Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700.

Hear the full conversations:

• Tom Hegna: Don't Worry, Retire Happy and Income for Life
• Terrell Davis: The Four-Yard Run, Football, and Financial Discipline
• Jen Sincero: Making Money and the Mindset of Wealth (Full Interview)

Produced October 15, 2026, from finished Coach Listens interview audio.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 I talk to very interesting people, and the most important part is that I shouldn't be the only one hearing it.

00:05 I really feel that if these people make sense to me, that everyone out there needs to hear it.

00:10 A successful retirement really has two key components.

00:14 Number one is increasing income for the rest of your life, and number two is risk management.

00:20 So my coach, when I got to the NFL, said, hey, man, we're not trying to have the long runs.

00:26 If you break a long run, that's great.

00:28 But what we want is consistency.

00:29 We want to be able to say, what is repeatable?

00:33 Absolutely, and it's because your mindset is what propels you to take action.

00:38 So if your mindset is focused on, I can't, it's impossible, it's going to be hard and no fun, your actions are going to reflect that, and you're going to get very, very much nowhere.

00:52 And very, very quickly.

00:54 800-661-7383 is the number to call.

00:56 800-661-7383.

00:59 You can also text keyword plan to 600-700.

01:02 Keyword plan to 600-700.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 your book, Paychecks and Playchecks. For folks who've never heard that phrase, can you tell the difference between a paycheck and a playcheck in retirement? Yeah, so that book is really based in math and science. It's the research of the leading PhDs around the world who write these white papers that people don't read while I happen to read them. And really, the paycheck is what you should live on in retirement. And that should be covered with guaranteed lifetime income. So Social Security, pension, lifetime income annuities from an insurance company, that should cover your basic living expenses. That's the paycheck. And then the playcheck, you can invest however you want in stocks, real estate, bonds, crypto, whatever you want. And that's for the travel, the fun, the cruises, the pickleball, the golf, all that kind of stuff. So you want to have both paychecks and playchecks

00:45 to have a successful retirement. Yeah, and retirement's very important. And here's something that let's say you had 50 advisors, different financial advisors, you sat them all down in one room. And you asked them how to build a secure retirement. And you said you probably get 50 different opinions. Why is there so little agreement in this financial industry on something so important as lifetime income? The advisors have kind of followed the baby boomers, all right? And so for 40 years, they were advising them how to diversify their portfolio and accumulate wealth and what stock should I be in and all that kind of stuff. That has nothing to do with retirement. Retirement is totally different, okay? Retirement, you want to make sure that you have increasing income for the rest of your life and that you're managing the risks. You got to manage inflation risk, market risk. You could live a long time. They can raise your taxes. You might need long-term

01:37 care. You might die. There's all these different risks in retirement. So retirement is not about accumulation and diversification and asset allocation. Yeah, those can play a role. But retirement is really about having increasing income for life and managing those key risks. That's what a successful retirement needs. You said they could raise our taxes, Thomas. They will. They will raise our taxes. They're going to have to. I mean, it's math. Yeah. Well, the national debt is kind of scary, isn't it? We're over $40 trillion now that they admit to. That's funded and unfunded liabilities. When you get to look at the promised pensions and all that, we're over $100 trillion in debt that we have a response. Yeah. I've seen, I've seen numbers where it's over $200 trillion for unfunded obligation for social security, Medicare, Medicaid, government pensions, military pensions. I mean, yeah, we're in big trouble. And so, you know, what I've done is first of all, I converted all of my

02:27 IRAs and 401ks to Roth. So, and most of those are in income annuities. So I got all this tax-free income coming in. I moved more of my personal wealth to cash value life insurance. I just finished a 12 pay whole life policy where my premium was 226,000 a year. So, I mean, I'm serious about it. I moved a whole bunch of money into cash value life insurance. And now I I'm sitting in just a great spot because I have all this money that I can get out tax-free. My, my, my annuities are coming to me tax-free. I mean, that's pretty powerful position to be in. And I would encourage your listeners to really, really look at that because what happens if taxes double and, and honestly, to get us out of this mess, they're either going to have to cut spending significantly or raise taxes significantly, and they don't like cutting spending. And so, you know, I think they're going to be raising taxes.

03:14 Lately, we've been having a lot of those Roth conversations with listeners. I think people are starting to realize it makes sense to convert regular IRAs to Roth IRAs. Even if you have to bite the tax bullet right now, you'll never have to bite it again in the future. And that's what people overlook. They like to kick the can down the road, but if you leave all your money in regular traditional IRAs or traditional 401ks, you're going to owe tax every single year, every single year in retirement. And that's going to be money you could have spent on yourself. Now you have to give to the government. And those taxes are going to have to go up, I think significantly. I mean, again, it's just math. You just look at it. You talk to any half smart person who knows numbers and math and any economist, anybody who knows this kind of stuff. And they're going to tell you that we're in a huge, difficult situation and taxes are going to have to go up a lot.

04:00 Well, let's look at your decision process because you said you put about $226,000 a year in a whole life policy and now you're paid off. But what led you to do that? Well, you know, I've been in this industry for 35 years and I've seen how wealthy people use whole life to their advantage. I mean, it's a great bond substitute. It's not a stock substitute. When people try to compare it to stocks, it's not going to beat stocks, but it will be bonds. Okay. And it's tax-free and I can leave life-changing legacy to my family. You know, I wasn't raised, my parents were teachers in the small towns in Minnesota. They didn't make much money. I grew up in a lower middle-class family. When I moved to Arizona, when I first went in the army, everything I owned was in my Masta 626, everything I owned, you know? And so I started with nothing and now I have the ability to not only

04:47 live a great life with my wife and I, but to really have generational wealth transfer to my children and grandchildren. So let's talk about, when we look at Nelson Nash, he was a friend of mine. He wrote the book, Be Your Own Banker. He said, treat a life insurance policy as your own bank. And a lot of folks don't realize that concept, but I think that's what you're doing with the whole life. You also, there are a lot of life insurance policies now that let you use the death benefit to pay for long-term care. So you don't need a standalone long-term care policy anymore. Absolutely. You can solve a lot of problems. And you know, I bought my last two houses with money out of my life insurance policy. Because think about it, we're in Arizona. You had to be a cash buyer to get the good deal down here. If you were going to do a mortgage, you weren't going to get the deal. They wanted cash. Well, where do you come up with one or two million cash in a couple

05:32 days? I, you know, you can't do that at the bank. They're going to fill out this form. We've got to underwrite it. We go see, and then they're going to charge you nine or 10% interest. No, I just call up. In fact, I think I did it all online out of my phone. Two days later, I got, you know, over a million bucks sitting in my bank account to close on the house. And then I, then I pay back, you know, the loan on my, my life insurance policy. So for me, it's been, it's been a really a great blessing. And, and, uh, you know, people don't understand life insurance. In fact, my own son is buying a policy now and he's like, well, dad, you know, I'm looking for a lower premium. I say, Sean, you don't want the lowest premium in life insurance. You want the highest premium. You want to put as much money in there as you can. You know, you want to overfund these policies. You want to put extra money into them. That's, you know, everybody wants a lot of tax-free money. Well, to get a lot of tax-free money, guess what? You got to put some tax-free money. You got to put

06:19 some money in there in order to get it out. And so I don't, you know, I, you know, but I deal, we'll tell you 226,000 was harder than I thought, because that's like 400 something pre-tax to put 226 after tax. So it was a little harder than I thought, but I'm glad I did it. And folks, we're talking to Tom Hegna. He's the author of the really bestselling book, Don't Worry, Retire Happy. A great, great name, great title, Tom, by the way. And, uh, you wrote about the go-go, slow-go and no-go years. And so can you go through those real quick for us? Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of people think retirement's going to be 30 or 40 years of golf, tennis, pickleball, line dancing, and cruises. And that's not true. You go through three distinct phases. The first phase is what I call the go-go years. I'm in my go-go years. I'm about 70% retired. I play golf four to five days a week. I play pickleball two days a week. My wife and I

07:05 travel all over the world. So, uh, but I still do things like this, you know, on my schedule when I'm able to, and when I want to, but that's the go-go years when, when you're, when you're out and you're active and that you actually need a little more income. You know, people say, Oh, when you retire, you'll need 70% of your working income. No, no. For the go-go years, you're going to need more because every day is Saturday and you're out there spending money. The second phase is what I call the slow-go years. Now the slow-go years, you can still do everything in the go-go. You just don't want to anymore. You know, you don't want to go downtown after four 30 because dad can't see when it's dark out. And then the no-go years, the no-go years are those years when you're probably not leaving the building till you're leaving the building. If you know what I'm talking about. So in the go-go years, what's important is having income. That's the most important thing, not assets, assets. I don't care about assets, income. You want to have as much income as you can in your go-go

07:54 years so that you can go, go and have a lot of fun. The slow-go years, it's all about long-term care. And just like you said, any plan is better than no plan. So people can buy a traditional long-term care insurance policy. But I think what makes sense for more people is to get the life insurance policy with a long-term care benefit because that way, if you don't need the long-term care, you still have a death benefit for your kids or you still have an emergency fund. It does three things in one. And then, or if you've got somebody who's medically unable, they, oh, I can't buy life insurance. I can't buy long-term care insurance. I have too many medical problems. There are annuities out there, coach, that will double or triple the income for a period of, you know, three to five years, depending on the company. So that, and most, most long-term care events are three to five years. And so that normally works out pretty well. I say any plan is better than no plan. And then the no-go years,

08:43 that's where life insurance fits. And people say, well, life insurance has nothing to do with retirement. Well, I already told you, I moved more of my personal wealth to cash value life insurance. And by the way, Ernst & Young says the optimal retirement portfolio is 30% income annuity, 30% whole life insurance, 40% investment. So I'm not alone in this. This is researched and documented. All right. But we have four kids. And one of the reasons many retirees don't fully enjoy their retirement is because they think they got to leave some money to their kids. And so one day we were sitting around and my wife said, you know, we were talking about how much we leave the kids. And my wife said, I don't know what you think. And I said, well, if we bought a $1 million second to die life insurance policy, name the four kids beneficiary. When we're both gone, they're going to get a million dollars tax-free. That's 250,000 a piece tax-free plus whatever's left over. I said, let's start there.

09:30 So we bought that $1 million second to die life insurance policy, name the four kids beneficiary. That policy is completely paid up. The total cost of that policy was 150,000. Now think about that for 15 cents on the dollar, we get to transfer a million dollars tax-free to our kids. But here's the best part who gets to spend the other 850,000 we do. So I tell people all the time, don't leave your kids any money. You're supposed to spend your money, leave them life insurance because you can do it for pennies on the dollar. Tom, you famously said that every day is Saturday in retirement. Most people think retirement means spending less. Why do you say it often means spending more, especially early on? Yeah. Well, I think Dr. Wade Fowler did a really good job on this. He calls it the retirement smile. And he says the spending is like a smile. So early in retirement, you're going

10:19 to spend more because those are the go-go years. That's when you're traveling, you're spending time with your grandkids, you're buying, you're still buying stuff, you're maybe get another new car or something. And so you spend more at the beginning. And then when you go into the slow-go years, you typically spend less because now you're not traveling, you're sitting at home more, you're watching TV, the grandkids come to you, you don't go to them. And so you spend less in that slow-go period. And then as you get older, that's when long-term care things kick in. That's when medical problems happen. That's when you need your house redone, you need a walk-in bathtub, you need grab bars in the toilet or whatever. And so then you spend more. And so that's what he calls the retirement smile. You spend more at the beginning, then you spend less, and then you spend more as you age. Yeah.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Consumer advocate Thomas Lipscomb here with you alongside America's wealth, financial, and income coach, best-selling author, Coach Pete D’Arruda. Excited for the show today. Coach, you always have such special guests that come on the program, no less this weekend as well. Well, it's been about 20 years since I've known David, and we're having David Walker, folks, former U.S. Comptroller General, and over with both different parties, so it's not like one party. And I remember, David, we saw each other in 2012 when you were in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. You were on your 10 million a minute bus tour. Remember that day? I remember. It ain't worse now. I know. I was telling Thomas and my daughter Carrie, who's my summer intern here, I told those guys, I said, I'm going to talk about it being 10 million a minute, and David's going to get mad about that.

00:45 Now, what is it now, you think, David? It's over 10. I haven't calculated. Let's put it this way. You know, back then, our total liabilities and unfunded obligations were $70 trillion. Now, they're $136 trillion plus and going up rapidly. And so, you know, we've lost control. There's just absolutely no question. You know, when do you think, because Congress, both sides, they meet, you know, they meet all the time, and who knows what they do up there, but they never accomplish what they're supposed to. They kick this can down the road. They can't even agree on a spending bill anymore. We keep having these government shutdowns. How are they ever going to agree to pay this debt? Well, first, Congress is very good at doing nothing. And that's okay when things are going well. But when things aren't going well and they're getting worse with the passage of time, it's

01:34 not acceptable. And it's a bipartisan problem. It is. You know, whether the Democrats are in charge or Republicans, they've both been kicking the can down the road. You know, there's only one thing in the Constitution that Congress is supposed to do every year, only one. And that's passed all the appropriations bills on time. The last time they did it was 96. They've only done it four times in my lifetime. That's an F minus. So look, here's what it's going to take, Pete. You know, it's going to take a statutory, meaning by law, fiscal commission that will educate, engage the American people on the facts, the truth, the tough choices, solicit input, make a package of recommendations for up or down vote in Congress. And secondly, a constitutional amendment that limits how much debt we can take on as a percentage

02:23 of the economy, absent limited and extraordinary conditions. A constitutional amendment is the only thing that will force the Congress to restore and sustain fiscal sanity. They're not going to, I mean, why would they do that? I mean, I can't even get folks a lot of times to pay attention to the fact that a Roth IRA is a great place. You pay the taxes now, you put the money away, you never have to worry about taxes again. People don't want to even think about spending or paying money right now. And same thing with Congress. It seems like they, you know, they can't get enough traction. I mean, you tried very hard there in 2012 to get attention. How far up did we get in the polls as far as people being aware of the debt and wanting to get something done? Do you remember? Well, first, I have done Roth transfers last year and this year. Okay. So I believe in leading by example. Yes. Secondly, people are getting more concerned about it.

03:11 And it's not just Main Street America. It's our investors. We're starting to have a supply and demand imbalance. We need to issue a lot more debt and the appetite for our debt is going down. China has significantly reduced its debt holdings. Other countries are becoming reticent about buying as much of our debt as they have historically. You know, we're having to pay higher interest rates in order to be able to finance our deficits. The second largest expense is interest. The fastest growing expense is interest. And what do you get for interest? Nothing. And so things are changing. I'm about ready to go back on the road again in late 26 and 27 because while these issues won't be a top priority for the midterms, they will be for the 28 election.

03:58 And I've got a new book coming out this fall that hopefully will be a basis to be able to get people much more informed and engaged. Do you have a title for the book yet? Yes. Saving Social Security in America. Common Sense Solutions. What do you think of the top two or three solutions people can push their congressmen or woman to do now? Well, you know, we need that commission. There are bipartisan bills in both the House and the Senate that hopefully can get moved to the lame duck session. Nothing's going to happen before the midterms. Congress is not going to pass a constitutional amendment. And so we need to go with Plan B. Plan B is what the founders envisioned. The states need to get together, propose an amendment. But Congress should have called a state-led convention as far back as 79.

04:44 They didn't do it. They're stiff in the states. And now I'm trying to get a state attorney general to sue the Congress for failing to call the convention. I think these are very two significant things that are either going to happen or not happen in calendar 2026. And so let's hope that they do. You know, Social Security, the trust fund goes to zero in 2032. That's an action-enforcing event. And that's why I say that while it's not going to be a big issue in this year's midterms, it will be in 2028. We need to start telling the ground on it, turning the heat up. It's right when I was supposed to start getting Social Security in 67. I hear you, my friend. By the way, the 67 is probably going to go up one month a year over 24 years.

05:31 Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't afford to pay us. We're living longer. And we don't have that money there. It's not there. So the Roth IRA, it makes a lot of sense now because at least we know where the tax rates are now. And if we put it in a place that the government supposedly can't touch, I mean, how confident are you that they won't try to change those rules going down the road? Well, your grandfather, okay, even if they try to change the rules going, they're not going to do it retroactively. And I do think that the individual income tax rates are as low as they're ever going to be. And while the problem to be able to put our finances in order are primarily a spending problem, we're going to have to have more revenues. And the single largest source of revenue is individual income taxes. That's not the one I want them to get revenue from. I understand that.

06:17 Yeah, that was raising tax rates. Folks, we're talking to former U.S. Comptroller General Mr. David Walker joining us on the show today. David, it's just frustrating when we all can see this, but it doesn't seem like Congress really cares. Well, the biggest deficit that we have, Pete, is a leadership deficit. You know, we have too many laggards, not enough leaders, too many people living for today rather than help create a better tomorrow. You know, the sad thing is, is for the first 200 years roughly of our republic, we believed in the concept of stewardship, which is not just generating positive results today, not just leaving things better off when you leave them when they came, but leaving things better positioned for the future. We've abandoned that.

07:29 People in it. And it's called Grow It or Blow It. Grow It or Blow It. And it's about, like, people you remember in the past, like the Commodore Vanderbilt, all the famous people, the big millionaires and billionaires who made the money. And within three generations, many of their fortunes they left was gone because the grandkids never saw mom and dad working as hard as they did. The kids usually kept it alive for the most part. It's the grandkids because they didn't see all the sweat and equity that went into building this empire. And so fast, the empire disappeared a lot of times. And that's what's happening here with our government, if we're not careful. Our whole U.S. system could go the same route as some of these inherited wealth folks had the trouble with. Well, we need to learn from history. We need to learn from others.

08:15 There are plenty of superpowers that have existed in the past that no longer exist. The leading indicator on the way up is economic power. The leading indicator on the way down is loss of economic power. We're not exempt from the laws of prudent finance. If you can't put your finances in order, you will lose economic power with adverse consequences both internationally and domestically. Not only economic consequences but also national security consequences. Now, a lot of people listening say, ah, this doesn't really apply to me. I don't really care. The government's going to do it or they don't do it. But what can we really do? Let's take it down to the grassroots level. People are listening. They're getting mad. They should be getting mad because the dollars, folks, that you've been putting aside are worth less and less because of this. And especially if taxes keep going up, the money you thought you were going to have isn't going to be there anymore.

09:00 And, David, what can the average consumer, the average citizen that's listening right now, how can we get this to a point where we can get that grassroots to grow to 60%, 70%? If we can get up to 70%, 80% of everyone on Congress, they'll have to do something. Well, I'm president of a new and emerging effort that has not gone public yet called We the People. And we're going to try to have a major citizen education activation campaign for the 28th election to get 50 million Americans engaged and communicating with their current and prospective elected officials to make these issues a top priority in the 2028 election. And let me give you some numbers, Pete, that I think people can relate to more.

09:47 Most people can't relate to billions, much less tens or hundreds of trillions. So let's say that Uncle Sam is a real person. And I'm going to take the financial statements for the U.S. government for the year ended September 30, 2025. And all I'm going to do is drop eight zeros. So this is what Uncle Sam's finances look like. He made $52,000. He spent $73,000. He's in the hole for the year $21,000. He's got total liabilities and unfunded obligations of $1,362,000. But don't worry. He's got $61,000 in assets. So he's only underwater $1,301,000. Would you lend Uncle Sam money?

10:33 No. Get out of my office, I'd say. By the way, Jamie Dimon, who's a pretty smart guy, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was asked this past week, would he buy long-term U.S. bonds? Personally, he said no. Yeah. I mean, so it's just frustrating when we talk about these kind of things. Folks, if you're interested in finding out how to get that Roth conversion started, because you're going to have to pay taxes when you convert the money from a regular IRA or 401K or 403B or thrift savings plan over to a Roth. But you better pay it now than pay it later over and over again. It's the analogy of a farmer who has a bunch of IRS agents come up when he's planting the seeds one season, and they say, hey, Mr. Farmer, we can either tax you on these seeds and never come back again, or we can let you not pay tax on these seeds today but come back every year at harvest and tax you over and over again.

11:26 I think we all know where we'd stand on that. When we come back with David in a little while, we're going to talk about the We the People tour. We're also going to talk about common-sense strategies we can all employ to make sure that we're on the right track. We'll be right back after this. Loving the conversation today. This really, truly is a special interview that we're having today. Coach, you've brought in David Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States. Folks, if you want to catch up on the conversation, maybe the radio dial has just tuned in to us. Find podcasts online at FinancialSafari.com. Again, that is FinancialSafari.com. David, it's frustrating because you and I both can see this happening, and I know a lot of folks out there can see what's going on with the government. But nobody wants to do anything about the debt. And it's, you know what happens, it's going to keep growing.

12:13 Can't ignore it. Ignoring is not going to make it go away. No one wants to make these uncomfortable decisions. They don't want to get voted out, I guess. So it's a lot easier to promise people a lot of free stuff than it is to tell people we need to tighten the belt a little bit. Well, everybody wants something for nothing. I mean, you know, one party wants to have tax cuts. The truth is not all tax cuts stimulate the economy. Very few pay for themselves. The other party wants to grow government even more, even in circumstances where we're not generating the results that we need to achieve. The truth is we're going to have to reform Social Security and make it solvent, sustainable, secure. We're going to have to do the same thing for Medicare. But we've way overpromised on health care. We're going to have to dramatically reform our health care system. We can get into that if you want. Yes. Social Security is very easy to solve.

13:00 We can exceed the expectation of every generation of Americans. We can talk about that a little bit if you want. But the toughest choices are going to have to be on health care and taxes. Those are going to be the toughest choices. Well, we were talking when I told Thomas that I was going to have you on this week. Well, last week we started talking and I said, you know, this debt is out of control and people don't realize it. And David's been talking about it for a long time. The Social Security aspect, the health care aspect, and nothing is good about this. So Thomas was excited to have you on because he did want to hear about your opinions on, I know, Thomas, you mentioned the health care there, because the Obamacare, when it came in, was supposed to lower prices and all it has done. It was a big time bomb, wasn't it? It was. It's been especially having four kids now. We have to have these conversations.

13:46 It feels like every month or two, do we go to the doctor or not? And I can't believe in America I'm having to ask that question. Yeah. So what do you think about the health care, Dave? Well, first, we've over-promised, over-subsidized, and we have failed on the three elements you have to have to have a successful and sustainable system. Now, we're in baseball season. Let me tell you what those three are. Number one, you have to have properly designed incentives that encourage people to do the right thing and discourage them from doing the wrong thing. You need to have adequate transparency, including things like cost and quality, to provide reasonable assurance they will do the right thing and discourage them from doing the wrong thing. And then you have to have appropriate accountability, which means positive reinforcement when people do the right thing and accountability when they don't.

14:35 In the case of health care, we're zero for three. That's a strikeout, okay? And so we need to step back and ask ourselves how much universal health care, and I did use the word universal, how much universal health care is appropriate, affordable, and sustainable? And most Americans believe that's preventable wellness and catastrophic care that everybody ought to get. If you want more than that, then you get it from your employer, you get it from your union, you get your industry association, or maybe you buy it through the Affordable Care Act, which is, by the way, misnamed, just like the Inflation Reduction Act. How does that work out, okay? But, you know, you've got to keep in mind Congress is not subject to truth in advertising laws, okay?

15:22 If they were, a lot of people would be in trouble. But, so, you know, we need a dramatic reform because we spend about 50% more of our economy on health care than other industrialized nations as a percentage of GDP, and we get below average results. Yeah. Well, you know what's been very troublesome to me is the amount of fraud we keep seeing, like billions and billions of dollars of fraud. I'm kind of mad that I didn't think of one of these things and open up some phony companies with phony patients and no beds and bill the government for billions a year and just get away with it. Because I really haven't seen anyone, you know, we're not seeing these perp walks. And if you don't see the perp walk, I mean, you start thinking maybe I should try something. Well, you know, criminals go where the money is. You know, remember, you know, people asked in the past, why do you rob banks?

16:07 That's where the money is. That's Willie Sutton. Yeah, yeah, I remember they said. Health care is where the money is, okay? Right. But understand this. The federal government needs to learn a lesson. You need to have adequate controls up front before the money goes out. Because once it goes out, you're probably not getting it back. The other thing you need to do is you can't have self-certification. Newsflash. Criminals have no problem self-certifying if they're eligible for something they're not eligible for. And then thirdly, you have to have information systems that will share information, you know, across these different systems. You know, so you're not paying things to dead people. So you're not, you know, very simple things. But again, the government is a lag indicator when it comes to these things.

16:56 And so, like, Social Security, what's the solution for that? Because we're coming right up. I mean, we're right here on the deadline now. It's just a few years ago where people are going to start feeling catastrophic changes. Well, here's where I think we're going, okay? As I said, we can exceed the expectation of every generation of Americans because young people don't think they're going to get it. And they're wrong. They are. They're going to get it probably at a different age and maybe a different amount. Seniors think they're going to get cut dramatically. That's not going to happen either. So we can reform it, phase in the changes, and everybody gets more than they think they're going to get. I think that's exceeding expectations. So what are some of the things? I think we're probably going to see a further gradual increase in the normal retirement age because we are living longer. Secondly, I think we're going to see a significant increase in the taxable wage-based cap, but not an elimination of the taxable wage-based cap.

17:48 I think we're going to see an effort to try to prevent, or if we can't prevent it, minimize tax rate increases because that's a very regressive tax. I think we're going to see adjustment in the benefit formula so we end up keeping more people out of poverty, but we don't turn it into a means-tested welfare program. But upper-middle and upper-income individuals get somewhat less of a replacement rate than otherwise. I think we're going to see changes in the cost-of-living formula, if you will. And I think we're also going to see, for people that don't have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, an automatic savings supplement that would come on on top of the reform-defined benefit system.

18:34 And I think we'll keep the defined benefit system because most everything else you have in the retirement world is defined contribution, where the individual ends up bearing the investment risk. Again, folks, we're talking to former U.S. Comptroller General, Mr. David Walker, joining us, generous enough to join us for two segments today. David, here's what Thomas said to me the other day, and I looked at him and he said, I could say it. We did this little back and forth, and he said, oh, you could say it. We were doing our little communications by sign, baseball signs. I was throwing signs to him. And he said this to me. He said, Coach, if they would have let us have our own individual Social Security accounts when we first started this system, we could have all picked where we had our money, but we all would have had our own money in our own little accounts. Why did the government not do it like that? Well, for one thing, the government created this program in 1935.

19:21 It started paying benefits in 1940. It's a pay-as-you-go system, and therefore the people who ended up getting the early benefits got a huge return on investment, okay? You know, the simple fact of the matter is is that most people don't understand that Social Security is three insurance programs. It's just not a retirement savings account. It is retirement income. It is disability income. And it is survivor's income. And one of the guys that's going to be going on tour with me is a guy by the name of Joe Penland Sr., Joe from Texas. And you can find out more about it at his website, Joe from Texas. And he benefited from all three of those programs when he was young. And he's lived the American dream. He's now wealthy.

20:07 He's a very successful entrepreneur. But, you know, you need to understand what the system is. Insurance system, not just, you know, a savings and retirement account. Yeah. Well, it wasn't designed to be that. It was designed to be a safety net, which that's – Correct. We want to keep that safety net. We can't live – like, you need other money to supplement that, but it's a good way to help pay the bills, I guess, to the living expenses. Well, you know, when we formed it, it was intended to be the foundation. And like a house, you can't just live on a foundation. You need – Get rain done. You need a sponsored plan. You need personal savings on top of that in order to have a habitable dwelling. Yeah. We've got a couple minutes here before we let you go. I want to ask you what you think about this, what appears to be a push towards socialism. Where do you think the money is coming to get all these political ads to push socialism?

20:55 Do you think it's coming from other countries that are trying to bring us down by making us try to get too many people interested in socialism? They've never told them the bad things about socialism, have they? Unfortunately, many Americans don't learn from history and don't learn from others, and this is a perfect example of that. There has never been a true socialist, which many times converts into communism, that's been successful, that stood the test of time. And if you want to scare the bejesus out of somebody, have them read the platform for the Democrat Socialists of America. It's basically paralleling Saul Alinsky's, you know, communist principles, you know, take control of education, take control of health care, don't worry about deficits and debt, tax the rich.

21:43 I mean, it's, you know, it won't work, okay? But again, the problem is people don't learn from history and people don't learn from others. If they did, they wouldn't have anything to do with this. And I'm one of the national co-founders of a group called No Labels, and No Labels is trying to fight the wingnuts, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and provide support to the Sensible Center, which is mainstream America, no matter what your political affiliation is. I think the Sensible Center is about 80% of the people, and like you call them, the wingnuts are 10% on either side, right around there. Yeah, the Sensible Center is at least 60%, at least 60%, and last time I checked, that's a winning formula. It is. It's a majority. Let's say change those rules. That doesn't meet the filibuster requirement, but yeah.

22:29 You know, once I started studying Saul Alinsky, you see it all the time these days. I mean, if you study his rules for radicals, I mean, you can, I can see it. I said, oh, here, they're trying that method. And you know why? Because it works, because nobody's really, nobody calls them out on it. But we see it. I mean, you can see it, and once you see it, you never don't see it, can you? Nope, that's right. Folks, his name is David Walker. David, when is the book coming out, and when is the tour? I think the book will probably come out on Amazon around October time frame, and you know, we're going to start doing some events later this year and continuing into 2027, because as I said, this is not going to be a big issue for the midterms, but it will be. It must be for the 28th election. Well, when the book comes out, we're going to have you back on. How's that? That'd be great. All right, folks, David Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General, thanks for your time today, and folks, we'll be right back after this.

23:18 Thanks, David. Thanks, Coach Pete. Take care. Thomas will get you a copy of this when we get it done. Yes, sir. Sounds great. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Well folks, today we have a very special guest. His name is Professor Cam Harvey. He's the professor at Duke University. Doc, welcome in. Thank you for inviting me. It's a strange financial world. I've been around the financial arena for 33 years. I've watched it before I got into the financial arena. The market goes up, down, all around. People get influenced and enticed, sometimes by big market swings either way. A lot of people sell when they should buy and buy when they sell. But overall, do you think that headlines influence people's investing habits too much? I mean, get in the way, in other words, of people's success sometimes. Yeah, I think so. One of the key things is that the stock market is volatile. And some of that volatility is just what we call noise.

00:47 So there's some short-term news. People overreact to it or underreact to it. And that leads to mistakes in the short term when people should be thinking about longer term investing. It's one of the biggest mistakes that investors make. They look and judge the short-term news to make very consequential decisions for their portfolio. So they should have a longer-term perspective. You know, I grew up, as you did, when we had newspapers. That's how we got our stock news. Like you'd look at, you'd try to find your stocks the next day in the paper and see if you were up or down. Before the internet. Remember those days? Yes. Do you think the internet has sped up the market cycles in people's heads? I mean, we used to say if you didn't have 10 years to wait and leave a stock alone,

01:34 you really shouldn't get into a stock because of the cycles of the market. Your opinion on just overall the rapidity, I don't know if that's a name, but people are trading so rapid they're not really giving time a lot of times for their stocks to grow. Sort of like if you planted a seed and if a seed didn't sprout in a day, you re-till the soil and plant another seed. Do you think patience has suffered because of social media? Definitely. So, it's interesting you give the newspaper analogy. So to get a story into a newspaper was vetted. So you've got professional reporters, you've got professional editors, and you've got this lag of 24 hours. So what it does is it reduces some of this noise.

02:21 Now anybody is a reporter. Nobody is a blogger. There's almost no editorial control. And, and this is a fundamental difference, the more outrageous your comments, the more eyeballs or page views that you actually get. So there's an incentive to actually say things that are exaggerated and that influences people. So I think that the internet and the rapidity of the information has made things worse. And I come from the University of Chicago, the School of Efficient Markets, but I'm not afraid to say that the market today is less efficient today than it was 20 years ago.

03:08 And the reason being because people aren't educated enough or what's the main reason why it's not quite as good as it used to be? Yeah. So people naively measure the efficiency of a market by things like, well, transactions costs, which have come down dramatically. Yes. And you've got online brokers that make it very easy to trade. So what this has done paradoxically, it's increased the number of retail investors. And those retail investors are operating at a very large disadvantage. They do not have big data and quantitative models working for them. And the second thing that's really important is the explosion of passive investing.

03:59 So passive investing is more than active investing now. It's about 53% of all investing. And a passive investor doesn't care about fundamentals. That's completely irrelevant. They just buy according to market capitalization. And what that means, it hardwires into a portfolio a mechanical overinvestment in overvalued stocks and underinvestment in undervalued stocks. So this is very negative for price discovery. It's negative for liquidity. It's negative for systemic risk because these giant buys of everything happen and they can be giant cells of everything. So you put these things together and markets are not what people thought they would be 20 years ago.

04:54 And we've kind of degraded. So the individual investor, I think they're more and more at a disadvantage if they're trying to swing trade or day trade, right? Because you're going against these massive algorithms and AI computerized trading. You really don't stand a chance. You're being led to slaughter as a sheep a lot of times, aren't you? Oh, this is definitely the case. There's a reason that the transaction fees are so low on Robinhood. That's because Robinhood sells their order flow. And you think, well, who would want to pay for the quarter flow? Well, it turns out Robinhood and not just Robinhood, but other online brokers, mainly retail investors. And the hedge funds actually want to trade against a retail investor.

05:43 So a hedge fund doesn't want to trade against Jane Street or Citadel. So they want to trade against a retail investor. If they are, let's say, buying securities from Citadel, they're thinking, well, what does Citadel know? They might know something that I don't. That's a dangerous trade. But if they're trading against a retail investor, no big deal. They're willing to pay for it. And this is just another layer here. And it's not just buying. They're shorting into the buying a lot of times. That's what I see a lot of times is in dark pools they're called too. A lot of times some very mysterious shorts, we'll say. We'll say it nicely that you really don't stand a chance. If you're trying to beat the big boys in this kind of game, sort of like going to Vegas with

06:28 a couple hundred dollars and thinking you're going to beat the big bookies there who know what the spreads are and the games and all that kind of stuff. When did you see a change? I mean, back in the day, because I remember I had a, I think my first, JB Oxford was my first online trading account back in the late 90s. And it was $300 a trade plus a penny per share. And that's when we had the 12 and a half cent kind of levels too. So there's a lot of, a lot of money was made on each transaction. And now they're making money on making it affordable to get in because they can short, when you're buying, they know you're buying. So they can even take your shares sometimes and then they can we short them. Yeah, definitely. So the acceleration really happened about four years ago when the amount of online trading

07:14 really exploded and the price, like the cost of trading just went down dramatically. Yeah. So on your mobile phone, you're checking and trading all the time. So that's when it really took over. The passive investing has been increasing very steadily. So I've actually done calculations and looked at the degree of passive compared to overall investing. So as I said, it's like 53% now, but it is on trend to go to 80%. Wow. And at some point, like what, what is the threshold where markets become really dysfunctional? Yeah. Well, and then you add a lot of these brokerages will let you go on margin. And you know, maybe people are doing home equity lines and that happened in 2008.

08:03 And I saw a lot of people getting a lot of trouble for doing that financially. But people are still doing it because it's like, it's like an online casino. You know, it's fun to win. That's right. And you, a lot of times you lose and now you're trying to play catch up. And that's where people are getting in trouble. They're putting their retirement, what worries me the most is people are doing this with their retirement money. I mean, that's, what's one thing to do with money you can afford to lose, but you can't afford to lose the retirement money. Yeah. So again, the online brokers make it so easy to trade and it's not just stocks. Yeah. So we've got prediction markets also that are increasingly popular. Yes. We can gamble on almost anything. We've got crypto on the side. Yeah. So, so this is basically enabling a large scale kind of gambling.

08:50 Right. It used to be that you needed to get on a plane to go to Vegas. Yeah. You don't need to anymore. That was expensive to do. Vegas is having less people come out there now, mysteriously. Yeah. They had to restructure. Yes. It is. Again, we're with Professor Cam Harvey, folks, a great professor in finance here at Duke University, right down the road from where we're taping this. Crypto, you mentioned that. Your opinion on crypto. I mean, it's come out of nowhere. And, you know, we watch Bitcoin go way up and go way down, has 90% swings. It's not for the light at heart, is it? No. So, Bitcoin is extremely volatile. So, think of Bitcoin as four times as volatile as the S&P 500. Wow. So, think of Bitcoin.

09:35 And it is sometimes sold as a substitute for gold, as a safe haven asset. But, let's consider the following fact. Over the last 14 years, Bitcoin has had a drawdown of 60%, six zero percent, six times. And that's not including what's happening today. So, any asset that's got drawdowns like that, so frequently, is hardly a safe haven asset. So, it is also important to actually differentiate the different types of crypto. Right. So, Bitcoin is a crypto that originally was going to be a method for peer-to-peer transactions.

10:28 That was the original model of Satoshi Nakamoto. Right. It's not. It's a store of value. It doesn't have much throughput. It's got value because people believe it's got value. There's other cryptos that have, like, more utility. So, Ether, which is the crypto of Ethereum, you can do the transfers from one person to another, but you can also use that currency to pay for computing time on the Ethereum system. So, it actually has a value. It has something of use. So, you pay Amazon Web Services for computing time. So, you pay Ethereum. So, it's got some tangible value. And these computer programs are very interesting because they enable yet another layer.

11:16 And that is the collateralized crypto. So, think of stablecoins. Okay. So, these are not volatile. Or, they're only as volatile as the underlying asset. Yes. And these stablecoins are extremely useful. We now have regulations in the US with the Genius Act. And they really disrupt the banking system. So, think of a transfer anywhere in the world in 1 to 12 seconds. That's amazing. Compared to 3 to 5 days. Yeah. So, it really does change the game. So, I would say that I'm more enthusiastic about the cryptos that actually have some fundamental value than ones that are just used for speculation. I was talking to some friends about that same thing.

12:03 Because Bitcoin was originally built to be the transactional coin. Yeah. But no one's transacted. They're buying it and storing it. And so, until it actually proves its worth. Now, I did have in 2012, I had a guy on the show and he talked about the million dollar pizza. Yes. Because the guy used Bitcoin to buy a pizza. And actually, it's two pizzas. It must have been good at Caesars. Right. And that was a million dollars worth of Bitcoin back in 12. And I think Bitcoin right then was around $1,000. It's a billion dollar pizza now. It's crazy. Exactly. So, it's just looking at anything in this world, it has to have a use. And it has to have a use to the general public. Not just like if me and you use it, but nobody else uses it. It has to have a real big use to get the value it's basically claiming right now. I mean, even right now, it's around, as we taped this, around $60,000 a coin.

12:49 We do need to be careful because it's not just the use today, but the potential use in the future. Yes. So, there's always some option value that things could change. But you're right. There's got to be a use case. Yes. And that use case might be viable today and it might be viable in the future. Yeah. Well, fascinating. Folks, this is Professor Cam Harvey. When we come back, we're going to dive a little bit into precious metals and safe retirement strategies. 800-661-7383. 800-661-7383. Or text the word PLAN to 600-700. That's PLAN to 600-700.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Folks, this is Coach Pete. We're back with Professor Cam Harvey from Duke University. Cam, so many different choices for the, like, let's say someone's watching this and they're 55 years old. And they've been watching all these news programs. You know, you can't help it. You turn the TV on, there's Kramer saying buy, buy, buy one day and then sell, sell, sell the next. And you go online. There's all sorts of places you can get on that freeway of buying and selling your own stuff. You don't need a broker anymore. Why do we even need brokers anymore, people say. Many times you don't. But how important is it to have a real plan, though, as we are 55 and up, a real plan for income and retirement? Because we don't want to work all our lives. So we get to that checkered flag, let's say age 65. That's what we were always told retirement age was. So we're there, time to retire.

00:46 But then we realize all I have is my 401K and it has over 403B or TSP and it has a big balance on it. But it doesn't tell me how much I can take out of this balance to make sure I don't outlive this money. I mean, that's a big problem for anybody as we get older. Because, number one, I've seen we're going to live longer. Peter Diamandis, who's a futurist, told me years ago, he said, Coach, you'll be able to buy years in the future. And I think we're coming, you know, all the fancy DNA technology and all that. Maybe you can. How important is it, though, for anyone watching to make sure they have lifetime income, not just Social Security income? Yeah. Yeah. So, number one, you cannot count on Social Security. Yep. So that trust fund will run out of money in 2033. We're getting close.

01:32 We are close. Yeah. And there is very little disagreement about this. It's very easy to forecast. And that means if nothing is done, there'll be at least a 20% haircut in the Social Security. So you cannot rely upon that. So it makes it even more important to plan for retirement. And I do believe that this 65 retirement is becoming a little more fluid. And people actually think, well, 65, I've got at least 20 years. And I want to continue working. And it might not be 35 hours a week. So what I see happening in the economy is that people will continue to work, but at reduced hours.

02:21 So you come in a couple of days a week. Just to keep your mind moving. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But never, so that's important because it means you've still got some income. Right. But it is just much more relaxed than today. The other part is your financial portfolio. So that needs to be carefully structured. And again, you're investing for the next 20 years. You're not investing for what's going to happen tomorrow or next week. Right. So you need to have a longer term perspective. And indeed, it would be, for example, a mistake if you've got a 20-year perspective to be 100% in a money market fund. Yeah. So you need to still take some risk. And there's so many opportunities in the U.S. given what's happening with so many disruptions.

03:13 AI is in our face, obviously. But there's other things going on. So our financial system becoming much more efficient with decentralized technologies, quantum computing, and you mentioned biomedical. Yeah. So this confluence of DNA, RNA, and proteins, dealing with them all at the same time. So this will extend life. And I'm a big believer in that. All of these demographic projections are wrong. So again, you need to plan. You cannot rely upon a government that's got a $38 trillion debt right now. Yeah. And a $1.9 trillion deficit at a time where we've got decent economic growth, low unemployment, inflation that is below 3%, and a stock market that's at near record highs.

04:11 So it doesn't make any sense. So you cannot rely upon somebody handing the money out. So when the time comes, I mean, yeah. So again, it's even more important now to depend on yourself instead of other people. So if someone's watching now and they're just starting to work, save some money every year somewhere, right, to save for retirement. Earmark it for 40, 50 years down the road, a time capsule. Pay yourself first, we always say. But let's say someone's watching now, they're in their 50s, or let's say 40-something, and they do have a good balance in the 401k, but they've never thought about having to turn that balance into a stream of income they cannot live. That's going to be more and more important as we get older because we're going to get older and older. So the key thing is to have a diversified, balanced portfolio.

05:00 Right. And the focus, when you're younger, let's say 55, is on building the capital. And you need to be careful here. So it would be a mistake to take an unreasonable, undiversified risk on a certain sector. And you could be just a giant loser on that. It's also, in my opinion, a mistake to just invest passively. You can do better than that. There are low-cost products that are available that I've got a recent paper, for example, that I didn't know this. It's kind of remarkable that if you take a portfolio of like Russell 1000 value and then blend it 50-50 with Russell 1000 growth, you exactly get the Russell 1000.

05:54 And I'm thinking about that with some co-authors. And that's not really what you want because it means that you're investing in expensive, low-growth stocks. That's a pretty bad combination. That's a bad idea. So it's really hard to justify that. So doing very simple things like structuring a portfolio that's got a balance between value and growth, which are well accepted in terms of risk premia, but excluding those stocks that are expensive and low-growth at the same time. You can be expensive and have high growth. That is fine. But there's no economic or financial justification for investing in expensive, low-growth stocks.

06:44 Strip those out. Folks, what would Professor Cam Harvey from Duke University say, yeah, when you talk about expensive and low-growth, sometimes they do a good job of disguising that, though, for the average investor. I mean, you have to look behind the scenes to see because no one's going to admit they're low-growth. I mean, no one would invest in it, right, especially if it's expensive. Yeah, so this research, the paper's called Fundamental Growth. It looks at very simple measures of growth. So things that we can easily observe, like sales growth or R&D growth. Like, that's fundamental. If you're investing in R&D, that's growth. Yes. And then it's easy to identify these stocks that are super expensive and low-growth and just exclude them from your portfolio.

07:32 And the results are remarkable. Peter Lynch founded the Fidelity Magellan Fund back in the day. And I still remember his quote. He said, invest in companies you know. So if you use it, like Facebook, that's why I invested in Facebook years ago when they IPO'd, then they went way down. When the insider's lock expired, they were able to dump. I got my Facebook at $17 a share because that's the first place I always go. You know, I admit it. When I log on in the morning, I check Facebook, see what my friends are doing. See, nowadays, I see who's, unfortunately, who's passed away or who's had bad news in there. That's where we go for our news. I went to my 40-year high school reunion last year, and I almost didn't even want to go because I already knew everything about everybody there. We saw it on Facebook. But we look at, like, index.

08:19 Like, Vanguard has VOO. It's S&P 500. It's where I put a lot. To me, I call that a passive fund for me because I'm not buying and selling it. I just put money in there every month. I'm double-cost averaging in. And the S&P over history has done pretty well. But if someone wants to totally eliminate any chance of loss with some money, we do this with some fixed annuities that are out there that tie their return to a share of some market index. I kind of like the S&P because not many games can be played there, but there's some other indexes out there in the annuity world, again, protecting the principal but have a chance of growth. And if the market goes down, you don't get any share of the loss, which, to me, that gives people peace of mind. Annuities are great for income like that. But we also need some more maximum potential horsepower somewhere else.

09:05 So if you had a strategy like that where you were using, let's say you're 60 years old and using the rule of 100, maybe put 50% of the money in annuity with income for the future, so now you know what your income's going to be, what would you advise for the other 50%? Somebody like that. What do you think would be a good place for them? So I totally agree that this idea of a fixed index annuity is a good idea in that it provides peace of mind. Yeah. So you don't have to bear that downside. And I think psychologically, that's really important. So as for the other part of your portfolio, again, I would be hesitant to do just purely passive investing. Some blend of value and growth for equities is, I think, important.

09:54 But it's not just equity. So a portfolio needs to be diversified. There should be some fixed income, high-quality fixed income in the portfolio. And there should also be a safe portion of your portfolio in addition to the FIA component. And that safe component might be inflation-protected bonds. It might be some commodities like gold. So to have part of your portfolio ultra-safe, I think, is important also. Gold's been fun to watch. I watch this show on Friday night. They go out and they look for gold in Alaska. And they used to say when they'd find like 10 ounces, it was worth $10,000.

10:41 Now 10 ounces are worth almost $50,000. It's crazy how the gold market is going crazy. What about silver? Silver's done pretty well, too. And silver has an industrial use. Of course, there's a lot more silver out there, right? Yeah, so silver is the number two. And there is a lot of distance between gold and silver. Yes. So both in the past have been currencies. And we kind of lost the gold standard in August of 1971. It's been a while now. Yeah, it's been a while. Gold also has tangible uses. So 5% of gold is used in technology. So your mobile phone has got gold in it. 2% in dentistry. And over 50% in jewelry. And that's not going away.

11:27 So gold has got this tangible use. Plus, it has got this track record of millennia in terms of the world's oldest financial asset. It's been a currency before. It is held by central banks and reserves. So there's a lot of like check, check, check for gold. And now it's just incredibly easy to hold, either through an ETF like GLD or in your wallet as tokenized gold. So like a stable coin but backed by gold. See, that's going to be interesting as more and more people hear about tokenization in the crypto world because you'll have a real-world asset behind the crypto. So that's a great combination. So your point is super interesting. Yep. So we lost the gold standard August 15, 1971.

12:17 So the tokenized gold holds the possibility. I know it sounds crazy. The possibility of a de facto return to a type of gold standard that is opt-in. No central bank needs to be involved. But you've got something else that is a medium of exchange, a store of value that you can use to pay for stuff. Yeah. Very easy to do. So it's a very intriguing idea that, you know, forget the Fed or the Bank of England or Bank of Japan. And we can return to a type of gold standard. And it's your choice. So I think it's very exciting. Do you think there may be some folks out there that don't want to go back to the gold standard? It's their choice. Totally.

13:03 If they don't want it, fine. Well, the people get away with a lot of stuff because we're not on the gold standard. You can leverage crazily without being on the gold standard. So I think it'll be more controlled to the consumer if we go back to the gold standard. It is true that today the central banks have a monopoly over fiat. And we see what happens with that. They print more money and then we suffer the inflation that results. It was out of control a few years ago. This is different. So gold's inflation is very steady. And what I mean by gold inflation, the new mining. So the mining adds to the gold above ground. For the last 10 years, that inflation is less than 2%. So think of that as roughly real economic growth. So this is an asset with a long track record that over the very long term has held its value.

13:59 And it is a credible currency because it's been a currency. It's been around since King Tut before that. Two questions. That's it. We'll finish up with two. Number one, flavor of the day. All right. So we get this every single year. People start calling our show or ask me when they meet me in person, in public. And they say, Coach, what do you think about blank and how can we get in it? Right now, SpaceX. We're hearing about SpaceX all the time. What's your opinion on these flavor of the day kind of stocks? Because I know people run into them when it's going to be a crazy IPO when it comes out. That's when a lot of people get hurt, right? When they're buying on the run up. Yeah. So it is the greatest investment mistake that people make. Yeah. And they continue to make it. And that is buying high and selling low.

14:47 My students know that that's one of the main lessons in my course, to do the opposite. You buy low and sell high. Yes. But it is just so tempting to extrapolate, to jump on the bandwagon. And as people are jumping on the bandwagon, the price continues to go up. Validating this hypothesis. And fear of missing out. People jump in. This is Warren Buffett's words. Until... Tipping point. The tipping point. And it unravels. So you need to exercise discipline. And buying at all-time highs is generally a bad strategy. That's a good point on that. Finally, now we've seen this happen a lot locally.

15:32 Lately I've seen a lot of it. Your opinion on non-traded REITs. You're familiar with that. It's an illiquid investment. You're investing in real estate. It's sold a lot of times. Like, hey, you can't afford to buy your own nursing home, but why don't you invest with a thousand other people that are all going to pull the money and buy this nursing home. The problem with non-traded REITs that I see is that they're non-traded. Once you put your money in, it's very illiquid. And we've seen several of these lately go Chapter 11. So they're sold as an income stream, what I hear. And can it really be sold as a lifetime income stream if there's no chance a lot of times of having lifetime income from them? So it's an excellent question. And this has to do with an illiquidity premium. So if something is not liquid, you've got a lockup, there's a premium associated with that.

16:22 So if you're able to hold something for the longer term, you can reap that premium. This is the reason that university endowments invest in venture capital and highly illiquid investments. Because time's on their side. Exactly. They've got a 50-year horizon, and they can harvest that illiquidity premium. So I don't have a problem with an investor that's got a long horizon, that doesn't need the money in the short term. Yes. Investing in something like that. However, let's be careful here. People need to look at their portfolio as a whole.

17:09 Your portfolio is not just the stocks you're invested in, but your human capital. And also include your house. Yeah. And that's real estate. So you don't want to be undiversified. And if you're investing in some illiquid, non-traded REIT, make sure it's more than one. Yeah. So you just don't want to hold one because you're correct. Yeah. That it could go Chapter 11. Yeah. So you need more than one. And one of the great things with kind of tokenization and things like that is you can hold a very small fraction of many. So instead of having one, you've got 100. So now you're really diversified in a good way. Well, Professor Kim Harvey, thanks for your time today. Thank you. 800-661-7383.

17:55 800-661-7383. Or text the word plan to 600-700. That's plan to 600-700. 800-800-800.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 For the Financial Safari News Network, I'm Steve Sedahl. Today, we'll meet Bob Berg, co-author of the new book, The Go-Giver Influencer, a little story about a most persuasive idea. It's the third in a series of business parables, and some say it's the most important yet. A little about Bob Berg first. He's a former television personality turned top sales producer. He now speaks to corporations and other organizations on the principles embodied in the Go-Giver series. Bob, welcome. So how did the Go-Giver series come to be, and what is it about the Go-Giver Influencer that makes it so important? These days, you know, we are seeing, especially on the Internet, but there's also, whether it's a family get-together, a social event, whatever, we see that between family members and friends, employers, employees, politicians, political opponents,

00:46 and, you know, the millions of people on social media, today's discussions are really no longer discussions. They're really fueled up, hate-filled, vitriol-spilling diatribes and personal insults. Well, the result is that no minds are being chained, no one's being influenced, but rather people remain stuck in the echo chambers, if you will, of their already closely held beliefs. So friends are becoming enemies, discourse is shut down, understanding and acceptance not being reached, and people feel lousy about it, and that's really what we want to be able to now approach and kind of turn this around. It's being able to get the results you want when dealing with others, and this is, again, whether it's family members, friends, those you lead, those you work with, people in your social circles, what have you,

01:33 getting the results you want with everyone coming away a winner and feeling like a winner. So getting the results you want while making other people feel genuinely good about themselves, and the person who can do that, that's the person who's influential, and we have a lot of people saying that they're right away, they're giving this book to their kids and their grandkids, and, you know, because these are life skills. You know, talent is important. Talent is very important, but talent is the bottom, you know, talent is the baseline now for just getting into the game. It's those people who've mastered people's skills, but doing so in a way that's genuine and authentic and benevolent, not manipulative, but persuasive. That's the person who really is nine steps ahead of the game in a 10-step game. Well, and you've got the five secrets of the genuine influencer, and boy, they really ring true,

02:24 and I'm going to skip right to number five, let go of having to be right. And that is the thing that it just, you know, that's the frustrating part of it, is because if you have to be right, that means somebody has to be wrong, and guess what? They're not necessarily wrong. Well, exactly. And, you know, if you ever notice the political debates on social media, or, again, even in person, and someone says, people like you are the worst people on earth, you're heartless, and you don't care, and blah, blah, blah, you want to ruin this country. You know, the other person never responds by saying, oh, thank you so much for pointing out the error of my ways. I haven't thought about it like that, right? And so, no, what we've got to do is we've got to first, you know, we need to see this person as a person who has good intent, because they probably do.

03:10 The big difference is the way you would go about having something happen. And when we say let go of having to be right, that doesn't mean you don't desire to be right. It doesn't mean you don't do your best to be right. What it means is you allow yourself to go into learner's mode, as opposed to the people who, when you debate with them, you think to yourself, goodness, you know, it's like, don't even bother confusing them with the facts. Their mind is already made up. These are the people who have trouble with confirmation bias, right? They hear something that agrees with their already held beliefs. They believe it. If not, they ignore it. Well, that person cannot grow. But if you will let go of having to be right, you'll find that you're able to look at something from the other person's point of view. That does not mean you agree with it.

03:56 It just means you're able to see where they're coming from. And it puts you actually in a much stronger influential position. Hey, remember, tact should never be confused with compromise. You can always speak to someone with tact and with respect without compromising your values. And the neat thing about that is to the degree you do that, not only are you more influential with that person, but all the other people who are sort of watching, right? Right. They tend to take more to you as well. Bob, let's get to this list and talk about the five secrets of the genuine influencer or influence. One is master your emotions. Absolutely. Yeah, well, this is so tough because we're human beings, right? Yeah. And we're emotional creatures.

04:42 We'd like to think we're logical, but we're pretty emotionally driven. We make major decisions based on very limited or based on emotion. Then we back up those emotional decisions with logic. We rationalize, which simply means we tell ourselves rational lies in order to justify it. So what we need to do is, you know, it's not a matter of foregoing your emotions or denying them. There's no reason for that. Emotions are a great part of life. Just make sure you're the master of your emotions as opposed to they being the master of you or, as we like to say, by all means, take your emotions along for the ride, but make sure you are driving the car. See the types of situations that occur in your life, whether it's with people or circumstances that tend to just really get your emotional hot button. Right. And you it causes yourself to to become frustrated or impatient or angry.

05:33 Right. And you know how that feels when it happens. Well, now what I want you to do is I want you to picture the same situation. But now I want you to picture not being surprised by it. That's what usually happens. It takes us by surprise. But I want you to rehearse this a number of times. Rehearse this person or the situation or something similar. Um, and, and just kind of picture yourself handling it beautifully that it just, it doesn't bother you. You're able to listen to that person without interrupting. You're able to say the perfect thing. Again, don't worry about the words that comes later. Just get the feeling of this. And what I want you to do is practice it just like an astronaut before they go up into space, they would run hundreds of simulations. Right. So that by the time they get up there, if something actually happens, heaven forbid, well, they're

06:21 already been there. They've done that. They can, they can handle it because they've seen it tons of times. It's the same with this practice it in your mind again and again and again, and keep getting that good feeling of how you're handling it beautifully. Now, when it comes up, I want you to just do that very thing. And when you do feel good about it and understand two things. One is if you can do it right. One time you could do it right. Every time. Now, the second thing is you won't do it right. Every time because you're a human being and we all mess up from time to time. But I'll tell you this because I had to do this 25, 30 years ago when I was having a real issue with, with anger. And I've taught lots of people how to do this. And all of our lives have been changed dramatically because when you're not at the mercy of your

07:08 emotions, when you are the boss of yourself, first of all, you feel better about yourself. You're much more effective and you're much more influential. So step number two is step into the other person's shoes. You know, you try to do that or I try to do that. And again, that's not always easy either. And that's because most of us have different size feet. In other words, we come from different ways of seeing the world, different experiences, different belief systems. So we can't necessarily step into their shoes. So what we need to do to make up for that is we ask questions. We discover, hey, we do this in sales. What is selling? It's simply discovering what the other person wants, needs or desires and helping them to

07:55 get it. It's the same with influence. So ask questions, but don't just listen with your ears. OK, as one of the mentors in the story, because it's a parable, one of the mentors in the story tells his protege, don't just listen with your ears. That's the surface listening. Most of us do. That's listening in order to speak, in order to have a comeback. Right. No. Listen with your eyes. Listen with your posture. Listen, he said, with the back of your neck. In other words, put your entire being into listening. What happens is not only do you actually discover more about what drives that other person, which is so important, but they feel listened to and they become much more responsive to your idea. People want to feel understood. The only way you can understand another person, step into their shoes, is by asking questions

08:44 and listening. I think it's really just a matter of understanding that when you can move from an I focus or me focus to what we call an other focus, this is the way that you make yourself the most influential. Because remember, and Dale Carnegie said this in his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Ultimately, people do things for their reasons, not our reasons. So as mature human beings, we need to understand and tap into human nature in a very positive, benevolent way and understand that if we want to influence someone to do a certain thing, we need to give them a reason that works for them. The book is called The Go-Giver Influencer, a little story about a most persuasive idea, written by Bob Berg and John David Mann.

09:31 Thanks again to author Bob Berg for chatting with us today. To learn more and get two free chapters of the book, just visit thegogiver.com. That's thegogiver.com. I'm Steve Sedahl for the Financial Safari News Network.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Folks, this is the time of the show where we go out all across the world and find someone who's made a difference or maybe you've seen on TV. And this week is no exception. We have a repeat visitor on the show. If you've ever watched a TV show called The Shark Tank, you've probably seen her on there as well. Her name is Barbara Corcoran. She is joining us here on the show. Barbara, welcome in. Hey, Coach. Nice to be here. Yeah. Now, let's talk about, you know, just in general, the business environment that you're seeing. How is the business environment out there globally? I know on The Shark Tank, you guys have a lot of different business owners come in or entrepreneurs with ideas. And I noticed you have all six sharks on there many times when I'm watching this year. Has that made it more competitive? Have there been more loans available? Or what do you think is going on there? That's a lot of questions at once. Let me start backwards on you, OK?

00:45 You're one of those guys that shoot through a lot of questions on the first one. Too much coffee. There's a lot more. That's all right. I need another one to keep up with you. But there's a lot more competition, not just because we've had six sharks on the set at once, which, of course, makes it a more crowded set. It makes it harder to be heard and harder to get your bid in and harder to overbid and second guess what the next guy is going to do. So that's bad enough. But you know what? We've all gotten more aggressive. The deals have gotten bigger. We've had a lot of big moneymakers. So there's a lot of gold walking into that set. I remember in season one or two, you figured you might make a few bucks, but you expected to lose more money than you could make. Now, all of a sudden, each of us have good deals where we're making a lot of money. So we get greedier. Instead of getting nicer, we're getting greedier. And so that's upping the ante. On top of that, the entrepreneurs that have been coming in are getting greedier and asking for more money.

01:33 And so it just seems like the stakes are higher. It seems a little bit more serious. I have to pinch myself at times to get myself to loosen up. And even a couple of times this season, I didn't want to have dinner with my fellow sharks. That's not like me. I'd love to have a glass of Pinot Noir and talk about the day. But no, a lot of us didn't want to talk about the day because we're pretty upset about losing deals to the next guy. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of gotten too crazy, I think. Speaking of wine, I think Mr. Wonderful is the big wine guy there, right? Oh, who wants to buy a brand named O'Leary Wines? Why didn't he make scotch or gin or something? O'Leary Wines? How big could it be? I think he's crazy. I had my first Maine lobster roll the other day, by the way. I know you're big fans of those guys. That's different. So let me tell you, don't tell my other entrepreneurs, please, but they are my favorites.

02:20 They're both drop-dead gorgeous. They're both phenomenal entrepreneurs. They're sending me checks all the time, and they're building a huge franchise. They are so friendly. Whenever they take pictures of us together, they have the decency to airbrush my face, and I look exactly their age, which is young 30s. I love these guys. I love everything about them. But sadly for me, one of them is now engaged. I'm like, doggone it. You sure you're making the right decision? Let me slow you up on that one. One down, one to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my favorite one is the one engaged. Doggone it. I don't even like his girlfriend. I haven't met her yet. That's how it all works. That's how it all works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, hey, let's talk about on-deck lending. I know I've seen a lot about that. You've got a special contest coming up with those guys. I think all entrepreneurs need to know about this because I talk to a lot of business owners,

03:08 and one of the hardest things they have to do each day is figure out that cash flow. Money coming in, money going out. And Barbara, one of the things I see, it sure goes out a lot faster than it comes in. Everybody's short on cash. If you're building a business, your hopes are over, like, ahead of your capacity if you're any good at a business. So you're always short on cash. Coming to the holidays, for some reason, it's a big money crunch. You need capital. And you can't really get it through the traditional sources unless you're a giant company anymore. The banks have gotten very greedy about holding on to the money. You have to prove you're going to pay it back. And a young business cannot prove they can pay it back. So there is a real need for online lending like OnDeck does. They're the largest one in that space, and there's a reason for it. One, they're good at it, but also, very importantly, there's a real need for it.

03:55 Now, why we did this contest is for two reasons. I love young businesses. I love entrepreneurs. They love young entrepreneurs and new businesses, and so we got together. But what's fun about it, it's like playing Christmas or Santa Claus for me because we're giving $10,000 to three winners, and we're also giving three winners an hour of my time in New York City where I'll really understand their business and tell them what they're doing right and what they could do better and what they're doing wrong. And so I feel like I can make a big difference, and OnDeck feels they can make a big difference with the lending. So I think it's really a fun thing for me, a lot more exciting than a lot of the other things I do with my days. You know, with banks, regular banks, I see that they want to loan money to people who don't need to borrow money. That's what it seems like a lot of times.

04:40 So the business owner who is struggling and trying to get ahead, I mean, what's a good way for them to get a loan? Go to OnDeck Lending, I guess, right? Yeah, they go to OnDeck Lending, and you'll get the money you need. And most money needs that businesses have are always short-term. It's not like they're trying to build an apartment building. They're trying to hire extra help over the holidays or getting extra stock because they know they can get the orders in. Basic things that make great common sense, no matter how you look at it, yet common sense isn't good enough for the institutional lenders anymore. What they want is proof you'll pay me back. So who can prove they'll be paid back? The huge businesses. But think about who's really producing all the new jobs in America. It's small lenders like OnDeck. It's small businesses that are hiring people.

05:26 It's small businesses that are making our economy what it is. And yet the banks are lending to the big companies that really don't need the cash. I know it breaks my heart, actually, but that's the way it is. I hope it's going to change, but that's the way it is. Well, let's give the listener a fly-on-the-wall advantage to get a head start to be a winner in the Seal of Approval contest, Barbara. How does someone get there? Oh, it's like trading, you mean. That's right. Well, it's very easy to enter. Everyone can go to Facebook.com, OnDeck Capital, and it takes one to two minutes just to fill out the form. And basically what the form is is tell us what you do with the money. Now, I think if you're wise, you realize I'm judging it. I don't want any highfalutin words like burn rates and all that kind of nonsense that turns me off. What I really want is a common-sense reason why you'd spend the money on what.

06:16 And if you want to really appeal to me, make sure it amounts to sales, how I'm going to increase sales. Because when your sales are going up, every other illness in a business is cured. I know that because I've lived it, I've worked it. So give me a reason how this money is going to be spent that's going to increase sales. And you've got a much better shot at winning, much better shot. Because I'm the judge, and that's what I believe in. You know, how many entrants are you expecting? How many people entered last time? Well, last time we had thousands, but we had three winners. But I have to say these three winners stood apart the pack, stood above the pack in such a smart way. And to prove that, they've taken the money and they've really expanded their business with it. It wasn't just talk. They really kept the heat on their business, took the money, it gave them a new momentum, and they've been able to carry that through the entire year.

07:02 Sadly for them, they disqualified this year. They can't win it two years in a row. We need three new winners, and that's who we're looking for. Well, hopefully they took the money they borrowed, and now they're making enough where they don't need to borrow again. No, they haven't been borrowing money. One of the winners took their small business. It was a male grooming shop, very different than any other shop in Dallas, and now he's turned into a franchise. He's doing very well. A baker is producing her little cupcakes, which couldn't be shipped, and now she's producing them in little jars. And then one woman who had a health care product, an exercise slash health care product, took the money out and really aggressively sought sales, and now has it through a giant chain in her area where she lives and works. So they all did very good things with that money.

07:50 And, of course, I'm sure it was more due to my great advice. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the cash. Well, wouldn't it be great to see one of the people that got one of these $10,000 loans sometime on the Shark Tank looking for millions of dollars of investment capital? Well, you are a good coach. You know what? I never even thought of that. No wonder they call you the coach. My gosh. You're coaching me. I'm insulted. The coach is hungry now after you talked about cupcakes, Barbara. I'll tell you that much. Oh, yeah? You know what I think? I think you should be going over the $10,000 from online lending on that capital. I can't even get that straight. I guess I'm still early in the morning. I think you should be thinking about going for that cash. Forget about the cupcakes. Oh, yeah. Cash over cupcakes. You've got to have a good idea. A guy like you has got to have a good idea. You can buy a lot of cupcakes with cash, can't you?

08:36 Yep, yep, yep. Get that cash from on deck. Well, folks, her name is Barbara Corcoran. You can see her on Shark Tank every single week. They have great ideas coming before them. And some don't get funding, but they get orders from me, like the Ice Age guys with the Paleo Diet. I ordered a box of their food after being on the show, even though they didn't get funding. Did you reorder? Did you reorder? This is the question. Well, I haven't got the first box yet, so as soon as I get the first box, I'll probably order a second box. And, folks, again, if you want to find out about this contest, it's Facebook.com. It's at On Deck Lending, and it's a $10,000 scholarship, basically a loan program for three lucky people. Her name again, Barbara Corcoran. Barbara, thanks for your time today. My pleasure. Nice seeing you with me, Coach. Yep. Again, Barbara Corcoran from the Shark Tank. You can catch her every single week on TV. I don't think it's ABC, the Shark Tank.

09:22 And if you want to hear this interview again in its entirety, you can always go to FinancialSafari.com. Click on that As Heard on the Show icon. We'll be right back after this.

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Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Welcome back into the program. Coming up, we're joined by Joe Casey, who just got back from CES 2026 in studio with me. Consumer advocate Thomas Lipscomb is America's wealth coach and best-selling author, Coach Pete D’Arruda. Thomas, what do we do on our show? We define our terms. Yes, what is CES? Oh, please don't. Joe, can you help me? Consumer Electronics Show, Thomas. That's right. That's absolutely right. Consumer Electronics Show, where they show all the neat stuff that's coming up that you can't afford. Yeah, exactly. And they tease you because a lot of this stuff's not available yet, probably. But I didn't go, and it's been a long time since I went to CES, probably about 10 years, a decade. But back when I was growing up, my dad had computer stores, and we would go to a show once a year in Atlanta and Vegas called Comdex.

00:47 It was a show with all the new computer stuff that was coming up. Nice. I was geeking out there. But, Joe, how was the event? Was it worthwhile attending? Absolutely. The event was eye-opening. And, you know, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Saw a lot of cool stuff. I mean, just like you said, stuff that's not available yet, but is coming. And got to play off a few gadgets. And, you know, some of the things, and, of course, I won't get into it just yet, but some of the stuff that I just walked out of the CES show and said, you know what, I understand AI now much, much better. Well, yeah, right now it's just basically a Google on steroids is what AI is for most people. But what do you see AI becoming here in the next, let's say, five years and a decade?

01:34 Well, I see it really being a game changer. You know, when you look back at the Internet and when the Internet came out, it gave such usability. It gave companies a way to scale. And you see companies today coming online. I kind of like to look at it like, you know, like Starbucks. Those are what I call atom companies. Those are companies that have to have thousands of stores to, you know, service millions of customers, right? Well, today, AI, you're able to deploy very, very sophisticated software using a cloud base. And companies are able to scale like nothing you've ever seen. I mean, they can go to these billion-dollar valuations literally in a very, very short period of time.

02:21 And just to hear about what AI is becoming and what it is, it just opened my eyes. This year was fantastic. So when you're a startup company, one of the main problems is finding enough people to help you get to become a big company. So I think AI can eliminate that need for a lot of employees, can't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, when you look at AI's, the trajectory of AI, and of course, I'm guilty of just using it for, like you said, Google on steroids, going to chat GPT and asking, you know, can you reword this letter for me? Yeah. And, you know, that's just the way I've used it. But there's so much more application when it comes to AI. So who were the big attendees, like who had the biggest booth there at the CES? I would say NVIDIA probably had the biggest display.

03:09 Okay. They had all of their robots and cars. And probably the most interesting thing that I saw, which I saw a lot of interesting things, was the Tensor. I don't know if you've heard of that name before, but Tensor has a robo car that you're going to be able to buy. And this is an autonomous, a Gen Tech type of AI that basically the steering wheel disappears, the foot pedals disappear, and this thing takes you to where you're going. And it was absolutely mind-boggling to watch this. It was just like out of a sci-fi movie. So do you get in the car and you see the steering wheel and the gas pedals and they disappear in front of you? Or do you mean they're not even there to begin with? No, no. They're there. You can drive. Oh, okay. And then when the car takes over, the steering wheel pulls into the dashboard, a screen goes over, the pedals disappear into the floor.

04:00 And that way the driver can't, you can't do anything. Yeah. You just sit back and enjoy. Keeps user error from happening. That reminds me of the movie iRobot with Will Smith and the police were coming after him and the whole car basically could shut itself down. Yeah. What was that show, the movies that the kids liked with the Transformers? Yeah. Where things were turning into different things right in front of you, right? Yeah, totally. Wow. That's pretty cool. Did they have rides available in that car or was it just a display thing? You know, they had it displayed in the Fountain Blue Hotel, and I'm sure at some point, you know, certain folks probably could take a test ride. But it wasn't there for me to do the test ride. I'd love to have done it, but it was in the hotel. You could get in it. You could check it all out.

04:45 It was amazing. The Fountain Blue is an amazing hotel over there. It's a gigantic place. It's a gigantic place. Exactly. You know, I have an office in Vegas, so after work that day, I went over to Capitol Grill, which is right across from, like, Wynn and all the, like, where all a lot of stuff was going on. And in the bar, I looked around the restaurant. I didn't see a single woman in that restaurant. It was all techie kind of guys, so that explains it. It looked like a bunch of NVIDIA guys in there at Capitol Grill. Well, that would explain it for sure. Now, NVIDIA had probably a big display, too, right, because they're a big AI company with the chips. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they had, you know, some of their servers out there. They had some of their robots. They had some video of, you know, futuristic goals that they're pressing toward.

05:33 And, you know, just a huge display. All right. So autonomous cars, that's what I think about the future. You know, that would not have surprised me when I go to CES because you see the futuristic things like that, a lot of AI stuff. What really surprised you? Like, you weren't expecting to see at CES this year. Well, I would say, you know, obviously, AI was going to be there, no doubt. Oh, yeah. But probably the thing that it wasn't, I guess it wasn't so much of what I saw. It was the impression that I took away. And it was like embracing AI as more of a platform that you put in your business, that you put to work in your life.

06:19 That was probably the greatest thing that I took away. Probably the coolest things that I saw was the RoboCar. That was off the chart. A lot of the smart glasses. I don't know if you've ever tried those, but the smart glasses, especially if I was a retiree, I'm 52, the smart glasses is going to be a game changer. If I was a retiree, you know, 60, 65, I'll tell you right now, I would 100% get these smart glasses because they're freaking amazing. I don't know if you've ever tried any. Well, if you haven't. I bought them twice and never used them. I got the first generation, and then I just got the, well, I didn't buy the second one. I got it as a gift at Christmas time, but I haven't ever used them. But I have seen online, there are some, like, non-name brand smart glasses.

07:07 You know, you get these ads on Facebook all the time. One would translate for you. One would tape every single minute of your day just in case you forgot what was going on, which, again, is good for people as we get older, we forget things. So you can't say you don't remember anymore. So you just look at it through the glasses and say, hey, remind me of what this looks like. So I don't know. I kind of like playing dumb sometimes. For sure. Not going to be able to do that anymore. Check. All right. Personal robots. Go ahead. Sorry. I was going to say another thing I saw that was good because I brush my teeth. I know it's kind of corny. But I brush my teeth. I floss. But I hate doing it. But I still do it two times a day. And they had toothbrushes there that you were able to brush and floss at the same time.

07:54 And so it was made by company Soccas. I believe. S-O-C-C-A-S. And check that out if you ever get a chance. It was really, really cool. C-C-A-S. S-O-O-C-A-S. Yeah. I can't pronounce it. Now, that's pretty funny because, I mean, in order to, because there's a gap between your teeth, that's where the floss has to go. So how does it know that? Does it have a camera built into the toothbrush? Well, it has a water. It has a water spout on it. Okay. Yep. That it shoots the water between your teeth. Okay. Well, I have one of those things that squirts water into whatever you call it. Water pick. Water pick. Yeah. Water pick. And when I used to use it, I would never have cavities.

08:40 So it really worked. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow. Well, I was really impressed. You've got the brush and you've got the water pick all in one. And I'm definitely going to get me one of those and try them out. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. I thought you were going to say you just put it in your mouth and it brushes your teeth for you and then you spit it out when you're done. That's the next generation. Nanobots going in and just doing their job for a few seconds. Now, speaking of bots, what kind of personal robots did you see? Well, you know, they had robots folding clothes. They had them moving dishes around in the kitchens. And so a lot of, you know, homemaking type robots that I found very cool because, you know, most of the ones you see are the ones that's, you know, sweeping up the floor. Yeah. And, you know, the little black thing running around.

09:27 We have a couple of those here. We have a couple of those here. You know, I think of when you talk about folding clothes, I think about the Jetsons. Rosie. Rosie was a little maid robot. And so one thing I hate doing is laundry, but I do my own laundry and I really hate folding. So that would be, I would buy a robot today if they would get promised to fold my clothes and hang them. Well, it was a little slow, but I could see over some time that the technology is really, really going to emerge. Now, I met the new owner of Napster while I was there. And, you know, Napster, you know, you remember from the 90s. Yeah, a long time ago. Yep. This guy, he bought the Napster company and he now, that program now, you can use it for

10:12 like young artists. Any artist could use it. And basically, it will take your music that you're making and license it. I mean, it does the whole thing for you. It's really, it's something you probably should check out at some time. That's pretty neat. You know, I remember Napster. I mean, that was the first place I got free music from back in the day. Exactly. That was me too. Yep. Me too. That's great. It's the whole industry and the industry has not stopped since then, really. That's true. How about new players? I mean, like Napster's a new player from an old name, but what about the new ones that are coming that are like, all right, so we got the robots, we got the cars. Oh, Thomas wanted to ask about TVs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I saw an announcement that, and I'm not sure the brand, it might have been LG, but they did a wallpaper television that was less than a centimeter thin.

11:01 Did you see that? Yeah. Yes, yes, that was really cool. I took a bunch of pictures, got some info, and that's something that I'm very interested in purchasing. Yeah, that's pretty amazing, isn't it? I mean, the technology. Absolutely. And there were several different brands there. You know, they had some from China, some various places, but yeah, your major TV brands were there. They had their displays, but the TV, I mean, that screen was super, I mean, you could literally glue it to the wall. Wow. It was crazy. What do you think the price point for something like that's, I guess, a good, the size? What about a 50-inch one of those? What do you think those are going to go for? You know, it's going to be hard to say, but I would say at least, at least, probably you're

11:46 in the lower thousands at this point. Wow. But that stuff will come down quickly as more competitors emerge. You know, we just ordered 200-inch ones for our new auditorium we have on our third floor, and one of them was cracked when we got it, but we didn't know it until we opened it four months later. Well, now you're going to be able to get just these panels and just lay them out across the wall wherever you want. That's amazing, isn't it? It's true, though. It's amazing. Yeah. Well, we grew up with the big, fat TVs. Remember how heavy those were? Oh, yeah. The 32-inch one was gigantic, and it took two guys to move it. Yeah, yeah. Crazy. The tube. Remember the big tube? So we got rid of the tubes, and we had plasma. I mean, I haven't heard the word plasma TV in forever, have you? I mean, those are the big things that never really came.

12:32 Sort of like Blu-ray. Remember, Blu-ray was out, then it was gone. Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's funny how fast things change. I mean, I grew up in, I missed eight-track cassettes, but I had regular cassette. That's what Columbia House was nice enough to send me a bunch of times. The cassette tapes. I still got my collection. I've got a big old tote tray full of them. Nice. So how big was this? Did they have it in the convention center, and they're already spread out to different hotels, or did they have it all over different hotels? That was a little overwhelming. You had several of the convention halls set up, and then they had five of the major hotels. They had speakers and panelists off and on all day long. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to some of the panelists talk, and just hearing some of the techie guys

13:21 and some Hollywood producers and CEOs, just hearing them all collaborate together was very powerful. Well, you know, Hollywood's not going to have to have these gigantic scenes anymore. They're not going to have to pay a whole bunch of people. They'll just have it all in CG. Well, something more advanced than CGI, but they'll be able to do it all on a computer. Sort of like Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones did a lot of that, by the way, too. They did a lot of the graphics added on. One of the gentlemen from Warner Brothers, he was talking about that. I don't know if you know this yet, but they're coming out with a Barbie 2. That's what he said, that they're making the Barbie 2 movie, and it's going to have some of these effects and all this stuff in it, and it's going to be really, really good. Pretty amazing. Now, tell folks, you're not just a normal person that's going to CES. You've got a pretty big tech background. Where'd you go to college? Well, I went to Ohio State, and I've attended MIT, and I love tech.

14:11 I love digging into the stuff. I'm the guy that wants to know how the watch works. I get it. Now, you said Ohio State. Usually when someone says Ohio State, they say the Ohio State. The Ohio State, yeah. Thomas, you've heard that before, right? You watch any football game when the guys announce where they're from. The Ohio State. Which I've been to Columbus. It's a nice place. I mean, I've been to Notre Dame, too. Those are like nice college towns. Yeah. Yeah. I had a subway store not far from campus there on 23, and it was the number one subway store in Columbus because of the college. There you go. It was good old days back then. Nice, nice. Now, you were looking at a lot of things there, and I'm sure, because you're a big investor, too.

15:02 You like to invest in stocks and play the market the right way. Do you see any – did you notice any maybe small companies that no one's ever heard of that you might think are ready to explode with the products they have? You know, I'm still compiling that thought. I'm doing some research, and, you know – Thomas, he doesn't want to share, in other words. He's going to his beard. When he goes to his beard, you know, he's thinking. Contemplating, contemplating. No, I mean, it's pretty neat, though. It's a great way. Oh, yeah. I mean, anyone who's up and coming is going to be at CES, and if they're not there, it may not be tomorrow, but it may not be next year. But the next five years, some of those companies you saw are going to be big names. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, the one thing that I'm looking for when I'm looking for these types of investments, I'm looking for people that have big vision and that are looking to be a disruptor.

15:59 You know, you take Elon Musk. You know, his goal is to colonize Mars. I mean, that's just like way up there. And, you know, these companies, fortunately, you know, when you aim high, that, you know, you might not hit the stars, but you're going to get into the atmosphere of space. And that's what – when you're looking at these companies, seeing the technology and hearing their ambitions, you know, do they have an open architecture that you could see this company really, really making some waves. And I think a recent example – And really the cloud – I would say a recent example of that is NVIDIA. We just had a clip on our show recently where the president was talking about because we provide the chips to everybody. They're that foundational structure. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's important to get those kind of companies.

16:44 But then also the ones that are – no one's heard of yet. Exactly. And then all of a sudden everyone hears about. But it's too late to get in almost. So true. So true. It's the meteoric rise, they call it. So how about Elon's tunnel? Did you get a ride down there in his tunnel? You know, I didn't get in the tunnel, but I saw cars coming out of it, and I was very impressed. I wanted to get in there, but it didn't happen. C'est la vie. What was your favorite interactive display? Because, you know, a lot of these companies spend millions sometimes on their displays. Oh, yeah. Well, one of the displays that really caught my attention was they had a display there where they had an omnidirectional treadmill. And there was a guy that was in the VR suit, and basically he was in Ready Player One total.

17:31 I mean, he had the whole getup. And, you know, they had a bunch of demonstrations going on, lots of people in those suits. And I was watching what they were seeing in the TV, and I thought, oh, my God. Gaming is coming a long way. And this is the evolution of the gaming industry right here. You know, when you think about gaming growing up, it was the fat kid that would just sit inside and play on the, like, sit in front of the TV. But now you have interactive gaming where you can get in shape by playing games. And that makes sense. I told Thomas, and Jose, you've probably heard this too, back in the day I played a game called Halo. Oh, yeah. Halo was on the Xbox back then. And my rule back then, and my bedroom was underneath my workout room, so my wife would hear me because I'd start playing the game like at 12 at night and go all the way.

18:19 But my rule was I had to ride the exercise bike while I was playing Halo. Nice. So it's funny. So when I started being chased, I would pedal faster, even though it had nothing to do with the game. But I was in really good shape, so I made myself work out to play the game. But now you're going to have to work out to play the games because if not, you're going to get killed too easily. Yeah. So it makes sense. Yeah. Good incentive. One thing that did stand out too that I just, I don't know, I just never had thought of this, but listening to a lot of the CEOs of these different companies speak and some of the producers at Hollywood, they are bringing influencers out now and allowing them to stream from the TV set. They're bringing them into these companies and allowing them to stream to their audiences.

19:09 And that's how these movies, they clearly said it. That's how these movies go through these huge ticket sales prior, you know, as the movie's coming out because they let these streamers are coming in. And I thought that was very, very interesting. You have to build the excitement because back in the day, they would maybe six months before a movie would come out. You started hearing about it. Then you started seeing advertisements on TV. But it would be like a six-month runway into the movie. Nowadays, the movies don't even go to this theater a lot of times. They come right to Netflix or Amazon or something like that. So everything's changing. And influencers are becoming a big part of that too. Oh, big part. I was very impressed with that. One word I'll drop in there for you is agentic AI. It's something that you probably want to get to know better. That's going to probably be a trillion-dollar industry before you know it.

19:59 And that's something to really, you know, explore, find companies that are focused on agentic top of AI. That's going to be your autonomous top AI. And that's going to be the big, big thing here down the road. So AI without you having to be around, I guess, right? That's exactly it. Okay. A self-driving car, for example, would be agentic AI. Okay. That's what we always hear about, self-driving car. What else could we, like, what other? You think it would be self-driving planes down the road? You get on a plane and there's no pilot up there? You know, I'm sure that'll eventually be the case. It's kind of scary. I don't want to be that first few guys that get in there and, you know. So anything else that excited you during the show?

20:46 You know, I just going through and just seeing the technology, seeing the massage chairs, that was pretty exciting. Because now they've got them where they'll stretch your whole body out. And so that was pretty nice. Really, just being overwhelmed is probably the word. You can only see so many things before your brain's just, ugh. But it was so many cool things. There was a couple. Oh, I'll tell you something that I saw that was really interesting. And you may have seen these before and you may not have. They had crafts there that are full size. And you can put one or two people in and fly them around.

21:31 It's a giant drone that you can fly your body around in. Like, I could buy this thing, get in it here at my house, and fly on the other side of town to my buddy's house. That would come in handy in New York City where they have a lot of traffic, wouldn't it? You know, you just fly over the traffic. Oh, man. That's pretty neat. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. When I was looking, I was like, wow. Either I'm behind on my knowledge here or this is new. So do you get in it like, I remember Orville and Wilbur Wright, they get in there like Superman. Is that what you do? Is it big enough? It's a big drone, then. It's a big drone. It's got big blades on it. And I'm sure it has some limitations, but you can literally get in this thing and fly over to your buddy's house. You've got to make sure you don't cut somebody's head off with those blades, too, right?

22:17 Oh, yeah. Yeah. The blades were no joke. They were huge. What is it? Battery-powered, I guess, right? Yeah. So did it have new battery technology coming out? Did you see anything like that? Because that's always a big thing. You know, I didn't see very much on that. I'm sure it was there because, you know, obviously the battery is powering all of our stuff. We want better and better. You know, Jackery had some great solar batteries there. They had a huge gazebo design that you can buy and put in your backyard. At the same time, it's a whole charging station. So that was kind of cool. That's pretty cool, yeah. How much was the big drone that could fly you around? I'm interested. You know, I didn't see the price on that. I didn't see no price out there.

23:03 I just think of the last time I tried to fly a drone. It would be like me real life morrowing something. Oh, my God. Well, we had Caesar in our office. He got his drone stuck in a tree. I wouldn't want to get stuck in a tree if I'm in a drone. Oh, my God. You heard about your cat being stuck in a tree. You had to call the fire department to get the cat out of the tree. Now you have to call the fire department to get people out of the tree. Get people out of the tree. Well, my husband's in the tree again. All right, we'll be right over. That's good. That's good. So how did they have the show? I know you said it was spread out all amongst a bunch of different hotels and the conference, whatever they call it, the convention center. How did they have the booths divided? Did they have them in different sections? Like you went to Tomorrow World over here and you went to sort of like Disney. You had different places? Yes. They had it customized by theme.

23:50 And so you could see some of the cars here. You could see some of the health and nutrition things. Oh, that's another thing I saw. I saw this one workout gym. It's called Monster Gym, I believe was the name of. Gym Monster. That's the name of it. And this is the granddaddy of home fitness. It's a very small thing that you can literally fold up, but it's got the technology built into it. It's like having two, 300-pound weights that you can bench press. You can do all kinds of stuff. And it's the whole thing that folds out. And it was made really, really well. I was like, wow. But when you're done, you just literally fold it up and it's like hardly anything. Because that's a complaint a lot of times people have. And they have to go to the gym because they don't have enough room at their house for all that equipment and everything.

24:39 So that's pretty neat. I was really impressed of how functioning this thing was. And you literally pull it out. You do whatever workout. I mean, from squats to bench press. I mean, the whole thing. And then you just kind of package it right back up and boom, it's done. It reminds me of that bed that people used to have. They'd pull it out of the wall and the bed would come out. When you're done, you'd throw the bed back in the wall. That's pretty much it, yeah. But they did have it all divided up by sections. Okay. And it was really neat. So what innovation made you say, why hasn't this existed before? That's a good question. And I would say that it's hard to really pinpoint something. Because I was like a kid in a candy store just walking around.

25:27 The clothes folding thing sounds cool to me. Oh, that's number one. That and the flying, the little drone that can fly from one side of the city to the other. That's neat. Yeah. I would say the drone was probably that. I was like, wow, I'm surprised it's kind of taken this long. Because drones have been out for a long time. Yep. And, you know, and again, I may just be behind in that area. But when I saw that, I was like, wow. The gaming, I'll tell you, the gaming had came a long, long way. Just seeing those people in the full gear. I can't remember the name of what you call that. But just seeing the folks in the VR glasses and the suits. And then watching them play the game on the TV.

26:14 It was just amazing. All right. Two more points and then I'll let you go. But, I mean, your phone. I've always told Thomas, you know, there's going to come a time where we're not carrying our phone around all the time. I mean, it's a burden. But I have my credit cards in here, too. So this is my wallet, basically. But, I mean, is there going to come a time where you don't have to have a phone, but you can still have all the functionality you have with the phone right now? I think so. I think eventually you're going to have some type of futuristic device that, whether that's a band you put around your wrist and it has a small projection that when you hit the button, it kind of pops up and, you know, you got everything kind of almost in the air. Yep. I did see a phone there, though, that was really, really amazing. It was a very, very thin phone that it was like a tri-fold.

27:00 It folded out and it was the size of an iPad. And it was big. But then when you folded it back up, it was basically like this iPhone I got right here. Yeah. That was really interesting. Samsung, it was one of their brands and it was pretty much brand new. So eventually you'll probably see that hit the market at some point. Because you know all these companies are trying to come out with the thing that replaces the phone, right? Oh, yeah. But I guess it's a ways down the road. Now, this wasn't your first trade show. You've been to CES before, right? Yeah. How do you compare this to others? Well, it had been a while since I had been. And this one just seemed to have a lot more action. You just saw a lot more people.

27:46 There were a lot more gadgets. And just I think the thing that I believe really made the difference was the panelists that they had pulled together. And I'm sure they're going to keep doing this more and more in the future. And that was really impressive. So did you go to some of those speeches? Yeah. It was like I went to a conference. I went to a conference and I went to a trade show. What was your favorite speaker? Who was your favorite speaker? It was a panelist that basically was speaking on the future of the coaching and digital marketing industry. Ah, that's cool. And it was a combination of you had a guy there from Twitch. You had a guy. One of them was a Hollywood producer. Substack had a big presence there. I don't know if you know what Substack is.

28:32 It's like YouTube except you own your own stuff. So that was probably some of the highlight of the speaking and panelists. I've told my staff we need to have a Substack page, but it never happens. Yeah. I guess I'm going to do it again. Thomas is getting worried. I see him over there. I was very impressed. The owner of Substack was there and he was talking about where they're at, where they're going, and just how they work with the people that's on their site. So definitely check that out. So you say this year is just more bigger, more faster, more better. It sounds like just everything, the excitement level seems to be higher. I think the excitement level was super high because AI was just everywhere. And if you could just put yourself back in those couple days, you were there for two or three days probably.

29:21 What was the most exciting moment that you had where you just felt excited about the future? Oh, that's when I won. I pulled the handle and all of a sudden this big thing started flashing. It said I won. Oh, yeah? How much did you win? How much did you win? You win a lot? For IRS purposes, we'll keep it under $10,000. Yeah, we'll keep it under $10,000. But I would say probably the biggest thing was leaving the show, I felt like I had a new perspective on what AI is really going to become down the road. And it got me really fired up. I'm thinking about going back and taking some classes at MIT on a GenTech and on some of that AI so that I can better incorporate it into my business and so forth.

30:09 So very excited about it. Well, here's one thing I just forgot. I said it was my last question, but I've got one more here. But blockchain, we've heard so much about blockchain over the years. Were there any blockchain-type companies there showing you what the future is going to be in blockchain? Yes, yes. There were some companies there illustrating some of their stuff and blockchain. Absolutely. And blockchain is going to continue to emerge, especially with quantum computers. And you put blockchains and quantum computers together, that's going to be a huge deal, especially when we have access to it. Yeah, I really think that that's the future of voting. If we can perfect the voter ID, then if people vote on the blockchain, there'll be no more cheating anymore. That's exactly right. And so that's the way to go. One final thing, your favorite restaurant while in Vegas.

30:56 My favorite restaurant, believe it or not, it was just Gordon Ramsay's Burger Bar at the Planet Hollywood. I've heard good things about that, actually. Some of his other places, like Hell's Kitchen is good, but it's expensive and it's a long wait. But the Burger Bar is good. The best steakhouse I've ever been to there is the Golden Steer. Oh, yeah. It's featured in the movie Casino. It's one of the old-timey ones. But it's one of the best steaks ever. So just keep that in mind. You've probably been there before. I'll check that out. All right. His name is Joe Casey, and he's one of the guys that I like to talk to when we talk about tech and also investing. Joe, thanks for your time today. Hey, thanks for having me, Coach Pete. Love it. Look forward to seeing you again soon and hanging out with you anytime, man. Call me anytime. Hey, if people wanted to contact you, how could they do that?

31:41 They could simply just go to CatalystWealthCoaching.com, and you'll find all my information right there. There you go. Thanks a lot, Joe. Take care. We'll look forward to talking to you again in the future. Yes, sir. Have a good one. Bye-bye. Folks, we'll be right back after this. Bye-bye.

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Each and every week I talk to very interesting people and the most important part is that I shouldn't be the only one hearing it. I really feel that if these people make sense to me that everyone out there needs to hear it. So stay tuned folks and I hope you enjoy this newest weekly segment on Coach Business. Well folks welcome back into the show. This is the time of the show where I like to go out around the world and find someone who is making a difference reporting on people making a difference or just overall a cool guy to talk to and I've talked to him for years over a decade now. I've talked to Niall Nichol. We've had him on the show before and he's one of my designated tech experts and Niall welcome in. How you doing? Man I am doing great and I'll tell you what tech

00:45 is exploding so we will have no shortage of things to talk about. Yeah well before we even get into what I wanted to ask you what do you think is the number one tech aspect that's going to change the way everyone listening does what they do in the next five years? You know it's been in the news so much but quite frankly I don't think people take it as seriously as they should and that is AI. Yeah. And AI has been really since its introduction into the marketplace it's just made huge leaps and bounds but what most people don't realize is it's been in development in serious development for 40 years. Wow. So you take it to the marketplace and you take it from a handful of tech geeks and

01:33 scientists you know like me and you put it out to where literally it's not millions of people anymore billions of people are using it a day it gets smart real fast and it just something called a large language model which means it takes all this information people ask it questions they correct things that it says wrong and all of that and it gets very sophisticated and so when you start getting billions of people using it it gets really sophisticated really fast across cultures and it is going to radically change our landscape in the next five years. Well a lot of jobs that are done today simply aren't going to exist in five years. Yeah that's that's so what makes you happiest about

02:18 this and then what makes you saddest and what scares you the most? There's a three three-part question there. What's a happy thing about this? So the happy thing to me is it's called artificial intelligence and I really wish that they would rename it to assistive intelligence. The reason I say that is it is great I probably use it you know I bet on a on a given day me interacting with it I might use it two hours a day. Well but I use it as as an assistant and it's an assistant that I have to train I have to correct I have to review what the assistant gives me and as long as you interact with this artificial

03:05 intelligence platform whichever one you want to talk about in that capacity it makes me very happy because it lets me get probably I bet it lets me get easily two to three hundred percent more done a day than I do without it. Now by the way I can't just press a button ask it a question press a button and then spit it out because it's also wrong a lot it's wrong an awful lot but just like an assistant you know you hire an assistant you have to train them you have to get them sophisticated you have to review what they've done for you to make sure it's correct and after you build up some trust maybe you let them go a little bit but that's sort of what this is like so that's what makes me the

03:50 happiest. Yeah so unlike a human where you have to tell them the same thing over and over again I think AI remembers it the first time right when you when you correct it it doesn't make the same mistake or does it? Well you would think that would be the case but no as a matter of fact you'll laugh at this and if you don't there's something wrong with us I argue with it quite frank quite frankly often oh yeah in fact I'll even curse at it every now and again does it curse back? Sometimes yeah or it will say Niall now now now but uh the flip side is is um I have had to tell it to do the same thing over or make the same corrections sometimes five six seven times and you might say well why do you do that again it still improves my productivity. I see Thomas nod and Thomas you agree huh? Oh it's totally true

04:41 and I think you know you can think of the AI the artificial intelligence I like what you said there and assisted intelligence uh as this silver bullet but it's not but it is definitely helpful it's uh so it's almost like a footstool instead of a ladder. Yeah I would say so I think I love your description there Niall because I because I agree with you I use it a whole lot and and it's not an end-all solution but it is certainly amazing. So what makes you the saddest about it Niall? The saddest is that I do believe even though I'm telling you where it's going to go in five years or so I think it's over full today um you know it sort of reminds me as we talk technology you know when high definitions televisions hit the market. Oh yeah. Everything had HD on it. You could buy HD sunglasses. Now how did that

05:31 change the sunglass? It didn't change it a bit. It changed the price. Well you're starting to up. That's exactly right. It did change that but you're starting to see AI in everything and AI certainly has its place. It has its place in a lot of devices um you know some of the things that we might talk about like uh lawnmowers uh you know that that were introduced at CES this year um you roll the lawnmower out it gets the weather forecast and it might say you know what I'm going to put off mowing the lawn until three o'clock because it's supposed to rain. It sounds like I used to do but I just put it on for a couple days. Exactly. You wouldn't go back out to do it. Yeah right. And and you might say hey there's HOA rules that only allow us to mow you know between eight o'clock

06:18 and and 11 o'clock in the morning and we can't do it on Sundays at that off limit. So um it could ask you some questions like that and it could learn and then by the way if it happens to be mowing your lawn for you and it's geo-fenced because it will do that um and it finds something peculiar in your yard that you weren't expecting well not only will it document it'll mow around it and you know if it could do something to uh to take care of the situation it will but otherwise at least it notifies you there's a problem. Wow. Now for remote homeowners this is great because after it mows your lawn it goes back and parks in the recharging station and it's ready to go again. You know that reminds me of this Roomba thing we have in the office it goes around in vacuums and stuff and it then recharges itself empties itself out and it's like it's almost self-sufficient right Thomas? Every day when

07:06 it gets stuck on a wire or something or a power cord. In the lawnmower's position it's going to be a beer can that the construction worker threw. Or a snake. Or a snake in the yard. And that's where the that's where the AI is coming into into play because it recognizes those things and it might say yeah you've got beer cans all over your backyard. Who's getting drunk that's gonna call the cops on you? Drinking! Oh you know if you could think of the Roomba and uh or Rumbo whichever way we were to say it uh if you could think of that device that learns what's there you move furniture around and it learns that it has to adapt its patterns or whatever uh you know that that's a great application for AI. It's amazing as folks we're talking to our tech expert Niall Nickel and he's uh he's been uh a guest

07:52 on the show for over 10 years now a decade Niall pretty funny and now you're retired supposedly but you're working harder than ever it looks like. Yeah yeah I had hair at one point in time too not so much now. It's a great hair migration you had the same thing happen it went from the top of your head to your chin. That's exactly right. Hey uh all right so what is the scariest thing to you about AI going forward? The scariest thing to me about AI is uh when it gets into certain applications that it shouldn't be in and that there's nobody checking it or verifying it um it it as I said it does produce bad results um that I still use it um because I'm able to identify that but for people that don't

08:39 uh recognize that it's not perfect um it gets you in a lot of trouble in fact there's been attorneys because quite frankly uh AI today is great for law but there's been attorneys that have used it in briefs and it has it's made up information that's just not correct and it puts it in a brief and let me tell you a judge is not very happy when that happens. Yeah you know and they find it. You can't blame anybody but yourself even if it was AI though you're supposed to do it yourself anyway. It's sort of like Dennis Rodman the famous basketball player for Chicago Bulls back in the day and uh he had an autobiography came out which means it's all about himself he supposedly wrote it and somebody asked him about a quote in the book and he said I was misquoted. It's his own it was supposedly his own book so you know you can't blame anybody but yourself who's got two thumbs and it's to blame you right so you got to be

09:27 careful. Well he did he didn't want to talk about the multiple personality disorder there but we'll just leave that alone. All right well that's that's funny so the CES the consumer electronics show this year there was amazing things I heard about drones that could fly you from one side of the city to another like your own personal aircraft uh robots that could do everything mowing the lawn and then fold your clothes and all this other stuff what what do you think is going to be in the like let's say in two years from now what what from CES is going to be almost a household item do you think? Wow that's that's sort of hard to predict. Yeah it is. A couple of things I would say are going to be radical changes and one of them we're already starting to see a lot but you probably don't realize it and that is smart city technology integrating with smart cars. The way that we're

10:19 seeing a lot of smart city technology right now is we're seeing road signs that automatically update based on road conditions accidents and things like that. You might think that there's a person sending out those messages most likely it's not there's automatic or automated traffic monitoring they start to detect backups and they reroute traffic automatically but now with smart cars you're getting those messages because it knows your route in fact I've got a 2026 model now and I don't even have to tell it when I'm heading home it knows it updates the route if there's any problems and it gives me my ETA so now when my wife calls and says when are you going to be home I could say 13 minutes. You can't blame traffic anymore can you? You used to have that built-in excuse for about 15 minutes. Oh

11:08 yeah it was caught in traffic. No you weren't. Where's my buffer? No you weren't. The car texted me and said you weren't. So is that a 2026 Tesla by the way? Is that what you're talking about? No no no believe it or not I I've driven pickup trucks now for I don't know how long and I bought a 2026 Chevrolet Silverado diesel so I was blown away with the fuel mileage. And it has that technology built into it. Okay that's cool. It does. Wow. It does but in the city I'm getting 25 miles per gallon on our road I'm getting between 35 and 50. Wow that's like the old days back when before they had the catalytic converters in the car. Exactly exactly. Wow that's amazing. Yeah but it does have that technology and and it's it's really awesome from that perspective because it does save you time as

11:54 well. But we are so going to see now I'm not going to tell you this is in two years in fact my prediction on this is we're going to start to see it major metropolitan areas probably in eight to ten years. Okay. But you're going to start to see traffic lights get smaller or be removed overall and that's where we're going to start to see technology migrated into vehicles that are predictive as cars enter intersections. They know what cars are coming what direction and literally they're going to thread those cars together. And so if you happen to think about traffic moving without having to stop it changes fuel mileage issues pollution gets you from your point a to point b more quickly.

12:40 But I'll tell you what the first time we do that I don't know how I'm going to feel about that one. Yeah I'm not going to look. Close your eyes. Some people are doing that now anyway. Yeah oh I know. Well you know they call that the zipper the zipper merge and that's like when people are merging in you're supposed to like one car merges in the other one lets it go they like every other car that's a zipper and that's what you're talking about is no wasted space that's how you're supposed to merge into traffic even though there's that one person that tries to cut in front of everybody it makes everybody mad. I was here first. Then they jam on their brakes and it backs up things right. Yeah yeah yeah yeah and so then road rage happens and all that stuff. We are going to see we are going to see driver-based cars go away and a lot of people don't believe that but it's the insurance companies that are pushing it. Right now you know you hear about accidents that are from automated or autonomous

13:32 vehicles but right now today and the technology is about is evolving rapidly they are a hundred times better at driving and having fewer accidents than the best human that they compare to. Okay. Now you tell me what that does to insurance companies and everything else. Well it will be here. But to me insurance companies then should charge a hundred times less but they won't. Exactly. Because I don't know why they're mouthing off because they make a fortune charging people all sorts of rates when like if my neighbor has a wreck I get I get charged more you know that kind of thing. That's exactly right. To me they better be careful what they wish for they're going to do that FAFO kind of stuff and they're going to be out they're going to be out of business when no one's having any wrecks. Yeah. Won't need insurance. That's good. Yeah. The next thing related to these automated vehicles. Yeah I wasn't either.

14:21 In today's age if you don't know it go look it up. Ask your AI. Yeah really. That's it. That would be an interesting conversation. But you know in addition to that as we start to see that assistive technology in cars and autonomous vehicles you know I don't know about your vehicle mine should idle most of the time probably 95 percent of the time. Yeah. And I figure I drive a fair amount but it's still suicidal most of the time. So what we're going to start to see is shared vehicle services where when you want to go somewhere it shows up and takes you there and you know then it drops you off and goes and gets somebody else but you won't have to really wait. Yeah. But that's not that far down the

15:11 road either. No. We did a movie with a guy named Peter Diamandis back in the day. Him and Elon Musk and Richard Branson were the X Prize people where they had the X Prize with for the I think it was a five million dollar prize for the first person that could launch a rocket have it go around earth once and then come down and land safely. And I think Elon Musk won that award. But Peter said. And now he's doing it right. Yeah. But Peter told me back then this was like 10 years ago he said there'll be a time where you won't own a car and you won't even need garages anymore. And basically you just when you're ready to get picked up you press a button. Sort of like Uber and Lyft do now. But it'd be even better. And it's just amazing to think about it. And it's coming but it's certain people I kind of like the freedom of being able to just get in the car and drive. So if I'm in a bad mood I get in the car and drive around listening to some tunes every now and then. I guess you won't be able to do that. Maybe get in a simulated car and not even go anywhere. Well then maybe that'll be the case. But yeah.

16:01 But yeah I mean think about that you know when we get assistive AI in the home. Right. Obviously if you're getting ready it's easy for a technology like this to determine that. Yeah. And it's looked at your schedule right. It probably has a very good idea of when you're going. In fact you might even get reminders to tell you hey you need to step it up or you're going to be late. Yeah. And you walk out and the car's already there. You didn't even order it. So you know. So you know. It's almost I mean it sounds cool and it's great for technology in the future and all that. But I kind of like the freedom of doing what I want to do whenever I want to do it. I think we're going to have to overcome that with the more of a automated and structured society going forward it looks like. Well the technologists have been that this is one of the issues that

16:47 technologists and psychologists have been analyzing. Interesting. Because especially in the American culture driving is a rite of passage. Right. Yep. Getting your driver's license. It's a big deal. It is. Well guess what. You don't need a driver's license anymore if that's the case. Right. You'll just need an. Yeah. You'll just need an ID. Yeah. But. But yeah there are there are shifts like that that are going to occur. But right now the thinking is is it's going to open you up to some things that you've always wanted to do but you didn't have the time to do. Yeah you're right. Um and so you know like you said you might want to cruise around and listen to tunes. Well now maybe you want to cruise around and just look at the sunset driving down the beach or going through the mountains or in the countryside where you're not driving and you don't have to pay attention to

17:35 the road. Well um and oh guess what now you could have the bottle of wine open right because there's no more open container restrictions. It's almost like being in a limo all the time. There could be a lot of things. You know Thomas has a Tesla. That's right. Thomas has the you have that what do you call it on your Tesla where you don't have to drive anymore. Full self-driving. And you do that right. I do. Yes. So he just basically chills on the way home now. You don't have to have your hands on a steering wheel or anything right. Do you still watch every now and then. I do watch just because uh as we've said assisted uh intelligence as opposed to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still don't trust it. Still don't trust it. Trust but verify. There you go. There you go. No but it's getting good. It's getting good every year a little bit more. Well now I've caught you. I've kept you a little longer than I wanted to because uh we were against a clock but uh but I really appreciate your time and and I mean I think we should keep in contact. Maybe you have your AI

18:21 contact our AI when something big happens. Yeah well you know what we didn't talk about printed human organs and I'm really. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. Here because I like like 15 or 20 years ago I invested in a company called Orgagenics and they were going to print body parts out and I lost all that money because it never did anything but again I was ahead of I think I was ahead of the curve on that because it makes a lot of sense using a little of your DNA you can print out a new liver so you can drink all you want there in your driver's car you can drink all the time now. There you go yeah well they started printing and I don't know because I've seen you at CES I believe once or twice. Yes we did. Or we talked in passing there. Yep. But they've been printing food 3D printed food for a while now and a lot of critics are saying you know what they've gotten to the point that you

19:07 really can't tell the difference. Wow. So now they're starting to print skin for example. Yeah. So if you've got a bad burn or something you need a skin graft no problem. It's amazing. Blood vessels from your own DNA technology they are working on right now and they think they're less than a few years away from hearts and kidneys. Wow. Now heart's a big muscle and a kidney is a big filtering organ vastly different but they think that they're probably going to be able to enter clinical trials trials I can't say that trials in less than two years. What's that guy? Maybe I have too much to drink I don't know. Hannibal Lecter like he liked like with a Keontae liver. Kidney and fava beans. So they can print him out some kidney seed now so there's food for him right? Yeah and then he doesn't even have to kill people

19:52 anymore to get it right. Or he can just get the ones they take out of people it's all been marinated in the body for a while. So this is amazing though. This is amazing to me. The skin thing is a big thing for burn victims though because usually they never recover like the skin always looked bad. Now you can just peel off the bad skin and put they'll put new skin on. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. The skin grafts have they're in the marketplace now. Wow. So if you know that you've got something coming up that needs a skin graft they could grow the new skin and and it's not rejected. Amazing. You know it's your DNA. So yeah that is probably to me one of the most exciting things that that really has been progressing well and was a huge big hit at CES. Longivity you'll go up tremendously if you can just print a new heart outfit instead of getting a pacemaker or you know anything like that. I mean just put a new one in.

20:38 That's yours and it won't be rejected because your body will think it's the same one. Uh if we deal with brain aging problems uh guess what but that that's going to be a big big deal. It's I mean that's that is that is a Thomas what do you think about that it's pretty amazing. It is amazing it's uh the words aren't coming to me because it does it can extend so you coach we talk about live to 121 and beyond talk about beyond. Yeah that's important of lifetime income now because lifetime could be even longer insurance companies be mad about that too. Yeah really really. So uh but have you have you yourself Niall have you have you ever eaten uh 3d printed food and known about it before or you eat it and then someone told you afterwards or have you ever had it to begin with? Uh yes I have I did that probably and I'm trying to think it was four or five years ago at CES and and what they did was they gave you an AB a taste comparison can you tell the difference?

21:24 And could and you couldn't? I couldn't. And what was it steak? Um they I I believe they gave me salmon um they gave me hamburger which is easy uh but you know they gave me hamburger and then they gave me some vegetable I don't know if it was zucchini or I wouldn't have been broccoli because I wouldn't have eaten it but um they gave me a couple of things and and quite frankly I I couldn't tell the difference uh the salmon had a slightly different texture but it tasted like salmon. Wow and how about the ground beef uh it's same exactly? Ground beef tastes identical identical um interesting but you know what what they're doing with beyond burger and things like that where they're doing plant-based meats now yeah they've got those to the the point where they're hard to tell the difference quite frankly. It's just amazing I mean uh I mean I guess we're living through a new

22:13 generation generational shifts going on here like uh when they when the horse and buggy was replaced by a car that's about the kind of you know the phone and electricity all that kind of stuff we're seeing that right now on a broader and uh more advanced scale think about it. Yeah well we we talked about AI obviously at the beginning of the segment here but you know we didn't talk about where it's going because AI is just the first step. Generative AI is where it goes next and that's where the AI starts to think for itself and gives you recommendations that maybe you didn't even think about. And this is where we get into 2001 the space odyssey when Hal decided he didn't need the humans anymore so we have to be careful about how much we got them think right? That gets to be the scary part. It is and the Terminator remember the movie Terminator that's when the machines took over they didn't need the humans anymore so we need to make sure we let them know

23:01 that they always need us somehow and plant that into their DNA they always need us friendly humans here. Well we didn't go down talking about some of the robotics because that gets AI and it takes it to a different level so we'll talk about that sometime in the future. Well I mean do you want to I mean I've got five more minutes you do you want to get time I mean the robotics thing it's just so many interesting things I just didn't I didn't know where to even start talking about it here but I mean all right let's talk about the robotics real quick what do you what are you thinking there? So we are starting to see humanoid robotics and the real progress has come out of Japan. Japan has a major health care issue with older folks right for a number of reasons and and so they started working heavily on robotic technology about 15 years ago that was a

23:50 system in health care and one of the things that they found out pretty quickly was the robots did a much better job with the care than the humans did because the patient could be as grouchy as insulting or anything else as they wanted to be and the robot doesn't have a an emotional response right? I hear you. Uh so but what they found was in order to get the human to engage with the robot they had to put a face on the robot and the more human like they made the face the more humans engaged with it well it got to the point even in its infancy with faces that sort of looked human they weren't great um that the health care patients one of the robots instead of the humans uh so guess what they solved the problem

24:42 fast forward to ces 2026 to demonstrate how mobile and agile these humanoid robots were they had a martial arts an mma if you will of two robots fighting now that means they're trying to knock each other over they're not getting up like rock'em stock'em robots except unprogrammed wow and it what it did was it demonstrated exactly how agile the robots are how well they could move and then take a step over to the next booth and you've got robots that are lifting 600 a thousand pounds moving it around in a in a warehouse type setting move over to the next booth and they've got an exoskeleton that you could

25:30 strap on for people that are quadriplegic or paraplegic that does the brain or eye connections to be assistive technology and allow you to move around without a wheelchair or anything like that sort of like robo cop back in the day remember the cop was basically killed and they brought him back and he's put the exoskeleton around him it's amazing how hollywood hollywood is ahead of uh science or science is ahead of hollywood it's like that kind of thing if science follows hollywood sometimes it does by the way those things were all available and demonstrated at the ef this year it's not we're not talking about future technology we're talking about do you want it would you like it delivered you know next week next month or or whatever so what's the price on something like if you wanted to one of those robots to like lift weight lift like move stuff for you and work in a warehouse i guess like 30 000

26:22 well it really varies they start at the low end uh about six to ten thousand dollars for the the home assistive robots that do your house cleaning and can do some cooking and things like that um so low in there but they'll go up to well over a hundred thousand dollars depending on what you want and you know you could take that as far as you want to take it because they have robots that do what you might imagine they might do and that's a porn convention exactly in fact they walked from one booth to the other to go to that convention and as a matter of fact the uh the sex technology uh at ces has actually become about 20 of the ces floor these days sex sells man i'm telling you you know i'd like a big technology emerald gazi chef robot and

27:12 he'd like say bam and then bring my food to me you know like uh remember yeah right chef ramsey one that's cussing in the kitchen and bringing a good food beef wellington from grow program it any way you want to it's just amazing man you know it's also worrisome at the same time because a lot of careers are in jeopardy now when when these robots can do such a great job uh and all you do is i guess how long do you have to plug them in or how long does like one of these robots go without a charge and how long does it take to charge them coach pete oh man i'm shaking my head now no they they decide when they need to be charged based on what they see the workload to be and they just they take the break if you will and go charge them so okay um avid do they need to do a fast charge or you know can they shut down for the night because you're not going to need them for the next four to six to 12 hours

27:58 so if they charge too fast does it become a smoking break a smoking break well good that's a good one i like that there you go thomas wait we got to give you one of these wrong batteries and we've got that problem right well man we're going down all sorts of rabbit holes here with all this stuff it's amazing it really is amazing we're in a we're in a amazing time of uh basically history think about it it's i mean gosh they'll talk about this like they did the roman agents uh 3 000 years from now i think you know if we're still around i agree i agree and some of us may be yeah i can't i can't imagine trying to think you know we we talk in here really we talk short term maybe five to ten years right i can't imagine where this is in in 25 to 30 years i really can't um it's progressing faster than the human imagination can really keep

28:50 up with it yeah and imagination drives this stuff by the way well of course i mean you think about all the stuff you mentioned it's just amazing i mean it's i never even thought you could have a robot do you know back in the day a robot would just like gone lost in space warning mr you know that kind of thing but now the robots are more agile than we are crazy yeah and and by the way they've improved that face technology like we were talking about with recognizing emotions uh being able to have more facial emotions with the eyes the mouth the everything and uh you know they've gotten to the point where if you just do a quick glass and glance and passing you won't know that it's a robot they're that good but remember there was a movie probably about 25 or 30 years ago michael keaton it was dupe duplicity or something where you may invented like five or six robots that look just like him so basically he

29:39 just sat home and he sent them out to work and do all the hard stuff and he took all the credit made all the money and then the then the robots started getting mad at him though they they started getting smart on him you remember that movie ganging up on him yeah what if what if we could just invent a bunch of coach peets and send them out all over the place i only have one question yes sir is the world ready for that i don't think so give him some time give him some time uh folks his name is nile nickel and uh what a fascinating conversation nile we're gonna we're gonna air this uh we're gonna put this on our financial speakeasy network too we're gonna put some good video behind this as well so uh we're gonna air this on radio and uh have this everywhere because it's just amazing what what your imagination after listening to this i mean you could spend some time talking to your get it to come up with more ideas probably well yeah and by the way we didn't even talk about

30:29 setting your ai voices to whatever voice you want do you want a male voice a female voice do you want it to have an accent do you want to train it on somebody my wife doesn't like my grok voice right now she says it's too sexy and she wants me to change it too so you're too sexy for your voice i'm not gonna go there either and well nile thanks for your time today and uh yeah let's uh thomas let's make sure nile gets a copy of this but let's let's make sure to stay in touch now maybe every three or four months we need to talk about some advances if anything really big comes we need to talk about that as well well it's always exciting and i always enjoy the time like our personal meetings when we meet on the road but it's been a little while so we'll have to figure it out where that is the next time maybe we can meet next year or the year after at ces because i haven't been in a couple years so i need to you need to go this year i don't think we need to get there and see what's

31:14 going on man it's a lot of things are changing yeah a lot of things are changing absolutely well listen it has been a pleasure i hope it's been enlightening for everybody yes sir well you take care and we'll be in touch soon i'll nickel folks take care

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Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 In this FinancialSafari.com interview from mid-June 2012, Peter Rashawn and Coach Pete interview former pilot and American hero, Sully Sullenberger. And welcome back into the Financial Safari, your weekly show aimed at educating you on all aspects of your money, your finance, and your financial decision-making. And Coach Pete, we have a very special guest on for this special Father's Day weekend edition of the Financial Safari. We have Sully Sullenberger, the captain that had the miracle in the Hudson, of course, that landing. And he's writing books, in fact, a multiply published author now, several books out. And we wanted to bring him on the show because he is really making a difference in people's lives.

00:49 And welcome in, Captain Sully. Great to be with you. Thank you. Coach Pete, we wanted to talk with him about that miracle in the Hudson and about the books that he's been writing. Yeah, that was Flight 1549. I'm sure Sully remembers that well. Yeah, January 15, 2009. That's one of those events that people remember where they were when they first heard about it. I was telling the producer of the show, we'll never see an event like that again. I don't think no one got hurt. Well, everybody survived, all 155 people. We were very grateful for that. A lot of people did their jobs exceptionally well that day. Now, you've become a pretty well-known author here. I wanted to talk about your, I mean, the book that I like, Making a Difference, Stories of Vision and Courage from America's Leaders. What inspired you to write that? And let's talk about some of the leaders you talk about in the book. Well, of course, leadership is incredibly important, especially now we're facing as a society so many large and complicated problems that it may take generations to solve.

01:41 And so these are things I've been thinking about my whole life. And of course, in the last three years, these mind-bending three years that we've had to travel the world and meet world leaders from all walks of life, I began to hear these incredible, sometimes funny but always inspiring stories that I just had to put on the page and I had to share. So what were some of the best ones that you found in the process of writing the book? Well, the very first one we profile is Admiral Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard Commandant, who was brought in in the darkest hours of the response to Hurricane Katrina to fix it. And just through the power of his personal leadership and courage, he was able to turn it around with incredible skill and quickness. And he did the same thing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf and with the 2010 response to the earthquake in Haiti.

02:30 Another one is Jack Bogle, the founder and retired CEO of the Vanguard Group, a mutual fund pioneer, an absolute maven in terms of the financial world. Another is Jim Senegal, the co-founder and recently retired CEO of Costco, who is someone who's done well while doing good. He's found a way in a very difficult business, retail, to reward his shareholders, to provide great value for his customers, and still make it a great place to work. Yeah, I fought Costco for a while, but I went in there a few months ago, and it really does have some great savings for the customers. And I was amazed. If you look at the name badges of the employees who worked at Costco, they have the year that they started, and it's often 20 or 25 years ago that gives you a great indication of if it weren't a great place to work,

03:16 they wouldn't have stayed that long. And interestingly, one of the bellwether measures that Jim Senegal used to see how he was doing at Costco was that the price of the Costco hot dog has been $1.50 since 1985. That's 27 years now. And I can't think of anything else that's been the same price for 27 years. Right. That's good savings. Well, at Costco, they seem to have a system. They seem to have systemized how they have a process to getting the product to the stores, getting the product in the consumer's hand, and getting that savings. And I think having a system is very important to many things in life, training a pet, educating a child, and really making a difference. And how much of the system, the training, the preparation, and the exit planning, Captain Sully accounted for all of your passengers to be able to survive that miracle on the Hudson.

04:05 Well, it certainly was all that and more. It was a culture in which we operated. Again, it takes great leadership to have an effective and collaborative and a safe and high-quality culture. And so these people that I profiled in there from all walks of life, a very diverse group, some particularly well-known but whose stories have not been completely told, and some not well-known at all, but all of whom viewed the world in the same way, as an opportunity for good. And as one of them says, Gene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director who with his team helped bring Apollo 13 safely back from around the moon, he says leaders have to be able to check their ego at the door. They have to be able to do things for the right reason, you know, for the greater good of the group and not just for their own personal needs.

04:54 Absolutely. You know, your goal as a pilot was to get 100% of the time, get the people who got on the plane, let them get off the plane safely, correct? Absolutely. And that required great vigilance on every flight because, you know, out of a 42-year flying career, 20,000 hours on the air where we worked very hard to make it routine and never be surprised by anything, I never knew when or even if on one day I might face some ultimate challenge, but I had to be ready for whatever might happen and be able to solve the problem the first time, even if it was something like this that we'd never specifically trained for. And you had your flight planned to begin with, but you also had to have some contingencies in place if things didn't go as planned. Absolutely. That was one of the challenges of being an airline pilot when things go so well, 99.99% of the time, but being vigilant enough and avoiding complacency.

05:42 So if something bad did happen, you could just, you could handle it really well. So, you know, it absolutely required great commitment, great leadership to do that consistently on every flight, on every day for years. You know, I say that because there are some amazing parallels between being an aircraft pilot and also being a financial planner because things don't go as planned a lot of times in the financial world. Matter of fact, there are some Wall Street firms that say that people only have a 92% chance of not outliving their money when they retire. In other words, they have an 8% chance of not having money through retirement. And we often joke that if, like, if you were getting ready to take off and you came through the intercom and told folks that you had a 92% chance of landing safely, I think everyone would pull the slide and jump out before you could take off. Yeah, that wouldn't be good enough for me.

06:29 I mean, so what we've done in aviation is we went from, in the decade from 1967 to 1976, your chances of dying in a major jet airline accident in the U.S. were about 1 in 2 million today. They're about 1 in 20 million. So we've kept on getting it stronger and better and safer all along the way. And we kept innovating like we did on that flight that day. By the way, my favorite definition of innovation is to change before you're forced to, either by regulation, by competition, or by circumstance. And the more and greater you're able to change, the more of a competitive advantage it becomes and the more you're able to turn adversity into an opportunity. Well, I've talked with several motorcycle riders, Captain Sully, who said that there are really two types of riders, those that have crashed and those that will. Lucky that it's not that same way in the air because you are prepared,

07:19 and it's always better to be prepared than to be surprised. But regularly checking up on your progress and doing those maintenance inspections and seeing how you have been doing and making sure that you are staying ahead of that curve, that's vitally important, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the takeaways of the book, and there are lots of leadership books written for or by CEOs or for salespeople, but my book is written for everyone, whether you have a big job or not, a fancy title or not. These are techniques that, from these very personal stories, these dozen people we interview, that everyone can learn, that each of us can learn to be more fulfilled at work, more effective at work, at school or at home. And even if you don't have a title, you can be a leader, and many people are. And so there are a lot of people right now in every walk of life who are doing these things,

08:05 who are being leaders. They not think of themselves that way, but by the way they act and the way they treat others, they are. We are talking again, friends, with Captain Sully, of course, the pilot for that miracle on the Hudson, where all of his passengers did survive his emergency crash landing into the Hudson River several years ago. He has also authored some great books, Making the Difference and Highest Duty. We've had a great time having him on the program. And another couple questions here from Coach Pete. Well, I know you went to the Air Force Academy to begin with, correct? I did, and then graduate school at Purdue and then University of Northern Colorado. Yeah, so, I mean, it takes a lot of skill to do what you've done. And retirement was just around the corner when this accident happened. And, I mean, what would Sully have been doing if this accident didn't happen?

08:51 Oh, I was going to keep on working for a long time. I mean, I'm a lifelong learner, and I had become an expert in these things over my whole career. I'd done more than just fly, I'd become an expert in managing risk and leading in difficult situations. In fact, that was one of the classes I helped develop at the airline and taught to many of our colleagues. So I was going to fly as long as I could, probably until at least age 65. Because, you know, in the airline industry, we've had a lot of difficult challenges, airline bankruptcies, loss of pensions, huge pay cuts. And so I was setting myself up for my next career even well before this. Well, Sully, a drill I like to do with everyone I talk to is ask them if they could get into a time machine and go 10 years into the future, where do they see themselves? I see myself doing more of what I'm doing now as a speaker, as an author, as a consultant to industry,

09:42 as a CBS News aviation and safety expert doing on-air commentary about important issues that people care about. I'd like to do more of that. I want to continue to make a difference. In fact, my personal goal is that even though we, my crew and I, and all the first responders, were able to save the lives of all 155 passengers and crew three years ago, that if I am diligent and work very hard, and if I'm particularly adept, and if I'm fortunate, it may be that my greatest contributions lie ahead. And whether it's in quality control and process control or safety for industry, or whether it's applying what we've learned in aviation to medicine and improving patient safety, which I'm working on with many others right now, I hope that we can continue to make important contributions and make a difference. I saw a great article on you almost right after it happened in People magazine.

10:30 I don't remember that article or not. I do. I remember it well. There was a cover photograph of us. That was February 2009, so just a month after our emergency landing in the Hudson. And the writer actually was in my high school. She went to my high school. She was one year under me, Nicole Wysensee. Oh, yes. I remember her well. That was a well-done piece. I had a crush on her in high school. That transitions nicely into my next set. It's on the Internet. She'll find out. Speaking of which, Captain Sully, you talk a lot about making the most out of relationships. What do people need to be doing and thinking about when they are forming and building relationships to really help make the most out of each relationship that they have here in life? I think that they need to do what many of us do and what I try to do every week when I would come to work as an airline captain.

11:21 What people don't understand or appreciate about what it's like to work for a large airline is that we fly with people all the time that we've never met before. And so at the beginning of a week of flying, one of the responsibilities of the captain after the introductions are made is to quickly take this collection of individuals and form an effective team to align goals, to set the proper tone, to open channels of communication, to create a shared sense of responsibility for the outcome among all of us. So if something bad or some challenge were to happen on the very first flight, that we can as effectively deal with it as we'd normally develop over weeks or days of working together. And so it's that kind of vision, a kind of personal connection, a kind of creating an environment in which we can all do our best work.

12:09 That's so important no matter what we do. And so, again, leadership is really the key. And then making a personal connection even with large numbers of people is what the best leaders are able to do. A group of strangers form a team as they all ride together in an aluminum canister in the sky. We're talking with Captain Chesley, Sullenberger, and Sully. Captain Sully, we certainly appreciate the time. Thank you so much for all you've done. And we appreciate the great information that you've shared with us in your books. Thank you. It's called Making a Difference, Stories of Vision and Courage from America's Leaders, available for Father's Day. All the best, Captain Sully. Thanks for being with you. Thank you so much for listening to this interview on the Financial Safari. Remember, folks, if you have any questions about this interview or your financial situation,

12:55 you can email the team from the Financial Safari at comments at financialsafari.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 In this FinancialSafari.com interview from December 2011, Coach Pete interviews TV star Jamie Farr. And welcome back into the Financial Safari. Of course, your weekly show looking through the worldwide economy. And every now and then I like to get a national guest on that people have seen from the past. We are very lucky today to have former TV star from MASH. People will recognize that show. I know a lot of our listeners watch MASH. I know, Rob, you've watched it too, our producer. Oh, absolutely. We've got Jamie Farr on. Jamie, welcome to the Financial Safari. Well, thank you very much. Jamie, people will remember you from that and other things. You were, of course, Corporal Clinger on MASH. And you were in both of the Cannonball Run movies, which I loved them tremendously, with Burt Reynolds.

00:46 Well, I go back farther than that. It's my 57th, 58th year in the business. I actually started out when I was at the Pasadena Playhouse. I did my first feature film at MGM, which was Blackboard Jungle, which starred Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier and Richard Kiley and Louis Calhoun and Francis. Vic Morrow and, of course, brought Rock Around the Clock, Bill Haley and the Comets to fame. So that was my very first movie. And I had grown up going to the movie theaters in Toledo, Ohio, watching MGM movies. And then two years later, after high school, I'm on the MGM lot making an MGM movie. That was very exciting for me. Wow. You've also voiced on The Family Guy. Heard that episode, too? Yeah. You know what? I even worked with Walter Cronkite.

01:32 I didn't remember this. Late Walter Cronkite. I met his daughter. And she said, Jamie, you worked with Dad. I said, when did I do that? He said, you used to do a TV show called You Are There on CBS. And I said, you're right. I remember now I was about 20 years old and I played Abe Kratyshinsky, who was a World War I Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. And Walter Cronkite narrated it. And, of course, I was the hero in that show. Some people come up to me and they talk to me and I go, oh, my goodness, you're right. I did work with that person. It's hard for me to remember after all these years. Well, we interview a lot of people each week. I'm sure that I probably worked with many of them. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is I forget. Sometimes I forget who and we were talking right before you came on about the love boat

02:17 because you were on the love boat. Fred Grandy was gopher on there. We had. Fred Grandy. That's right. Yes. Oh, as a matter of fact, did Fred tell you that story when he was when he got burned, seriously burned when we were in I think we were in Turkey and they were in an automobile. We had gone to a party. We were actually filming a love boat in Egypt, Turkey, Israel. It's a tough life. I remember some of the other Greek islands. And they were in an automobile and some of the balloons that the people had given us were filled with a explosive gas. And somebody in the car, he was sitting in the car, lighted a cigarette and ignited the balloon. And they almost emulated inside that car. Fred really burned himself very badly. They had to obviously have to take him to the hospital and the doctor.

03:05 And they had to put all sorts of medications on it. And they had to continue filming. And what they did is they created a glove, a latex glove that looked like it had human skin on it to put over his hand and arm so that he could continue shooting. He was a real trooper then, wasn't he? He wanted to the show. Must go on. Fred's a great guy. I've known him for years. As you know, he probably mentioned he was a congressman. Yes. He was in Washington from the state of Iowa. Now, what has Jamie Farr been up to lately? Well, lately I've been doing a great deal of live theater. I play a particular theater in Kansas City called the New Theater. And I've been back there about seven times. The last show I did was in January, Lend Me a Tenor. And then I've also had the mini road company of the wonderful play that Mitch Albom wrote.

03:55 It's actually a bestselling book, Tuesdays with Maury. And you're called Coach Pete. And interestingly enough, in the play, Tuesdays with Maury, Mitch Albom calls his teacher Maury coach. And Maury says, I like that because everyone should have a coach. That was very endearing to me to hear that you're called Coach Pete. Were you really ever a coach? Yeah, well, I coached a little league softball and soccer growing up. But I became a money coach about 22 years ago. And of course, as you know, when you get closer to retirement or in retirement, you really need someone to make sure that your money's behaving. And that's what coaches do. They keep things in line. I certainly hope so. And I hope you're one that can be entrusted. Nowadays, it's tough, isn't it, Jamie? Yeah, it is. You know, you never know whether or not the person is a good coach.

04:40 He's not only making himself a prophet, but he's looking after you. Yeah. When you entrust somebody with a name like coach or minister, rabbi, priest, teacher, any of those things, you want to make sure that you're entrusting the right individual. I'm sure you're a good coach. There's bad apples everywhere, unfortunately. And I probably saw them in Hollywood. Of course, there are. There are some nice people. I've met many, many nice people in my 50-some years in this business. And you meet a lot of jerks also. But as you said, that comes in. It doesn't matter what profession you're in or what business you're in. You have good people and bad people. Now, until recently, I guess in 2008, you stopped doing it. But you were on a rotation with two of my other favorite guys from Hollywood, Chuck Woolery and Bob Eubanks. Oh, yeah.

05:25 We were doing a game show called the $250,000 Game Show. We did it a few places. One was Las Vegas at the Hilton Hotel. We rotated. As a matter of fact, Chuck, I think, still has a game show on one of the, maybe the Game Show Network that might still be live. I'm not sure. I haven't talked to Chuck. He lives in Texas. And Bob Eubanks, I talk to him quite often. He lives in Westlake, not too far from where I live. And Bob and I are still close buddies. Well, when I grew up, I'm 45 now. When I grew up, we had a TV. It had three channels on it. It's NBC, CBS, and what was the other one? ABC. You only had a couple of choices. So you watched the game shows and you watched the great series like MASH that you were on and I Dream of Jeannie, which you were also on.

06:10 Yeah, weren't the game shows fun, though? Yeah, I love to go to the Game Show Network. They were really lots of fun. Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Pyramid, Password. They had some terrific game shows on. And I was fortunate enough to be on many of them. Well, and we watched it. We grew up with people like that. And the funny thing is, I think it was called the $10,000 Pyramid when it first started, wasn't it? Remember that show, The Pyramid? That was, yeah, $20,000 Pyramid. I did it with, I did Password with Burt Condi. I never did it with Alan Ludden. And I did Pyramid with Dick Clark. And then I did it later with John Davidson. And then later on, I did it with Donny Osmond. They all had the show. It's funny, because, yeah, it started as a $10,000 Pyramid. Then inflation kicked in, and they had to get up to the $25,000.

06:56 That's right. You had to give away. Well, listen, when I was a kid, I'm a lot older than you are. And we used to listen to the game shows on radio. And the game show that became the $64,000 question was a game show called Take It or Leave It, brought to you by Eversharp Pencils and Pins. And the big question at the end of the game show was for $64. Wow. And that was that. Later on, it became the $64,000 question. But they used to give away $64. That was the big takeaway at the end of the show. You know, Rocky Blyer is a friend of mine. I remember Rocky Blyer for the Pittsburgh Sears. Oh, sure, Pittsburgh. Yeah. Rocky, great, great player. And he went to Vietnam, and then he came back after getting hurt there and played. But he told me, like, the salary back then for even the Stars was only like $20,000, $25,000 a year for the Stars.

07:43 Oh, yeah. Well, they say, you know, Joe DiMaggio's best year was, I think, $100,000 a year. Some of these players who you're probably never going to remember make about $100,000 an inning. And, of course, you as a financial advisor, a lot of these athletes, they make so much money that they really do need guidance as to where to put that money. Because we all have, whether you're in sports or in the arts or anything else, you have that small window of time when you're famous. And when you command those large dollars that you want to make sure those investments are right. Yeah, I cringe. Anytime I pick up the paper and you read about some of the athletes that have made millions and millions of dollars declaring bankruptcy because they lost it all. I know. Jerry Buss was a friend of mine. When they say was, I mean, he probably still is. I haven't seen him in a long time.

08:29 Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers, of course. And I used to be a big hockey fan and he owned the L.A. Kings at the time. And he used to tell me they'd sign these young players, you know, with huge bonuses. And he tried to get them somebody to guide them with the money that they were going to make. But a lot of them just feel that it's forever. And they waste a lot of money. They spend it on homes and cars and all kinds of things. You have to be very, very careful. Money is very important to you. You don't want to worship it. But at the same time, you know that it's necessary in order for you to keep your dignity in life, especially if you've made some kind of mark in life. So, I know it's money. I tell you, everybody, it's a pursuit of money, whether it's your money or somebody else's money.

09:16 Yeah. Somebody's always after it, right? Well, and here's what I do when I do get somebody who's made a lot of money. What we do is we take half of the money if we can talk them into it. And it's tough sometimes because, like you say, they think it's always going to be coming in. But we take half and put it into what we call a time capsule account, which will protect it and then give them a yearly income they can never outlive. And so then they can go blow a little bit of the leftover money that they have outside of that and get that out of the way, that feeling of just throwing money around. But they always have money protected and giving them income. Is that another word for an annuity? Yeah. There's some good annuities out there that do the – I have those. Yeah. Yeah. I was wise enough to listen to somebody. So I – and then my accountant passed away last year. And so we had to get a new accountant. And my wife, who was a former bookkeeper, she's taking care of our books now.

10:04 We make sure that any money that comes in from the corporation, that we take sufficient taxes out and put it in the bank just with that purpose to pay those taxes for the corporation. Well, let me ask – So we try to do the right thing. Yeah. I didn't want to really get too deep in financial with you because I just wanted to touch base with you and see what Jamie Farr was doing. But let me ask you this. You said you have money in annuities. How does it make you feel to know your money's safe and is always going to be there? Well, is there anything really safe? I wake up every morning thinking that they are, including my pensions, that I have with the Screen Actors Guild and the Aftra and Actors Equity. But that money comes from someplace. Yep. If our whole country goes belly up, then we're all going to be broke. You're right.

10:49 And so – Yes. I feel comfortable in that sense, of course. But it's very hard to save money. It's very, very hard. Mr. Farr, this is Rob again. Just a quick financial question. Being a younger guy, talking to a guy that's been through the ropes, what's the best financial advice you've ever received while going through your career? It's a very simple one. It was a man by the name of Ed Wynn. He was known as the perfect fool. Red Skelton was my mentor, the great comedian who passed away a few years ago. And Ed Wynn was Red Skelton's mentor. And I happened to ask him that question because Ed made tons and tons of money in the business. And I said, sir, what's the wisest thing to do? And he said, all right, I have three words for you. Save your money.

11:36 Now, how you do that, that's where Coach Pete comes in. You have to have somebody guide you as to know where you're going to put that money. But that's the truth. You don't want to live at the height of whatever money you're making. In other words, his son, Kenan Wynn, the actor, he said, Jamie, if Kenan made $5,000 a week, which was a tremendous amount of money in the 40s, he'd spend $10,000. And if he made $10,000 a week, he'd spend $15,000. So you can't do that. You really have to budget yourself. Absolutely is. And, folks, it's Jamie Farr. Of course, you might recognize that name. He played Corporal Klinger on MASH, and he's been all over the place on Hollywood. We also have our golf tournament, Rob, in Toledo. I've been with the LPGA for 27 years.

12:22 We've raised over $6.5 million for children's charities and abused women in Northwest Ohio. That's incredible. I'm sure you've heard of it, the Jamie Farr Toledo Classic. Absolutely. I've been to it a number of times, enjoyed it every time. Yeah. Well, it's good to give back also. That's very important. Well, Jamie Farr, thanks for coming on to Financial Safari, and hopefully you come back on in the future and report in to us what's going on in your life again. My pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to this interview on the Financial Safari. Remember, folks, if you have any questions about this interview or your financial situation, you can email the team from the Financial Safari at comments at financialsafari.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 And we're back here. We've got a very special guest here along with Coach Pete. I'm Chuck Kaiton, and I'm happy to introduce to you a guy that I'm sure you've seen because he's done every sport. And I think he's the only sportscaster right now that's doing all four professional sports right now. Hockey, baseball, football, and basketball. But unfortunately, Coach. He's not doing any right now. He's not. That's right, because we're in a little bit of quarantine, and his name is Kenny Albert. And he is in that, what we would call the red zone of retirement. But we're not going to talk retirement yet as a young 50-year-old, 52-year-old young man. But here's a guy. Kenny is very well known for doing football on Fox, NBC Sports Network with the National Hockey League, and of course, Madison Square Garden Network, where he fills in doing some Knicks games, and he also does New York Rangers radio. So Kenny, good to have you with us.

00:49 Well, it's great to be with you guys. Always wonderful to hear Chuck's voice, and I hope you guys and your listening audience are all healthy and staying safe here in New Jersey. It's day 76 since I last worked. So, Kenny, let's move into what's going on right now. I mean, this is why, I mean, we've all taken for granted some of the things that we've seen in our lives, and now, folks are listening now, maybe the first time they've heard us in a while, because a lot of folks haven't even been in their car here for the last three months. And I just want to get to what you're hearing out there as far as what's going to happen next. Are we going to go back to regular sports as we've seen it, or what's your opinion on what's going on? And then let's tangent over to the financial world for the athletes. Are you talking to any athletes who are struggling and arena people who are struggling? What's going on right there in the economy? Well, Coach, it's certainly been a surreal time, a bizarre. The last game I worked was on March 11th, the Rangers-Avalanche game in Denver, and that was 76 days ago.

01:44 Not sure any of us thought the pause would go on for this long, but here we are in late May, and we're starting to see some sports come back. The golf match on Sunday involving Tiger Woods, Phil Nicholson, Tom Brady, and Peyton Manning. We've watched European soccer and Korean professional baseball, and now in certain states, they are allowing practice facilities for pro sports teams to reopen. And it'll be real interesting to hear what the plans are as far as the return of the National Hockey League. What will it look like right at the return? Who knows? Will it be empty buildings? Will it be broadcast done out of studios instead of in the arena? There's so much speculation and so many different rumors that we've all heard and read over the past month, month and a half.

02:32 So we'll see what happens. You know, as far as the arena workers, I know many teams have taken care of them. Teams and arenas have put plans in place, but that's the thing. It's not only the players and the coaches and to the next level, you know, the broadcasters and the team management staff. But you have the folks that sell the popcorn and work in the parking garages at the arenas. There are thousands and thousands of people who make their living by working at sporting events throughout the year. So tough times. Hopefully, hopefully all those folks are doing well. And again, we're keeping our fingers crossed that in the near future, everything's back to some semblance of normal. Well, our West Coast office is in Las Vegas, and I've seen firsthand million people laid off.

03:18 And that's crazy. But the casinos in Vegas is more than casinos, but the casinos in Vegas are hurting. And it's not just casinos. It's the people that work for the casinos that supply them. And same thing with athletic events. And then in Vegas, they've got that brand new football stadium they've been building, which is a monster for the Raiders. It's going to be a beautiful place. But, you know, I think a lot of folks who I've talked to are just ready to get back to normal a little bit. I know we have a virus out there, but we've had viruses since the caveman. And so we have to, you know, we have to be humans. We have to live. So we have to be careful, but we also have to get back to what we're doing. And there's a new normal. I've heard that phrase. I don't, I'm not a big fan of that phrase, but the new normal is sort of like when we saw the Tom Brady, like you said, Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning. That was an invented sports because people are, you know, we're watching reruns from 30 or 40 years ago.

04:07 And the Michael Jordan series became the most popular thing ever because that was the only sports people really had to talk about every day. Right. Yeah, that was great. No, you're right. There's so many phrases that we never really heard and used before, such as social distancing and new normal. And again, hopefully things, you know, get back to that new normal pretty soon. You know, we'll leave it up to the scientists and the doctors who are certainly at a much higher pay grade than I am. And it was a fascinating story in the New York Times yesterday about the influenza pandemic back in 1917, 18, 19, and how it affected the Stanley Cup series, which was actually tied, I think, at two. It was the best of five, if I'm not mistaken. Seattle and Montreal. And Joe Hall was the player of Montreal who wound up passing away. And when he became ill, they actually put a halt to the series and he died about a week or two later.

04:58 But it was fascinating to read that column in the New York Times and look at some of the pictures and really compare some of the similarities to what they were going through over 100 years ago, even in the sports world as we are today. You know, we look at and I think this was either last football season or the season before. I remember I'm a New England Patriot fan. And so I remember my Patriots were playing a team and that team had been struck by the regular flu. Or maybe it was this flu. Who knows? But it was a flu and they were bragging. The announcers were bragging about how some of the players on that team were playing through it. Right. And then the very next week, about half the Patriots had the flu now. So I don't think we're going to allow that anymore, are we? Well, again, those questions hopefully will be answered by the scientists and the doctors and the team medical staff and the trainers. But, you know, we've already seen documents published by Major League Baseball and by the NHL yesterday

05:46 talking about this new normal, what some of the procedures are going to be when sports do come back. It's crazy when you think about it because I remember back, you know, I missed a few days of school every semester growing up. And there was always this kid at the end of high school who would get the 100% attendance certificate. He never missed a day for the – or she never missed a day since kindergarten all the way to high school, even though they came to school sick. That's not going to be something to brag about anymore, I don't think. You know, it's funny you mention that, Coach. Well, Chuck, you're familiar with Tom Galitti who does a great job for NHL.com. He's a long-time beat writer for the New Jersey Devils. We actually went to middle school and high school together. And I was the sports editor of the student newspaper, and Tom started to write for me. So I take a small percentage of credit for his professional career.

06:32 He was the guy in high school who won that award. It was called the Iron Man Award. Oh, Doug Jarvis Award, yeah. During the three years of high school, it was Tom Galitti of NHL.com who never missed a day. That's amazing. Kenny Albert, our guest. And I'll tell you what, when it comes to planning, as Coach said before, though, when it comes to what these guys are doing financially, I don't think there's a lot of people who will feel sorry for professional athletes. But we're still talking about quite an impact. And all I want to know is, as we probably wrap it up here, is how are you going to do a football game when the National Football League season starts and sit there without anybody in the stands? You're going to have to really manufacture that wonderful enthusiasm that you have. Yeah, you know, as you know, Chuck, it's certainly more challenging to do broadcasts out of a studio. We've all done them throughout our careers.

07:18 And I think, you know, there's still some uncertainty, whether it's hockey or football, as to whether we're going to be at the stadium, at the arena right at the start, or if we're going to call games from the studio. The NASCAR race on Fox, the announcers and the producer were in Charlotte. And the race, I think, was in South Carolina. And they put the graphics in from Los Angeles. So, you know, my personal preference during normal times is to be at the game, at the arena, at the stadium. It's a lot easier for a play-by-play announcer when you're actually at the venue, in the building. But, you know, we'll see what happens as far as are we in a studio, at least at the beginning? Are we calling games from empty stadiums? There are travel concerns. And do the networks want people staying at a hotel for a long period of time?

08:03 So we'll see what happens. I think, I do think, you know, I'm optimistic that at some point, hopefully within the next six months, we're back to normal and fans are in the stadium and we're doing the games from the booth and everything's as it was prior to March 11th and March 12th, 2020. But as far as what happens right at the start when sports do come back, we'll have to wait and see. Well, Kenny, it's been a pleasure. I've been watching and listening to you for years, and it's amazing how you can do four sports like that. I mean, you really never have a break, do you? This might have been a good break for you. You know, there are certain times of the year that are a lot hectic, more hectic than others. And, you know, as long as I don't call a goal a touchdown during a hockey game, I think we'll check. We're going to get a lot of fun. I really enjoy the variety. And I'm real fortunate to have been involved in all four through the years.

08:49 That movie with Eddie Murphy in it, Coming to America, when he was sitting in the stands out, I think it was a basketball game, and he yelled touchdown when the girl next to him was doing stuff to him. It's funny. I was actually at that game. There you go. That was a St. John's Marist basketball game. That's amazing. And I was there. The game was at the Madison Square Garden. That's the game they used in the movie Coming to America. What a great movie. Still talking about it today. Tremendous. Well, I'll tell you. Kenny, thanks for your time. Kenny Albert, stay safe with you and your family. And for Coach Pete, I'm very honored to have had you on the program. And just be well, my friend, and we'll cross paths at some point. Thanks, Chuck. Thanks, Coach. And Chuck, once things are back to normal and you're up here in the Northeast, next time you're driving on the Palisades Parkway, I'm only five minutes away.

09:36 So make sure to give me a call. Absolutely. Take care, Kenny. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Again, folks, that was Kenny Albert, famous broadcaster. You may have heard his dad before, Marv Albert. But Kenny's been around. Chuck, he's 52. He's just young. Just a couple years younger than Coach Pete. And he's in that financial red zone. And I know that he's a guy, too, that I hope that retirement planning for him is going well. I'm sure it is. It's just a strange world, folks. It's important to get the right plan for the right place. And I really appreciate him taking time earlier this week to talk to us. Folks, we'll be right back after this. We'll be right back.

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Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Each and every week I talk to very interesting people and the most important part is that I shouldn't be the only one hearing it. I really feel that if these people make sense to me that everyone out there needs to hear it. So stay tuned folks and I hope you enjoy this newest weekly segment on Coach Listens. Well folks, very excited today to have in studio Super Bowl XXXII MVP and NFL Hall of Famer. Of course his name is Terrell Davis. He played with the Denver Broncos. He's from the University of Georgia originally. Go Dawgs! Welcome in the studio Terrell. Hey Coach Pete, thank you man. This is great to be here. This is a West Coast kid back down south. This is awesome.

00:45 Back in the East Coast. That's right. It's not often we interview people about every week, but it's not often we have people in studio. So I'm glad you got to come in here. I'm glad we got to see you in person too. Yeah, I am too man. You know, just enjoying the off season right now. The season's about to start, but yeah man, it's good to be here. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. I've heard that voice on the radio and it's quite sexy. Yeah. Does the face look like the voice? No. Different story. You know, we were talking before the show though, and it's how important. And with the correlations between football and people's financial picture. Yeah. And you said as a running back, your goal was to get four yards every time you carry the ball. Now explain that concept and let's tie that into the financial world. All right. So in football, there's the concept of the four yard run.

01:30 Right. And to me, and I've been told it's the most powerful run in football. And let me tell you why. When I was in college, I used to try to break off the long runs, right? But long runs are unpredictable. Right. You can't repeat them and there's no formula to make them happen. Yep. So my coach, when I got to the NFL, said, hey man, we're not trying to have the long runs. If you break a long run, that's great. But what we want is consistency. We want to be able to say what is repeatable. Yep. And in football, the four yard run is the most repeatable play in all sports. And the reason it's powerful is because if you get four yards on every carry, three carries, that's 12 yards, right? You've got the ref running out saying first down. That is a first down. Marching down the field. In football, the name of the game is to move the chain.

02:17 Absolutely. So first downs leads to touchdowns. Touchdowns leads to scores. Scores leads to winning games. Winning games leads to winning championships. So we were always taught to focus on the four yard run. And the financial word is the same thing. Yeah. You know, you're not trying to look at the high returns. You want something that you can repeat, that's consistent, that you're not trying to swing out offenses, and there's no risk really involved. There's a lot of risk trying to break that 20 yard run. You see Barry Sanders, as great as he was, and he is, there's more risk to a 20 yard run because you have to, sometimes you have to lose yards to gain 20. I've seen guys loop around and then start dancing around and they maybe get blindsided by somebody else too. And that happens in retirement when people are swinging for the fences, like you said, and taking too much risk. That's it. To go backwards. That's it. My coach, he was risk adverse. He hated risk. He wanted four yards. He said, man, listen, I want my four yards. If you give me anything more than four, I'm fine with that. But I want my four yards.

03:12 Now, who was your coach in college? Ray Goff was my head coach at the University of Georgia. Was it the same philosophy there that you had? No, no, there was, it was different because, you know, in college, I thought I really failed, man, because they were used to big runs. You know, I played behind Garrison Hurst and Garrison would make the 80 yard runs, 90 yard runs. I wasn't so much a guy who could break long runs. I was more of a chain mover. So when I left Georgia, I was, I kind of felt like, man, like I kind of failed. You know what I mean? Like I wasn't successful. Well, you were consistent and persistent and you were reliable. That's important. Well, not then it wasn't, I guess they didn't see it that way because, you know, college football is a little different. They want more explosive plays. Right. But what I was built for was the pro game. And when I got there and my coach said in the meeting, he said, hey, I just want four yards.

04:02 Uh, I want you guys to just get four yards. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, that's it? Four yards? I said, I can get you four. So it made it where it registered in my head and it was something that I was, I was pretty good at doing already. And so once I was able to get four yards, then sometimes I could take chances and break a longer run. But I always made sure in the back of my mind to get the four, get that four yards. Yeah. Now we're going to be talking to you a lot in the future, though. We're going to follow the progress of the book. We're also going to go over that is make sure people understand from a point of view that that's understandable because a lot of advisors are talking over people's heads. We're going to bring it right down to the, to the, to the ground floor and make sure people get educated going forward. I really appreciate your time. Absolutely. Thank you, man, for having me. Folks. Again, that was a NFL hall of famer and Superbowl MVP, Terrell Davis. He's going to be a guest on the show coming up a lot of times in the future. Thanks for your time today, Terrell. No problem. Folks. We'll be right back after this.

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Transcript

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00:00 And hello and welcome into the program. This is the Financial Safari, your weekly show aimed at educating you about your money, about your finances, about your financial decision making. And in studio, as always, is the nation's income planner, investment advisor, registered financial consultant, published financial author, Coach Pete D’Arruda, as well as Stan Moore CPA. We've got several other people who will be joining us throughout the program today, including a very special guest. I see him connecting on the phone right now. We'll have him up in just a minute. Coach Pete, who do we have on today that you want to let folks know about? Well, there's a book I read several years ago called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and he's written several other books since then. And probably before that, Robert Kiyosaki, folks, you've probably heard that name. You've seen him on TV. He's one of Donald Trump's close friends, Robert Kiyosaki, will be joining us very shortly.

00:47 But folks, I want to tell you right here on this show, happy Memorial Day weekend, by the way, to all our listeners. And a special shout out to all the armed forces active and retired. It's because of you guys that we're able to talk freely on the radio and tell people about all the great things that they could do in retirement. But I like to tell everyone, gain confidence in yourself and your retirement. Very, very important. And everything we're going to talk about today evolves around retirement planning, 401ks. And it doesn't matter how old or how young you are, you'll find something on the show today that will be very valuable, including later on a free book giveaway. So, folks, listen closely. The free book Memorial Day giveaway is coming up shortly. The more you know about your money, the more you get to keep in your pocket. And I think that's why this next gentleman here on the program has been educating folks about their financial decision making for years and years, authoring several books.

01:37 I think he's got 16 books under his belt now. Welcome to the program, Mr. Kiyosaki. Hey, thanks. And thanks for doing a financial education show. Our government needs it. Well, we've been doing this about six years now, Robert, and it never changes. You watch TV and you read in the papers and get magazines and everyone's trying to push one thing or the other. And that's what I like about what you do is you take a step back and tell people what they really should be doing, not what they should be following the herd with. And we've got a copy of your new book. And, folks, you need to get a copy of this. It's called The Unfair Advantage, The Power of a Financial Education. Subtitle is What Schools Will Never Teach You About Money. Of course, the author is Robert Kiyosaki. And, Robert, there's so many good things in the book. I'll start with asking you a couple of questions, and you can tell me what you really want to draw attention to in the book. But in the book, you talk about five levels of investors. Do you want to go over that real quick?

02:26 Yeah, that's a little bit too tough to get into. But the average person is not investing, and they're depending upon the government to take care of them. And they're depending upon Social Security and Medicare. The very people they're asking to take care of them, I'm not Republican or Democrat. The problem is our very people who are protecting us are ripping us off. That's why I made the comment about you guys should be talking to our leaders also because they don't know what they're doing since we have no financial education in our schools. We have a very serious problem in the next 10 years is the old guys like me will start collecting Social Security and Medicare, and it's going to kill us. We talk all the time on the program about the more you know, the more money you get to keep in your pocket. So why is it that schools will never teach this information that you lay out pretty simply in your book? Well, if you read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, my poor dad's a great guy.

03:12 He was a Ph.D., and he was the head of education as well as head of the teacher's union. And it's the teacher's union that's the big problem because, as you know, most unions – I'm not against unions – but most unions, they want to work less and get paid more. So we're going broke because those are the guys running our country. The NEA, National Education Association, is the most powerful labor union in the United States. So they're not going to teach anything that violates what they're doing. It's basically communism is what they're doing, unfortunately. I was a Marine, and I fought in Vietnam, and I didn't fight for communism. It was my fault for capitalism. Well, as a Marine, you know the motto was advance and protect. I mean that's how you fight a battle is you always should be gaining, and when you gain, you should never give back, correct? Right. It was also kill or be killed. Well, that's the way it is in the financial world.

03:59 The people keep making more money, and the old saying, it takes money to make money, is almost a little bit off base. But we talk about financial experts in the book, or you do, and you have a great quote from Warren Buffett. He says that Wall Street's the only place where people ride to work in a Rolls Royce and get advice from those who take the subway. That's correct. That's the way you think about it. I wouldn't listen to most financial planners, but this is the difference. I don't need to listen to most financial planners because I don't think the way they do. And I think the 401k is the biggest ripoff ever put on the United States. It is ripping people off left, right, and center, but it's making Wall Street guys richer. You know, they're getting paid billions in bonuses, and guys are losing their homes and their jobs. This is a complete ripoff right now. What's wrong with the 401k system, Mr. Kiyosaki? Taxes.

04:45 You will pay more and more in taxes than you'll ever know. Plus, when you put a mutual fund inside a 401k, it's the most stupid thing you can do. Plus, mutual funds, you know, they don't tell you what their high expense ratios are. I'm not against this whole thing. If you don't have any financial education, you should save money and put money in a 401k. But I don't save money. I don't get out of debt. I'm trying to get into debt. And I don't have a 401k because I don't like being ripped off. It's that simple. But I have a financial education. That's the biggest difference of all. So there's advice for different stratas. For those of you who want to understand how the rich are getting richer, you should read Unfair Advantage. Because Rich Dad Poor Dad has a story when I was nine years old. An unfair advantage is what I'm doing today. And I'm making so much more money, but I don't have a financial advisor giving me bad advice.

05:31 But you have to do what's best for you and don't do what I do. Unfair Advantage will give you some ideas. Oh, that's how those guys are doing it. There's five unfair advantages. One is debt. Second is taxes. We love debt because banks always call me up because they want to unload more property onto me. And number two is because I'm on their team, I don't pay any tax on it. So when you read that, you go, oh, my God, that's how they're doing it. They're getting richer, paying less in taxes. And the thing is, you can do it, too. You just have fewer zeros behind what you do. They started off small, footed Donald Trump, but now we have millions of dollars coming at us because we have an education that most people don't have. And you can do it, too. That's my whole point. Well, you and I think a lot alike.

06:17 And we talk about this almost weekly on our show about two things. One is about cash flow, and I want to talk about that in a minute. But number two is most financial planners try to look at the past to justify what they're going to put you in in the future. Isn't that right? It's worse than that, but that's true. They look at historical values. What they'll tell you, I'm not against them. I just don't like their advice. You know what I mean? You know, they'll say, well, this mutual fund's five-star rated. Well, as compared to what? You know, it's like having a beauty pageant of ugly people and saying, well, this person's the least ugly. That's what five-star means. Well, let's look at this now. They're not comparing it to guys like me who are kicking butt out there, you know, getting infinite returns because I'm not using my money. I'm using the bank's money. So that's why if you think getting out of debt is smart, unfair advantage will shock you and say, my God, these guys are using debt to get rich and pay no tax.

07:09 It's so opposite of what people have been taught. You know, in a land of small people, a five-foot person is a tall person, right? So that's why we have to be careful what they're comparing to. It's all relative. It's all relative. So when you read unfair advantage, my idea was that by having the same advantages and seeing how it works in today's economy, like I said, rich dad, poor dad was me in elementary school. Unfair advantage is me in grad school. And you'll see why the rich are just kicking butt right now. You know, I was just talking to my friend Donald, and he says, man, I can't believe how many deals are coming at me. I said, me too. This is the best time of my life. But we're old guys now. For the average person, you've followed the mantra that your house is not an asset. But the debt can be an asset to you, can't it? And that's how you are leveraging your money and making more, isn't it?

07:55 Right. When I said your house is not an asset, you know, realtors stopped sending me Christmas cards. It was back in 1997. And now with the subprime crisis and the crashes on Wall Street and all this, you know, people are saying maybe Kiyosaki and Trump weren't so far off base. But we do think differently because we had rich dads. And our job is to put those ideas into your head. And maybe if you don't do it, maybe you can teach your kids differently. Because the second biggest ripoff is going to school on those student loans. Those are the worst loans you can possibly get. But they don't tell you that. You know, many kids coming out of school today will never pay off that school loan. And when their kids go to school, they'll still be paying off the student loans and their kids will be getting the student loan. That's bad debt. But the whole system is based upon debt.

08:40 And if you don't know how to handle debt, that's why you get into trouble. That's why your house is not an asset. I'm not saying don't buy a house. I'm saying don't be stupid out there. And now what I've been saying since Rich Dad, Poor Dad came out 15 or 13 years ago, whatever it is, people are saying, well, maybe the guy wasn't so stupid. Well, you know, you used a great example and analogy in this book. And I want to really get into this because this explains cash flow to a T. You say the three priceless lessons you learned from Monopoly. Monopoly. And then, of course, your wife, Kim. My wife's name's Kim, too, so we have that in common. But she has a commentary, too, so she must have played some Monopoly. But explain to folks how they should have learned if they ever played Monopoly, they should have learned that lesson then. And they might never have had to take another financial course in their life if they would have just paid attention when they were playing Monopoly.

09:27 Absolutely. Monopoly is one of the most brilliant games ever created. You know, let's say you have one house. You get paid, let's say, $10 rent. You have two houses. You get paid $20, $30, $40, $40, and a rent a hotel $60. That's all you have to do. So when I was nine years old, I was playing Monopoly, and my rich dad started telling me this is how the game is played. That's all? I said, yes. I said, why am I going to go to school? He says, I don't know. So I was like 10 years old, nine years old, and all this. And today I'm still playing Monopoly. And that's what I'm trying to say to people. That's the real education you should have had is how to play Monopoly. Because today, in Unfair Advantage, I'm talking about how banks are calling me up today saying, hey, we should take this off our hands. We're in trouble. We'll give you the money. It's so different of what the average person is taught in school.

10:12 The average person will work for guys like me and pay higher taxes to the government. And that's what I don't want for the average person. You should play the game of Monopoly for real because you don't have to go to college to do that. Mr. Kiyosaki, in your new book, you talk about the fact that the crisis, the economic crisis, is not over and the worst is yet to come. What do you feel that our future for the economy is going to look like in this country? You've predicted a pretty rough future. Well, let me tell you how I see the economy. Because I started saying years ago that gold and silver were the best investment. That was in 2000. Back then, I think gold was $275 a pound and silver was like, let's say, $5. And today, gold is $1,500 and silver is $35. If you had just done that, you would kick butt.

10:58 But today, this is how I look. I always look in 10-year increments. I look at 2010 to the year 2020. And I ask myself, what's going to happen between 2010 and 2020? Well, what's going to happen is the old guys like me, the baby boomers, we're going to start collecting on IOUs. That's basically one big Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Those IOUs and Ponzi schemes are called Social Security and Medicare. Social Security is a $15 trillion problem. And Medicare is a $65 trillion problem. So you ask yourself, can our government, I'm not either Republican or Democrat, can our leaders, the president to the senators or the congressmen, can they solve probably a $100 trillion problem? I don't think so. And that's why I'm not betting with the government.

11:45 I'm betting against them. If you think the next president, be it Obama, whoever wins, can solve the problems in the next 10 years, then you just do what school taught you. Go to school, save money, work hard, buy a house, and put your money in a 401K. But if you are betting against the government, you'll do other things. I bet against my government. I love my country. I also don't trust my leaders. That's the problem. We're talking with Mr. Robert Kiyosaki. He is the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, joining us here on the Financial Safari. And it's always a pleasure to get to speak with such a prestigious name. His new book, Unfair Advantage, The Power of Financial Education, What Schools Will Never Teach You, emphasizes his long-held belief that the school system and our education system is not teaching us the financial knowledge that we need to know.

12:32 Mr. Kiyosaki, you challenge people to invest in the one thing that they can control themselves. And that goes right along with what we talk about here on the Financial Safari all the time, kind of like recycling and the old mantra, think globally and act locally. You need to control what's in your own personal economy rather than worry about all these global factors and forces that are outside of your control, don't you? Amen. You're 100% on. The one thing you can control is what you put in your head. And that's why the start of Unfair Advantage is they choose your teachers wisely. I'm not against teachers, but most of them aren't rich. And I want to be rich. So you better choose leaders or teachers that you want to be like, like Mr. Trump's a good friend of mine.

13:18 Steve Forbes is a good friend of mine. I'm not as rich as they are, but I like hanging out with them because I learn a lot from them. I think like them. I want to think like them. I want to think more like them. But when somebody comes up to me and says, well, you know, you've got to have a secure job. I say, yeah, if you like paying taxes, that's a good idea. Well, you must save money. I said, yeah, you save money. You say you save your $5,000 and the Fed just printed $3.7 trillion. What is your little $10,000 in savings worth? Nothing. And then you pay tax upon that. That's really stupid from my book, from my perspective. So you've got to make your own choice. Whose ideas are you going to put into your head? And that's one thing you have control over. And it's about reprogramming a lot of times because people are bombarded with bad information. And even Kim, your wife, wrote it. She said, my earth-shattering realization came when I realized I had been taught and programmed

14:08 all my life to focus on the wrong thing when it came to money. And what it really should be, Robert, is all about cash flow, isn't it? Yeah, it's a lot about cash flow, but it's also debt and taxes. The thing is, I use debt to get rich. And the average person says they have no financial education. Debt makes them poorer. And the average person who is working hard, saving money, and putting in a 401k, they're going to pay the highest taxes of anybody around. And the people that pay the most taxes are the A students, the guys who are doctors and lawyers and accountants. They pay the highest taxes. And those are the A students. It's so backwards. If you read Unfair Advantage, you go, oh my god, we've really been looking at it from the wrong side of the coin. If there's two sides of a coin, they may look on the loose side of the coin, not the wind side of the coin.

14:54 Anybody will ever spend. It's called Unfair Advantage, folks. The power of financial education. What schools will never teach you about money? It is an education in one book. And if you read this, folks, there's no way you can't make money in the future. Mr. Kiyosaki, you've written rich dad, poor dad. You've written rich kid, poor kid. Any advice out there for the moms? Yeah, be very careful of what's being put inside the child's head. For example, my poor dad always said, I can't afford it. Or he would say such things as, the rich are evil. The rich rip us all off. And you go to school. You make sure you get a good school. Go to Harvard, you know? If that's what you're putting inside your kid's head, they're going to wind up like, you're getting bad advice financially. Now, education might be good. Might get a better job. But as I'm saying, employees and doctors and lawyers pay the highest taxes of all.

15:40 When President Obama says he's going to tax the rich, he's not taxing the rich. He's not taxing guys like me. They're giving me tax breaks. They're giving me tax break after tax break after tax break. But the people who go to school, they're just raising taxes on them. It's really bad. So I just bought a sailboat in a million bucks. I got a 100% tax write-off for it. Oh, that's nice. It's just a different way of looking at life. It's not the sailboat. It's my knowledge. So I understand the tax system, and I just play the tax system. But nobody ever tells you about taxes in school, nor do they tell you about debt. I just bought 680 units in San Antonio, Texas, apartment houses. And the thing was $27 million. Somebody ran it into the ground. So the bank calls up and says, look, would you take it off our hands for $21 million? And we say, sure. No money down. We got $20 million property.

16:27 Think about that one. It's shocking what happens in unfair advantage. As you'll read about, there's five unfair advantages. The last unfair advantage is called the law of compensation. It's exactly opposite of what they tell you in school. So I get richer and richer. Every year, my wife and I, we add, you know, this year, we're going to add another 1,000 units. I'm going to drill more oil wells. I just get richer and richer. The government gives me the tax breaks for it. But I'm doing what the government wants me to do. But by getting a job and working hard and saving money, you're doing what the government doesn't want you to do. That's why you pay more tax than I do. You had some pretty good oxymorons, a little page on that. The definition of oxymoron is words that contradict each other, like jumbo shrimp, government service, and painless dentist. That's a pretty good one. And how about adult male? There's no such thing as an adult male.

17:13 Well, and the one I wanted to call attention to was diversified portfolio. Yeah. That's a good one. It's not diversified. It's de-worsified. I'll just say it again. The mutual fund is like, let's say you have a plastic bucket. What a mutual fund is, is they drill holes all the way down to the last inch of the bucket. And so you're putting money in, but all the money is pouring out the sides, and all you keep is in the bottom one inch of the bucket. The mutual fund company gets the rest. And you know when they say there's a five-star and all this stuff? You're not going, you're lying. That's the worst thing about it. A person can't tell they're being lied to. That's what disturbs me. If you don't know, you have no financial education, you can't tell what's good or bad. You just have to listen to somebody who's a financial planner. I'm not against them.

17:59 But ask them how much education it takes to become a financial planner. You can become a financial planner in one month, just 30 days. You too can be planning people's futures. But it takes 18 months to become a massage therapist. You know, I mean, what's more valuable, a massage or your financial future? Depends on what time of day it is. There's a couple of massage therapists that do a good job. Mr. Kiyosaki, the majority of the American public are investing in 401ks, though. They are investing in mutual funds. What advice do you have for those retirement-minded Americans, those within a five-year window of retirement or already into retirement, that are now in a situation where they are drawing off of those qualified accounts, those 401ks and those IRAs?

18:48 What would you tell those folks? I would do something different, number one. I would pray for them. As I said, look from 2010 to 2020 and ask yourself, what's going to happen in the future? Either keep doing the same thing and pray a lot or say, I'm going to get some new ideas and take some different actions. That's all I can say. And I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's not good. So if you want to keep doing it, fine. Have a good life. There's different advice for different people. Like Susie Orman, when she speaks, she's a friend of mine. When she speaks to most people, she's scolding them. And many people need to be scolded. And then you have Dave Ramsey who's saying, act your wage. And what he's basically saying, stay an employee and get taxed to death. Now, if you like that advice, stay there. I'm saying you better do something different.

19:34 So if you just want to stay as an employee, hope that Social Security and Medicare are there for you, and a 401k is going to keep you going, that's fine. What I'm saying, there's better ways to do it. But as you said, you have to change your thinking. You have to change who you listen to. That's where it starts. In your book here, you talk about the difference between the person who is chasing capital gains and the one who is comfortable with the cash flow. Right. What it all comes down to, isn't it? Yeah. Last year, I think we bought another 2,000 apartment units. We drilled five oil wells or something. We hit five. So our cash flow per month goes up by like $100,000 a month. Now, it's not big money. That's $1.2 million a year. I'm not rich like the rich guys, but $1.2 million a year cash flow without working kind of gets me comfortable every month.

20:20 And other people who are investing in stocks of oil companies like Exxon and Enron and those guys, they're going up and down with the capital gains of the company. Meanwhile, the same companies are sending me a check every month for the oil I'm investing in. So there's a different way to look at it. I don't like the stock market because I have no control of the up and down. Now, you can if you play options and those types of things. But I would rather just receive my check every month. So every month, we have about 3,000 people sending us a check for using our apartment houses. And I have commercial properties. I never lost during the financial crash. So it's $100,000 a month. A lot of people don't make $100,000 a year, but I make that a month without working. Then I go to work every month on top of that. Well, you talked about taxes being an unfair advantage, debt being an unfair advantage, like your friend Warren Buffett that you quoted in your book, who has said that he was in a lower effective tax bracket than his own secretary.

21:12 So, folks, you need to think about your finances differently. And, Mr. Kiyosaki, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you again. Robert Kiyosaki, the author of The Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books, his newest book, Unfair Advantage, The Power of Financial Education. Folks, that is your unfair advantage. And the subtitle of the book is What Schools Will Never Teach You About Money. Mr. Kiyosaki, we would love to have you back on in the future. Please feel free to give us a call whenever, or if possible, I would love to reach out to you to have you back on the program. Yeah, please do. You guys are doing a great job. And, you know, the most important thing is to change the way people think. Look at the world differently. This is the best time in my life right now, but I had an unfair advantage. Well, we would love to have you back on to talk more and learn more from you.

21:58 And put a good word in for us, if you would, with your friends Donald Trump and Steve Forbes and Susie Orman, too. All right. I'll do that. Thank you, Mr. Kiyosaki, for joining us on the Financial Safari. And, everybody, I highly recommend you go out and buy a copy of Mr. Kiyosaki's newest book, Unfair Advantage, The Power of Financial Education. Keep up the good work, you guys. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care. You take care.

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00:00 Well, folks, this is the time of the show where I like to go out around the world and find someone who is a difference maker, who has touched my life in different ways. And we've got a return visitor on my show. I saw him speak in front of one of my groups about 12 years ago. A group full of financial advisors were fascinated by his story. His name is Mr. Jim Stovall, and he's enjoyed success as an author, athlete, investment banker or broker and entrepreneur while dealing with the challenge of blindness. Yes, folks, during his remarkable life, Jim has been a national champion Olympic weightlifter as well as author of over 30 books. In addition to his personal accomplishments, Jim was honored as the 2000 International Humanitarium of the Year, amongst many other things. Let's welcome in Mr. Jim Stovall. Jim, welcome in.

00:45 It's great to be back with you, Coach Pete. Well, one of your books crossed my desk the other day, and it's called Dear Napoleon, The Living Legacy of Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich Book. And that's over 100 years old now, isn't it? That original book, not your book. Yeah, yeah, it is. And, you know, Napoleon Hill was born in the 1800s, wrote this book in the early 1900s, and, you know, now is impacting people still in the new millennium. And his work is, that is the best-selling book in the field of success or personal development. And, you know, everyone listening to us now, if they haven't been impacted directly by that book, they have been impacted by somebody who was impacted by that book, I can assure you.

01:33 Yeah, well, it makes sense. I mean, this book is 74 chapters because you've interviewed or you've had people write a chapter in the book, each one, about how this, the original book, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, has affected their lives. And I figured we would talk about a few of the success stories or a few of the chapters here. And then if the listener is interested, we'll show them how they can get a copy of that book on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. Yeah, it's great. You know, and I wanted to, I mean, I could sit around and give my opinion of the impact of his work, but it's a little like looking out the window. You can't see the wind. Nobody can see the wind, but you can see what it does. It moves the trees, the leaves, the things out there. And that's where I wanted people to see the impact of Napoleon Hill so they could kind of tap into that well.

02:21 Let's talk about the original book, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. When did you first read it and what has it meant to you? I read the book. I was losing my sight and I was a college student and I realized I was not going to get a normal job. Nobody wanted to hire this Olympic weightlifting champion blind guy. So I decided I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know anything about it, but I thought if I owned a company, you know, they couldn't fire me. So I remember going to tell my father I'm not going to get a job, which really thrills parents when you're there in college. But he said, I don't know anything about that, but I'll introduce you to a guy. And he introduced me to a guy he knew that Mr. Lee Braxton had a third grade education, made $10 million during the Great Depression,

03:07 gave most of it away and lived the rest of his life off of his investments. And he worked for a dollar a year for various nonprofits and that was his life. And I met this man and he said, before we even start, he said, you've got to read this book. This book is the basis of all we're going to talk about. And I read it and came back and he asked me a question and he didn't like my answer. He said, go read it again. Well, it turns out Petey made me read this thing three times before he would even sit and talk to me. And that became the basis of our work. And then what was interesting is a number of years later, after I became successful, I wrote a book called The Millionaire Map. And the head of the Napoleon Hill Foundation called me and they said, did you realize that your mentor, Lee Braxton, was Napoleon Hill's best friend?

03:54 He gave the eulogy at Hill's funeral, of all things. And I had no idea of the relationship they have. But what makes this book unique, Think and Grow Rich, is the fact that it's not one man's theory. It's not anything. Napoleon Hill was a young newspaper reporter. He had reported on the Wright brothers flying their first flight and other things. And he was assigned to go interview Andrew Carnegie of U.S. Steel, probably the richest man of his era. And he asked him, how do you become rich? How do you become successful? And Carnegie said, no one has really quantified that. But if you'll dedicate the next 20 years of your life, you will be the one that reveals that. And Hill took the challenge. And Carnegie introduced Napoleon Hill to people like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Helen Keller and 500 of the most successful people of that era.

04:48 And out of those 500 interviews came the science of success and Think and Grow Rich. So it's not a theory. It's an actual, this is how people actually did this. And it's just a great tribute to him. And that's what I wanted to do in this book. And folks, we're talking to Jim Stovall. He's one of the authors of his book here. He's got a collection of people that wrote about their positive influence. By reading that book, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, we're talking to Jim Stovall. Jim, is having money the ultimate, I guess, indicator of success? No. No. Living the life you want to live is the ultimate success. And that includes living your life, helping other people live their life, giving, creating, and, you know, fulfilling your destiny.

05:35 Now, money is a key component of that. You know, I mean, I don't think there is any success without the financial resources. It's like, you know, there is no success without oxygen. You know, you and I don't think about oxygen, but if you cut it off in the next 60 to 90 seconds, that's going to be really critical to us. Well, the same thing with money. You know, it's like if you and I were going to go on a vacation somewhere, the key to our vacation is not gasoline in the tank. But we're not going anywhere unless we have some. And that's what money is. Money is not the end. Money is the tool. It's a good point. I remember growing up, I used to visit my grandparents up in New England. I had no idea about money back then. I was like eight years old, seven years old. And the neighbors had some children about my and my brother's ages.

06:23 So when we got up there, we tried to hang with them. But every now and then, their parents would take them to this fancy amusement park. And I remember sulking and poking my whip out and telling my grandpa, wife wasn't fair. And he said, Peter, money isn't everything. And I still remember that. And because we had, and looking back at it now, my grandparents were poor. My grandfather was a carpenter. He built the house they lived in. And basically, he was the water commissioner of the town. And they didn't pay anything either. But he did it to support the community and make friends. But him and my grandmother had a very happy life. But they didn't have much money. And so looking back at it now, it really did prove that theory that money isn't everything. No, money isn't everything. But nothing will take the place of money and the things that money does. Yes. And oxygen isn't everything. But it's critical to us as we live and move and have our being and do the things we do.

07:13 And, you know, but I believe everybody, if there's a dream, a calling, a desire you have in your heart, the resources are there. I mean, the key to money is knowledge. It's information. That's why Napoleon Hill's book was Think and Grow Rich. You know, the whole thing is just getting the information and learning what you learn. Money is not a cause. It's a result. It's the result of learning things you learn. If you took all the money in the world and divided it up evenly, within a few years, it'd be back where it is today. Because rich people are not rich because they have money. They're rich because they have information. Yeah, right. I mean, that's a great point right there. I think it was the Vanderbilts who found, like, the Biltmore House and all that. There was a story about the original Vanderbilt guy was really rich.

08:02 I think it had something to do with the railroads. Yeah, Commodore Vanderbilt. Yeah. And he left money to his kids and grandkids when he passed away, and most of them blew it. A couple of his kids became successful, but most of them are in poverty. And so that just shows you how fast you can blow money if you don't do the right thing. And anybody who tells me that money isn't everything, I always say, well, I'd like to try that side with a bunch of money and see how I feel, see how happy it makes me. But it shouldn't be the ultimate goal, but it does help you reach all the goals you want to get to. Is that correct? Absolutely. And, folks, Jim knows a little bit about money, by the way. And if his name sounds familiar, if you've listened to the show at all over the last 17 years, I wrote a book five years ago now called Seven Baby Steps to a Ridiculously Reliable Retirement Income. And Jim wrote the foreword for this book, and I read it all the time.

08:48 And, Jim, you gave me a really good foreword there. I don't think I deserved all the good stuff he said. Oh, I believe you did. I didn't write it for any reason other than it was true. So we'll give a copy of that book away. My book, right after the segment, so you can read Jim's foreword. And then the book we're talking about right now, though, fascinating book, Dear Napoleon, available everywhere books are sold. Jim, the people that you interviewed for this book or that wrote chapters in here, are there any chapters that stick out in your head as fascinating? Well, you know, obviously, one of the blessings I got after I got connected with the Napoleon Hill Foundation and found out that my mentor had been best friends with Napoleon Hill, they sent me a huge file of letters that Napoleon Hill and Lee Braxton had sent back and forth in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

09:35 And out of those letters, I took things that Lee Braxton had said to Napoleon Hill, and I crafted his letter for him. So his is the only letter that someone really didn't write to Napoleon Hill, and I crafted that for him. But there are some amazing people there. Mo Anderson, she is a billionaire and one of the forces behind Keller Williams Realty, the largest real estate company in the world. And then just so many other people that are in there from every walk of life. I mean, there are billionaires. There are athletes. There are great school teachers. There are just people sharing how this message helped them to become who they wanted to become. And, you know, when Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, he said it's not just about money.

10:25 You can be rich in experience, rich in joy, rich in happiness, rich in your family. And so it's people who have achieved each of those things that I think is what makes these individuals powerful. Now, Thomas, how old are you, 35? 36 now. 36. I always mess that up. You were 29 when you started with me. It's true. It's true. Do you remember the book? Have you ever read the book Think and Grow Rich? And don't feel bad if you haven't. No, I haven't. No. It's over 100 years old. You had to blow the dust off it. No, just joking. It makes me want to read it after this conversation. It's a really good book. See, Jim, a lot of the folks here that are listening that are younger than you and I, and I'm 55. Jim, you're about my age, I think. You're not that much older than me. 63 this week. 63. Oh, happy birthday. Not belated, because it's right now. So happy birthday coming up. Right. Yeah. But a lot of folks in Thomas' age group have never heard of this book.

11:15 And then some have. And Thomas, maybe there's some... I mean, you're a successful guy. You could be more successful if you read the book. There you go. There you go. So anyway, the fascinating book, folks, the name of it is Dear Napoleon. And it's 74 chapters. Each chapter, a person writing a letter to Napoleon Hill telling him how much they benefited for and enjoyed the book. And there's some really good stories in here. And you can learn a lot from each one of these chapters, Jim. Yeah, absolutely. It's designed to give the message of the book. But more importantly, to have people, you know, really get curious enough to go to the well themselves. And because I can assure you, you have read Napoleon Hill's philosophy, even if you haven't read his book. Because everybody that does what I do, and I've written over 50 books now, everybody that does that, we all stand on the shoulders of Napoleon Hill.

12:04 And it's a magnificent piece of work. So I would recommend it to anyone. Well, folks, again, the name of the book, Dear Napoleon, get it anywhere books are sold. Now, Thomas, I want to do this. We mentioned Jim gave me the foreword in my book, The Seven Baby Steps. Let's give 20 of those away to the next 20 listeners who call in and want to copy this and also a golden ticket for your no-cost total retirement plan. Fantastic. Let's do this. 800-661-7383 is the number to call. 800-661-7383. You can also text keyword plan to 600-700. Keyword plan to 600-700. Jim, I really appreciate your time today, buddy. Hey, I appreciate you guys, and I look forward to our next time together. Thank you. And, folks, we'll be right back after this.

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Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Each and every week I talk to very interesting people, and the most important part is that I shouldn't be the only one hearing it. I really feel that if these people make sense to me, that everyone out there needs to hear it. So stay tuned, folks, and I hope you enjoy this newest weekly segment on Coach Business. Jen Sincero is a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book, You Are a Badass at Making Money, Mastering the Mindset of Wealth, continues to get rave reviews. She says she spent years getting really good at being broke. She worked as a freelance writer in New York City, lived in a converted one-car garage. Sincero says she was in her 40s when she finally decided she was done being broke and set out to get rich. Her first bestseller, You Are a Badass, How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, got her started on that path, and she hasn't looked back.

00:51 I had a chance to chat with Jen about her life in the garage and how she broke free. Jen, that was quite a transformation. Yeah, it was pretty epic, especially since previous to the transformation. I truly believed that it was not possible for me to make money. So it was a complete overhaul of my entire reality, basically. Well, you know, I think we're all aware of the law of attraction. And it always seemed to me to be, I don't know, more than just, you know, thinking of something and it's going to happen. And when I read your book, it became clear to me it is more than that. It's all about the mindset and sort of reprogramming our subconscious. Absolutely. And it's because your mindset is what propels you to take action. So if your mindset is focused on, I can't, it's impossible, it's going to be hard and no fun,

01:41 your actions are going to reflect that and you're going to get very, very much nowhere. And very, very quickly. Yes, exactly. Well, and I mean, once you decided that this is not how you're going to live, what happened? I mean, what did you do? The first thing I did was I allowed myself to focus on making money, which sounds very simple, but in our culture, it's very controversial. Money is the root of all evil and you have to do stuff you hate to make money. It means you have no morals if you focus on making money. You know, that's what we're, you know, subconsciously raised to believe. So allowing myself to focus on making money was the first huge step. And then I went out and read all the self-help books and hired private coaches and went to money-making seminars. I basically did everything I could think of to get myself in the game with the money thing.

02:30 And I read recently you said that we should be grateful for our debt and everything else. Really? Yeah, because when you, what you focus on, you create more of. So if you're angry at debt, if you're fearful of your debt, if you're angry at your income and your bills, you know, there's so many ways to look at things. And if you look at your debt like, hey, when I needed money, money was there for me. So if I need it again, it could be there for me again. That puts you out in the world with a very different energy and has you focusing on the positive instead of the negative, which is so, you know, so much more powerful than we give it credit for. I know it's sort of tagged as a very woo-woo ideal, but it's real. No, it is real. And I think that once you realize that you've programmed your subconscious all these years,

03:18 it's hard to, you know, reprint it or remake it. Well, you have to work at it. So, you know, to just sit around and hope stuff changes is not going to get you very far. Absolutely. You have to do the work. But, you know, by the way, doing the quote-unquote work is a hell of a lot easier than spending your entire life in struggle thinking it's impossible. You've got to focus on your thoughts and switch them around if they're not helping you and take scary action and surround yourself with people who are kicking ass who can help you out. You know, it's not that hard. It's scary and challenging, but it's not hard. Yeah, absolutely. And here's another one that I've read that I like, play to win instead of play not to lose. Good advice. Yeah, I think that we, you know, it's sort of like working in your business instead of on your business.

04:10 You know, it's sort of just putting out the fires of your day-to-day life. If you really want to create a new reality, you've got to step it up and go for it on a much bigger level than just sort of, you know, continuously keep the status quo. One of the things I liked about the book, too, is, and I never thought of it like this, but having a relationship with money. And it's like any relationship. You've got to work at it. You've got to understand each other. And once you start thinking that way, things start to happen. At least they did for me. Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? It really is. And really waking up to that realization. I mean, I have an exercise in You Are a Badass at Making Money where you write a letter to money as if it's a person. I did that. It's fantastic. Oh, good. Yeah, I mean, when I did it, I was like, oh, boy, I have more problems than I even thought.

04:57 Because like most people, I loved money. I wanted more of it. But I felt dirty admitting that. And I didn't trust it. But I was so happy when it showed up. So lots of us have this very push-pull relationship with money. And that is one of the roots of why you're not making much if you're not making much. Absolutely. Now, you talk a lot about affirmations and how powerful they are. And the book is full of them. And I have them all on my phone, or a lot of them. But one of them wasn't actually an affirmation, but I love this line. It's, shut up, slow down, breathe, connect with your higher self, and act with intention. I think of that every day. Yeah, that's sort of my personal one right now, too. Another one that we had, you say gratitude defeats fear. And you talk a lot about gratitude and how important that is.

05:43 You know, again, what we focus on, we create more of. And when you are in a state of gratitude for what you presently see standing in front of you, as well as what you are working to create, it puts you in a different energy. And we are creatures that thrive on energy. And so when you've got a low energy and you're focused on the negative and all the can't and the woe is me, you pull in more of that into your reality. That's what you're able to see. And so when you're in a state of gratitude, it opens you up to all the experiences and people that are going to help you get where you want to go. And you're just going to feel a lot better. You're just going to be happier. So what's to not like about that? You know, I work with a lot of people that are heading into retirement

06:29 or are scared to look at their retirement. And this is a book that can help them as well, because it really is never too late to start that saving, to start believing that you can have a good retirement. Absolutely. And I think you said something really important. They're scared to look at it. They're scared to look at their money. And, you know, like it or not, money is the medium of exchange on planet Earth in the human realm. So having that relationship with it, again, it's back to that relationship, like know what your money is doing. Create a yummy place for it to grow. You know, you have to know where your money is and how much you have and what's going on with it. You've got to be in the flow with it if you want it to really serve you. So I think it's so important, especially for people who are heading towards retirement, to have a very healthy relationship with their money.

07:19 Absolutely. And to face it head on, because money's not going to hurt you. It's only going to help you. Absolutely. And it gets such a bad rap. You know, why is money the root of all evil? Money is, you know, paying for this phone that I'm talking to you on and bought me a cup of coffee this morning. You know, let's focus on all the beautiful, beautiful things that money really does bring into our world. You know, people do horrible things out of greed, certainly, but it's not money's fault. One of the things you mentioned in the book, too, is the cocktail of creation. That's amazing, too. That whole thing of just, you go through that little list of just one-word things, but they really open up the mind and to sort of get you into that creative flow. Yeah, it's all the stuff that anybody who's schooled in self-helpery, it's the reason that we say this stuff over and over and over.

08:07 It's watching your words and your thoughts and taking scary action and stretching yourself and, you know, doing all the things that you've probably heard that you should be doing all the time and trusting that it really works and keeping the faith and surrounding yourself with strong people. And, you know, there is a method to the madness, and it's a matter of allowing yourself to do it. And you can change your life on a dime. I mean, I certainly, once I got serious about it, it started happening really quickly. What's next for you? You know, I honestly, this book just came out in April, so I'm letting myself be really happy about this book, being out and promoting it and celebrating it. And, you know, of course, I'm getting a million ideas for future books

08:53 that will be written someday, but I'm really trying to just be in the moment with the fact that I just gave birth and celebrating my new baby. Well, I'm happy to help you celebrate because I love the book. And, again, thank you so much for spending some time with us today, and especially talking to folks who are in that retirement red zone, we like to say. And those are the folks that I work with, and they need to hear this as well. They do. And really, honestly, guys, like I was such a late bloomer. I didn't, you know, I'm 52 now, and I didn't start getting my act together until my 40s. I was living in that garage in my 40s. So, you know, it's never too late. And if my broke ass can do it, so can you, because I had spent a lifetime teaching myself how to be poor, and then I decided not to do that anymore. So, seriously, you've got one life.

09:40 I'm with you. Thanks again to Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass, Making Money, Mastering the Mindset of Wealth. You can learn more about Jen Sincero at her website, jensincero.com, spelled S-I-N-C-E-R-O. Her books are available everywhere. For the Financial Safari, I'm Steve Sedahl.

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Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate.

00:00 Each and every week on the Financial Safari, we like to bring in a special guest to help us find out what's happening in the financial world. Authors, artists, actors, and financial experts. You never know who's going to stop by and bring their unique perspective to the Financial Safari. So let's send it to Coach Pete with this week's special guest. Take it away, Coach. This is Walter Storholt filling in for Coach Pete on this week's interview. And today we're going to be joined by the author of the book, How to Retire Overseas, Everything You Need to Know to Live Well for Less Abroad. And our guest is Kathleen Petticord, the author of the book. And Kathleen, thank you for joining us today. And first of all, it says on the back of the book, retiring abroad has never been more accessible, appealing, and affordable.

00:49 Why? Hello. Good morning. I'm very glad to be here. It is because primarily of thanks to the internet. The internet makes this much easier, a much more accessible idea, much easier to research, much easier to consider. You can wake up one morning with the idea in your head that you would like to retire to the south of France or to an island off Belize. And you can go to Google and search and find all the information you could need or want to figure out how to actually make that happen. So is this something that you have done yourself, Kathleen, or have you seen it personally for many people? I've been covering this beat, as it were, for almost 30 years. But I'm not retired yet. I'm still working away. But I left the States about 16 years ago. I lived in Ireland for seven

01:36 years, Paris for four. And we're living now in Panama City, Panama. We've been here about five and a half years. So I have a fair amount of experience living outside the States and doing business, but not as a retiree. But I've been working over these 29 years with tens and tens of thousands of people who have retired overseas during that time. Now, tell me a little bit about this, because, you know, a lot of people traditionally are going to Florida. We know that Arizona over the past several years has kind of exploded into a retiree haven. Why go overseas when you can get what you, you know, you can get the nice beaches, you can get the warm weather here in the U.S.? You can. And the primary motivating factor, the impetus that gets a lot of people to consider

02:22 this idea, puts this idea on the table for a lot of retirees, is cost of living and especially of health care. Because both those things, your cost of living overall and especially your cost of medical care and health insurance can be dramatically reduced. It sounds like kind of marketing speak, but they can become a fraction of what they would be back home, you know, depending on wherever that you're coming from. So you can afford a kind of lifestyle that you might have to write off your list entirely if you were to stay in the States. So the best of a California Pacific Coast lifestyle, or the best of a Caribbean Coast lifestyle, or mountain or city or whatever your retirement dream is, you'll be able to afford that lifestyle in its fully packaged glory. You won't be skimping or

03:07 scraping by or making do. You'll have the retirement you dreamed of because your money, whatever your retirement nest egg is, it will just go much farther. So that's what gets a lot of people going on this idea. It's just a very practical, you know, back to basics idea. Your retirement dollars, however many of them you have, will go farther. But then what happens once you begin to consider this idea, and certainly once you begin to look at specific destinations and take your research trip and start spending time in other places you're considering, is you realize that the reduced cost of living is just the beginning of the payoff, that the real payoff is a much enriched, a much broadened and expanded lifestyle. We're talking to Kathleen Petticord, the author of How to Retire Overseas, Everything You Need to Know to

03:53 Live Well for Less Abroad. Do you run into the situation where folks, they kind of have that dream of living overseas, but they also don't want to leave the good old USA? They've been happy being American citizens. And do you ever run into that scenario where they want the, they want that tropical feel and they want that retirement destination, but at the same time don't want to leave the country they've lived in their whole lives? Definitely. There are a lot of emotional and psychological factors to consider. And what I say to people is, this is not all or nothing. And it isn't like jumping off a cliff, or it shouldn't be. You don't have to decide you're retiring to Belize or Uruguay or Argentina or France or Thailand or wherever you, you know, your, your imagination takes you. You don't have to wake up. I'm retiring to Thailand. I'm selling my house. I'm selling my two cars. I'm selling my lawnmower. I'm selling

04:42 and giving away everything I own at this point. And I'm packing my suitcases and I'm going to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and I'm never coming back. Well, the thought of that is, is intimidating, scary, and kind of crazy. On the face of it, that's a kind of crazy idea. So don't approach it that way. I really recommend to people approach this in stages, in steps, and the steps can be as big or as small as you're comfortable with. Also, this idea is very customizable. So if you're not interested or if you're intimidated by the idea of retiring full time to another country, don't. Just think of it this way. Start out by taking a trip. Go for two weeks or a month to someplace that has your attention someplace you've dreamed about your whole life. You've wanted to spend time in Italy. Fair

05:30 enough. Go spend two weeks or four weeks in Italy and just see what you see. See where that leads. It can all develop very organically and gradually. You talked about health insurance and medical care and those kinds of things. What about taxes? Are taxes better outside the United States in some of these locations? How often are people going to be putting themselves into a better tax situation? It depends on your situation. Where does your money come from? For the typical retiree, if what you're talking about is pension income, social security income, just quote unquote retirement income, then moving to another country, retiring overseas should be a tax neutral event for you. You won't pay any more tax and you probably won't pay any less. If though you still have earned income,

06:16 then if you are running a business, an internet business or consulting or earning income in any capacity, then the tax savings can be substantial. Excellent. This is good information to know. Now, we can talk in generics all day, Kathleen, but I like to get into specifics. So let's hear some of the popular places that people like to go. If you had a top three of the most popular places and the places that give you the best benefits, where would they be and what are some of those best benefits that you'd get? I'd say right now, the three places that make the most sense and where the greatest numbers of Americans are retiring would be Panama, Belize and Ecuador. And why? Panama is, I see it as

07:01 the destination with the lowest level of culture shock. This is kind of the easiest place to go if you're just not sure about the idea, worried about what your new life will be like. You don't want to learn Spanish. You don't want life to be too different. Panama is a really good choice. I think of it sometimes as kind of a halfway house for retirees because Americans are very much a part of the landscape here. You know, we built the canal for the past hundred years. We've been a big part of life, especially in Panama City. In Panama City, you definitely can get by without learning Spanish and you'll be tapping into, you'll have the opportunity to tap into a very established, very big and very fast growing community of other people just like you. Like-minded people of your same age, with your same interests, your same life experiences, looking for more friends just like you are at this

07:49 stage of life. So Panama, it offers affordable or even really low, depending where in the country you go, cost of living, world standard health care, especially in Panama City. It's very accessible. It's the travel hub of the Americas. So it's very easy place to come to and from, from North America. It has everything that the retiree is looking for. It has beaches. It has lots of sunshine, warm weather. So it's an all around great destination. And again, it's very well packaged at this point because there are just so many other Americans who've already retired here. Ecuador is a top choice if budget is your primary concern. Ecuador is the most affordable place to retire overseas comfortably right now. There are places where you could retire on less, but you would be moving farther outside your comfort

08:37 zone as an American retiree. For a typical American retiree looking for a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, Ecuador is the best choice from a cost of living factor. And then I mentioned Belize. I think Belize is the best choice for someone who wants a Caribbean lifestyle in retirement. And for some people, that's what they've dreamt of their whole lives. They'd want to swing in a havoc, you know, with the warm tropical breeze and the white sand all around and the blue waters and here the lapping Caribbean sea, that's their ideal retirement picture. And Belize is, I think, the best place to pursue that right now. Again, we're talking with Kathleen Petticord, the author of How to Retire Overseas, Everything You Need to Know to Live Well for Less Abroad. One little item I want to go over, Kathleen, before we let you go

09:25 is what about safety? Because I know that that's going to be a primary concern. It's not necessarily a financial one, but a lot of people are going to say, well, these places all sound wonderful, but how safe am I going to be to drive a car there and to feel free to walk around at night and those kinds of things? And where do you stand? And does that change sort of your answers on any of the questions that people have for you frequently? Definitely. That's a primary concern. I'd say along with health care, medical care, that safety is the biggest concern for a retiree and understandably so, especially a single woman retiring on her own to another country. And I'm asked this question really every day at this point from single women in their 50s or 60s thinking about retiring to a new country. And I'm so impressed by them because I recognize it takes not an insignificant amount of courage to take this step on your own

10:14 as a woman in your 50s or 60s or even older. And my response is all of the places that we recommend and that I write about, all the countries and destinations that I feature in the book, for example, they are all safe. They are definitely all safe places for the American retiree, including a single woman retiree. That's not to say there's no crime. There's nowhere in the world where crime doesn't exist. In any city, you're going to have, you know, street crime, petty crime, pickpockets, etc. Anywhere in the world, there's crimes of opportunity will take place. If you leave your iPad sitting on a park bench anywhere in the world, somebody's probably going to pick it up. Does that mean it's an unsafe place? No. So you have to make a distinction between certainly violent crime and the places I talk about, that's not a concern at all. Petty crime, you just, you know,

11:01 use your common sense. But again, the places that we recommend, they're all places where I've spent time, I was a single mom for a part of my career, part of my life. These are places I traveled to on my own with my young daughter when it was just her and me and where I have always felt very safe. I recently was in Cancun and stayed in one of those all-inclusive resorts. And when I, when I hear places like Panama or Belize or, you know, or Mexico or something else where you're going to this sort of tropical location to retire, I, the first thing that I picture is going to be the sort of that resort style. Is that how people are retiring in these locations? Or are you in your own home or your own condo and you've still got to go to the market and do all those kinds of things? Or are both of those options available? Both of those options. All versions of this are possible.

11:48 And that, that question speaks to what I think is a critical question for anyone considering this idea to address very early on in the thinking. And that is, do you want to retire to that kind of an environment to a resort style environment or what is very common in, in places where retirees are congregating foreign retirees established and kind of turnkey developments designed and built specifically for foreign retirees. These are increasingly common in lots of places, especially Panama, Ecuador, Belize, and the places that I write about all the time. You'll find lots of these. These developments are typically designed, conceived, built by Americans. Sometimes Americans who've retired to the country, looked around, saw an opportunity for this kind of a product, this

12:35 kind of a lifestyle product and, and are building them. So now, you know, there have been retirees in Panama for 15 years. Americans have been retiring here in big numbers. And a number of them now in all those years have worked to build these kinds of developments. Moving into one of these places, your day-to-day experience of life could be very much the same as though you were retired in Florida or Arizona in the States. Everything would feel very comfortable, would look the same because it's been built by someone like you from your same background and lifestyle history in the States. So it's going to look like what you grew up with, what you're used to. Or do you want to move outside that comfort zone and have a more adventuresome experience? And I think of this as the question of how local do you

13:21 want to go. Buying into one of the packaged turnkey developments is a non-local choice. Your neighbors are going to be other foreigners like you. Lots of pluses and some minuses. Or do you want to, again, have a more exotic experience and have, you know, in Panama, live in a Panamanian neighborhood and have Panamanians as, as your new friends? That's a really critical question to address up front. Lots of options, lots of questions, and that's where I want to leave this, Kathleen. Kathleen, I'm not at retirement age, but if I were, having read through some of your book already, I want to get started. So what do I need to do first? Do I need to pick the location I want to go? Do I pick a style? Or do I start with what my budget is and then see all the different places that might be options? All those are important things, but where I think you'd start is, it sounds

14:06 a little silly, a little corny, but you need to get to know yourself. What is it you want? What kind of lifestyle are you looking for? And this probably speaks to your suggestion of what style are you looking for. I suggest, think of it this way. This makes it very specific, very tangible. What view would you like to have outside your bedroom window every morning? Do you want to see the Caribbean Sea? Do you want to see the crashing Pacific Ocean? Do you want to see a city street scene? Do you want to see a hillside covered with wildflowers? What lifestyle do you want? Start there. What's important to you and what's not? Make a list. Make a detailed list and then you go and try to connect the dots between your priorities and your preferences and the lifestyle you want to create for yourself. Connect that to where in the world you can afford it. Again, the book is How to Retire Overseas,

14:54 Everything You Need to Know to Live Well for Less Abroad, written by Kathleen Petticord. She's been our guest here today on The Financial Safari. If you're interested in retiring overseas, this is a must read. Again, the book, How to Retire Overseas. Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us here on The Financial Safari. Appreciate it and enjoy the warm weather down there for us, would you? Thank you very much. It was great to talk to you. Stay tuned. There's more coming up here on The Financial Safari.

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