The Breakdown - It’s Time for a Revolution in Financial Education, Feat. Tyrone Ross

Episode Date: July 4, 2020

Financial education and financial literacy are at crisis levels in this country. Financial advisers spend billions on advertising but a fraction of that on education. The resources that are available tend to be inaccessible and not designed for the people who need them most. Financial media remains a boring, exclusionary acronym game.  The net result of all of this is a population of Americans who don’t have the mental tools to understand, make sense of and make good decisions around their finances.  In this passionate conversation with NLW, financial adviser Tyrone Ross argues that all hope is not lost. According to Tyrone: Financial literacy is a cross-cutting crisis not limited to any one demographic Even the resources that do exist aren’t designed for the way their intended targets consume media  Despite all the bad things happening, this moment is also providing an inflection point where change is possible  Find our guest online:Website: tyroneross.io Twitter: @TR401

One, we have to start taking the information to the people now immediately. Secondly, we have to meet people where they are. Do you live in the poorest congressional district in the South Bronx where half of the people are unbanked? If that is the case, I do not care what Ether is. I do not care what an ETF is. I do not care what a Roth RIA is. What I do care about is that I have to operate outside of a financial system that was not tailored to me. So I use payday loans.

I use check cash in places. I do use, you know, cash every day of my life and mostly transact with cash. What does it mean for me to actually operate in a system that was not set up for me? And oh, by the way, when you meet these people where they are and you look them in the eye and you try and help them get a bank account, they look at you and say, well, what's a maiden name? Welcome back to the breakdowns, Free Ideas Festival, a 4th of July exploration of ideas with the potential to shape the future of the economy. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and Crypto.com.

The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to the Breakdown. It is July 4th Independence Day and the last day of our Free Ideas Festival, and I am closing it out with someone that I couldn't be more excited to have back on the show. Tyrone Ross is a financial advisor. He's the director of community for altruist. He's the host of the human advisor podcast and he is an all-around incredible, thoughtful, giving guy who is here to talk about an incredibly important topic, financial education and financial literacy. There is so much to be

said about this topic. There is so much to be done about this issue that I'm actually just going to turn it over to the interview right away and let Tyrone take it away. All right, I am here with Tyrone Ross. Tyrone. Great to have you back on the show. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm fired up for this one. Let's get right to it. All right. Okay. So you have been thinking a lot recently. I mean, not just recently, but especially recently about financial literacy, financial education, I guess just by way of starting, take me into where your brain has been over the course of the last month. I mean, it's been one of the most significant in our history in some ways. Absolutely. So let's just zoom out and look bigger picture. One of the things that I've been

telling everyone is, again, rest of peace, George Floyd, and that whole thing. But that was literally the match that set this whole thing off. But income inequality in this country has been an issue class in this country has been an issue. But if you zoom out and look at what's happening here where you look at the looters and what they're actually taking and running to their gods, which is Gucci and Prada and Fendi, right?

And then also you see videos of people going into Walmart and Target and stealing the basics of life, right? Toilet paper tied. There's a video. So this woman actually went back and was two or three times and just grabbed bottles of tie. And it's like this is a lens of America right now of what we're seeing.

And what that means is that we've left out a whole class of people, one that have we've made them believe that they should, you know, idolize things. And then also we haven't given them the tools and resources for them to cover their basics. So I feel like right now we need to get back to the essence of what financial education is and even redefining financial literacy because what I've found is people are equating financial literacy. literacy with the poor. And that's inaccurate. There's financial literacy all across the spectrum, all across socioeconomic status and class, and then also financial education broadens the spectrum because now you start to really dig deep into what it means to be literate and to have an education and also looking at what does education mean. I've educated you once you've learned something. That the education and me forgiving you that education is just part of the process.

I need to make sure that you've been edified by it and inspired by it and the message has got across. Once that happens, now you've gone from education to learning. And I think we really haven't done a good job with that. And myself, I work in an industry as a financial advisor where they spend $17 billion on marketing financial services, billion, and less than 1% on financial education. Think about that for a second. That is ridiculous. And that is why we are in a situation.

are in in this country. And oh, by the way, 60 plus percent of financial, 60 percent of Americans are considered financially illiterate. So let's talk about literacy, because I think you actually touched on something. I want to actually combine two things that you talked about into one, because I think it gets at this fundamental contradiction in the system that we have. We speak about financial literacy as as though we kind of know what it means, right? We have the sense that. maybe that means something shared across us. But let's talk about the fact that you have this situation where what we need for the way

that America is structured to come back is people to spend money on stuff that they don't need because we've designed this to be an ever sort of gnawing consumer society rather than something that's designed around resilience. And when most people think about financial literacy or like thinking about growing up, It was these lessons to like save for a rainy day and all the sort of stuff. But our economy doesn't reward that. In fact, it systematically disincentivizes that. It punishes people who do that. And so I think that it feels to me that part of the conversation about financial literacy is what does it actually mean to be literate? What are the lessons that are relevant? And if we find that those lessons are leading people into a place that's less

sustainable, right, that's pushing them too far out on some sort of risk curve, how do we pull that back? So, I mean, how do you think about what it actually means to be financially illiterate? That's a really great question. And I can answer it personally because, again, as I've said to you multiple times and I make no secret about it, is I grew up in a financially illiterate home. I did not know what the stock market was until I was 26 years old. And having to come to, right, there's a couple of things here is there's a mindset shift that has to happen. But let's just go all the way back. I've done some work with Investopedia.

and one of the things that they say is the most searched term on investipedia is what is money. Like, think about that for a second, to the tune, I believe, of a million page views is what is money is the most searched term on investopedia. So we've done a really bad job of making sure that we are getting this education of what money is as early as possible into our school system. And a lot of people say, well, these are starting the home. Okay, well, yeah, if it starts in the home, what if your parents and my parents, right? My father with a middle school education, my mother who dropped out of high school and had a baby at 17, they had no time to teach me about money. It was about survival, which leads me to the next point. Sometimes financial literacy is simply survival for some people. So what we need to do a better job of is, and again, I had this conversation with Hester Pierce a couple weeks ago. She's like, oh, investor.gov, there's all this great information. How does the SEC get this to the people? I'm like the issue, whether it's the SEC, FINRA, financial advisors, RIAs, wirehouses, though, we don't take the information to the people. We just simply say, it's here. Why aren't you guys using it? So one, we have to start taking the information to the people now immediately. Secondly, we have to

meet people where they are. Do you live in the poorest congressional district in the South Bronx where half of the people are unbanked? If that is the case, I do not care what Ether is. I do not care what an ETF is. I do not care what a Roth RIA is. What I do care about is that I have to operate outside of a financial system that was not tailored to me. So I use payday loans. I use check cash in places. I do use cash every day of my life and mostly transact with cash. What does it mean for me to actually operate in a system that was not set up for me? And oh, by the way, when you meet these people where they are and you look them in the eye and you try and help them get a bank account, They look at you and say, well, what's a maiden name?

Or like my parents said, well, this statement came from TD Bank. What is a debit and the credit? Explain that to me, right? The basics, the very, very, very basics. Now, that may be totally different from someone that graduated from first in their class at Michigan and now they get a job at Google and then they have to understand, well, I need to allocate my 401K, I need to figure out what the HSA is. And oh, by the way, I have stock options.

what the hell is this mean, right? So these are all, no matter where you are on that spectrum, we have to start creating education and meeting people where they are, delivering it to them on their terms in a way that is consumable, that is fun, and ultimately, right, personalized where no matter where I am in my life, I can get that advice. And it's all out there. We can list resources for the next hour, but we do a bad job of taking it to the people and making it for the people. and that's what I've seen now. And it's indicative of what you're seeing with all of a sudden this swell of, oh, financial literacy and financial education and how do we get into schools and, you know,

TikTok doing, you know, announcing $250 million for learn on, you know, whatever, learn on TikTok or whatever it is. All of a sudden people are realizing, you know, the opportunity here of how we've dropped the ball. And financial services has dropped the ball more than anyone, right? when you talk about, you know, the median net worth of a black family in Boston is $8. I said this on a meeting with the folks at State Street. $8.

That's not good for anybody. So I think we have to do a better job of getting into the communities, early education, providing hardware in schools for kids to learn, and then also giving them the resources to take home because, oh, by the way, any parent will tell you, You get the kid, you get the parent. Because if the kid is interested in soccer or gymnastics or crypto, the parents immediately have to go spend money in that area, spend time in that area, because that's what the kid cares about. And I've found that by going into after-school programs and into schools, you get the kids, you get the parents. Now you send them home with hardware, a laptop or data or games or whatever it is where they can play inside of the home and then you're educating the parents as well.

and then you follow that up with advisors, helping teachers, you know, work curriculum into their lesson plans and in doing after school, mentoring and tutoring. And then you pair that with, you know, making sure that resources and bank branches and credit unions and, you know, all of these places are well funded to then turn around and educate the community. And now we're starting to build a network and the infrastructure, right? Because there's two things here. There's a systemic problem and a structural problem. Systemic has been hundreds of years in the making. We're not going to change that this year. The structural piece we can change right now. And the structure of how we actually create this content, how we promote it, how we deliver it to the people in the areas of where it's actually presented, right, and exclusive. We need to break that down and make it more inclusive. And once we do that, I think we'll come out of this with a more educated America and more accessible. and we start to democratize access to financial services for everyone in every corner of the country. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors,

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I'm excited to share that one of this month's breakdown sponsors is crypto.com. Crypto.com offers one of the most cost-efficient ways to purchase crypto out there, as they've just waived the 3.5% credit card fee for all crypto purchases. What's more? With crypto.com's MCO Visa card, you can get up to 10% back on things like food and grocery shopping. When you buy gift cards with the crypto.com app, you can get up to 20% back. Download the crypto.com app today and enjoy these offers until the end of September. I want to hang on a couple different parts of what you said or piece them out.

So first, around this idea that we make a mistake when we treat financial literacy like it's something just for poor people. So one of my favorite sort of social justice, thinkers of all time as Jane Adams, who started Hull House in Chicago. And part of what I always loved about Jane Adams is that she was the most vocal about a problem which she recognized. And the way that she described it was this. She said, the problem with philanthropy is the unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped. And that was written in 1890, 1891, something like that. And I still, I see that everywhere. And I think to your point about just how wide reaching this problem is. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, right? The opposite end of the spectrum when we're

talking about financial literacy. And you know what no one ever did? And no one ever asked anyone to do is when they were presented with their startup package, right, with this massively reduced salary and a bunch of stock options. The sale for that was entirely like, well, for Facebook, you're all going to be millionaires because Facebook, the day that it went public, minted a thousand millionaires. That's the dream, right? No one ever did a discounted cash flow on what they'd make at a normal corporate job, divided by the number of years it was going to be, like times the amount of lost salary. No one ever went and figured out that, like, actually, and a lot of times that I started

to do this towards the end of my time there, I was like, well, if you could make $200,000 at some other job as an engineer, you would really need this company to sell. Not for like a great exit of $50 million. You're talking like $250, $400 million to exit to have anything approaching the same return that you would get from just working a normal job. And that doesn't mean don't do this, but know the actual tradeoffs, right? And so I think that this is just the point, the only point that I'm trying to make is not an equivalence here, but the fact that like we, I agree wholeheartedly that we would be making a mistake to think that financial literacy is just an issue for poor communities,

right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's just something that I thought about a lot. So the second piece and then I wanted to maybe get your kind of follow up on is it feels like a lot of what you're describing in terms of the problem is it's a classic problem of content when people spend a huge amount of time making great content and don't think at all about the distribution, right? They don't think about how it gets to their audience. And it feels like that's part of part of the big challenges. One, where are the right distribution channels? And two, who are the right voices? And three, probably what are the right formats to be delivering this information that's going to make it sticky, resonant, and interesting, right?

100%. And I think one of the things that, again, if you do the research, which is very simple with these folks who do, whether they don't want to or, you know, when you look at inner city communities and rural communities, right, and most people have access to a phone now, but when you look at there's, why is it a lot of our information that we're trying to create consumable on mobile? And why isn't it consumable in the areas where we know that these folks are going to be? And that includes partnering with payday lenders, which, oh, by the way, aren't that terrible. If you had your life saved by a payday lender, you understand that. And I talk about that all the time or a check cash in place or a credit union. We should be there. We should be educating there. We should have content there that looks like the people that is consumable for the people and something that makes sense for them, whether that's in different languages,

whether that's in the different genders and colors of people, all of these different things we're missing the ball on. But that community and those communities, right, are very much in tuned with access on a cell phone. They have access to that, which is why Cash App is so successful, right, in urban communities and inner cities because of how they market. And they specifically market there in a very unique way

that whether it's sponsoring podcasts or whether it's sponsored with entertainers or athletes or whatever, not the best way in my opinion, but they know that's a great way to get the focus of them folks and then they narrow it down and making sure that it's on their phones.

It's where they actually go, right? The marketing, the branding, the advertising is really geared. It's 100% geared for them. So when you now look at financial services and what we do wrong is, again, we create this content and then we put it on Barron's, on MarketWatch, or Morningstar, or the Wall Street Journal, or the financial time.

The average, I remember when I first was, I'm like, why is this paper pink? Like, I had no idea. I was clueless. So I feel like we need to, one, look at the content to create, just look at financial media overall. It is not for the people. It is for a protected class. It's very elitist.

We need to make sure, and this has nothing to do with color, by the way, because because poor is not a color, it's a condition. So I don't think anyone that is middle America that is striving to make ends meet turns on CNBC every night and go, oh, I'm fired up about this. They are speaking directly to me. Right. So it's, I mean, no, it's three-letter bingo, right? It's, it's exclusionary by virtue of the fact that once you have mastered the set of terms, part of the way that you signal to the world that you get it is by using the lingo rather than actually making that lingo more accessible. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. 100%. And that's the thing. It needs to be jargon-free, and everyone says that. But it's like, if it's really going to do that, you have to know your audience. We always say, who is it that you want to speak to? Right. And that's just what it is.

I mean, and even in crypto right now, and again, I don't want to go too far down this path, but everyone is reaching out to me. Tyrone, why can't we reach financial advisors? You're not talking to them. You're not speaking their language. They don't care about the halving. They don't care about Shatou 56. They don't care about those things.

You have to speak to the things that matter to them. The messenger matters. They're really smart people in crypto, no doubt. But at the end of the day, your conversational advisors can't be 1% allocation. All right, great. How? How do I do that right now if I custody of TD Ameritrade? How do I do that?

Right. So I think even with that in an education, you have to know your, audience, how do you reach them? What does it look like to reach them? Where do they consume most of that information? And again, the messenger matters. We need to send someone of their ilk to look them in the eye and says, this is for you. We've created this for you. We're bringing it to a specifically for you. And then once we do that, now we're going to make sure we empower you. Right back to my three E's, expose your education and empowerment. Financial Services and even crypto now has that bug where it wants to lead with the middle E to prove to everyone how smart we are, just expose me,

then educate me. And then after that, okay, well, now I know what Bitcoin is. Now what? Where do I go? Do I go to Abra? Do I go to Cash App? Do I go to Coinbase? Do I go to Binance?

Like all of these different things. And that answer, even as a financial advisor or people in general, that answer is now based on me exposing you based on where you are, right? Are you in Silicon Valley and you're very tech-native and you understand that? So now I can talk to you about Binan. maybe and how that whole thing work. Or are you the cashier at Waffle House where I always tell the story where I had to buy BTC shirt on? And she's like, what's BTC? And I'm like, Bitcoin. She's like, oh, I think I saw that on my cash hat. So now I'm not going to talk to her.

Have you, you know, you thought about Binance or Bittrix? She doesn't care about that. It's like, I'm going to go right to cash. I'm going to meet her where she is. So I just think we need to do a better job of that. And everyone will benefit in the long run. another kind of small anecdote validating that point so ever since my wife uh joined one of those groups when she got pregnant a couple years ago that's like it's all organized around it's the what to expect when you're expecting community and they have these groups with like literally hundreds of thousands of women organized by the month that you're due right uh so she was in like the october 2018 group or whatever it was and even this day like you know 20 months later or whatever after

the baby was born that group still talks to each other like crazy all the time, right? All the mom advice, all the stuff. It's just like, it is for a lot of these women, like, one of their most important support groups. And for my wife, it's like one of her favorite social channels, you know, because she's known these people for two years now. They have something in common, yada, yada, yada. The other day, someone popped up and was like, I keep hearing about Bitcoin on my cash app and from friends, like, where do I learn more? What do I do? Right? She was looking to a community that she had trust in and faith in, even though it wasn't the, like, it wasn't her financial advisor community, you know? And I think this is going to the point of

who is telling them that this is for them and where is that coming from? You know, it's not just, it's not just about the right information. Agreed. I think, you know, we can, we can spend a whole another podcast on that, but it's, it's so important when you look at, I know even, I have so many examples of that when you have these groups and in the support system, I think, I forget was a friend of mine, it's a flight attendant. And there was so many different things, you know, what happened in COVID and they have the support group on Facebook. Now again, they were giving out some pretty bad financial advice there. But at the end of the day, it was just a group of, okay, well, you know, are you taking a furlough or are you actually going to stay on, you know,

where to get good masks, all of these different things. So again, that small group, that think tank of people who look like me, think like me, act like me, come from, come from understand my circumstances. It makes it really easy to feel comfortable. Again, in our business, we always talk about trust. You have to get the client to trust you. And right, if we are congregating in the same area, we have the same circumstance, whether there's pregnant women of flight attendance or we've all grew up in a particular area, right? That trust barrier is not an issue. It's already come down. So now whatever I say, it has immediate. validity, right? So, and we create this support system. Again, now you're going to make sure that

that information is accurate and on point. But to your point, yeah, I just, I think that's a really good way to rally behind one another and we need to focus on that moving forward and create those, more of those groups, right, in different areas to make sure we're getting people access the information that is going to help them improve their lives at the end of the day, which we're all trying to do. Or I guess that like part of the, part of the thing too might be just that thinking about it as a platform rather than a product, right? If you allow the people who are, you know, we always talk about do your own research, right? But what about the person in that flight attendant group who actually did go deep on all this?

Like, how are they empowered to actually share that because they already have that trust established? Exactly. I mean, it's not, you know, I think there's a lot there. So I guess, you know, what is the, when it comes to why we haven't done well with financial education, is it a failure of values, a failure. a failure of business model, i.e. it's just not the clients that we care about, so we don't do it? Or is it just a failure of imagination? It's not something we've prioritized even thinking about. Failure of imagination is one for sure. Just being able to think critically and outside of the box has, and again, it's not for lack of effort. There's a lot of resources out there. But again,

I always talk about, you know, you follow me on Twitter. One of the things I always talk about is proximity, getting proximate to people. So, yes, we now have to break that paradigm and get, you know, really, you know, imaginative about how we're going to reach people, right, in really unique ways and fun ways. And again, I've been saying recently, like, I'm the one idiot that believes that you can get people to run to a TV, like they're going to watch Ozark or something for financial content. Like, I truly believe that. We just haven't done it.

I think the other thing is where, you know, as far as, again, financial services going, I keep going back to this because we're complicit is we make money off of people's ignorance and exposing that. And you're starting to see that again, even in the crypto space. I was having the commerce space behind the scenes now a very aggravated gentleman and, you know, who runs an RIA and he's looking at the fees and he's looking at some of the products out there. It bothers me that the retail investor is getting smoked. And I'm like, there you go, right? You pay with your ignorance and it's being allowed in a certain capacity. So I want to make it very clear that there's a reason why that number that I gave, that 17 billion number is what it is, and the education number is so low.

There's some of it that is on purpose because the less, and I was reading an article, actually, that was saying that one of the worries from financial advisors with that, as people got more educated, they wouldn't need an advisor. How ridiculous is that? Like, obviously, the more, like, how ridiculous is that? Right. So it's like, if I learn, if I learn to read, I'm not going to read novels eventually. I'm just going to keep reading kid books. Like, it doesn't make any sense. So that mindset has to be broken, right? And we're dealing with we're breaking mindsets here. And I think the last piece, is just simply that when you look at, again, going macro, looking at the bigger picture,

there's so many great resources out there and avenues where if you want to get investor.gov from the SEC and, you know, the Dallas Fed has something and Investopedia and Cossera and it's all out there. But it's all segmented, which is why, you know, and, you know, again, just a small plug here, but why. I'm building what I'm building with Evolve, right, which is going to be a centralized hub for all things financial education in this country. You should be able to go somewhere where there's one spot where whether you want information from Investopedia or you want it from CoinDesk where you can get financial education in a particular area that is specifically

geared for what it is, K through 12, NFL first round draft pick, small business owner in Detroit, single mom struggling to pay bills with five kids in Compton. There should be one place for that. And the bottom line is right now there isn't. And, you know, I'm really excited about building this and getting it off the ground. And I just feel like if there's just one place where people can go for any and everything related to financial education, it'll make it a lot easier for people to get what they need when they need it.

So by way of wrapping up, over the last. few months, we've also seen a huge surge of people getting into the stock market via Robin Hood, right, around Portnoy and all this sort of thing, Wall Street bets. And one of the things that's fascinating is you see kids trading stock tips on TikTok, right? They're making these videos and things. And the dominant narrative, a response to this has been, oh, no, this ends in crisis. They're going to lose all their money. It's just like any other mania cycle where I'm sitting here being like, did you just say that kids are on TikTok talking about stocks? Doesn't this feel like there's an opportunity there? And so I guess my final question is, well, one, what do you think about

that? But two, do you think that as hard as this moment is, it is that sort of inflection point, it has that inflection point potential where we could be really ready to design something different for the future. I love it. The same way that I loved Robin Hood when Robin Hood came out in those in my industry where I was getting in a little bicker and rants and, you know, little scuffles on Twitter about it because Robin Hood provides access. And that is the one thing that has been lacking forever and give people access. And if they have free trades, it doesn't mean that they're going to trade themselves, you know, and getting this. And yes, there's, there's, unfortunately, I know there was a sad story of a young man who supposedly, you know, killed himself over, you know,

creating this tremendous debt for himself with it. But again, and God rest his soul, but I think for the most part, we have to look at the bigger picture here and providing access to the half of Americans who aren't even in the stock market. I've had so many people come to me and ask about Robin Hood and it's their first time, right? And it doesn't mean that everyone's going to trade. The other part of that, when you look at TikTok, I'm like, this is fascinating. that people are actually going on there for financial advice. And now, instead of licensed financial professionals being scared or saying it's a bad thing, get on there.

Take control the narrative. Control the narrative on IG. Control the narrative on TikTok. Control it. Because all we do on Twitter is throw the same information out to one another that we all know. It's like, how many blog posts am I going to read on PE ratios? We get it.

All we're doing is screaming in the cafeteria to one another, but we have to get off of there now, get on TikTok, again, which is another reason why I've been so passionate about let's create a new form of financial media. And I tweeted this, let's pitch it to TikTok, let's pitch it to Quibi, let's pitch it to YouTube, let's picture it to Snapchat. That's where this next generation of investor that are going to fire their mommy and daddy's advisor right now, that's where they're getting their information. And that's why a lot of financial advisors are going to get fired. That at crypto and add the fact. And add the of, you know, right now how financial media is going to change.

A lot of financial advisors are in full world or hurt. The financial industry is in four world or hurt. And the revolution has come. And you saw it. What a TikTok do? They go, all right, we're going to put $250 million into this. And we're going to start to control an average and create and look at the content. Make sure it's really good, high quality truth.

And now we're going to put our arms around it and send it to. the people. And again, meanwhile, we're all sitting here on Twitter. Oh, that's terrible. Look at that. That's talking about annuities. That's just wrong. What'd you do about it? So, but yeah, I think that's the wave. And whether it's there, again, whether it's on Snapchat or wherever else, I think that's the future of financial education. And, you know, we're trying to turn around the Titanic here and is not looking good. Well, Tyrone, I can talk to you about this for hours and hours and hours. But for now, where can people find you if they want to, want to hear more about this, want to learn more, want to see what you're up to? Absolutely. On my website,

tyroonross.io, and on Twitter at TR4.1, where you'll see me rant about this stuff all day, every day. And again, as always, I tell you, you are a beacon of light just for how you, you know, you spread messages, you share your network, you share your platform. And I'm super grateful for you and the opportunity to speak on this, which is so timely and important right now. I appreciate you and all you stand for, sir. No, all my thanks to you, Tyrone. Thanks for hanging out. And hey, happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Absolutely, enjoy. Love and light, all. Most definitely the idea that sticks with me from that conversation is this question about what financial literacy really means. When we say financial education, when we say financial literacy, there is an implicit idea behind that, that we understand what it looks like to tell people how to navigate this system. The problem is that there is a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, we teach people or we try to teach people to save and build resilience. On the other, our system isn't designed to incentivize,

encourage, or reward resilience. It's designed to encourage spending. It's designed to encourage spending on debt. It's designed to encourage a growing credit score and a growing credit balance. How do we reconcile that? How do we make financial education that is in line with what our economy is actually trying to do? And when you ask that question, it's hard not to come back to the idea that maybe we need not just financial education, but to rethink the way that we've designed the economy in a fundamental way such that the education that we give that we want to provide the lessons that we want to pass on actually reflect what's best for the economy as well. With that thought, I'm going to wrap this Three Ideas Festival, these five days of big picture,

big think items. We will be back next week with your regularly scheduled breakdown, and so I hope that you are having a great Fourth of July wherever you are. Until next time, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace. I'm Galen Moore, senior research analyst at CoinDesk. On July 7, I'll be with Lucas Nutsi from Coin Metrics, hosting a live webinar on everything you need to know about a fundamental that's critical for understanding digital assets. Bitcoin Days Destroyed. Join us by signing up at coindex.com slash signup.