Latest / Founder Talk with Alex Sheridan / NEVER Invest Like This During Market Volatility (or You’re DONE): Straight from Investment Experts

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NEVER Invest Like This During Market Volatility (or You’re DONE): Straight from Investment Experts · Founder Talk with Alex Sheridan

• 0:00
  Now, do you think that's a good idea for business owners to be
• 0:02
  picking their own stocks and ETS and things like that, or so they
• 0:04
  just say, hey, index the S&P 500?
• 0:06
  There's a lot of people out there that should not be picking
• 0:08
  their own stocks. I think most and.
• 0:11
  That human beings are just hardwired to lose money because
• 0:13
  they're driven sort by fear and greed.
• 0:15
  Essentially, often times there's only about 10 days out of the
• 0:18
  three 300 trading days a year where the market makes up for
• 0:23
  that 20% return, where you get that 8% day.
• 0:26
  And if you're trying to time the market and you miss that 8%,
• 0:30
  your returns going to look a lot different than 20% at the end of
• 0:33
  the year. What would the top two or three
• 0:35
  things that an entrepreneur can do to make their profits, Make
• 0:39
  money in their sleep? To have their money work for
• 0:42
  them 24/7. Cash balance plans because the
• 0:44
  amount of money that you can put away tax free is really quite
• 0:48
  shocking depending on really set it.
• 0:50
  Up what's 1 of the worst investments you guys have made
• 0:52
  or one of the biggest mistakes you've made?
• 0:53
  An investment that you're like, oh man, that was just stupid.
• 0:56
  Oh, that's a great question. I had one.
• 1:01
  Bill and Matt Founders of Vista Mark, welcome to the Founder
• 1:03
  Talk podcast. Thank you.
• 1:05
  Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us.
• 1:06
  Excited for you guys to be here. So, you know, we were talking a
• 1:08
  little bit beforehand on a video call.
• 1:11
  Was it? Yes, No, earlier this week, I
• 1:13
  guess feels like yesterday. We kind of got you guys here
• 1:16
  quick, quicker than normal, but you found a Vista mark in
• 1:19
  September 2025 and then you've grown it to 0 to $300 million in
• 1:25
  assets under management AUM since then.
• 1:27
  So I think there's a, a pretty cool opportunity to talk about
• 1:30
  how you guys did that. That might be valuable to the
• 1:32
  entrepreneurs, business owners listening.
• 1:34
  And I also think just an opportunity to talk about your
• 1:37
  areas of expertise. And I'll, I'll leave the floor
• 1:40
  to you guys to describe how would you describe what your
• 1:42
  area of expertise is in a sentence or two?
• 1:46
  Yeah, sure. Well, just to kind of the, the
• 1:48
  taking the first part of that, you know, how did we, how did we
• 1:53
  go from essentially 0 to 310 million?
• 1:57
  No big deal, A. Few months, it was a bit
• 2:00
  challenging. I had the good fortune in my
• 2:04
  late 20s to become a partner in a kind of a, a small boutique
• 2:09
  investment advisory firm. And I had a great mentor and
• 2:12
  ended up kind of building that business from zero to 300
• 2:15
  million or 300 billion in assets.
• 2:17
  And then we, we did a transaction with Madison
• 2:20
  Dearborn Partners. And I was really the, the under
• 2:25
  the age of 50 at the time. And all my other larger
• 2:28
  shareholders were generally in their 60s and there was kind of
• 2:30
  a mismatch and from a timing perspective, but we had a two
• 2:33
  year non compete. So when I sold my interest to
• 2:37
  leave, I basically spent two years in purgatory kind of
• 2:40
  waiting for just finding my time, waiting to start.
• 2:44
  So I had a chance to be a chief investment officer in my late
• 2:47
  20s, early 30s and and just developed a lot of really,
• 2:50
  really good experience, good contacts.
• 2:53
  And I sort of knew that when the time came, it was actually July
• 2:56
  1st, not that I was keeping track that minute by minute of
• 2:59
  my launch for Vista Mark was going to be basically coincided
• 3:03
  exactly with the end of my non compete.
• 3:06
  The only reason it was September 5th is it took the state of
• 3:09
  Illinois a little longer than you would expect to to kind of
• 3:12
  get the registration done. So yeah, sometimes those things
• 3:18
  don't go exactly according to order.
• 3:20
  Now, did they know that you were leaving to go start your own
• 3:23
  business or is this? Well, they knew there.
• 3:25
  Here's the thing. When I left, I, I basically said
• 3:28
  I want to leave, let's figure something out.
• 3:30
  And then and they cut back the two year non compete to a one
• 3:33
  year in exchange for me providing them free investment
• 3:36
  consulting services. And so we kind of struck a deal
• 3:40
  there. And then they also allowed me to
• 3:42
  work. It technically might not have
• 3:44
  violated my non compete, but it was kind of in that iffy area.
• 3:47
  But they let me work for a bank up in Madison as chief
• 3:50
  investment officer, but it was kind of a different clientele,
• 3:53
  different enough. I was not allowed to have
• 3:56
  certain responsibilities like business development or anything
• 3:59
  like that. And so we kind of negotiated a,
• 4:02
  you know, a way for me to keep working.
• 4:04
  And the great, the great thing is I continue to work with that
• 4:06
  organ. You know that company as a
• 4:09
  essentially it's an outsourcer integrated chief investment
• 4:12
  officer even now that I started Vista Mark, so.
• 4:14
  What would you think? We're going to get into some of
• 4:16
  the investment and financial wealth building stuff here in a
• 4:18
  little bit here. I'm excited to dive into that
• 4:19
  stuff. I know it out on that, but what
• 4:21
  would you say to founders, entrepreneurs, business owners
• 4:23
  listening right now that want to have that type of explosive
• 4:27
  growth? And not that we're going to
• 4:28
  compare their journey to your journey, because everyone's
• 4:30
  journey is different. And you, you had decades of
• 4:32
  experience that probably LED you to be able to do that and you
• 4:34
  did too, Bill. So but what what would be maybe
• 4:36
  one thing that you'd say that led to that explosive growth
• 4:39
  that founders could learn from? Well, boy, it's there's a
• 4:42
  handful of things. Probably the biggest ones are,
• 4:45
  you know, you have that concern when you're finding, when you're
• 4:48
  starting a new business, it's, I call it the Field of Dreams
• 4:52
  concern. If I build it, will they come?
• 4:55
  And, and I think generally, if you've, if you've built good
• 4:59
  relationships with people, you've been somebody who's done
• 5:04
  what you've said and said what you're going to do and then do
• 5:07
  what you're going to say. And you've been kind to people,
• 5:10
  thoughtful to people, and you've been useful to people over time.
• 5:15
  You know, when you actually hang out that shingle, they will
• 5:18
  come. They will come and maybe it
• 5:20
  won't be as fast as you hope and maybe it'll take it a few extra
• 5:23
  weeks and a few extra phone calls.
• 5:25
  But I think it's first and foremost is having that
• 5:28
  confidence and belief in yourself and that willingness to
• 5:32
  take that risk and kind of jump without looking.
• 5:36
  I think that was probably for a lot of folks, myself included,
• 5:40
  that are that are starting a business.
• 5:42
  It's, it's, you know, and sometimes you have a golden
• 5:45
  handcuff in your old situation, so you don't have a bad
• 5:48
  situation and, you know, sometimes you need some sort of
• 5:52
  catalyst that kind of trigger you along.
• 5:54
  But I, I think it's to be real intentional with people.
• 5:58
  And, you know, obviously any businesses requires sales, you
• 6:02
  need to bring on clients. And so it's just maintaining
• 6:06
  those relationships and and kind of being very outbound and
• 6:09
  thoughtful about your, your communication with people.
• 6:12
  Would you add anything to that bill?
• 6:13
  Yeah, I mean, I would echo that same sentiment.
• 6:16
  Relationships are everything in this business.
• 6:18
  And you know, frankly, when it was time for me to decide
• 6:21
  whether I wanted to work for a big wire house or an RIA or
• 6:25
  start something on my own, you know, I wouldn't even have been
• 6:28
  in that situation had I not spent 10 years at some great
• 6:32
  other organizations building my network.
• 6:35
  Because these things take time. You know, if you're trying to
• 6:38
  bring in a $10 million relationship, that's a lot
• 6:40
  different than bringing in a $500,000 relationship.
• 6:44
  And so having that runway and having that great experience and
• 6:48
  training all along the way has really positioned me to join
• 6:52
  Vista Mark and hit the ground running with my own existing
• 6:56
  network, but also relying on Sean's network and Matt's
• 6:59
  network. Which?
• 7:01
  Which, you know, I was unaware of at the time, and that's
• 7:03
  created a lot more opportunities for us as well.
• 7:06
  Yeah, it's kind of funny how business fundamentals really
• 7:08
  don't change over time. It's like, do goods, you know,
• 7:11
  have good service, good products take care of your customers.
• 7:14
  You know, they'll refer other customers to you.
• 7:16
  They'll stay with you longer, you know, and even stuff like
• 7:19
  this, I think this, this was maybe a we weren't able to catch
• 7:22
  for this maybe 20 years ago, but now we can sit down, have these
• 7:25
  conversations that we would have had anyways, maybe in a coffee
• 7:27
  shop or in an office. And now we're able to put it out
• 7:29
  there in the public. But yeah, just taking care and
• 7:32
  doing right by people. And and that comes back to you
• 7:35
  tenfold. And even though the ways that we
• 7:37
  do it may change and the technology changes, certainly
• 7:39
  over time, I think a lot of the fundamentals remain the same.
• 7:42
  Build trust, credibility, offer good products and services,
• 7:45
  Build good relationships. As easy as there, as simple as
• 7:49
  it sounds, it's not always easy. Yeah.
• 7:51
  And there's been a ton of consolidation in our industry.
• 7:53
  So I think that's creating a lot, a lot of opportunities for
• 7:57
  us. So, you know, folks are getting
• 7:59
  gobbled up. Yeah.
• 8:01
  And whenever that happens, there's a change in investment
• 8:04
  process or a change in philosophy or a change in
• 8:07
  service model. Clients don't necessarily, you
• 8:11
  know, often times they select an advisor based on, you know,
• 8:15
  particular deliverable and then suddenly that deliverable
• 8:18
  changes the leadership, changes the and, and you know, I think
• 8:23
  getting back to that boutiquey vibe now, there's just a lot of
• 8:26
  these giants that are now gobbling up everyone getting
• 8:29
  back to wait. I actually have a a name and a
• 8:32
  face. I get to work with the owner of
• 8:34
  the business. I get to work the owners of the
• 8:37
  business. I get to work with the senior
• 8:38
  level people. I get to talk with the actual
• 8:41
  decision makers. That's a huge reason I think out
• 8:44
  of the gate, we've been so successful out of the gate, is
• 8:47
  that the ability to kind of cut through all the layers of
• 8:49
  bureaucracy and just, you know, deal with the, the, the decision
• 8:53
  makers and, and work. And that's a great thing about
• 8:55
  being a boutique. You know, you know, 5 or 10
• 8:57
  years from now are we going to I, you know that the challenge
• 9:00
  will be to try to maintain that boutique.
• 9:01
  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 9:03
  Would you guys say that you're in the wealth building business?
• 9:05
  To a degree, yeah. Yeah, very much.
• 9:07
  I'm going to share the stat with you.
• 9:09
  I did a little bit of research on this, but I said roughly 34%
• 9:13
  of small to medium sized business owners have no
• 9:16
  retirement savings plan at all for themselves.
• 9:20
  What are your thoughts on that? Well, we have retirement plan,
• 9:25
  we launched it like we just ran our first payroll and four O 1K
• 9:29
  deferrals all all went out. So we have that plan and we have
• 9:33
  a plan for our, you know, our employees as we bring them on,
• 9:37
  but you know, every single every single client that comes on
• 9:41
  board, you know, from a private wealth perspective, we have a
• 9:44
  plan for. So like that's Bill's
• 9:46
  responsibility in part. Sean and I are more the
• 9:48
  investment nerds, the guys that get up in the morning and eat,
• 9:52
  live and breathe the markets and and and, but.
• 9:55
  What are your what are your thoughts on on the 34%?
• 9:58
  That's unbelievable. I I, I my, my thoughts are that
• 10:01
  can't be true, that it's hard to believe that.
• 10:05
  Yeah, So when I was doing the research, it looked like that a
• 10:08
  lot of them are either just like holding it off until later,
• 10:11
  they're waiting for the some big sale their business later
• 10:14
  they're reinvesting a lot back in their business.
• 10:17
  I had a financial an owner of a financial firm, a pretty, pretty
• 10:22
  large 1 and was telling you guys last week and he said one of the
• 10:25
  biggest mistakes that founders make when building wealth is
• 10:27
  that they only invest in their own business.
• 10:30
  And as much as you kind of need to do that sometimes, especially
• 10:32
  in the beginning, it's like go all in on that thing and don't
• 10:34
  you know, get sidetracked. You need to pour money back into
• 10:36
  the business, whether it's hiring people or technology or
• 10:39
  this, whatever it is. It can also be a detriment
• 10:42
  because if you don't set something up that's, you know,
• 10:45
  another income stream or investment or a retirement fund
• 10:47
  or whatever it is, something could happen to the business or
• 10:50
  maybe you change directions and all of a sudden that investment
• 10:52
  egg isn't there. What are your guys thoughts on
• 10:54
  that? No, I I think there there's some
• 10:57
  healthy aspect of being all in on a business.
• 10:59
  I do too. That's a metaphor, you know,
• 11:02
  that's maybe more of a metaphorical truth than a like,
• 11:05
  OK, maybe you should have a little bit set aside for a rainy
• 11:10
  day and or retirement. But I think to the extent that
• 11:13
  you, you look first and foremost when you're starting a new
• 11:16
  business, you need to get that thing up and running.
• 11:19
  And, you know, but to the extent that you can set dollars aside
• 11:24
  for retirement long term, that should be near the top priority.
• 11:27
  Priority #2 right after getting your business up and running and
• 11:31
  going. And I think the problem perhaps
• 11:34
  is that some folks may put it as priority number 5 or 10.
• 11:38
  No, it should be #2 probably it's 1st pay your business, 2nd
• 11:42
  pay your retirement, then worry about everything else.
• 11:46
  So if you're 45 years old, you're a 45 year old business
• 11:49
  owner, and you have no retirement or investment
• 11:52
  accounts or anything, are you screwed?
• 11:56
  Not, I mean you better your business better be successful,
• 11:59
  that's what. If you're not going to sell your
• 12:01
  business. If you're not going to sell your
• 12:03
  business, you're going to be in trouble.
• 12:05
  Probably you. Think 45 is you're, you're kind
• 12:07
  of past the point where you can't catch up or do you think
• 12:10
  there's opportunity still at that point to still, hey, you
• 12:13
  can still save for retirement? There's always opportunity to to
• 12:16
  save. It just gets it becomes a much
• 12:18
  higher climb the longer you like.
• 12:21
  Time is on your side when it comes to savings, and the
• 12:24
  earlier you do it, the easier it is.
• 12:27
  The longer you wait, the harder it becomes because you have to
• 12:30
  catch up. You lose the, I mean the, I
• 12:32
  think it was Albert Einstein, right, that said the the most
• 12:35
  powerful force in the universe is compounding interest.
• 12:38
  Yeah, yeah. And it kind of is in a lot of
• 12:41
  ways and and more than just investing.
• 12:43
  Said that, but it was a. True.
• 12:44
  Something, something like that, yeah.
• 12:46
  But yeah, so and and and time is your biggest ally.
• 12:50
  There is time. Yeah, yeah.
• 12:53
  And also time, time in the market you don't want to be not.
• 12:56
  Timing the market, but time in the market.
• 12:58
  Time in the market not timing the market.
• 13:00
  What does that explain? That explain that principle
• 13:02
  there. So basically, you know, you, you
• 13:05
  want to take a long term investing approach because
• 13:07
  you're going to see ups and downs in the market, there's
• 13:09
  going to be volatility no matter what you look at.
• 13:12
  But over a long period of time, you see that line start to
• 13:15
  straighten out, right. And typically, you know, equity
• 13:19
  returns return anywhere from, you know, 5 to what we've seen
• 13:22
  lately, 20%. Yeah.
• 13:25
  And you want to be there to realize those returns because
• 13:27
  often times there's only about 10 days out of the three 300
• 13:31
  trading days a year where, you know, the market makes up for
• 13:34
  that 20% return, where you get that 8% day.
• 13:38
  And if you're trying to time the market and you miss that 8% day,
• 13:42
  your return's going to look a lot different than 20% at the
• 13:44
  end of the year. So time in the market's
• 13:47
  important for what Matt said on, you know, the power of
• 13:50
  compounding, but just also being able to stay invested and stay
• 13:55
  gain exposure to the market, you know, every day, every single
• 13:58
  day, and, you know, take more of a disciplined approach.
• 14:02
  And there's the old rule of 72. If you take 72 divided by your
• 14:08
  rate of return, that's how long it takes you to double your
• 14:11
  money. So just really quickly, if you
• 14:12
  think you're earning a 7.2% rate of return, it takes 10 years to
• 14:18
  double your money. And so if you're, if you're
• 14:20
  factoring in 30 year time frame, there's three doublings of money
• 14:26
  in that period. And that second double, you
• 14:30
  know, if you, if you shave that first ten years off and you
• 14:34
  didn't save that first 10 year, there's a doubling factor that's
• 14:37
  lost in your savings. And so it's really, it's like I
• 14:41
  would early and often like one of the things that's a great
• 14:44
  idea is setting up Iras for your kids.
• 14:48
  You know, you can actually do that now because it's the amount
• 14:52
  of money you have to set aside is so small if you're doing it
• 14:56
  early. Yeah.
• 14:57
  If you're doing it later, boy, you better, you know, you have
• 14:59
  to, you know, pony up big chunks of your money to catch up late.
• 15:03
  So what would your advice be to someone in their mid late 40s,
• 15:06
  early 50s that hadn't really thought about retirement?
• 15:09
  What would you, where would you guide them?
• 15:11
  Not necessarily financial advice, but just if you were in
• 15:13
  that position. Yeah, first and foremost, I'd go
• 15:15
  to the Vista Mark website and find our contact, but no, I, I,
• 15:22
  I'd be intentional about it. Don't, don't, you know, don't,
• 15:27
  don't put it off for forever. Think about it, have a plan for
• 15:31
  it, talk to the right people to get it set up.
• 15:34
  And, and not obviously you need to spend 99% of your time on
• 15:41
  your business and getting that up and running and, and making
• 15:44
  that successful, but don't let other things.
• 15:46
  And by the way, it's not just retirement, it's other things,
• 15:48
  family, it's everything's outside your business that you
• 15:52
  should be spending some time with.
• 15:53
  And you know, if you, there's, there's nothing worse than
• 15:57
  potentially going all in on your business and letting the rest of
• 16:00
  your life fall apart. You know, whether it's your
• 16:03
  family, whether it's your retirement, whether it's just
• 16:06
  your hobbies and everything. You know, to become a
• 16:09
  well-rounded, happy person long term and spiritually, you need
• 16:12
  to have, you know, some work life balance so well.
• 16:15
  What does retirement mean to you guys, and do you think
• 16:17
  retirement's overrated? You know, it's interesting.
• 16:21
  I I had some, I actually had to ponder retirement a little bit.
• 16:24
  When you have a non compete and all of that, like being forced
• 16:27
  retirement and you know, for a long time, I always look forward
• 16:30
  to retirement is like my reward for all the hard work that was
• 16:34
  like it earlier in my career is kind of how I thought of
• 16:37
  retirement now. I view it as something I may, I
• 16:41
  may not ever want to completely do that.
• 16:44
  There might be a time when I want to step back and I want to
• 16:48
  spend less time kind of doing things and rely on other people
• 16:51
  to kind of take the leadership role.
• 16:54
  But I enjoy working. I love.
• 16:56
  Working and. So like the idea of me of
• 16:59
  stopping working now, like I, you know, for the most part, I
• 17:03
  could have retired already. So if, if I wanted to, but I
• 17:07
  love what I'm doing. And if you love what you're
• 17:09
  doing, life is really good. Yeah.
• 17:13
  For sure. And just going off that point, I
• 17:16
  mean, Matt's got a wealth of experience being the CIO of a
• 17:21
  multi billion dollar RIA. And so when I decided to partner
• 17:25
  with him, it was more about the mentor relationship too, and the
• 17:29
  experience that, you know, I can, I can learn a great deal
• 17:32
  from this guy. And, and Sean, our other partner
• 17:35
  as well, you know, he's, he's really focused on the
• 17:38
  alternative investments where, you know, I don't have as much
• 17:41
  experience in that, in that area, but I lean on him to bring
• 17:44
  that expertise to the table. And I just feel like, you know,
• 17:48
  leaning on that experience and those first hand examples has
• 17:52
  been invaluable earning from him everyday.
• 17:55
  You know, he some of these one liners that he'll drop in the
• 17:58
  room, I'll just jot him down and use them in my next meeting.
• 18:01
  You know, it gets down to even that level.
• 18:04
  So it's it's been a privilege to just have the opportunity to
• 18:07
  learn from somebody like Matt and Sean.
• 18:09
  And we will continue to kind of look for opportunities to hire
• 18:13
  individuals that that represent those same values and want to
• 18:16
  educate the next generation because we're not going
• 18:19
  anywhere. We want this firm to to outlive
• 18:22
  even our retirement. That's a great point, Bill.
• 18:25
  I mean, the, the, the greatest joy that I've had in this
• 18:28
  industry has been the mentorship opportunities to see young
• 18:33
  people to help them develop and grow and become who they, you
• 18:36
  know, who, who they want to be from a professional perspective
• 18:39
  and you know, personal perspective.
• 18:41
  I was fortunate enough 25 years ago, the Co founder of Demaio
• 18:44
  Schneider, Bill Schneider, took me under his wing.
• 18:47
  I had a great mentor and then had a chance to start mentoring
• 18:52
  others, including Sean Mcevley, who's our partner was actually I
• 18:57
  was paired up. We both played football at
• 18:58
  Northwestern and the the program pairs up older players with
• 19:01
  younger players who played the same position and who had the
• 19:06
  same majors. And so Sean was a, you know, was
• 19:09
  about 15 years behind me, but he actually interned with me 15
• 19:13
  years ago when he was in college.
• 19:15
  I told him to do the CFA program.
• 19:17
  We stayed in touch, had that that great relationship and then
• 19:22
  had when the opportunity came to partner up, we did and it and
• 19:25
  it's and it's weird because I'm in the Bill Schneider role now.
• 19:28
  You know, the mentor role, he's in the mentee role.
• 19:30
  And, and the one thing you learn is when you mentor other people,
• 19:32
  you end up learning more from your mentees than I think they
• 19:35
  learn from you. And so it's a it because you're.
• 19:39
  Teaching and you're thinking about things and you're.
• 19:41
  Yeah. Yeah, if you're a mentor and
• 19:42
  you're and you know everything, you're probably not a very good
• 19:45
  mentor, right. Exactly.
• 19:47
  Because you're not listening. Yeah.
• 19:48
  And you're not absorbing what you're learning.
• 19:50
  And, and, and just to see, I think this and Vista Mark, I
• 19:54
  really want, you know, folks like Bill, who's he's 15 years
• 19:57
  younger than me. Sean's 15, 10 years younger, Our
• 19:59
  other partner is about 10 years younger.
• 20:03
  To watch them take our business to the next levels, really,
• 20:08
  really exciting for me to watch them grow and develop and become
• 20:12
  better versions. And I want to keep growing like
• 20:14
  everyone needs to keep growing and you're either getting
• 20:16
  better. Are you getting worse like I
• 20:19
  learned well from? My I agree with that.
• 20:22
  You guys just hit on, I think two things that are really
• 20:24
  important for me personally in my professional and and personal
• 20:27
  life, which is growth and fulfillment.
• 20:29
  You know, growth, continuing to learn and get better and improve
• 20:31
  your game. I think if you're not doing
• 20:32
  that, yeah, you're dying in a, in a, in a short way, like
• 20:35
  you're in a slim way, you're kind of that lines going down,
• 20:38
  right? Whether you notice it or not,
• 20:39
  over time it does. And then the other part is
• 20:42
  fulfillment is giving back, is helping other people, is feeling
• 20:44
  good because you've given to some other cause or person and
• 20:47
  seen them grow. And that just feels good.
• 20:49
  Going back to the and I think that plays a role in the
• 20:51
  retirement conversation, which is like, if you just retire and
• 20:54
  it's all about you and you just can play golf all day, maybe for
• 20:57
  some people that's fine. For me, that would just feel
• 20:59
  empty. And that's why I say sometimes I
• 21:01
  think retirement is a little overrated in that.
• 21:04
  And I think people are trying to switch their philosophy on it,
• 21:06
  kind of like you just mentioned. I don't think I'll ever retire
• 21:09
  either. I'll I want to do something, I
• 21:11
  want to give back. I want to have a craft, I want
• 21:13
  to build something. I want to maybe on my own term,
• 21:15
  Sure, maybe it looks a little different than it does today
• 21:17
  when I'm 80, you know, or 75. But I think we just like, I
• 21:21
  don't know, the way I grew up. It's like you just work like a
• 21:24
  dog your entire life and then, you know, you get to 65 and then
• 21:28
  hopefully you can retire and like, just sit around or what?
• 21:31
  Do whatever you want that just does.
• 21:33
  That seems like a broken philosophy to me.
• 21:35
  And sometimes I'm like, yeah, save, invest.
• 21:37
  That's very important. You should be responsible with
• 21:39
  your money and have things set aside, kids, family, yourself,
• 21:43
  but at the same time don't like sacrifice everything for some
• 21:46
  later date 30 years from now that we don't even know that
• 21:49
  we're going to get to. I mean, that's the other thing
• 21:51
  is like you may be the best investor saver in the world and
• 21:54
  then you get to be 70 and you die of 68 and it's like, so I
• 21:57
  don't know. That's that's my thought on
• 21:59
  that. I think it's I see a balanced
• 22:01
  approach. If you can find something, if
• 22:03
  you mentioned your philosophy used to be, you know, kind of
• 22:07
  working up until you can get that reward at the end.
• 22:09
  And now what you've done basically is you're finding the
• 22:12
  reward now, you know, and that's like such a big shift that I, I
• 22:15
  hope people can learn from that. But OK, so next week I'm doing
• 22:20
  a, I'm doing a live next week about how founders,
• 22:24
  entrepreneurs can take their, the money that they make the
• 22:27
  profits they make and turn it into wealth, make their money,
• 22:31
  make money, more money in their sleep.
• 22:34
  And I'm not talking from an expert standpoint.
• 22:36
  I'm, I'm showing highlights of our show from people that have
• 22:38
  built these types of businesses like you guys.
• 22:40
  I'm having any experts that people would know in this
• 22:42
  industry. And I'm just kind of sharing the
• 22:44
  information and being the curator and giving my thoughts
• 22:46
  and perspectives on some things. What would you say if you were
• 22:50
  running this live? What would the top two or three
• 22:52
  things that an entrepreneur can do to make their profits, Make
• 22:57
  money in their sleep? To have their money work for
• 23:00
  them 24/7. Yeah, I mean, it's a great
• 23:02
  question. I mean, a lot of our clients are
• 23:03
  actually entrepreneurs who sold businesses and yeah, and they
• 23:07
  kind of have to switch gears from running a business, you
• 23:11
  know, where you invest in your business to being kind of a a
• 23:13
  different kind of investor and generating cash flows from your
• 23:17
  proceeds from the sale of your business.
• 23:19
  So I think first and foremost, you, you got to find the right
• 23:22
  partners and you got to find the right people to work with, to
• 23:24
  help you with that. You might be an expert in your
• 23:27
  field and whatever that business is.
• 23:30
  But if you once you sell that business and you're kind of
• 23:32
  getting involved with and you're trying to convert into a, you
• 23:35
  know, family office or something like that, finding the right
• 23:39
  partners. And that's one of the things we
• 23:40
  do, you know, with our clients. We have a lot of experience
• 23:43
  helping folks doing that. Let's say you just had to give
• 23:46
  them advice though. I think the advice would be
• 23:50
  engage with folks before you do a transaction.
• 23:53
  When you, if you are going to sell your business, make sure
• 23:56
  you're selling your business for the right reasons.
• 23:58
  What do you mean? I think make sure that you have
• 24:03
  a plan in place and that you've got a lifestyle, you've got a
• 24:07
  next chapter of your life that you want to engage.
• 24:10
  I think some people feel like, you know, private equity might
• 24:12
  come in and start dangling dollar signs over people.
• 24:16
  And then there's this need, you know, I like my business, I'm
• 24:18
  running my business, I'm enjoying my business.
• 24:21
  But boy, if I if I don't cash in right now, I might lose my
• 24:24
  opportunity. I don't.
• 24:26
  Know about that, you know, like if your business is successful,
• 24:29
  you're energized about it, keep it, keep private equity away.
• 24:32
  I mean, they'll always, if you have a good business, there will
• 24:35
  always be a time that you can, that you can transition it
• 24:38
  later. So, you know, I think the, the
• 24:41
  advice I would give them is figure out what you want to do
• 24:43
  in your life. Like, how do you want to spend
• 24:45
  your day? Like, like money, it comes and
• 24:48
  goes. Time is finite.
• 24:50
  Time is the most finite thing you have.
• 24:52
  And how do you want to spend your day?
• 24:54
  Well. What if you're not going to sell
• 24:55
  your business? You've got a successful
• 24:57
  business, you're going to run it, but maybe you're making
• 24:59
  profits and you're just putting your savings account and you're
• 25:01
  kind of stacking. So you're like I got an extra
• 25:02
  $100,000 or $200,000 or half $1,000,000.
• 25:05
  What are some things that they could do that to, you know, help
• 25:08
  their money, you know, make money in their sleep?
• 25:11
  Well, I think more tactical. I think first and foremost make
• 25:13
  sure you have a company retirement plan and you can
• 25:15
  maximize the taxed up. But whether it's a 401K plan or
• 25:19
  a cash balance plan. So what's let's talk about that
• 25:21
  a little bit more tactical like what is what is the plan of
• 25:24
  entrepreneurs you get for their savings or retirement account?
• 25:26
  How much can they put in a per year?
• 25:29
  Why would they do that? Yeah, I mean it, it depends on
• 25:31
  your age. Like typically you can, you can
• 25:33
  put upwards of 30 + 1000 dollars if you're over the age of 50
• 25:36
  into a 401K plan. Yeah.
• 25:38
  So right out of the gate, that's a great way.
• 25:41
  Solo 41. Cost solo 4 O 1K if you're a one
• 25:43
  person show or or whatever. Then if you're if you have a few
• 25:47
  more there's things cash balance plans which are it's I used to
• 25:52
  make fun. It's like the ultimate scam from
• 25:54
  an IRS perspective because the amount of money that you can put
• 25:56
  away tax free is really quite shocking depending on really set
• 26:01
  it up. Yeah.
• 26:02
  And and again, there's more complexity involved here.
• 26:05
  What are those called? A cash balance plan, so they're
• 26:07
  kind of hybrid defined contribution to find benefit
• 26:10
  plans. And so if you look at the and
• 26:13
  that was one of my specialties many years ago we we worked with
• 26:17
  in my prior firm, I think it was over 20 AM law 100 law firms.
• 26:22
  And so you look at how the large law firms and partners and
• 26:26
  defer, defer income from a tax retire into tax payable
• 26:31
  retirement accounts, they use those cash balance plans.
• 26:33
  Interesting. So how do you not pay taxes?
• 26:35
  What's the? What's the?
• 26:36
  It's basically there's a present value calculation that goes
• 26:39
  into, you know, based on your age that allows you essentially
• 26:43
  the older you are to defer higher amounts of, of dollars
• 26:48
  because it's technically structured as a defined benefit
• 26:50
  plan, so pension plan. And then what often happens is
• 26:53
  these plans, they get up and running, they make these large
• 26:55
  contributions, then you end up terminate the plan after a few
• 26:58
  years and then it converts to a defined contribution plan
• 27:04
  balance and then you can enroll it over an IR as.
• 27:07
  And so it's a it's better for worse, a little bit of a
• 27:12
  loophole. Yeah, well, you got to take
• 27:13
  advantage. Of it not close because because
• 27:15
  lawyers give a lot of money. Law firms give a lot of money to
• 27:18
  politicians, right? For sure, if there's a loophole,
• 27:22
  it's because somebody paid to have it in there.
• 27:24
  Yeah, exactly. Well, you got to, you got to
• 27:26
  look for the legal loopholes because.
• 27:28
  And you got to know about them because they're, they're not
• 27:30
  taking care of us, you know, in terms of they're taking our
• 27:32
  money, they're spending it. There's fraud, There's all kinds
• 27:35
  of things we're uncovering now, and I don't think the government
• 27:37
  is that efficient. And so it's like you got to look
• 27:39
  out for yourself and you got to find the law and understand it
• 27:42
  or find a professional that does, and you got to get those
• 27:44
  savings. But could you break down the
• 27:46
  difference between Roth Iras, traditional Iras, Seps?
• 27:50
  Like there's all these like lingos that I don't think a lot
• 27:52
  of business owners quite understand because they're not
• 27:54
  in the business. Like break those down for US4O1K
• 27:58
  Roth, non Roth. Like what are the differences?
• 28:00
  I mean, I'll, I'll start at a high level and I'm sure Bill can
• 28:03
  get more granular on it. But you know, at a high level
• 28:06
  there's the traditional contribution and a Roth
• 28:09
  contribution. And that's probably the first
• 28:12
  helpful place the traditional contribution can fall in this
• 28:15
  subset of all those other things, the four O 1K this, the
• 28:19
  IRA, the Sep IRA. But basically what a traditional
• 28:23
  contribution qualified plan contribution means is you're
• 28:27
  getting a tax deduction today to put your money in and then your
• 28:30
  money grows tax free when you invest it.
• 28:33
  And then when you pull the money out, you pay full income taxes
• 28:36
  in retirement. And so that's the rub in a Roth,
• 28:41
  whether it's a Roth 4 O1 KA, Roth IRA, it's the exact
• 28:48
  opposite. You do not get the tax deduction
• 28:51
  today. So you you forgo that benefit
• 28:55
  today, but in exchange for that you get tax free growth.
• 28:59
  And then when you pull your money out in retirement, there's
• 29:01
  no taxes. So if I put in 100, so Roth is
• 29:04
  better because I put in 100,000 for this example and then it
• 29:06
  grows to 2:50 and I pull it out, I'm not paying tax, that's 250.
• 29:10
  There is a stipulation when you do a Roth you do pay on that
• 29:14
  $100 you put in. So you pay the tax upfront and
• 29:17
  then it grows tax. Right, pull it out.
• 29:19
  So, but if I put in 100,000, sure I'll pay tax on the 100,000
• 29:22
  now, right. And then it'll.
• 29:24
  But if it goes to 250 now I'm not paying taxes on 150.
• 29:28
  Versus it's a, it's a calculated, it's it, it's not
• 29:31
  quite as simple because what tax bracket are you going to be in?
• 29:34
  In retirement, right? And then there's also our tax
• 29:37
  rates going to be higher today or higher in the future.
• 29:40
  Yeah. And so there's a lot of present
• 29:41
  future value calculations. And then generally the, the one
• 29:44
  other thing is that a typical IRA has something called a
• 29:47
  retirement required minimum distribution.
• 29:51
  So when you hit age, what is it, 7072 or whatever it is, I should
• 29:57
  know that that you have, that they force you to take money out
• 30:02
  of it every year, which means you have to pay taxes.
• 30:03
  If you're in a Roth, you don't have that.
• 30:06
  And so there's actually a calculation we help clients do
• 30:09
  where you can actually convert your your Traditional IRA into a
• 30:14
  Roth IRA and pay all the taxes upfront.
• 30:17
  So it's a complex calculation you can do to say, hey, maybe I
• 30:21
  should convert this 100 or $200,000 account from a
• 30:25
  traditional to a Roth, pay some of those taxes now with the idea
• 30:29
  of foregoing taxes in the future and.
• 30:32
  When you say pay taxes now in the traditional, let's just use
• 30:35
  the example. I put 30,000 dollars into my
• 30:37
  retirement account. If it's a traditional, I'm just,
• 30:40
  I can't deduct that basically, right.
• 30:41
  That's just that's my income. I can't write that off.
• 30:43
  But if I do a Roth or is mixed up opposite, sorry, traditional
• 30:48
  I've got, I will not get the benefit of no, I will get the
• 30:51
  benefit of the tax break. I'll deduct $30,000 for as a
• 30:54
  business expense as a Roth. I cannot deduct that as a
• 30:56
  $30,000 business expense, but I will have that tax free when I
• 31:00
  take it out, right, got it. Some people may know that, but I
• 31:03
  think a lot of people are just like, I don't know what the hell
• 31:04
  the Division is. Like, Sam, as much as you can
• 31:07
  get it explained to you and you're still like, I still don't
• 31:08
  get it. Yeah.
• 31:10
  And the other half of your question was like the difference
• 31:12
  between a four O 1 KA Sep IRA and IRA.
• 31:16
  You know, 4 O 1K is kind of the, if you're a company and you have
• 31:19
  multiple employees, that's probably the route you want to
• 31:22
  go. It's kind of gives you the most
• 31:23
  flexibility. You can match employer employee
• 31:26
  contributions and do things like that.
• 31:29
  And then there's a Sep IRA is usually much more small
• 31:32
  business, more of a profit sharing contribution.
• 31:34
  So it's it's sort of halfway between a four O 1K and a
• 31:37
  Traditional IRA. Yeah.
• 31:39
  That you're allowed to have as a company and it's it's I.
• 31:41
  Believe you can contribute a little more to a Sep IRA.
• 31:44
  Then you can then a Traditional IRA.
• 31:46
  Yeah, you can. That's the benefit.
• 31:47
  Of 50,000 yeah, out of that. Yeah.
• 31:49
  Now let me ask you this in a four O 1K, who is in there going
• 31:52
  and doing, are people trading day-to-day is a week to week?
• 31:55
  Is it AI doing the trading now? Like how does that work?
• 31:59
  Yeah, I mean a four O 1K plan and you know, mutual part of my
• 32:02
  prior business did a lot of advising on setting up multi
• 32:05
  billion dollar four O 1K. But it's basically a company
• 32:09
  selects a list of, you know, 1, whatever number of funds makes
• 32:14
  it available to employees for employees to select.
• 32:17
  So employees get to go in and decide how I want to invest my
• 32:20
  money across these funds. And often there's something
• 32:24
  called a custom or there's something called a target date
• 32:26
  fund in there as well. They become very popular in
• 32:28
  recent years where they have a a year in the name.
• 32:32
  So there's the 20, the 2060 fund, which is for people who
• 32:36
  plan to retire in 2060. And then the fund gradually
• 32:40
  reduces aggressiveness until you get to that retirement date.
• 32:44
  So right now it's usually employees that are just, they
• 32:48
  decide how to invest if they want to be something called 4 O
• 32:51
  4C compliant. The the, the Department of Labor
• 32:55
  actually says that if you want to be off the hook as an
• 32:58
  employer for investment decisions, you better allow your
• 33:02
  employees of the flexibility to choose their own funds and to
• 33:05
  make changes to their accounts. And so there's this thing called
• 33:07
  4 O 4C that almost every four O 1K plan has.
• 33:10
  So employees are ultimately responsible for making their own
• 33:13
  decisions. But and then there's also often
• 33:16
  times in a four O 1K plan, there can be something called a
• 33:18
  self-directed brokerage account. So rather than just being
• 33:21
  limited to those, you know, 20 or 30, whatever it might be,
• 33:25
  funds that an employer might offer in their plan, an employee
• 33:28
  can go outside that and go buy ETFs or go buy stocks or do
• 33:32
  whatever they want. Now, do you think that's a good
• 33:33
  idea for business owners to be picking their own stocks and ETS
• 33:36
  and things like that, or so they just say, hey, index the S&P
• 33:39
  500? I think it depends.
• 33:40
  It depends on the the owner. I think there's a lot of people
• 33:45
  out there that should not be picking their own stocks.
• 33:47
  I think most people and that. That and they should not be
• 33:51
  maybe getting too cute. And I, I think if you're, if
• 33:55
  you're a fairly sophisticated investor and by the way, if
• 33:57
  you're really, there's a lot of people who think there's
• 33:59
  sophisticated, yeah, really are not.
• 34:02
  Right and well, sophistication. Do you mean being able to read a
• 34:05
  chart and look at like? No, I mean being able to being
• 34:07
  capable of making sound investment decisions.
• 34:12
  Without emotion. That's a huge.
• 34:14
  Part of it. That's a big. 1 So it's a it's
• 34:16
  #1 having the right high level brain functions and having the
• 34:21
  knowledge base and then #2 not listening to their lizard brain
• 34:25
  as human beings, even very sophisticated investment people
• 34:30
  have all human beings are hardwired to lose money.
• 34:33
  That's I've, I've written a couple of books and the most
• 34:36
  interesting chapters, by the way, are are the ones on
• 34:39
  behavioral finance about how human beings are just hardwired
• 34:43
  to lose money because they're driven sort by fear and greed
• 34:45
  essentially. And if you go back, for example,
• 34:48
  to like April of this year when Trump did the old Liberation Day
• 34:54
  tariff announcements in the markets when the flu E exactly
• 34:59
  the right thing to have been doing is what we did, which was
• 35:02
  to rebalance client accounts into equities.
• 35:06
  But what was everyone out? I mean the, the, the fear hits
• 35:09
  people. What do you mean balanced
• 35:10
  accounts and equities? Break that down.
• 35:11
  Yeah. So if a, if a client was set up
• 35:13
  and they were a 6040 account and, and 60% stocks, 40% bonds,
• 35:19
  and then they went into Liberation Day, the stock market
• 35:22
  sold off their portfolio, maybe went to 50, 50 because the
• 35:26
  stocks fell a lot more than the bonds did, right?
• 35:30
  We would, we would go into our client accounts and rebalance
• 35:32
  back to 6040, which essentially means selling bonds, buying
• 35:35
  stocks and your typical investor who's hard wired to lose money
• 35:39
  is, is bailing out because they think the world's coming to an
• 35:42
  end. We're going to hit a recession.
• 35:43
  And, and, and it's the same thing in, in March of 2020
• 35:48
  during COVID, like I did, AI went on, I did a video, sent it
• 35:52
  out to all our clients in March of 2020, explaining to them,
• 35:57
  Hey, we're going to be doing something that you can't
• 35:59
  believe. We're going to be buying stocks
• 36:00
  right now. And every people are looking at
• 36:03
  me like I got a third eye. Like, and it's like, no, this is
• 36:07
  there's not a single person that you talk to that thinks the
• 36:10
  market has bottomed. You know what that means?
• 36:12
  It might have bottomed because markets kind of behave the exact
• 36:17
  opposite of human psychology. Isn't that true, man?
• 36:19
  That is true. Yeah.
• 36:21
  And because markets are nothing more than a weighted average of
• 36:24
  everyone buying and, you know, and selling.
• 36:26
  And typically when there comes a moment when everyone is totally
• 36:30
  bearish, that means there's no one left to sell.
• 36:32
  Everyone sold who's going to sell, That's that's when the
• 36:34
  market bottoms. Yeah.
• 36:36
  So that's how it happens. Like every single time I feel
• 36:38
  like what's 1 of the worst investments you guys have made
• 36:41
  or one of the biggest mistakes you've made in investment that
• 36:44
  you're like, oh man, that was just stupid.
• 36:46
  Oh, that's a great question. I had one, we call it 20
• 36:51
  something years ago coming out of like 2003, maybe 2004 started
• 36:59
  to do a lot of work on Commodity Futures contracts where you
• 37:03
  could go back and you could do a back test and look at Commodity
• 37:07
  Futures contracts over time. So the ability to invest in oil
• 37:10
  futures or indexes that have oil futures, gold futures, other
• 37:15
  futures. And if you kind of look back at
• 37:17
  the long term history, you'll find a history that showed a
• 37:21
  risk premium of Commodity Futures being on par with
• 37:25
  equities, meaning that they've generated a return historically
• 37:29
  on par with equities. And then with that kind of a
• 37:32
  positive implied 2% risk premium above and beyond kind of what
• 37:36
  you might expect from short term T-bills and, and and kind of
• 37:40
  inflation on deal with that. So you're getting to an equity
• 37:43
  style return. And I think the problem is they
• 37:45
  they started to roll out these indexes and these indexes became
• 37:49
  investable. And so we started to deploy some
• 37:53
  of these strategies within client portfolios with the idea
• 37:57
  that the big reason here was we're not owning commodities
• 38:00
  because we think commodities are just great.
• 38:02
  But when you look throughout history, you know, when Saddam
• 38:05
  Hussein invades Iraq, the stock and bond market doesn't like
• 38:08
  that oil tends to pop and come on.
• 38:11
  And when there's unanticipated inflation, commodity commodities
• 38:14
  tend to pop and stocks and bonds go down.
• 38:16
  So it's a great diversifier in theory.
• 38:19
  And so I think that we started to move into these.
• 38:22
  And I think the problem is they came out with these investable
• 38:24
  indexes. And I think what happened is
• 38:27
  this kind of like a little bit of the Heisenberg uncertainty
• 38:29
  principle. The minute that you observe
• 38:31
  something, it changes it, you know, like where it is.
• 38:35
  And so I think all this money started finding its way into
• 38:38
  Commodity Futures indexes and I think that fundamentally altered
• 38:41
  the return profile because it was, you know, there once money
• 38:46
  starts finding its way into it, then it changes kind of the
• 38:50
  historical dynamic. And so a lot of that I think the
• 38:53
  back tested history of the the analysis show.
• 38:56
  So anyway, there's a lot of these funds that went through a
• 38:59
  prolonged period, maybe a decade of flat to negative returns in a
• 39:05
  period where, you know, theoretically you did it for
• 39:07
  diversification and not for returns.
• 39:09
  But it was, you know, kind of a painful lesson, I think that
• 39:13
  that you never see back tests that don't work.
• 39:16
  And the minute that everybody finds something that's worked
• 39:18
  really well in history, sometimes that won't work in the
• 39:22
  future because the people adapt to it.
• 39:26
  And by all that money finding its way into commodity index has
• 39:29
  fundamentally altered the Commodity Futures markets and
• 39:31
  removed a lot of the opportunity set longer term.
• 39:36
  Can you guys explain how stocks move up and down because it to
• 39:40
  somebody that doesn't know a lot about it, you would think, OK,
• 39:42
  if there's more demand, obviously the price moves up.
• 39:44
  If there's, you know, less supply, you know, things like
• 39:47
  that, right. And then there's obviously just
• 39:48
  sentiment and other things. But from a simplistic
• 39:52
  standpoint, if someone's selling, that means someone's
• 39:54
  buying. If someone's buying, that means
• 39:56
  someone's selling. So if you say, well, everyone
• 39:58
  wants to buy the stock, well then they got to get the stock
• 40:01
  from someone that's selling it. So doesn't that offload that
• 40:03
  pressure? Can you explain how the stock
• 40:05
  markets move? Yeah, sure.
• 40:07
  I mean, it's does the demand for something outstrip the supply
• 40:11
  and if it does, the price goes up.
• 40:13
  And if there are more sellers than willing buyers, the price
• 40:16
  will fall until it gets to a low enough level that induces more
• 40:20
  buyers to come into the market. So it's very similar to how any
• 40:24
  other market works. Can you?
• 40:25
  Explain like a lemonade stand, right?
• 40:27
  If I got a lemonade stand, how would that?
• 40:28
  How would that compare? Yeah, I think if you, if you try
• 40:31
  to sell lemonade for $5 or $10 a drink, there might be somebody
• 40:37
  that walks by that's super, super thirsty and will pay
• 40:39
  $10.00 for it. But you're going to, you're
• 40:41
  going to say no to, there's probably going to be dozens of
• 40:43
  people that say no to you for that because it's just too
• 40:47
  expensive. I, I don't need lemonade that
• 40:49
  bad. I don't think lemonade's that
• 40:51
  good. Like lemonade's good, but it's
• 40:53
  not $10 good. And then, you know, if you, and
• 40:57
  then if you price lemonade at $0.25, maybe almost everyone
• 41:03
  that walks by will buy it. The problem becomes is that
• 41:06
  maybe it cost you $0.50 to make it.
• 41:08
  So you're losing money on it. So you have to find the right
• 41:11
  price. The market will find the right
• 41:13
  price. Maybe it's a dollar because it's
• 41:17
  enough that you can make money on it and you're and you're and
• 41:19
  there's enough people that walk by and go, yeah, I'll buy
• 41:21
  lemonade for a dollar. And it's finding that right mix
• 41:25
  of supply demand that sets the price of lemonade.
• 41:27
  That's exactly the same process that happens with NVIDIA stock
• 41:31
  or Microsoft stock or any stock in the in the market.
• 41:36
  I think some of the confusing part of the stock market is
• 41:38
  there's a there's someone, there's kind of two parties that
• 41:41
  Bolt own the stock like the lemonade stand is.
• 41:43
  That was a good breakdown. Someone has eliminated, someone
• 41:46
  has cash. And this is like, isn't it kind
• 41:48
  of somebody has NVIDIA stock to buy, someone has NVIDIA stock to
• 41:51
  sell, so. That's where it's like how
• 41:53
  somebody has to have cash to buy, right, that stock.
• 41:56
  So that somebody owns NVIDIA stock, somebody has cash and
• 42:00
  they're going to use that cash to buy the NVIDIA stock from the
• 42:03
  person that owns it. So they do need to have the
• 42:05
  cash. True.
• 42:05
  Yeah, that's true. I think beyond price too,
• 42:08
  they're looking at the value of the actual security, right?
• 42:11
  They're, they're bit, they're buying the perceived value of,
• 42:14
  of what the security is going to be in 10 years.
• 42:17
  So, you know, people are taking advantage of maybe some
• 42:21
  foresight around, yeah, information that isn't currently
• 42:25
  all available to to market participants.
• 42:27
  That's how you get a little bit of an edge.
• 42:29
  Right. And that that's the key is that
• 42:32
  everything in finding it's the the value of something is the
• 42:34
  present value of all its future cash flows.
• 42:37
  That's true of everything and that's often priced mispriced in
• 42:42
  the markets like that. I'm sorry.
• 42:44
  If you're the efficient market, you know, die hard, you were
• 42:48
  Chicago located over here, although that's the founding,
• 42:51
  the founders of the efficient market hypothesis are here in
• 42:54
  the University of Chicago, although so are the the founders
• 42:57
  of behavioral finance or if you were Chicago too, which are the
• 43:00
  two kind of exact opposite kind of mindsets.
• 43:03
  But yeah, that, that anything, anything out there, a bond, a
• 43:06
  stock, stock index, the value of it is based on the present value
• 43:11
  of all its future cash flows. And so if somebody's projecting,
• 43:15
  what is that stock going to be in for stocks like NVIDIA, like
• 43:18
  they're not paying dividends, it's growing.
• 43:20
  And the, and the theory is kind of predicated out 20304050 years
• 43:25
  from now, there's going to be a massive pile of dividends being
• 43:27
  paid in NVIDIA and that's driving the value of NVIDIA
• 43:31
  today. Whereas there's other stocks
• 43:33
  that are out there like the former Philip Morris sells
• 43:36
  cigarettes, they're not growing very much.
• 43:38
  They're probably shrinking, but, but they have a, but the
• 43:41
  valuation of that stock is really low.
• 43:44
  So it has a kind of a high embedded return on it because
• 43:48
  it's because the hurdle is very low.
• 43:51
  There's no, there's not a big expectation of of growth coming
• 43:54
  out of it and so. Are there any stocks right now
• 43:57
  that you guys are excited about that you're willing to say like
• 44:00
  anyone's that you're like, I think this is a lot of potential
• 44:02
  still like NVIDIA is that top? I mean, is it there's a lot of
• 44:04
  potential in NVIDIA anymore or Amazon?
• 44:06
  I, you know, I'm, I'm, I think longer term there's a lot of
• 44:10
  opportunities out there. I think when you're talking
• 44:12
  about trading a stock, you know, depends on like I, I wouldn't,
• 44:18
  I'm not going to be talking and speculating about stocks that
• 44:20
  might be good to own for the next week.
• 44:23
  But I think when you look long term at the markets, this the
• 44:27
  AI, yes, these stocks are valued at a healthy rate now, meaning
• 44:32
  the priced earnings ratios are elevated.
• 44:35
  But this, this is a little bit different though, than I
• 44:37
  remember 1999 when pets.com is worth $10 billion.
• 44:42
  Ten, it was worth $10 billion because they were selling pet
• 44:44
  food online. That was that was a bubble.
• 44:48
  You know, that was a clear tech stock Internet stock bubble.
• 44:53
  When you look at companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft, even
• 44:57
  Facebook, Google, all these that are kind of that are sort of AI
• 45:03
  plays they they, they, they have rich valuations for a reason.
• 45:07
  And then but I think what people are missing with the AI story is
• 45:11
  not so much those AI tech companies because yes, AI tech
• 45:15
  companies are are have the ability to do really amazing
• 45:19
  things over the next 10 years. But look at the products that
• 45:22
  they're that they're selling. They're going to allow
• 45:23
  businesses like Vista Mark, like, like the real benefit of
• 45:27
  AI is not going to be these tech companies that are driving the
• 45:31
  energy. It's going to be the people that
• 45:32
  adopt it and use that to grow their businesses.
• 45:35
  And I'm talking insurance companies, I'm talking
• 45:38
  manufacturing companies, I'm talking every business in the
• 45:41
  world is going to have the potential to grow and improve
• 45:44
  productivity at their business and improve their profit margin
• 45:50
  and or reduce the price of their product because of AI.
• 45:54
  And there's going to be disruption in terms of people
• 45:57
  losing their jobs and, but there's going to be new, a lot
• 45:59
  of new jobs created too as a part of it.
• 46:02
  One of the best performing assets over the last five to 10
• 46:04
  years, if you look at the the data is Bitcoin, cryptocurrency,
• 46:10
  blockchain technology. What do you guys think about
• 46:13
  that? Because I know you work a family
• 46:14
  offices, institutions. It seems like a lot more
• 46:17
  institutions are getting involved in this type of stuff.
• 46:19
  And then we could talk about the Clarity Act right now that's out
• 46:21
  there that just faced a lot of kind of pushback from Coinbase.
• 46:24
  But what are your thoughts on the future of cryptocurrencies
• 46:26
  and blockchain? You know, I've been, I've been
• 46:28
  wrong at every turn here because I, I was one of those early
• 46:31
  ones. It was like this whole thing's a
• 46:33
  scam because it most people and it looks like, and it still
• 46:36
  looks like a scam to me because it's a a.
• 46:40
  Cryptocurrency or blockchain technology or Bitcoin?
• 46:42
  Well, I think, I think crypto currencies, blockchain, like
• 46:46
  blockchain technologies are great technology and it's a
• 46:49
  great solution in search of a problem.
• 46:52
  And I don't think we really had a problem that Bitcoin came in
• 46:56
  like 1 of the one of the main things you want from a currency,
• 46:59
  for example, is you want a currency to be stable.
• 47:02
  Right. Well, I don't think, I don't
• 47:03
  think Bitcoin's a currency. I know it's a currency, but I
• 47:05
  think it's an asset like a digital gold.
• 47:07
  Then it, then it's something else.
• 47:09
  And then if it's not a, if it's not a currency, it's some sort
• 47:12
  of other assets. And what, what is that asset
• 47:16
  then? And digital gold, OK, gold has
• 47:19
  value. It's at value for thousands of
• 47:21
  years because it's shiny and pretty and there's a finite
• 47:25
  amount of it. And theoretically there's a
• 47:28
  finite amount of Bitcoin. But there's, you know, there
• 47:30
  will be when the mining is done and you know the, the, but at
• 47:35
  the same point, what does it do when you convert it to cash?
• 47:37
  It doesn't, it's not like a stock where there's a dividend
• 47:40
  being generated by the stock or bond.
• 47:43
  And so if you're doing that present value of a future cash
• 47:46
  flow, all that's predicated on is a future supply demand a
• 47:51
  Bitcoin or a future supply demand of that cryptocurrency,
• 47:54
  right, which you tell me what that is.
• 47:56
  There's no, there's no backing, there's no one really backing it
• 48:00
  kind of like U.S. dollar. It's backed by whatever that
• 48:04
  means. And what?
• 48:05
  Is the back that's actually that's not even back.
• 48:08
  But the the the most bullish case for crypto currencies is
• 48:12
  really a bearish case for all Fiat currency.
• 48:14
  Oh, for sure. That's that's that's what it's
• 48:15
  hedging against. And so the currency and so it's
• 48:17
  like. More money, the feds going to
• 48:19
  inject more on their balance sheet and.
• 48:20
  Yeah, it's, I think the idea is that maybe Bitcoins, the one
• 48:23
  eyed man in the land of the blind and the blind is all the
• 48:26
  other currencies because, you know, we've just gone out of
• 48:30
  control from a, you know, a debt perspective.
• 48:33
  But I, I still think that if you, if you believe that gold
• 48:37
  may still be a better asset to own and crypto and from a
• 48:40
  protection perspective, because you need the Internet to work
• 48:45
  for crypto to work. And if you get into a world
• 48:48
  where there's no longer Fiat currencies, governments fall.
• 48:52
  I'm man, that's pretty crazy, you know?
• 48:53
  So it's it's the Mac called the Mad Max scenario you.
• 48:56
  Know way out there. In a Mad Max scenario, you're
• 48:59
  going to want gold and you're going to want a mercenary army.
• 49:01
  You know you're going to want and that you know you're going
• 49:03
  to want food. You're going to want farmland.
• 49:04
  Guns, Guns. Guns.
• 49:06
  People are like, I need all the food, I need all the gold.
• 49:08
  I'm like, dude, if you got the guns, you got all that shit.
• 49:10
  Reminded me of a funny joke in January 2009, coming right out
• 49:16
  of the financial crisis. Yeah, I looked at high yield
• 49:18
  bonds and, you know, high yield bonds were priced like the
• 49:22
  credit was priced for the end of the world, the end of
• 49:25
  civilization. The stock market was just priced
• 49:27
  for a recession, severe recession.
• 49:30
  And I said, well, you put half your money in high yield bonds
• 49:32
  and the other half in canned foods and ammunition because 1/2
• 49:35
  of those trades is going to be the one is going to be really
• 49:38
  good. Because, yeah, yeah.
• 49:41
  Well, what about, like, Ethereum?
• 49:43
  Because, you know, Ethereum, the stock market's kind of being
• 49:45
  built on the chain. It seems like more things are
• 49:47
  going to be tokenized over the next couple of years.
• 49:50
  Government officials, people at big institutions have already
• 49:52
  said that they're going to be bringing things on chain.
• 49:55
  Ethereum seems to be the rails of that.
• 49:57
  Yeah, I see. Value in that the tokenization
• 50:00
  of various things so kind of an alternative payment method yeah
• 50:03
  using a blockchain technology to me like that is the applicable
• 50:09
  solution here like as opposed to more of just a general
• 50:13
  cryptocurrency where the supply demand is going to drive it and
• 50:18
  it doesn't really serve specific use yeah I think when you look
• 50:23
  at the but the but the technology itself is amazing and
• 50:26
  I think what it's able to do from an alternative payment like
• 50:29
  even in terms of like things like paying for AI use and
• 50:34
  paying for other things totally with these tokens I mean it's
• 50:37
  it's kind of a version of like when you go to an arcade you got
• 50:40
  the tokens used to have to use quarters now you you you would
• 50:43
  go and you would convert that into a token right you'd be able
• 50:46
  to use those it's the same concept digitally which I think
• 50:48
  it's has a ton of value and there's I think there's going to
• 50:51
  be a lot of use of that technology going forward and you
• 50:55
  know 5. Contracts and.
• 50:56
  We're not even thinking about it right.
• 50:57
  Now, Yeah, I think so too. What are your thoughts, Bill?
• 51:00
  I the only thing thing I'd add to that is, you know, if you're
• 51:03
  going to invest in cryptocurrency, make sure that
• 51:06
  you have the stomach to deal with the volatility that that's
• 51:09
  right, you're going to experience.
• 51:10
  You know, it's like a roller coaster ride.
• 51:12
  That's right. I haven't personally invested in
• 51:14
  it myself, but I have you bet I'm looking at it every day.
• 51:19
  Yeah. And I do have those days where,
• 51:22
  you know, you miss out on a 5% return and you have a little bit
• 51:25
  of FOMO. But, you know, going back to
• 51:27
  what Matt said, we're more focused on kind of those
• 51:31
  traditional asset classes that we've relied on for, for
• 51:35
  decades. But we certainly don't rule out
• 51:38
  any new innovate, innovative products that are coming out.
• 51:41
  And so we're definitely on the pulse on all the Bitcoin stuff.
• 51:44
  And yeah, we're tracking. For sure.
• 51:46
  Yeah, for sure. If the Clarity Act passes, are
• 51:49
  you guys familiar with that? What's going on with that right
• 51:51
  now? Little bit, but it's.
• 51:52
  Basically, there's a there's a it got passed in the house late
• 51:56
  last year and it, it's basically the regulation looking for
• 51:59
  crypto currencies, blockchain. It's right now.
• 52:02
  We, we, we had the genius act, which is more about stable coins
• 52:04
  and that kind of stuff, which a little bit easier to understand.
• 52:06
  It's a digital dollar. It's backed by treasuries or
• 52:09
  dial peg to the dollar. But but the clarity act is more
• 52:12
  blockchain crypto currencies. How what are these things going
• 52:15
  to be regulated by the SEC, their CFDC like what is all
• 52:18
  that? And it, it seemed like it was
• 52:21
  about to get passed through cryptos going like this.
• 52:24
  And then all of a sudden Coinbase and some of the big
• 52:26
  crypto companies and, and lobbyists were like, no, we're
• 52:30
  going to stop this because the banks jumped in and said, well,
• 52:33
  we don't want you to be able to earn yields on your interest,
• 52:36
  whatever you want to call it, on the stablecoins, which is the
• 52:39
  digital dollars, because banks don't offer 543 percent on
• 52:43
  savings account. They, they, they don't do that,
• 52:45
  even though they make billions of dollars of holding your money
• 52:47
  and they do other investments with it.
• 52:49
  And Coinbase was like, no, you can't, because we're competition
• 52:52
  and we're going to offer three or four 5% years.
• 52:54
  You can't say that we just, it's a law that we can't do that now
• 52:57
  because that's going to, you know, provide competition to you
• 52:59
  guys. And so now it's been, it's been
• 53:01
  stalled and we don't know what's going to happen.
• 53:03
  Now they're going to meet again, I think next month and have a
• 53:06
  committee meeting over and who knows?
• 53:07
  But if it it's in the, the Senate's trying to get, you
• 53:10
  know, draw up the bill and then it'll have to get approved there
• 53:12
  and obviously go back to the House because it'll be revised
• 53:15
  and then I'll get put together and then get signed by Trump,
• 53:17
  who we know is very pro crypto. So I think he would sign in
• 53:20
  heartbeat, but that's what's going on right now.
• 53:22
  And my thought is this, and just from watching that world over
• 53:26
  the last couple years, it seems like there's a lot of big
• 53:28
  institutions that obviously are getting in on the ETFs.
• 53:31
  We saw like Ethereum ETFs, Bitcoin, ETS, Solana, XRP,
• 53:35
  they're moving on it, even big ones like Fidelity in these guys
• 53:38
  that you wouldn't have thought two years, three years ago that
• 53:40
  would get into it. So you're seeing that movement
• 53:42
  pretty significantly, a lot of inflows, but I think there's a
• 53:46
  lot of money sitting on the sidelines that once the the
• 53:48
  regulation, once the Clarity Act gets passed into law, because I
• 53:53
  don't, I don't think a lot of these big institutions want to
• 53:55
  risk the reputation. And you guys might be sitting in
• 53:57
  a similar spot where you're like, look, we're catching that.
• 53:59
  We see it, We're a little bit here and there, but we're not
• 54:01
  like going all in those things. We don't know what the hell it
• 54:03
  is in terms of law and how it's regulated.
• 54:06
  And it it might be gone in two years.
• 54:07
  I don't think it's going to happen, but we don't know it.
• 54:10
  Was well over 120,000 three months ago.
• 54:14
  Big one was yeah, yeah. Now it's at 95 or whatever it
• 54:18
  is. Yeah, right.
• 54:19
  So yeah. But if you look, you know, I
• 54:21
  think two years ago, is it like 65 or something, right.
• 54:24
  And it, I mean, it's performed exceptionally well, but we are
• 54:27
  in a little bit of a winter right now for sure.
• 54:29
  And I think some of it's just liquidity obviously has a big,
• 54:32
  big deal. There hasn't been a lot of
• 54:33
  liquidity for risk on assets. And then I think the other thing
• 54:36
  is just regulation and laws around it.
• 54:38
  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think institutions, you know, like
• 54:41
  gold is still different. It's like the ultimate real
• 54:45
  asset because it's thousands of years of history and kind of use
• 54:49
  as a currency and use to like central banks using it.
• 54:53
  And then you have something like, and, and so like the
• 54:56
  uncertainty around what is this new thing going to look like in
• 55:00
  three months to six months to six years to 20 years.
• 55:04
  And then also you have the ability for governments to come
• 55:06
  in and just fundamentally change, you know, change the
• 55:09
  rules on this from a regulatory like like China could just say
• 55:13
  no. And like, and then suddenly the
• 55:15
  US dollar, like for example, they could, they could end up
• 55:19
  the the US Treasury could end up issuing a digital version of the
• 55:22
  dollar at some point. Like if suddenly the
• 55:26
  tokenization become, well, let's do it with the US dollar.
• 55:28
  There could be other there could be other quasi government
• 55:33
  entities that start competing assets and then what does that
• 55:36
  all mean? Yeah, but they're probably going
• 55:38
  to build on Ethereum or blockchains that are already out
• 55:40
  there. I would think they're not going
• 55:42
  to probably create their own. Blockchains, that's right, they
• 55:43
  would out, they would outsource the right the no doubt they
• 55:47
  would hopefully. By the way, gold had a hell.
• 55:49
  Gold and silver had an overrun all time high in 20.
• 55:51
  That was wild. And it's like, did these other
• 55:54
  assets have good runs or was it really more people going?
• 55:57
  I don't like the dollar. Right.
• 55:58
  Oh, for sure. No for.
• 56:00
  Much. I think for sure it is well,
• 56:02
  because you, I mean, you guys know this, we're going into
• 56:04
  money printing season. It seems like Q ES back and you
• 56:07
  know, we're going to the feds going to add to their balance
• 56:09
  sheet and they're going to start stimulating.
• 56:10
  The midterms are coming up and they're going to start pumping
• 56:12
  the economy, which drives the value of the dollar down right.
• 56:15
  So. Yeah.
• 56:16
  I mean, you can, you can explain a good some of the some of the
• 56:19
  returns in crypto from debasing, natural debasing of the dollar,
• 56:24
  but there's still this natural what I call a naturally
• 56:27
  occurring Ponzi process in play. And what it requires is a
• 56:34
  greater fool. It's not a future cash flow.
• 56:36
  It's a greater full theory, which is somebody has to be
• 56:39
  willing to pay more tomorrow for it than somebody's paying today.
• 56:42
  And the rationale isn't like some sort of discounted cash
• 56:45
  flow, which is, you know, stock, a bond, any other kind of
• 56:48
  financial asset, piece of real estate, you know, farmland, it's
• 56:53
  all priced based on the present value of future cash flows.
• 56:57
  You know, a currency like gold, gold doesn't have a cash flow,
• 57:02
  neither does crypto currency. It just is and it's supply
• 57:05
  demand. And it's like, so why is that
• 57:07
  worth more tomorrow than today? The cash flows didn't grow.
• 57:11
  There's no it's just the the speculation and it's the theory
• 57:16
  that somebody's going to be willing to pay more for it
• 57:17
  tomorrow than they did. Today, yeah, I think when you
• 57:20
  look at Ethereum of Solana, XRP, where they do have the real
• 57:22
  world utility and builder are building things on them that I
• 57:26
  think you could look at and say if the whole world's being built
• 57:28
  on this chain, it's probably going to be worth something
• 57:30
  because it burns the ETH fees as every time you do transactions.
• 57:34
  But I think I do think Bitcoin, you're right about that, where
• 57:36
  it's just it's a lot of speculation and I think even a
• 57:38
  lot of the other coins are just, hey, we think things are going
• 57:41
  to be built on this. We think this is going to be the
• 57:43
  future. We think this is going to be the
• 57:44
  technology. We don't know.
• 57:46
  We don't know. And also there's no regulatory
• 57:48
  clarity on it either. So we don't even know if it's
• 57:50
  going to get shot down or if it's going to be we're going to
• 57:52
  be able to do it. So, but I think you guys would
• 57:55
  agree that's also some of the times when it's the biggest risk
• 57:58
  is also could be the biggest return potentially, you know
• 58:01
  potentially. But typically I think, I think
• 58:03
  Bitcoin get, it's had a pattern, right?
• 58:05
  It gets cut in half every few years, four years, yeah.
• 58:07
  And then double s again. And yeah, yeah.
• 58:10
  And there's kind of a, you know, I, I don't know if it's gonna be
• 58:14
  a long term good investment, but I'm like, if you're gonna trade
• 58:16
  it, make sure you're looking at that pattern and you're not
• 58:19
  buying at the wrong time, right? And so if you had to guess five
• 58:23
  years, do you think it's over 200,000 a coin or do you think
• 58:25
  it's zero or less? Well, I think at some .5 years
• 58:30
  plus from now, it will be over that.
• 58:32
  And then I think there's a a chance five years from now,
• 58:35
  it'll be five years or more, it'll be maybe 75% below that
• 58:39
  too. So it's like what time frame
• 58:43
  because it's going to continue to go.
• 58:46
  Don't you think the volatility kind of drop still has more
• 58:48
  institutions, ETFs? It's like big money's coming
• 58:50
  into it. So it's kind of like stabilizing
• 58:52
  a little bit. I think by that point we'll have
• 58:54
  to. We have.
• 58:54
  This is the hard part of the project.
• 58:56
  Future. President's future.
• 58:58
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.
• 59:01
  Which is impossible to do. And it's, it's very like I, I
• 59:05
  don't know if, I don't know if governments are going to step in
• 59:09
  and like be able to impact the price of gold a ton.
• 59:11
  Maybe they are central banks and such, but they can step in and
• 59:15
  dramatically alter crypto assets with just.
• 59:18
  As of now, we can, yeah. And so, yeah, that's one of
• 59:22
  those things, like in order to forecast, you have to be a real
• 59:25
  futurist. Yeah.
• 59:27
  Beyond a financial person, yeah. Figure out what's going to
• 59:31
  happen. There.
• 59:31
  Well, no one knows what's going to happen, That's the thing.
• 59:33
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 59:34
  And you know, I and I and what do I know 'cause I, this is
• 59:36
  2026, I thought I'd have my flying car by now.
• 59:39
  And I yeah, although I have a self driving car.
• 59:40
  I mean, we're getting close. Elon's up to some pretty cool
• 59:43
  stuff, so we'll see, but do you guys think that money makes you
• 59:46
  happier? What's your relationship with
• 59:48
  money? I'm curious.
• 59:50
  I think the absence of money makes you miserable, but I think
• 59:53
  that there's some sort of there's some sort of happy
• 59:56
  medium where the incremental increase of dollars does not
• 1:00:00
  drive any more positive utility. And I think there's been some a
• 1:00:04
  good number of studies on this, but you hit a certain threshold
• 1:00:06
  of income or or wealth, adding additional doesn't make you any
• 1:00:12
  happier really. It and I think there might be a
• 1:00:16
  negative correlation at some levels because you get to a
• 1:00:19
  point where suddenly your wealth becomes more of a hindrance to
• 1:00:22
  some people anyway. And I think that's probably why
• 1:00:26
  a lot of wealthy people, they get to a point they they think
• 1:00:29
  about the pledge and they think about doing other things with
• 1:00:33
  their dollars because they realize that additional dollar
• 1:00:35
  isn't driving any more joy into their life and nor is it really
• 1:00:39
  driving any, nor is it helpful to their families at a certain
• 1:00:42
  level too. So.
• 1:00:44
  Right. Well, Alex, I'm from a family of
• 1:00:46
  business owners. So I've, I've lived, I've lived
• 1:00:49
  this. They went through a liquidity
• 1:00:50
  event back in 2005. My grandpa sold his home
• 1:00:53
  building business, Town and Country Homes.
• 1:00:55
  So I got to experience kind of the first, first hand, you know,
• 1:00:58
  what it means to inherit significant wealth and, and what
• 1:01:02
  that, you know, what kind of emotions that that provokes
• 1:01:05
  within a family. And really what I would say is
• 1:01:10
  it made us so much more appreciative of the hard work
• 1:01:13
  that both, you know, my parents, my grandparents did to, to bring
• 1:01:17
  the company to what it was to, to bring it to a sale.
• 1:01:20
  And it allowed us to do things that made us happy.
• 1:01:24
  I don't think the money itself gave us any, any sort of
• 1:01:28
  happiness by itself, but it allowed it gave us the freedom
• 1:01:31
  to travel together. It gave us the ability to go
• 1:01:34
  down to Florida every year and stay together. 30 I've got I'm 1
• 1:01:39
  of 31 cousins. Wow.
• 1:01:41
  My mom's one of seven. They were all part business
• 1:01:44
  owners of this company. And so it was very a unique
• 1:01:47
  situation for me to get to experience that first hand.
• 1:01:50
  And and you know what the biggest thing they did with the
• 1:01:53
  money was give back to the charities that they loved.
• 1:01:56
  I often talk to my clients and I say there's, there's four
• 1:01:58
  buckets you can put your money in, you can spend it, you can
• 1:02:01
  give it to the ones you love, you can give it to the
• 1:02:03
  organizations that you love, or you can give it to the
• 1:02:06
  government. And I really want to not do the
• 1:02:09
  last option. Most of them possibly can.
• 1:02:11
  I work with them on a daily basis to make sure we're
• 1:02:16
  prioritizing those first 3 buckets.
• 1:02:17
  Nice. And so.
• 1:02:19
  That's awesome. That's really well set from both
• 1:02:21
  of you guys. I agree.
• 1:02:22
  I think I've been in a place when I didn't have much money
• 1:02:25
  and it sucks to worry about money.
• 1:02:27
  It freaking sucks when you're going to the grocery store and
• 1:02:30
  you're like, man, can I afford this?
• 1:02:32
  And you're you go out to dinner and it's like, oh, that's $100.
• 1:02:35
  I got a caution to spend that, you know, versus when you can go
• 1:02:38
  to grocery store, not really look at pricing so much or go to
• 1:02:41
  dinner and it's completely stress free, stress free because
• 1:02:43
  you're not worrying about anything.
• 1:02:44
  You've got money in the bank. That's a good feeling.
• 1:02:47
  But to you, when you get to a certain point, does it make you
• 1:02:49
  happier being at, you know, this, this amount of money
• 1:02:52
  versus this or 1,000,000 versus 2 million or 10 or 20?
• 1:02:55
  I don't think so. I don't think so.
• 1:02:57
  Yeah. And I, I think we're at a state
• 1:02:59
  to where I think you'd rather be kind of average from a wealth
• 1:03:02
  perspective now. You're you're better off being
• 1:03:04
  average from a wealth perspective now than you were
• 1:03:06
  being the richest man in the world 100 years ago.
• 1:03:09
  That's a really good point. You know, like that.
• 1:03:11
  Really good point. You know, we're, we're and, you
• 1:03:14
  know, it's, it's wonderful that we've kind of hit that level
• 1:03:16
  where people, a lot of people are not day-to-day going through
• 1:03:20
  life worrying about the basics. You know, some are still and,
• 1:03:24
  and we need to take care of that, but most people are not
• 1:03:27
  worried about that. I mean, for most of human
• 1:03:29
  history, life really stunk. Like it was hard.
• 1:03:31
  It was like really bad. And it was survival day in and
• 1:03:34
  day out, so. Yeah, if you think, yeah, it's a
• 1:03:37
  good point too. If you think about we went back
• 1:03:39
  2000 years ago. The person today, even a lower
• 1:03:41
  income person, middle and middle class, lower income, they're
• 1:03:44
  living better than the king lived 2000 years ago.
• 1:03:46
  Yeah. It's like running water.
• 1:03:49
  They got food. There's like order food at their
• 1:03:50
  house. They could.
• 1:03:51
  They go, well, just just the healthcare thing.
• 1:03:53
  It's like, oh, you got the flu, You're gonna die.
• 1:03:54
  Yeah. Oh, for.
• 1:03:55
  Sure, $1,000,000 doesn't matter. You're gonna die.
• 1:03:57
  You know, we don't know how to deal with that.
• 1:03:59
  Yeah. You.
• 1:04:00
  You, you broke something or you need some type of surgery.
• 1:04:03
  There's no surgeries. That's that's not a thing,
• 1:04:05
  right? And you're.
• 1:04:05
  Never going to walk again. Yeah, that's it.
• 1:04:08
  So and I think life does come down to perspective, you know
• 1:04:11
  for sure just how you're thinking.
• 1:04:12
  It's easy to wake up every day and go, oh man, this didn't go,
• 1:04:15
  I don't have this or this is going on.
• 1:04:17
  And I always just bring myself back to man, look around you,
• 1:04:20
  dude. You got an awesome family,
• 1:04:22
  you're doing something you love, you're financially set, you know
• 1:04:24
  you're in a good place, you're not struggling and you're able
• 1:04:28
  to make an impact and like, I don't know, what more could you
• 1:04:31
  could you ask for? You're healthy, you know you.
• 1:04:33
  Live in the land of the Free. That's that's yeah, you live in
• 1:04:35
  the greatest country in the world.
• 1:04:36
  Anyone says, you know, it's we got challenges, yes, but it's a
• 1:04:39
  great country. So are you guys bullish on 2026?
• 1:04:43
  What's your outlook this year? What do you think?
• 1:04:44
  You know, I, we, we don't try to predict short term market
• 1:04:47
  cycles, but I think, you know, valuations are high, which I
• 1:04:51
  think are going to constrain to a certain extent where we can go
• 1:04:54
  5 and over the next 5 and over the next 10 years.
• 1:04:57
  From a stock market perspective, there's a, but when you, when
• 1:05:00
  you kind of look at what's in place right now, we probably
• 1:05:03
  have a couple more Fed cuts. I think we have a lot of
• 1:05:06
  potentially positive momentum things coming.
• 1:05:09
  I think there's plenty of room for the markets to continue to
• 1:05:12
  put up another, another Goodyear I, you know, whether it's double
• 1:05:15
  digits or not. Yeah, I agree.
• 1:05:17
  You tell me, but sometimes the the trend is your friend and you
• 1:05:21
  ride the horse in the direction that it's going.
• 1:05:24
  But there's I don't see significant cracks.
• 1:05:26
  I do see some softness in the labor market, but I think that's
• 1:05:28
  more of a, a healthy thing at this point because the big
• 1:05:33
  concern of the market is, is inflation.
• 1:05:36
  And I think is that if the labor market stays cool, doesn't get
• 1:05:40
  too hot, that allows for the Fed to continue to lower rates,
• 1:05:44
  which I think for the stock market and financial.
• 1:05:46
  Assets is good, really good. Yeah.
• 1:05:47
  We're one of those situations where a little bit of bad news
• 1:05:50
  in the labor market is kind of a little bit of good news for the.
• 1:05:52
  100% agree. Yeah, don't, don't make it too
• 1:05:55
  good because I'm like, alright, we ain't cutting anything this
• 1:05:57
  year. And it's like, alright, dude,
• 1:05:58
  you know, our interest rates are pretty high.
• 1:05:59
  Why mortgages are, you know, tougher people to afford.
• 1:06:01
  But I was going to ask you one other thing about that this
• 1:06:05
  year. Oh, the labor market.
• 1:06:07
  Yeah. I think that's one thing.
• 1:06:08
  That's like the one area that I would look at too.
• 1:06:10
  And it's like a little concerning because if it goes,
• 1:06:12
  if it keeps dropping, it could be a concern.
• 1:06:14
  But also I think about AI and technology.
• 1:06:16
  Does that jump into there where maybe that kind of helps support
• 1:06:20
  that a little bit as well where we don't need as many jobs?
• 1:06:22
  Well, I think that's, I think that's the trick is we don't
• 1:06:25
  need as many jobs. And I think we're on the cusp of
• 1:06:28
  realizing just how many fewer jobs we need.
• 1:06:32
  And I think that that requires the economy then to, to, to
• 1:06:36
  create these jobs. And that's the that's always
• 1:06:38
  happened, whether it's replacing the horse with an actual plow,
• 1:06:43
  you know, productivity increases when it was even Microsoft
• 1:06:48
  adding Windows for the first time.
• 1:06:50
  Imagine what business was like before people had e-mail and
• 1:06:52
  computers. You know, like everything sort
• 1:06:55
  of allowed us to do things with fewer people.
• 1:06:58
  And AI is going to be another leap in that regard.
• 1:07:01
  But then the economy is always responded by generating jobs in
• 1:07:04
  areas that we never anticipated. Like, did people think that?
• 1:07:08
  Like the people think that that there'd be these massive chip
• 1:07:12
  companies building chips for AI a few years.
• 1:07:16
  Like no, a few years ago, did people think that there'd be
• 1:07:19
  self driving cars and a bunch of engineers deployed on how to
• 1:07:22
  figure out that? No.
• 1:07:24
  And so there's a lot of, and so I think what's kind of what's
• 1:07:27
  kind of, but there's a transition process.
• 1:07:29
  The, the unemployment rate will probably go up.
• 1:07:31
  People will be out of work for a while.
• 1:07:33
  They'll need to be retrained and there will be new industries
• 1:07:36
  being created. And people will, I think over
• 1:07:39
  time, the supply demand will work its way out.
• 1:07:41
  But, and I, I am excited though. I mean, Elon Musk has talked
• 1:07:44
  about the the notion that at some point in the future work
• 1:07:50
  may be like optional, optional. And we're kind of hitting that
• 1:07:54
  area in Star Trek. A lot of these things are
• 1:07:56
  happening where people they didn't use, they don't use money
• 1:07:59
  in the future. That's true.
• 1:08:00
  I don't know how I feel about that though.
• 1:08:02
  Where there's kind of like maybe there's no constraint to
• 1:08:06
  resources at some point where yeah, that's cool.
• 1:08:08
  Anybody who wants to own a, the really amazing car will be able
• 1:08:12
  to because you'll be able to push a button and AI will
• 1:08:14
  create, you know, like theoretically.
• 1:08:17
  And, and so there could be this opportunity like for people to
• 1:08:20
  really work because they want to and because they want to be
• 1:08:22
  productive. And, and, you know, that would
• 1:08:25
  be an interesting future, but there's going to be a, you know,
• 1:08:28
  there's going to be this period where politics is going to have
• 1:08:30
  to deal with that. Too.
• 1:08:31
  Yeah, for sure. Because if you own the
• 1:08:34
  businesses and you own pieces of the economy that drive this
• 1:08:38
  tremendous AI wealth, you're going to do very, very well.
• 1:08:41
  And then there could be this period where where the labour is
• 1:08:45
  not doing well. And so it's like, how do you
• 1:08:47
  transition that? At a certain point, history
• 1:08:50
  shows that at some point there's pitchforks that come out if
• 1:08:54
  there's too much politically, yes, the pitchforks come out if
• 1:08:58
  there's too much inequality occurring.
• 1:09:01
  Yeah, for sure. And.
• 1:09:02
  Particularly when the when the bottom half is suffering.
• 1:09:05
  Yeah, You know, if the bottom half is doing really, really
• 1:09:07
  well, then yeah, you know, you're OK.
• 1:09:10
  You got the rich people with humanoid robotics in their house
• 1:09:13
  or driving flying cars. Then you got the people at the
• 1:09:16
  bottom that are suffering. They can't even eat.
• 1:09:17
  Or that would be a problem. You know are homeless and can't
• 1:09:20
  you know, are suffering, struggling.
• 1:09:22
  I do hope that it does work out like that.
• 1:09:24
  I do hope that it does it. It creates an opportunity where
• 1:09:26
  people can focus on maybe something they're passionate
• 1:09:28
  about or their purpose. Or maybe you got someone that
• 1:09:30
  loves to paint or do poems or theater or whatever it is.
• 1:09:32
  And now because they don't have to have that job they hate that
• 1:09:35
  makes 4550 thousand a year they can go do that.
• 1:09:37
  I mean, that would be kind of cool.
• 1:09:38
  And maybe they like to build stuff and then they're gonna do
• 1:09:40
  that instead of having their job in whatever industry that they
• 1:09:43
  have. Or it's a white collar job,
• 1:09:44
  maybe. So there's that opportunity,
• 1:09:46
  too. Yeah.
• 1:09:48
  Well, this has been a great conversation.
• 1:09:49
  I really appreciate you guys coming on.
• 1:09:51
  I had fun. I mean, this is just some fun
• 1:09:53
  back and forth. Yeah.
• 1:09:54
  Where can people find you guys who should find you and where do
• 1:09:57
  they find you? How do they connect and learn
• 1:09:59
  more about what you guys do? Yeah, great.
• 1:10:00
  I mean go to go to our website www.youstill have to say that
• 1:10:04
  now WWW. We'll link it up in the
• 1:10:07
  description so. Yeah, check the description
• 1:10:09
  Vista, markllc.com. If you go there, you'll find us.
• 1:10:13
  But if you're the folks that should find us, we hope if
• 1:10:16
  you've, if you're, if you're looking to invest, you're
• 1:10:20
  you're, you're an individual who has surplus funds and you want
• 1:10:23
  to invest or you need a new financial advisor, please reach
• 1:10:26
  out to us. If you're an institution or a
• 1:10:28
  nonprofit and endowment or a foundation and you're looking
• 1:10:32
  for help there, please reach out to us.
• 1:10:35
  And if you just want to say hi, come by.
• 1:10:38
  Yeah, we're, yeah, we're in Hinsdale.
• 1:10:39
  Our main office is here in Hinsdale.
• 1:10:41
  We have an office in Phoenix, we have an office downtown Chicago.
• 1:10:44
  So we'd love to, we'd love to chat with you.
• 1:10:48
  And if we can't help you where there's a pretty good chance we
• 1:10:50
  can point in the right direction.
• 1:10:52
  Love it, that's for sure. Thanks again for coming on the
• 1:10:54
  show guys. Appreciate it.
• 1:10:55
  Thank you. Alex, thank you.