no, at least me.

I definitely don't have it.

He's in it and this is kind of his subject matter expertise.

He's going to correct me on some things, but what I thought I'd share was really fascinating.

So for the live show that we're getting ready to do, I'm going down the rabbit hole of some things that are not on YouTube.

I spent a lot of time preparing for this podcast on YouTube and reading where I can.

And ChatGPT helped a lot, especially with the design of the studio.

But now I'm in this realm where I'm trying to connect an ATEM Extreme ISO, which is, you know, kind of a mid tier production switcher, mechanical switcher with the Rode Rodecaster audio interface all connected to a stream deck, working with OBS broadcast software to broadcast both in vertical and horizontal formats to multiple platforms.

This is a full production studio at this point.

While doing this, creating intros, outros, adding different sources, the ability to use effectively teleprompters and stuff like that.

And if it all goes well, it's going to look like it was very easy.

But this is not like you download a stream package for the Internet for Twitch and you just upload it to Twitch and follow the rules.

You got to query how to do this stuff.

And this is not stuff that you find on YouTube or the Internet very readily available.

Right.

You have to piece it together.

I have been stunned.

It's not a huge demand to learn all this, right?

Stunned at how wrong ChatGPT has been, how frequently.

And no, you would almost hope that it'd be like, I don't know if I know enough about this to.

It's been.

There's been three or four times where I have.

I have literally called it out and it says, you're right to call, you're right to question that.

I was wrong when I said X.

And you're like, wait, what?

It had me going on the rabbit hole.

I'm using ndi, which is a way to video broadcast over, over a wireless signal to like other devices, right?

So I can sit in this room, use the iPad and circle things while not connected to the physical computer because computer's broadcasting a video signal.

Yeah, yeah.

Over this NDI frequency.

But it was causing this lag.

So I was like, hey, like you Know CHAT GPT like, you know, blah, blah, blah, what's going on here?

And it led me down this rabbit hole for literally three hours when I finally got to the like the light bulb went on in my dumb ass head where I'm like, you don't know what you're talking about.

ChatGPT.

Yeah, I'm calling shenanigans.

I did.

You know what it said?

You're right.

Oh my gosh.

But it's, it's really interesting when you think about it.

If ChatGPT is only correct because it's a better.

It's better at searching the Internet than Google was crawling the Internet then is it really reasoning if it's just feeding me what it's finding from multiple sources in one source.

Is that really a reasoning model?

Yeah, because it's been wrong.

I'm telling you, the last two weeks I've been spending a lot of time late at night and early in the mornings working on video, stuff like that and this very, very narrow niche and it has been wrong literally more times than it's been.

Right, right.

And this is.

You got some review.

Oh, I thought you were getting ready to say something.

Sorry, let him talk to you like that.

Yeah, no, I mean I'm gonna talk to you.

I'm giving my man the floor in case you want.

I thought I heard him getting ready.

To say what's your flowers with Jill?

Give him his flowers, bro.

You look tired.

You're good.

No, he's, he's good.

I'm good.

I got first form.

Oh, shout out.

Yeah, that's another thing happened in 2025.

We got cases and he sent us cases of beverages.

And he sent us cases of beverages.

Thank you, Andy.

Again.

But yeah, I had like five today.

It's not good.

But I mean to your point, like look, and this is the fear, right?

This is the fear that a lot of people have, a lot of investors have in the space is okay so far.

It's, it's, it's a really good assistant right now.

Right.

And really good place to.

As a launching pad.

Right.

But is it going to get to where it needs to get to before we have a correction, correction here.

Correction on the statement.

ChatGPT is not there yet.

Yes.

From a reasoning general AGI model.

But I think it's.

Isn't it the most used source for.

Some things for, for querying.

I think ChatGPT is a great Google replacement.

Right.

If you're Google, you got to be worried.

You gotta be going like Shizen.

Yeah, but, but they had the.

Google's had the benefit of letting them kind of lead the way, explore, and they're.

They're getting to work on the back end.

But now you got Nano Banana, right?

Such a wild name.

Wow.

I love it.

Yeah, I'm for it.

Yeah.

That, to me, honestly, like, that's a stripper.

Name one of those.

Now coming to the floor.

Nano Banana, everybody.

I was driving on the way over here, and I was literally, literally thinking to myself, I wanted to just catch you off guard, but I know you.

I know you so well.

If I try something new and you, like, I didn't, like, give you, like, time to prep for it, I would.

Just stop and look at you.

You just look at me and be like, that was the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

So I was like, I'm not gonna look stupid, but I was gonna be like, welcome back to the number one financial literate.

Yeah.

No.

Or what was his name?

The guy that.

Yeah, the guy that introduces the fighters at ufc.

Oh, Michael Buffer.

Yeah, Michael.

Michael Buffer.

And I was like, you're just going to look at me like I'm stupid, so I'm just not even going to do.

Let's get ready to financial.

Yeah, I was going to go.

I was going to go the full thing.

Really?

That's really lame.

Don't do that.

I mean, I know it is.

I know.

That's the point.

I'm willing to make fun of myself.

We're supposed to be friends, talking, people overhearing, not like two jackasses in the corner.

Everybody's pointing at, like, look at these two nerds.

It's, by the way, the four of us here, between you, me, Regiel and Matt.

Yeah.

This is the nerdiest room has ever done so hard.

And, like, nerd financials is unbelievable.

So back to my point.

Nano Banana, the stripper.

So that is a really good model.

Like, that model is working exceptionally well.

You get really good product from it.

And you've now deviated from that period of time where you're like, oh, it's AI generated.

Look, he's got seven fingers.

You know?

And now you're like, okay, wait a minute.

That's pretty convincing.

And now you got video models.

You got all sorts.

I mean, Sora has been spectacular.

Although I would say that they should have really ramped out.

They were popular for a brief minute, and they kind of backed off.

But you've got delivery of some of the benefits of AI already.

Like when you call a call center.

And I've seen This technology in place I've talked about on the show you call a call center, AI is already aggregating all of your debits and credits on your accounts and going, okay, how can, how much money can we save this person a month based on the payments they're making to X, Y and Z?

So when they're selling you.

Now imagine being in a teller line as a teller.

You and I, both former Wells Fargo tellers.

Shout out to Wells Fargo.

Yeah, Shout out.

WF in the house, homie.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Charles Schwarf.

What's up?

I got that.

I know, the secret handshake.

Yeah.

It's pay me, pay me what you owe me.

It's sell at all costs.

Too soon.

They're out of.

They're out of the regulatory hurdles.

Okay, so when somebody come to the seller line, you were trying to sell a product back then, and opening accounts is making accounts more sticky was part of how you had client retention at a bank.

Right.

Like, the more ingratiated you are into any ecosystem, whether it's a bank or it's Apple, a cable network or Apple, the less likely you are to leave the stickiness of your relationship.

Right?

Like, if you have, you're not going to change your entire ecosystem.

If you have a computer, you have a watch, you have, you have a phone, you have headphones, you got everything, right?

You got the cloud.

That's it, you're locked in, you're done.

Apple isn't concerned with keeping you as a client customer.

They're worried about increasing your spend on an annual basis.

Right.

So that, that's what they're.

They're looking to do.

Right.

And then a bank, I remember the pitch for Wells Fargo at the time.

Make sure they get the debit card, make sure they get the checking and the savings.

You got to also get them in on day one online banking.

And it was like all these things was like, now they're not going to switch banks if they've already took all this time to set this up.

It's very rare.

People switch banks and it's a headache.

Nobody wants to do it.

And I've done it before, and it's like, it's painful.

Yeah, yeah.

So that being said, when people came to you back in the days as a teller at the line, you were selling them on the generalized benefits of these products.

Hey, you should get a home equity line of credit.

You got equity in your house, you can probably use it.

Use this.

Right?

What if you knew exactly how it would benefit them financially?

When they came to your line, you see that on your screen now that is deployed technology.

Yeah, Real time at Wells Fargo, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that you can go to a teller line, they're going to be like, hey, Saeed, you can save 200amonth by doing this.

And that's not speculation, bro.

That's me telling you I'm looking at your spending.

This will save you money.

And that's how technical they can be based on tertiary circumstantial information that you as a human could never process.

And that's already out there.

And that's where once you've committed to the data and you start building the model, that's where you really see AI get better.

And I don't know what chat GPT's end game is like, and maybe I probably should, but, but they, they have not improved the AGI portion, the reasoning portion of the model, at least from my perspective, because there's some very illogical reasoning coming out of the model.

I'm basically trying to tell you that I'm smarter than Chat GPT.

Yeah, no, you definitely are.

I'm Chat cpt, homie.

Chat.

Oh, why, what's the cbt?

Compton.

Damn.

Baited you hard.

Compton Dominguez.

Oh, I didn't expect that.

That was good.

Look, and even if there was, even if there was like an asset bubble here with AI and there was an, an AI bubble that ultimately pops that, you know, it looks similar to the dot com crash.

I don't think it will even.

Okay, let's just say, but for just for the sake of the arm, even, even if it does.

Right, right.

It's going to rebound.

There's too much money that's gone into the data centers, into the infrastructure to let this thing fail.

Everybody's committed.

Everybody's committed.

Let's take this a different path.

Let's just say hypothetically that the AI infrastructure is not what increases the need for power.

We still need more power for more people.

And the way technology is going, even if you carve out the AI piece and the model piece and quantum computing, all of which are giant power sucks.

Right.

You just need more infrastructure for the world.

Right.

Used to have big cities, big gaps in between, another big city, big gap in between.

And now these suburbs are creeping into the cities and the cities are creeping into the suburbs to where you're not having a whole lot of space in between some of these cities anymore.

There are cities across America where you'll drive from one city to the next city.

You won't see any green pastures in between.

Yeah.

Right.

And Irvine and Tustin.

Tustin to Costa Mesa.

These are all fully developed urban Irvine.

To the Inland Empire.

Yeah, yeah.

So you start thinking about this in the context of like humanity just grows.

You're going to need more power, more infrastructure.

So the things that we're doing here are being, I guess, exposed for the need with AI and technology.

But as technology and the power back end of the workforce continues to grow, I mean, look, look at the studio Mac in there.

I mean, again, I've been doing this a lot lately.

Lately.

Right.

I got a full production suite in this office, in this office alone.

This tripped me out the other day.

I was counting it.

I'm like, wait a minute.

One screen, two screen TVs.

Three screen TVs.

Three monitors, six monitors plus the other one for the Google screen.

Right.

That doesn't include the iPad, the one on the wall for the thermostat.

And there's five cameras in this office that are not the cameras that I use to record on.

There's five more on top of that.

There's 10 cameras in total.

Right.

So.

Yeah.

That's insane.

It is insane.

In a.

This office that's highly secured.

Don't even think about it.

No, we got 24 hours security.

Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's indoors.

You can't get in.

Rajille's real second job is watching this place at night.

He sleeps on the walnut on the wall.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of technology here.

Yeah.

All power, all powered by that Mac.

Yeah.

Fighting Fijians.

The fighting Fiji is secured by.

Yeah.

Top Flight Security.

That's a good buying.

Fijian security sounds sick.

I'm in.

He was in the process of getting the security license.

Right.

I remember I have it.

Yeah, he already has it.

Look at that.

Ready?

We're gonna sponsor that 100 fighting Fijian securities.

I'm taking that name.

I'm taking that, taking that domain name right now.

We're doing movie voices now.

Yeah.

I mean, so yeah, to your point that, that little Mac is, is powering this entire studio.

Yeah.

Max silicone.

I mean, this is not technology.

And here's what's going to happen with quantum computing comes out.

I mean, all bets are off, bro.

We're going to have unbelievable technology at our fingertips.

Open up quantum dimensions.

I know.

And that part of it.

Get to meet Robert Downey Jr. That.

Part of it, I don't know, scares me.

It feels like it's Far away, but it's not that far away.

I mean, you got people like Bill Gates literally coming out and putting his name on statements of like, you know, 10 years.

I could see a two day work week.

That doesn't mean, like, you're going to be earning as much as you're making now right off.

Two days work.

That's not what that is.

He's like, no, you will be.

It is worth a lot less than.

You know.

And you're like, man, like, for him to come out and say something wild like that is crazy.

2036, inflation takes your wallet, you know?

And what's, What's.

What's sad is like, look, it's taken us thousands of years to get to this point, right?

To get to where we are today and to have the efficiency and the productivity that we have.

And you would think, man, as a.

As a human race, we could.

We could all bask in, you know, the benefits of all this and find a way to work less and make more.

But it's like, nope, that's it.

You heard it.

You heard it with Jill.

He's a socialist.

Get him, get him.

He's a socialist.

No, no, but you get what I mean, man.

I get what you mean, but the problem is, is that capitalism, I hate to say capitalism, because you have communism, which has the same problems.

I mean, look at China.

You've got billionaires there, dude.

When they say, oops, no, no.

But when they say, like, look, everybody had the same fear when the Internet came up.

And look.

And it ended up making more millionaires.

And listen, the goal is to replace tens of millions of jobs.

That's the goal.

And if they fulfill that promise, what are we talking about here, man?

For you to become an electrician?

Yeah, exactly.

Get a, you know, go to trade school.

You know, I don't have a problem.

I'm licensed general contractor.

I mean, I'll go.

I'll become a plumber.

I'm down.

You know, I. I have a lot of skills.

Rich.

Looking to account for this?

My.

My electrical.

You almost cut your finger off.

I did?

Almost.

Yeah.

I don't.

I don't know if you should be tooting your own horn right now.

No, my.

I am the world's worst contractor.

It's.

It's pretty bad.

If it wasn't for Rejeel, this place wouldn't be here.

That's right.

This is Rejeel's work.

Yeah.

Rejeel did all this.

I didn't pay him a dime for it either, which is really Good financial planning for people.

Listen to the show.

Here's what you do.

You take advantage of your friends.

Yeah.

Isn't this.

Isn't that what they teach life insurance agents?

Right?

They sell to your family.

Yes.

So first thing, what we're gonna do is go family members.

Your family and friends.

Then after that, then we'll welcome teriyaki.

Yeah.

You didn't get paid in teriyaki bowls.

We haven't been there in a while.

We should have.

Yeah, yeah, we should go.

Dude, he's never taken me to get teriyaki bowls.

That's because it's spicy.

Teriyaki bowls.

No.

What?

I eat spicy now.

We do.

We need to get Hawaiian rib eyes.

We gotta go do that.

Can we do like a holiday party for the.

I asked you last week.

Let's go to dinner and let's plan 2026.

You're like, oh, I'll get back to you, bro.

Did I really I sounded something I would say.

Did I say that to you?

I gotta check.

I got.

I gotta check with the boss.

Yeah.

That's the only thing I would say.

We can.

We can go have Hawaiian rib eyes and some karaoke.

There you go.

Karaoke is like, so seductive.

Yeah.

CBT now.

So I can just imagine, like, walking into Patrick, but David's like school of like insurance.

Do you have family members?

You know that's happened.

You know they're gonna die, right?

Yeah.

They need insurance.

They're gonna need life insurance.

That's what you're here for, buddy.

Don't you care about your nieces and nephews?

Don't you want them to have a less painful death?

That's actually.

Actually one probably one of the first episodes educational videos that I would like for us to make.

Right.

Is just an understanding.

A place where.

How to build a Ponzi scheme sponsored by the higher standards.

No, no, no, no, no.

Life insurance and go over, you know, whole life versus term and just some.

Some basic overall concepts.

Because I think.

I think that that's another one of those topics that people just put off because they're just too afraid to even consider.

It is daunting.

When I first did it, I was like, damn it.

And then I had a guy.

So I'll.

I'll full.

I'm not gonna lie to you.

I don't have it.

Really?

Yeah.

None.

It scares me.

I know I should.

I know that I should, but it scares me too.

So it's something that I myself need to dabble.

I think I'm worth more dead.

I got to be honest with you, like, I'm.

My wife's like, how much?

I'm like, yeah, don't kill me.

I mean.

I mean, you could guess.

You could.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I.

Being sarcastic here.

I've got half a million whole and half a million term and cost me about.

And I used to have another 250,000 with the corporate policy, but now that I'm no longer employed.

Employed by.

Yeah, my previous employer that doesn't exist anymore.

But I.

That's the knock right.

When you're pit.

When you're putting into it, when you're working for an employer like, okay, that.

That benefit goes away the second you're no longer there.

Yeah, well, they pay for that too.

So, I mean, it's like I was paying for it, But I mean, 1.25 million versus 1 million or whatever.

But yeah, whole interim, I have half.

It's about five grand a year.

Ish.

Combined that I pay once a year to I think General Insurance or something.

American General Insurance.

But I. I had the benefit, just to be clear, is when we started the bank, we actually had an intern insurance group internally.

And George, I remember them, sweetheart of a dude.

I sat down with George and he.

Really.

You don't remember George, do you?

You looked at me the I don't remember George face.

No, I thought it was James.

James, yeah.

Sorry, I was wrong.

No, no, George.

George.

Okay.

No, yeah, yeah, that's not good.

Yeah.

Anyway, so George and I sat down and he.

He went over.

George Romeo, he went over everything with me and broke it down and kind of like explained the benefits and.

And he cleared up a lot of questions.

And it was really cool to have somebody who works with us that you could just unilaterally trust.

I love that.

Yeah, yeah.

And I was like.

I got to the point where the conversation.

I'm like, you know what?

Here, stop right here.

Just give me whatever you think I need.

That's good.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that.

That's.

He goes, if I were you, I'd do this, this, and this.

And then I'm like, okay, well, I'm poor.

So let's back that up a little bit.

We're not there yet, chief.

Poverty line is right here.

Yeah, I'm there.

Exactly.

So, yeah, 20, 26, man.

We got a lot of fun things planned for the show.

What?

The show?

Yeah, this show.

And if it doesn't go, if I.

Was doing this, I was going to do like a Reading Rainbow like, montage.

Honestly, they're Reading Rainbow for the OG listeners they remember that.

Yeah.

Reading Rainbow it.

If this doesn't kick off in 2026, I. I blame all you guys.

And we're gonna have to point it.

At Brigill and I.

When you said that.

No, no, the cameras.

Cameras.

Okay, Cameras.

To be clear.

Yeah, yeah.

And point at this one.

I mean, you can.

It's not looking at me, but I'm excited, man.

The live shows, the educational content, we're gonna.

We're gonna go full throttle here and take this thing into the next gear.

It's not easy.

We need.

We're gonna really.

Look, We've never sold you guys anything on the show to profit off it, but the one thing we're gonna come out and ask everybody to do is to shoot.

Share the show.

You know, I mean, we're in the top 96 percentile.

99 percentile for that.

More.

More sharing, more.

I need all the shares.

You can't get to 100%.

I need the 100.

I need to be the number one.

Yeah.

Shared show.

Well, so here.

Here's.

Here's the mechanics behind the scenes that I think a lot of people don't understand.

We started the podcast out of the garage.

It was a very humbling experience, and it was really mind pump and a lot of what we've done, studio after studio and location for location, because the beginning wasn't a studio, it was a montage.

Homage to them, if you will.

Even behind us now with the.

The foam panels that are on the wall, that's a.

That's a little shout out to the guys at Mind Pump.

We've taken bits and pieces from them along the way, and it's been really a lot of their help.

And then there's people that have.

That have come and given us good piece of advice.

But the podcast was always to be, like, a helpful, like, tool.

And I think we figured out the audio streaming platforms.

I just think that it's not everybody's niche, but the video streaming platforms like YouTube exposed what we thought were some material weaknesses and some possible future bright spots.

Weakness number one is that we're not reactive enough.

And a lot of people tell us that they want to hear more from us, not less.

And we got a lot of kudos.

We were doing two shows a week, so the ability to be more reactive in real time, possibly with a live show on Mondays and Wednesdays from like 12 to call it 1, or 11 to 1, right before the market close, we can kind of go over the topics of the day, talk about what you saw, what you didn't see and possibly what's coming on the rest of the week would give people a live feed they can tap into and that'll be streamed live to five platforms all at once.

Right.

So X Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube.

And if you watch us on any of those platforms, you can see it.

Now that doesn't mean that the Apple Audio platform and the Spotify platforms won't be getting that streaming content, which will have a different intro, different outro, but very similar, but more news driven format.

Yep.

And the idea is to try to bridge the gap between a Jim Cramer as we saw earlier, and what we're doing here because this is educational, it's friendly, it's collegial, but we want to take that base and give them more.

We want to give them something more they can tap into if they want to.

The other part of that is the educational content.

Think 18 to 20 minutes, sorry, 8 to 20 minutes at most of just purely educational single topic derived content where site and I are going to speak directly to you like talking head video, but educate you on certain topics.

We're going to build up kind of a library of that.

All of which will be for free.

Right.

And it should be viewed as a resource that if you had a question about something, I want to hear what the guys over at the higher standard have to say about it versus maybe somebody else that you may not trust.

Right, yeah.

Or you could just forward it on to somebody else who says, hey, yeah, I want to know about insurance.

Well, here you go, here's a 13 minute clip on insurance.

Just watch these guys, I'll tell you everything they know.

And oh, by the way, there's all these episodes where they've talked about other parts of it.

Yeah, exactly.

So that was the intention and hope for 2026.

I will admit that the hard part for me on a human basis is going from a full time working executive in the banking space to launching another business in the banking realm that's doing quite well, to not being able to talk about the things that I'm doing publicly, to getting sued the way that I am in a couple different platforms and not being able to talk about it, not because I'm limited, but because I want to pay respect to the process.

And I think that it's, it's easier to, to tell people what you went through as opposed to what you're going through because I don't want pity from people.

Like, I know that I'm blessed and I'm lucky.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But at the same time, if you guys knew some of the stuff that was happening, I mean, $60 million lawsuits, stuff like.

I mean, stuff like that going on right now, that.

That's just.

You look at it and you go, okay, like, why?

And the.

The reasons and the logic, they're just not there.

But you can't stop people from doing what they want to do.

Right?

And that's fine.

And if they want to make false and baseless accusations are going to.

And you start doing all that, then you start.

Then you come into the studio and you want to be creative and build something right.

Where you kind of need, like this mental, like, frame of clarity.

Anybody that's ever done anything creative knows it's not easy to find your muse.

Well, I have you two.

I look, I look.

I look at your.

Both your faces, you and Rejeel's faces.

I look at your guys faces all day long.

Like, I'm not even saying this romantically.

Yeah.

I literally look at your faces all day long.

And the technology stack, I'm in this big build period where, like, there's no, like, dopamine hit.

And the one thing I will tell you, and I don't want to end the show on this, but I'm wildly grateful for, it's that a couple of shows back, I did a show talking about how, like, you know, it can be discouraging from time to time and all the things that happen and like, you know, we're going to change the show and people, like, people were afraid we're going to quit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The most, like, dopamine I've had lately, other than see my wife and my son and things that I do as a family, was not a paycheck.

It wasn't feeling successful.

I actually feel like a failure.

And there was that episode where I said that that really resonated people.

It's this, silly as it might sound, the.

The simple DMS I get from people saying, I listen.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, when a listener tells me she's pregnant and she listened to us during her last pregnancy, that's meaningful.

When Bob messages me saying, hey, bro, I heard you in the last show.

You mentioned me.

That's so cool.

Yeah, yeah.

When people are getting their spouses to bring their spouses in the room to hear that we shouted them out on the show, and then I'm hearing about it in DMS and they're telling us like, hey, I appreciated that.

And you start, like, looking back and you go, like, people that we used to work with, like, the Dave Mitsucci's of the world, who I know listen to the show like Yoshi, who listens to almost every single episode, God bless his sexy beard.

And you start thinking about all the people around us, and you start thinking about how many people whose lives we touch on a regular basis.

You just feel so blessed to be in other people's ear holes, you know?

I love being in other people's ear holes.

Inside them.

I know you do.

Resonating on a weekly basis.

That was good, man.

That was good.

And honestly for me too.

I don't get them as, as often and as frequent as you do, but seem disingenuous.

But.

No, no, I'm being serious.

But the people that do reach out and let and let me know and, and even, even the.

When people ask us to cover topics.

Right.

I, it's, it feels like a certain level of responsibility to make sure that, okay, make sure we do a good job, we perform at this.

You know, you don't talk about enough, I'm gonna cut you off.

You know, you don't talk about enough.

You've taken risks to do this.

I have.

You don't talk about it.

You don't talk about it enough.

Yeah, it's, I mean, maybe one day.

Is that what we're gonna get to?

Oh, we will definitely talk about it one day.

That's for sure.

I mean, I'm not gonna put you in the spot.

I'm just saying, like, I don't think.

People, I don't think people can appreciate that aspect of it, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'll use myself.

I'm also, I'm also.

I'm not saying one, One risk is greater than another, but, I mean, I'll say there's not a whole lot of flexibility on this side.

Can I use myself as an example?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please do.

I am privy to a board meeting that was had where I was referred to as a podcast star, and it was used to completely invalidate every bit of my otherwise professional capabilities, history, track record, and pedigree.

They didn't look at my education.

They didn't look at my experience.

They didn't look at my professional track record.

For 20 years, they dismissed me as a conflict of interest.

It was a quote, podcast star.

And the irony, the part that pisses me off to no end is just because they visibly saw me on something.

I can guarantee not a single person who sat in that room actually saw the show.

I can guarantee that not a single one of them actually appreciates the value that social media brought to their franchise in bringing more people to resonate with leadership, the human tactile touch.

And I can tell you straight up that not a single person in that room had ever actually had a conversation with me as a mature adult.

Yet my career was almost destroyed because a bunch of people in the room suggested that I was too busy doing this and not enough working.

And not a single person in those rooms ever once thought that I worked more hours than every one of them in that room.

And I will stand on that.

If anybody from any board that I was partaking on ever wants to have a conversation with me like a mature adult.

And I hope they get sent this and you want to check and go hour for hour on who put in more hours for 20 years, I can damn well tell you it was me.

And if you want to go look at time cards, which I'm sure you still have, where I clocked in and out of the parking structure, we can do this.

I slept at that office.

I work there.

And just because I'm physically capable of doing more work than you, because I'm willing to sacrifice things, you're not with your family to do something like this to help people and to be a good person, to give back.

The whole point of being successful in life is to provide value to others, opportunity to others.

I was demonized, written off as a podcast star and sent on my merry way, treated terribly along the way for it.

They looked at my my real estate business and said it must be a conflict.

How about the fact that I hadn't sold a home for anybody else other than employees who I gave the commissions back to every single damn time and paid taxes on it.

Actual and yet not a single person listen.

So for people listening to the show, I don't say this because I'm angry and emotionally charged.

I just that because I'm looking at sight and it makes me get aggressive.

But all your fault.

I say that because sacrifices to do this have been made.

And I think that it's sad that a lot of people have to keep their side hustles who listen to this quiet.

And it's not lost on me that people listen to the show go like I have a job.

I don't want to lose my job by making more money in the side.

And I will tell you, I don't care what that looks like.

I don't care what people say as long as it's not a conflict of interest or what you're actually physically doing.

If you're working for Pepsi, you Can't go work for Coke on the side, but if you're working for Pepsi, you can sell baseball cards on the side, dude.

Right, exactly.

You know, no one owns you.

Yeah.

And we've said this to.

To the listeners before.

Look, we've turned down potential conflicts.

Right.

Oh, we've turned down real money.

Yield street came to us, offered us lots of money to be a sponsor for the show.

And at the time, we had a wealth advisory firm, and I could not take that deal.

Right.

Can you believe that?

Yeah.

That's real money.

And look, that's okay.

That's.

We.

I mean, when we first started.

Look, in an ideal world, someday.

Yes.

I'm not saying that we don't want to make a profit off this.

That is obviously the.

It would be a nice added benefit.

What bothers me is not all that.

What bothers me is that people assume that your morals are as low as theirs.

Yes.

So they assume that you must have conflicts.

Here's the truth in all of it.

I disclosed twice a year, every year, for a decade.

For a decade.

On every single side.

Thing I was doing, I opened up my entire world to everybody and give everybody full disclosure.

I never hit anything.

It was on LinkedIn.

It was everywhere.

Because I wanted the world to see it.

You know?

And honestly, first of all, our spouses deserve a lot of credit.

Oh, God.

You know, we were recording at midnight.

Well, yeah, we were doing that for a long time.

We were.

We were getting into the studio.

This is back when we're doing two episodes a week.

Right.

Getting in at nine, leaving at midnight.

Or later.

Or later.

Sometimes we were drinking.

Yeah.

Just.

Just to be able to get through.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, it was tough, you know, and it was.

Let's look, I. I loved every part of it.

All of it.

All of it was growth.

Right.

And when other shows say this, I. I can.

I can say wholeheartedly that we mean it a whole hell of a lot more.

We literally do this show for the listeners.

Right?

We do for the listeners.

That's why we're here.

This show wouldn't be what it is without them.

If it wasn't for the listeners, I would not still be on social media 100%.

I would be off.

Yeah.

And thank you to all the listeners that have pushed this show to new heights.

Right.

This past year.

And I'm looking forward to what we're able to accomplish together in 2026.

I was only one.

One thing left to say originally.

Ready.

I'm ready.

Let's get ready to financial Good night, everybody.

Happy New Year.

Bye.