Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Okay, how about me.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Thoughts on why that is? But I'm sure you hope question is, are you doing it massively or abundance? Like it's, it's.
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Frank after 40. Today we have another interesting discussion. One of the subjects that I'm very passionate about and one of the main, you know, directions. We like to go with the channel, which is wealth building. And we have Mr. Marcus Howard. Welcome.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you so much, Frank. I'm happy to be here.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Thanks, man. I'm excited to have you.
There's a lot of ways we could probably go today, but we'll do what we normally do and we'll kind of first tell us a little bit about yourself, tell everybody who you are. And then I want to start with the early years and find out about, you know, where, what got you to where you are today. And then we're going to dive into.
I feel like this landscape has changed quite a bit. I feel like it is changing. I feel like it has changed. You know, we've got a lot going on with, with, in the terms of wealth and wealth building, with the fact that we have all this technology. And I feel like there's going to be some questions I have on that as well. But before we get. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about you, what you're doing now and then, and then let's, let's get to how you got to where you are. So tell us a little about you.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Absolutely. So, as you said, I'm Marcus Howard. I'm based in Chicago, Illinois.
As a profession, I am a hedge fund manager. So I run my own investment shop based in downtown Chicago, have an office in the Sears Tower. But my passion project and what I like to talk about these days is that I've actually started a school. So we started an online academy where we work with middle school and high school students on personal finance and how to trade.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: And.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: And so with just the change in landscape, whether it's from the adults or parents or especially the students, just these conversations that we want to have about money and how important they are just to be able to have a mechanism by which we can really teach the next generation how to be smart about money and how to be independent a lot sooner. We're really excited about that. So a very cool thing about that project that we have partnered with Interactive Brokers, which is the industry standard for trading platforms here in the United States, actually Across the world. And so the students that are in our program are actually learning on the tools, tools that professional investors are using, and they're not learning on some toy that they will never be able to use in their lifetime. So we're really excited to be able to introduce 14, 15, 16 year olds to the world of investing in a smart and meaningful way.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: I think that's really important.
Before we get to that, though, on that subject, tell me a little bit about early years for you, because I'm always interested to hear about what it was like in your family growing up. Because I find that the conversation of money, how early it takes place in some families and not in others. Like, we didn't talk about money in my family, really, there was no talk of investing or money. It was usually just my parents would have their conversations outside. It wasn't like they included the kids. So tell me how you grew up and was that ever something that took place in your family? And in what age did it start, if it did? And then kind of walk me through what. What took place and how maybe that, you know, what you're doing now was because of what happened when you were a child or not at all.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Sure. And that's a really insightful, intelligent question. So I appreciate you asking that because I feel like my story isn't unique. It's like a lot of families, many of the conversations that I had with my parents around money was mom or dad, can I have?
And it wasn't necessarily these sorts of intelligent conversations about how does money really work.
My mom, for example, was a social worker. She still is a social worker. And so she's never made.
Never made six figures in her life. Like every year, it's always been anywhere between 35 to $70,000. And so with that and my two other brothers, money was tight growing up in the household. And so it was. Sometimes it was tough to have those conversations around. Like what?
You know, why can't we have these things that we see our friends have or other people are having? And sometimes there's a bit of. In the family, on the adult side, there's a bit of shame, there's a bit of frustration. There's many things that come into it where sometimes I would just hear the answer because I said so, and sometimes you just have to accept that answer, you know what I mean? And. And as an adult now, I'm. I have a lot more empathy for my mother and my father for now, understanding those things. But when you're younger, you just didn't quite know.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: And so, yeah. So for me in my younger years and coming up, I mean, those conversations around money, I can say weren't the most healthy. But I had also been a really independent person growing up. So I lived. So I went to school, I went to high school in downtown Chicago. So I took a test to get into a magnet school or college preparatory school. So I went into a place that was maybe 10 or 15 miles away. It took me like 45 minutes to an hour to get to high school every day. But I did it because I knew that I wanted to do something more. And me going to my local high school probably wasn't the thing that was going to help me to be the person who I genuinely wanted to become.
And so with that kind of independent spirit and mindset of waking up at 5 o' clock every morning to be able to go to school, to start school at 7 o' clock. So I started at zero period, which was the period before first period. So I was an overachiever. I just kind of knew that I was destined for more. So how I actually got into then this kind of deeper realm of really me understanding money and actually getting into investing actually started because, believe it or not, my freshman year of college, my identity had gotten stolen. And so, yeah, and so in that process of learning what I had to do to fix my credit, I learned that there was a way that you could essentially build credit from scratch. And it's something that the mortgage industry has been doing for decades. I can't say that I, that I created it, but essentially, you know, if you are able to get what at the time now are secured loans, which is basically you can get a loan that is secured by the money that you have in your checking account, as long as they don't give you access to the debit card and you pay the interest up front, essentially you're going to get consistent credit history. And so my innovation was one that I had partnered with a couple of credit unions in Washington D.C. and then another one in California. And we were getting 18, 19 year old kids, unsecured loans in their name again, putting them having money in the checking account from that loan and then just paying the interest up front. So, so basically by the end of their first semester of school, they had a 700 plus credit score. So that allowed them to be able to do things like finance a car, get an apartment. When they were trying to get internships, they would check your credit to make sure that you weren't messing up those sorts of things. And then I had a friend of mine who was a computer science major who coded me up a rudimentary piece of software. Before software as a service was a thing, we're talking 2005 or so.
And so we were able to kind of automate a lot of these processes to be able to scale it. And so I had run this personal finance business. I had written a book called Preparing to Manage Millions. I'm not trying to promote it, that's just the name of it, where we had essentially taught the students or gave them the educational piece of it as well, in terms of how to not screw up the work that we were doing. And I ran that business for maybe 12 or 13 years before I started my investment company. So I've just, I've kind of been in this space for a really long time and seen every level of it, have been able to teach high school and college students at that level, but then also have the deeper conversations with parents to be able to repair some of these relationships that you have around money for yourself and your family.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so. But it doesn't sound like you really were bombarded with a lot of this conversation when you were young. So it's like you had a good work ethic is what I'm hearing. You were going to school, you tested into a good school. But like, how did you. At what point were you like, falling in love with the idea of helping people make good financial decisions?
Like, it sounds like you just like because your identity was stolen, you think, you think that was the moment where you were like, okay, my identity was stolen and you figured some things out and you were like, hey, I should help other people with this. They need to understand credit. Because credit is to me, totally different than investing. Like they're two separate things, really. I mean, obviously if you have good credit, that helps, but then you get into, there's the Dave Ramsey's who are like, credit system is jacked up, and then other people who are like me, that I believe a lot of what Dave Ramsey says, but I believe that you should use credit and you should, you know, if you leverage it wisely, then it could be a good thing. So how do you, how do you have that conversation with especially young people and then people that aren't young?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah. So to answer your question, that is where the genesis of my desire to want to serve and help people came from. It was from the pain of the experience of having my identity stolen and not necessarily wanting other people to, to go through that.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: And so I found that in many Moments in my life that when I am experiencing deep pain, my, my natural inclination is to want to figure out how to fix it and then to serve to have other people not be able to experience that or at least be able to get through some of those experiences. So that's just kind of been my natural proclivity to want to be able to teach. But as a, as a younger student going through high school, I mean, I was really just figuring out how can I invest in whether it's myself, whether it's other friends, projects that were going on or just investing in businesses or creating my own startups in order to be able to make a living and build wealth for myself and for my family.
So in just answering the kind of bigger question of when you are looking at credit, it's important to have it. I'm not saying that you need it in order to be able to build wealth, but it definitely does make it a lot easier. And I can tell you that when you get to this level in terms of looking to be able to either finance large things or, you know, work with other individuals who are providing you six or seven figures for investments, you better believe that they're looking at all of these things. Because if you can't handle your own money, how are you expected to handle theirs? And so you just have to be able to, you know, keep your proverbial house in order in order for other people to be able to trust you. So for credit, I would say it's more of a trust mechanism more than it is a wealth building instrument. But the things that you learn in terms of how to be able to build your wealth will be instrumental and help, I mean, I'm sorry, in building your credit will be instrumental in helping you to do other things in terms of being able to build your wealth.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: I agree.
So let's talk a little bit about.
I'll be selfish here for a minute. I have a nine year old.
What are the conversations we should be having in the family? What are people that, what are conversations people should be having with their kids to kind of help them? What role do parents play and what are the conversations we should be having to help our children be set up? Well, maybe there's things we should be doing, conversations we should be having.
We both know it's not going to happen in school, so in most cases. So how do we, what role do we fill? How do we fill that role?
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Yeah, Another really good question. The first thing that I would say that is imperative in this day and age and with this new generation that is coming up. And I know we always say that every generation is different, but this generation is growing up in a time where they don't know what it's like not only to not have the Internet, which you and I, we grew up around that time, so we know past and present, but they also haven't lived in a generation where they didn't know about social media.
And how that is truly not only changed the way that they communicate socially, but also the way their brains are structured is different. If you look at the peer reviewed studies on just how social media is changing, like literally the neuroplasticity of the brain, then the third part is this new gene generation. So your son or daughter was nine years old.
They're not going to understand the world without artificial intelligence. And so the number one thing that we need to be talking to our students about in this day and age is critical thinking more than anything else. Like they have to learn how to be able to think critically and think independently and learn how to question the information that is going to be given to them. Because 80% of the information in the next five years, it's going to be very hard to tell whether or not it's true.
And so critical thinking is that first piece of the puzzle that helps everything to become easier. Now if we want to talk about conversations in and around money, it's important to start with having the student be able to understand even what their own thoughts and beliefs around money are. Because these habits that we form when we're 7 to 10 years old, 7 to 13 years old, we don't realize it, but those are the things that truly stick with us into adulthood. So that literally the interactions you are having with your children right now are the things that are going to shape when they're 18, 19, 21 years old, how they truly think about money, not what you tell them, but what they see you do specifically. And so it's important for when you're, when you're building these dynamics around relationships and around family that you not only talk about it, but you also demonstrate it in an intelligent way. So one of the things that we have with our academy is a family wealth snapshot. So what this means is now 9 years old May be a little young, but we do it with high school students as well as their parents, is you can take a 10 question survey, which we link it with artificial intelligence that gives you a snapshot of like what your actual wealth appetite is, what your actual money profile is, and it's not, it's not an innovation. Like, we've seen plenty of these kind of wealth snapshots before, these money snapshots. But I think the thing that makes ours different is that whether you're a student or a parent, you start, and then you invite your entire family to go and do it, too. And so our artificial intelligence engine comes in and it looks at the dad, the mom, the son, the daughter, and you all look at each other as a family to see, okay, well, dad say first, but mom is spin first. So if this. If the son or daughter wants to have a conversation with somebody who connects with them more on a more personal level, they can go, well, I'm going to talk to dad, because dad is a little bit closer to the kind of person that I am than necessarily mom. So it kind of gives you this insight that you normally wouldn't have as a family to be able to truly understand, like, what your individual personalities are in and around money. Because that's the start of it. Once we really get an understanding of what's going on in the family, we can kind of have a deeper conversation. A lot of times with parents, they are.
They are slower to have these conversations because they've made mistakes in the past. And it's not a judgment, it's just a real thing. Like, even with all the work that I do, I haven't figured it all out yet. You know what I mean?
And so in those moments when you are dealing with your own insecurities, it's hard to be able to give what you feel like is the right information to your kid. Because a lot of times you just don't do what I did. And that may not be necessarily the right thing. So what is the actual right thing? And how do you communicate that to the student in a way that they can really use it? And then the other. The last part of this is that we just have to give them opportunities to be able to demonstrate that they are applying these things. The first time you file your taxes should not be when you have to do it.
The first time you establish a budget is not when you need to budget. So how do we apply those reps? How do we give them practice before it's time for them to actually get into the game so that they're not uncomfortable when they're really starting their adult life.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: So I'm a little bit confused on what.
Just to make sure I'm clear. So you're saying, hey, what you do is you kind of say, okay, here's dad's profile, here's mom's profile. Here's what your parents typically are like when it comes to investing money. And then you help the child determine are you more like dad, are you more like mom? Is that what I heard?
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Well, I don't. The artificial intelligence engine that we have. Yeah. So what it does is it gives, it gives a snapshot of the entire family in terms of what each individual's personality profiles is like, but it actually goes a step deeper in that. Then it does things like creates intelligent conversation pieces that parents can have with their children in and around money to help them to be able to understand things better. It gives them things that they can ask around the dinner table. It and again shows in terms of what your profile is and what your parents profile is, who are you naturally more like? Are you more like your mom or are you more like that?
[00:16:20] Speaker B: And, and so I guess that's more important because it makes them, it's like any personality profile test. It's like, okay, you have a tendency to be more risky or you have a tendency to be more, you know, long term focused. And so that's kind of what the goal is to kind of help you all have a conversation around like, okay, since you're more likely to be more risky, you're going to be prone to do more investments like this, this and this with your money. So you have to be careful. You have to, you know, make sure you're, you know, hedging your bets and having a well balanced portfolio. Is that kind of what I'm hearing?
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's a, it's a starter. So I'm not saying this is the, the be all to end all, but this is to start to be able to have healthier conversations as a family in and around money. But not just with, with the student and not just with the student, but then also as a husband and wife, sometimes you don't, you're not able to have these healthier conversations in and around who you are and the ways that you all behave. So it's a way for the family to truly get an understanding of each other. So think of what is the other really cool one that I think it's called like love languages, you know, where somebody may be more physical touch, somebody may be, you know, acts of kindness, these sorts of things. So once you understand how your partner is, then you can give them what it is that they want specifically, you can love them the way they need to be loved or that they're asking to be loved for the way they naturally would want to be loved versus the type of love that you want to give them, and those relationships become healthier.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Okay, so let's say you figure that out. Dad's like this, Mom's like this.
Then where do you go from there?
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So for us, that's the start of the equation. The other, the bigger piece of it is the educational aspect of it. So now that you know these things, how do you begin to create a dynamic within yourself, not just with the family, but with yourself to be able to grow into the natural sort of person that you are? And so if you do have a more riskier money appetite or more riskier investment appetite, then how do you learn how to do that, specifically in a healthier way? Or if you are more, you know, say first, how do you do that in a more healthier way? So think about.
Let me just use a sports analogy. If you are playing American football and there's offense and then there's defense. And so it doesn't make sense for a coach, if you're on defense, to teach you about all of these offensive things. You should become the best defender possible. And so a lot of times in life, we don't even know what our individual appetites or what our individual assessments are around these sorts of the ways that you live in terms of money. And so anything that is being taught to you, you're going to accept and think that it's the way that you should be, which in a lot of times it isn't. And so how do we put you in the right lane and then how do we educate you over the long term? So over two to three to four to seven years to help you to become the best version that we naturally know that you are, versus trying to fit you in a mode that isn't naturally you.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: I'm sticking on the family front for right now because I know that's, you know, one of the things that people are going to have a question about with kids and the family piece.
How do you keep kids interested?
How do you keep kids interested? I think that's my first question. How do you keep kids interested in this piece? I mean, you got social out there, people.
Let's just take, for example, again, I keep being selfish with my son, but this is what, you know, he'll. If he's on social or he's on YouTube, somebody with the Ferrari, you know, he'd. I'm like, look, man, this is not. This is not reality, right? So it's like, you know, oh, you know, YouTubers, gamers, like the stuff that he's seeing. So how are in a market, in a, in a day and age like this, when kids think that it's easy and it's like, that's everybody. And how are you getting them stay interested in what I believe is a lot of the financial world, which is, it's the consistent discipline that pays off over time.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: And I don't know if that's what you promote or, you know, but, but where go with this? How do you, is it gamifying it? Is it, how do you keep it interesting compared to what they're seeing?
[00:20:26] Speaker A: True. Now let me just first start out by saying this is the $10 million question. We are not the only ones that are struggling with this. Every single parent that I talk to is, is, is worried about how do I continue to engage my student in a way where they just really care. It's a lot of times this, this generation that is coming after us, they've just kind of checked out a little bit. And it's, it's not always completely their fault. It's. They are inheriting a world. And you, and you can see this now, they are inheriting a world that is basically telling them that we don't value you. And what do you do with that sort of information where it's like, okay, well I know that if I go to college and then if I do that for four years, I'm going to get myself into a whole bunch of debt unless I get a scholarship and then I is there a job waiting for me when I get out of college or is there not a job waiting for me when I get out of college?
How am I supposed to get an entry level job when it requires two to five years of experience? Or even with these entry level jobs now I'm competing with individuals that have been doing the job for 10 or 20 years, have been doing another job for 10 to 20 years, and they're trying to start over because artificial intelligence has taken their job. So the thing that I would say is that a lot of the reason why these students are checked out is not because they don't care. It's because they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall five to six years from now. And they're looking to the adults to say, well, what are we supposed to do? And the adults don't have the answer. And so there's a little bit of futileness in their attitude, which I don't blame them for. And so the first and foremost thing is to understand, appreciate and have empathy for that, that these Kids aren't dumb that they are actually seeing that the future that they are promised may not be the future that they are going to walk into. So what are they going to do about that?
So once you come from that level of empathy and understanding, then they lift up a little bit more and they pay attention to you because they realize that I'm not the adult whacking my finger saying that you need to be, you know, smart, you need to be intelligent, you need to work hard the same way that I did. But instead they go, yeah, the world that you're inheriting is kind of sucking right now. And so how do we help you to get to a place where you can really be able to survive and thrive and not get yourself into a whole bunch of debt? So first starting there. Now in terms of actually keeping the student engaged, that's a really important piece of the puzzle. And there are so many things that we are trying to do do. I'm not just saying me, I'm saying as a society, in terms of the education system and everything else, to be able to figure this out. So my wife is a researcher for the Department of Education. She does this at the, at an international level. So she doesn't just work here in the United States, but she has projects that in Puerto Rico, in the US Virgin Islands. Like they're really looking holistically at what the world is doing in relation to education. And I'm telling you that they have some pretty good answers. So it's not that we don't know what to do a lot of times it's that the things that we know work when we try to implement them, we run into political budget and just will issues at the education level. So it's hard to actually get this done in schools. I would say that the number one thing that I've seen that works in terms of the work that my wife does is family engagement, which is why we use so much family engagement in the work that we do in our online academy, where if you get the entire family involved, then it makes it a lot easier and a lot simpler for the student to be engaged. But when you're talking about this next generation of students specifically, it does include some of the things that you have said before, like gamifying these elements to understand that their intent, attention span has went from. You can't have them open a book and turn to page 12 and read for an hour like that method of learning is obsolete. So you have to meet them where they are. They're used to 2 to 5 minute or 60 second to 5 minute clips that teach them in short verse that they can be able to, to use quickly. The number one complaint that we had when we work with our students and they're learning about money and everything else in school is how is what you're teaching me right now going to apply to me in my life today? And if you cannot make that connection to them, then they're just going to tune out.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: So a lot of the work that you have to do is not to say this is going to help you five years from now, but how is this going to help you today and over the next three to six months so that you can really be able to see some substantial changes, substantial differences in your life. So whether it's reaching them where they are in terms of what are the sorts of things that they're interested in doing now. Are they interested in gaming, are they interested in sports or whatever it may be that they're truly interested in and showing them how they can utilize these tools to be able to benefit today. Like, I'm never the type to be like, you know, you're going to get a Ferrari at 18 or 19 years old.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: Of course, yeah, to be honest with.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: You, a lot of those kids are anyway. So like, I don't want you to be like them. You know, that's not a realistic way to be. But at the same time, that's not, that's not all kids. It's most of them, when they look at that, what they're actually asking for. If you go beneath all the stuff and ask enough why questions is certainty. So when they see the kid with a Ferrari, they have enough money to be financially secure and that's what they're actually looking for. They're looking for some degree of certainty in a very uncertain world.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: So let's switch a little bit here and go from kids to adults because I think that if the adults are misguided, it doesn't really matter. The kids are going to be misguided in most cases too.
So what are you finding out there?
I mean, I'm, you know, you're. If anybody who consumes content right now depends on what type of content you're consuming. But you know, we've got this AI revolution happening.
And then you take that and you take like for example, I might watch some content on. Okay, well if you're not investing in a. First of all, there's the investing piece. Like, okay, you have to have the budget so you have some money left over and then it's like if you have money left over, where do you even put that money? And then you have to have the discipline to do it consistently over a long term period of time, you know, whatever.
So what should people be focused on? If you're talking to adults, how are you talking to them and helping them with their investing mindset where they should be putting their money? But then there's also the concept of while they're one investing their money, it's will their job be there because of AI in the next three to five years? I think those are both real conversations that people have to be thinking about or are thinking about right now.
What is the conversation you're having with people?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so on.
So it's kind of multi tiered with me. So because I do run an investment company, I have those sorts of deeper conversations with my clients in terms of where are some good spaces for you to ultimately be able to, whether it's park your money or be able to invest your money over longer periods of time in order to be able to see your wealth grow. Those are, you know, kind of deeper conversations. And I want to be as broad as I can so that this isn't interpreted as me giving people financial advice.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, so. But nothing we're talking about today is, is financial advice.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Talking about what's going on out there.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And so you just have to understand, just so the, the deeper conversation that I have with my clients is to understand or to be able to have the mechanisms to know where the bigger institutions are moving bear money. It's not about what you think is interesting, it's not about what you think may end up blowing up, but instead it's how do you get access to the right reports and resources to know where the bigger money is moving and for you to put your money there, because the more money you put there, they are making the bet that these things are going to grow. So if you can ride those waves, then you'll be ultimately fine. There are plenty of places that you can go. I know it sounds weird and boring to say that you can look at the Federal Reserve website where a lot of that is in plain sight. If you just read these reports and understand. But just being able to do that little bit of level of research, most adults don't have time because you got the kids and busy and you have to cook dinner and you got your own concerns. And so they would work with someone like me because this is what I do for a living. This is sort of research that I do. But if you want to do this in an independent track, there are plenty of places that you can go. But the big advice that I would give you is just understand where the big institutions are putting their money and then put your money there. I can say they're putting things in areas like technology. They're putting it a lot of times in what most people is like developing countries. So you'll have American businesses that are doing a lot of development in South America and Central America where their currencies have been growing quickly over the last 10 years, outpacing the dollar in tremendous ways. And so even though they're American born companies, you know, their, their growth is, is growing exponentially because they are investing in some of the other developing places. So those are, those are, there are plenty of opportunities that are out here. It's one understanding the types of things that you want to invest in and what your individual risk appetite is and then again being able to follow the money. The reason why I say this, and I say this in 2025 versus when I started in 2019, is that since the pandemic, the investment landscape is fundamentally changed. I don't, I can't say that there's ever been a time where the market has been free and fair like they say that it has been. Yeah, definitely after the pandemic, like that is no longer the case anymore.
As much as I can say it's a rigged game. It's a rigged game. And so that comes with its own problems, but it also comes with its own solutions, which is, because now you know it's rigged, it's, it's kind of harder for them to hide the shell game that they're doing. So if you can just understand the game that's being played and you can just participate in the game moving in the directions of where again when you, when you're moving millions of dollars or billions of dollars, it's hard to hide those transactions. Like they take time. And so if you understand that and you can see where the bigger institutions are moving, you sometimes have a one to three to five month window because it takes them a little longer to be able to make those decisions so you can get in the front of it and be able to ride that wave.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: So I'd be crazy if I didn't ask, what do you see? Or what areas do you see big institutions moving their money to?
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Yeah, so that it's.
Most bigger institutions now are doing a bit of reshuffling in this day and age, like right now there's a big degree of uncertainty because one, what's going on geopolitically.
So there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of where you would want to be able to park your money. So a lot of times we're seeing money is being pulled out of the market as opposed to more money being put into the market.
And so if you're someone who trades options, it would make more sense for you to do puts as opposed to trying to do calls right now. So for those that don't know what I'm talking about, basically you're saying you're making a bet that the market is going to go down versus it's going to go up. And so with the amount of uncertainty that's going on with the tariff situation, with the geopolitical situation, with wars that are going on right now, a lot of people are just really, a lot of big institutions are really uncertain.
The flip side to that though is that because a lot of bigger institutions are reactionary in that if you're talking about, you know, s P500 companies or whatever that are beholden to their stakeholders so they have to bring reports every 90 days, a lot of these guys are reactionary and that they're putting money where everybody is saying putting money, which is technology and artificial intelligence, because not to say that you need to put it in the actual AI industry itself, but to they're looking at what, where are the five or 10 industries that will be most disrupted by artificial intelligence technology? And here's what I mean by this.
You're going to see because there's a part of me that's a futurist and I think that's why I enjoy investing so much. You're going to see that this age of 150,000 person conglomerate company is over.
You're never going to see these big institutions that have 100,000 employees, no more. What you're going to find is that these bigger institutions are going to be running or going to be the holding company of a lot of smaller kind of startup driven organizations that have about 4 or 500 people with about 10 million AI agents that are working underneath them. And so what they're trying to do is figure out where are these industries where there are standard operating procedures where a chimp could basically do these jobs, but humans are doing them now because they're going to automate those jobs away very quickly over the next two to five years. Now from a personal level, I think it's terrible because we're not having the deeper conversation in and around. Okay, well what are we going to do with all of these people that now don't have jobs and we're not having. And however you feel about universal basic income, I'm not saying that we should do it, but what I'm saying is that there needs to be something done. And you're not going to see corporations having these deeper conversations because one, they're not required to, they're required to have a fiduciary responsibility to just make money for their, for their company and their shareholders. Yeah, but then, then that falls on our governments to figure this out. And our governments can't even tie their shoes right now. And so nobody's really looking at this problem in a holistic way for what the next two to five years are going to look like. And so there's going to be just a mass displacement in many big industries. And I'm not really sure what we're going to ultimately do about that, but that's where institutions are putting their money, which is how do we take what is in most times one of the most expensive things in your organization, which is the human capital from, you know, the payroll to the insurance to the taxes and all that has to go with these organizations. It doesn't, it doesn't cost me. It cost me actually 90% less to bring in AI agents to be able to do so. So can I inflate my balance sheet that way?
[00:33:55] Speaker B: So will you explain for everybody that doesn't know, when you say AI agent, what do you mean?
[00:34:00] Speaker A: So AI agents are autonomous agents, or let me just use another word, it's a savant. So it's some, it's a, it's a type of agent that instead of like chat gbt, where it's basically, you have to give it a prompt, you have to tell it to do something or ask it something, and then it gives you an output. An autonomous AI agent instead is you can give it a single input saying this is what your job is, and then it goes out and does it for you continuously. You can work 6 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours a month long on any individual sets of tasks that you give it. And so the, the great part about that is that if you do again, have these things not, and I'm not just talking about big business, I know this is where we're going. But like, even as a, as a, as a lone solo entrepreneur or you have a small team, there are so many tasks that can be put into a standard operating procedure that can be replicated.
So many, like in so many different ways and so many Times that this is, this is truly a revolution in terms of business, if you understand how to use it in the correct way. So what an AI agent will do is it can do one task very, very well. Now, right now we're in that stage where we think that, okay, maybe AI can do everything. From the stuff that I've seen, a lot of it is behind the NDA, so I can't publicly talk about it, but I don't think we're there yet. I don't think it's that you're going to have just a, an AI CEO or an AICMO or an AIC OO that can do everything, but it can do SEO very well. It can do paid ads very well. It can do this particular process inside of your business very well. And what, what the opportunity is here now is that it costs you pennies on the dollar to be able to spin these things up where you can have an employee that you were paying, let's say, $10,000 a month now that you can have, you know, an AI agent that will cost you $150 a month to do the same job, if not better.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: Correct.
And I think that's in where you, when you bring in the UBI conversation, you know, the counter argument that I hear being made is, well, those people could go out and use technology to go create a new job for themselves and in that kind of a thing. And I think that's the, that's the interesting discussion that's going to be taking place for a while. But I think you're right, there's going to be a lot of people who I replaces that job. There's me a lot of people standing around and that's going to create a, that could create a big problem. And I think it's, it's funny because there's this conversation going on right now of all this opportunity created between, or all this devastation because of all this unemployment. And I think that's a, that's a real conversation that's taking place right now. And no one really has a good solution for it.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: No, they don't. And so again, I don't, I don't know truly where I land on the universal basic income discussion because I liken myself to be a liberal capitalist. So capitalism, universal, so basic income, these two things don't always mesh well. But I can also see the argument to it. But my, but my only rebuttal to that argument of the other side of it, which is that they can use AI agents to do or do those things is who does the training for that. So when you go to school and it trains you on the job or to be able to think critically, to be able to take the job that you're going to have out of school, or when you get hired by a corporation, that corporation trains you on that job. So you're saying that we're going to displace 80% of our working population and then not provide them any sort of skills or redevelopment training to be able to use the tools that are, that are available now. That part, the second part too is that we don't own, quote unquote, the technology behind these agents.
And so even if you do utilize them, you don't own that technology.
We don't always truly know where that information is going. I mean we just saw Yesterday that the Department of ChatGPT just got a, or OpenAI, I'm sorry, just got a $200 million defense contract. Like all of this information is being utilized and put somewhere and we don't really know where. I'm not trying to go really down that rabbit hole, but I'm just saying we have to, we have to have these deeper conversations around what's truly happening here.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Well then you go full circle and now we're back to education.
So it's like, okay, well where, where are the kids getting the education they need to be prepared for the future? Yeah, I don't even know what college courses, I'm not there yet with my son, but I don't know what colleges and college courses are offering AI or how they're, you know, using that even at the, really, it should be middle school level right now. You should, they should be some way being introduced AI. I would, I would think and, and I think that's, that's where we end up at, is okay, how are we preparing them? What you talked about in the beginning, which is preparing them for the future.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So you're raising a really big point that thankfully there is a solution for. So I don't, I don't really hold the same doom and gloom mentality that a lot of people do about AI coming in and taking jobs or that AI can't be used in a meaningful way. And here's what I mean. So the technology exists today for a 13 year old student to have a AI mentor on their phone that they can take a prior knowledge assessment or an assessment right now for that AI agent to truly understand where that student's strengths and weaknesses are. And that AI agent can remember everything about that student from now until the day that they die in order to be a private tutor or a private mentor for them. That one idea revolutionizes education, and it exists right now.
What we don't have is the political will to make that be the thing that we put into our education system. So this is not a question of technology. This is not even a question of funding. This is a question of will for us to be able to utilize this. Because our education system was built in the 1800s to be able to move kids into factories, to take these factory jobs. What we need is a. Is a transformation or a revolution in how we decide that we want to teach children. And that's something that can be done by humans today. That is. That doesn't have anything to do with technology. So if we do that and we put that technology forward now, we have a mechanism by which not just kids in the United States, because my academy is not just based in the US we have schools coming online in Indonesia, our curriculum is being taught in every high school in Jamaica, we're actually hosting Jamaica's national stock market competition for all of their high school students next year. So what I'm saying is the technology that we have today can change global education. There are more cell phones in exist than human beings on Earth. And all of these tools can be put on a cell phone today that can stay with the student forever and ever again. Figure out the technology of how we can be able to link it, where it goes from phone to phone to understand that this is the same person that they're talking to. But every single child on Earth right now can have a tutor that stays with them, that understands them better than any human ever could, better than any teacher ever could, that can truly save their life?
[00:40:52] Speaker B: I think it's 100% true. It's an interesting conversation.
Is there anything that you think that we need to cover that we haven't covered thus far today on the investment topic with kids, with families, and where can people go if they want to learn more about you and what you're doing?
[00:41:11] Speaker A: Sure.
I mean, there's so much that we can cover. You know what I mean? Like, this is such a very deep conversation. And thankfully it's.
Thankfully these conversations are being had, because these aren't the conversations that I see happening every single day. When we're talking about artificial intelligence and technology, a lot of times folks are talking about, well, how do I give ChatGPT a better prompt to fix my resume or do some of these other things? But we don't really have that deeper conversation around what these technologies are capable of today, to be able to transform systems, to be able to transform societies. And if we can have these sort of deeper intellectual conversations, I think it would do a great job of being able to alleviate a lot of the fear that people have about where this technology can truly go. It's not what the technology is capable of, it's what the humans do with this technology that makes the biggest difference. And so if you can just think critically as a human being, and I'm talking to all people that are listening today about how can you utilize this technology to be able to change the systems in your family, to be able to change the systems that you have going with your life, then you'll find that a lot of these, A lot of things can change within you. Most people.
So I run a on top of the investment fund. Before I started with the online academy with high school students, I was teaching adults, and I was teaching adults or retail traders about how to optimize their investment strategies. And what I found in a lot of instances is that they, like most people, don't have a thousand things wrong with them. It's usually two or three things that have been ingrained as habits that they do continuously. And on the surface it looks different, but once you go one level deeper, you realize it's that same thing from when you were 5 to 7 years old that's just rearing itself in so many different ways. There is technology that exists today that you can just sit and talk with it for an hour and it can give you those patterns for you to know that this is the thing that's really sabotaging everything else and then go and fix that thing. So imagine if a million people, if the population of the United States, that the population of the world had an opportunity to take this and use it to be the most reflective mirror for themselves, to say, these are the things that I can change about myself. And then what would that be? It's kind of like the law of one, right? Or Michael Jackson is the same way that I like, to paraphrase itself, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change. Because that's the only way that a revolution is really going to happen. It's an internal one, not an external one. So that'd be the thing that I say that we probably didn't discuss that. I would just want to invite everybody to take a look at, which is take a look at yourself and see how we can make these changes. Not necessarily there's technology or our government or whoever we think is the problem in terms of if you want to know more about what we do.
So it's just tradecology. So think psychology, but trading first. So T-R-A--E C-H-O-L-O-G-Y.com and that's going to take you to our online academy where we work with middle school and high school students. But then also in the fall, we're also going to be launching an adult program because the number one question we get from adults after they hear about our academy is, man, do you have something like this for adults? And so we listened and so we do have a 12 week accelerator that we put together for parents so that they can get caught up on some of the things that they truly didn't learn that I know that they want to learn. But a lot of times you either don't have good information because let's be honest, YouTube, TikTok and all these other things. How, how hard is it, how easy is it to really know where the truth lies in that, where the wisdom is?
[00:44:28] Speaker B: There's a lot of, yeah, sure, yeah.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: There'S not a lot of wisdom. You know what I mean? So we give you that in terms of what is the wisdom, what are the principles that you should really understand to be able to only work with yourself, but be able to have a better foundation so that when your kid is really growing up and they're going to ask you some of these important questions that you do have a better foundation to stand on.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: Love it. Well, I think it's an important conversation and I think it's great work you're doing.
Thank you for today. Thank you for giving everybody a little bit of an idea of what you guys are doing. And I think there's some important conversations that are going to be taking place here and continue. It's going to be interesting to see where we land.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: But maybe we'll have to do this again and see how far we. Where we end up after, after having these conversations today. But I appreciate it. We'll put everything in the show notes. Everybody knows where to go and.
And yeah, I appreciate it. My man.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
[00:45:19] Speaker B: All right, Marcus, Take care everybody. Till the next episode.
Bye.
It.
