The Pomp Podcast - 316: Tyrone Ross On The Need For Financial Education In America

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Tyrone Ross is a financial consultant, early-stage start-up advisor, entrepreneur, and athlete. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of financial education, how Bitcoin was built for the inner city communities, what financial advisors are missing right now, and what you can do as an average person listening at home. =============================== The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Tyrone Ross is a financial consultant, early stage startup advisor, an entrepreneur, and an athlete. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of financial education, how Bitcoin was built for the inner city communities, what financial advisors are missing right now, and what you can do as an average person listening at home. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tyrone, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into this episode, I want to talk about our sponsors. The first is a really interesting new sponsor. The world should

be more connected, but it isn't. We should be living in the age of the Jetsons, yet it sometimes feels like we're living in the age of the Flintstones. The only way to connect to the internet outdoors is by using cellular technologies. Your Wi-Fi just doesn't work. Wouldn't it make sense if all of these things had a network that worked just for them anywhere at any time? Well, now they do. That's what the Helium Hotspot does. The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. It democratizes the ownership of wireless networks. You can literally get paid for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices,

sending small bits of data. The People's Network, which is what the Helium Hotspot builds, is now live in over 745 cities around the world and growing. You can join the movement and get your Helium hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at Helium.com. That's H-E-L-I-U-M.com. Use the code POMP. I've got one set up. I'm helping to build the people's network and I hope you join us. Also, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Tyrone. I hope you guys enjoy it.

Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys.

Bang, bang. Tyrone is back. Round two. He's got the long Bitcoin short, the banker shirt on. He's ready to roll. I already know, man. What's up? It's going up.

All right. For those that didn't listen to the first episode that we did together and uh don't follow you on the internet which at this point seems impossible uh maybe you just start with kind of a two minutes on your background and kind of the work that you've been doing yeah really quick so before i start this again thank you again for having me man this is incredibly dope i'll be about to burn the internets down so i'm excited um so for those who don't know me i'm born and raised here in new jersey um one of the things i hold my hat on is

being a first generation uh high school graduate um and obviously first generation college graduate it as well. Part of the reasons why I'm super passionate about crypto is growing up in an unbaked home. I got a full scholarship to run track, went to Georgia Tech, was also the first of my family to get kicked out of college. So left Georgia Tech, ended up at Seton Hall, where I finished up my bachelor's there and then started a graduate program where I actually learned about Wall Street. I was 26 years old before I knew anything about the stock market or anything like that. So right now, currently licensed financial advisor, director of community at Altruist and host of the Human Advisor podcast, not as big as yours, but got my own podcast out

there trying to follow in your footsteps. So shout to my Altruist family. Also a founder of a company called 401, which is a storytelling consultancy that I launched in April of this year. And then the other piece of that is, again, a lot of work that I do bringing light to unbanked poverty, homelessness, child hunger. And I do a lot of speaking and engagement on that as well. And again, for those who don't realize or know, at TR401, you go on Twitter, you get the whole spiel. So there's a couple of people who are tweeting me asking, what is altruist? So let's just start there. I seen the podcast. It makes every other podcast look like nobody knows what they're doing. because it's super high quality. I said, I've never seen a podcast where somebody walks down

the street in her cords, but I respect the hell out of it. So what exactly is Altruist? Yeah, salute to that. So Altruist is a technology platform for financial advisors. They're basically trying to be the digital Schwab or the digital TD. Shout out to Jason Wink, who's a genius. So his whole thing is to make it cheaper for financial advisors, for RIAs only, so registered investment advisors only, making it cheaper for them to run their practices their tech stack so that then they can in turn work with a different demographic so that's hence the name altruist um they reached out to me july of last year about hosting a podcast and i'm like i ain't pumped like i ain't i'm not trying to host no podcast like i'm off that i

don't want no smoke with him um but jason was like listen you told your story we think that we could do something different here um with you helping advisors tell their stories and just really getting away from the jargon and everything and i'll keep it a buck we changed the game that there's no way you could turn on that podcast and relate it to any other thing that's in our business financial services there's nothing like it so shout to everyone at altruist that worked on that we completely turned the game on its ear and i said it all the time like i literally have mentees that are in gangs that are like yo that podcast is gangster and then i get you know people from all over our business like you know clients and everything love it so we definitely changed

the game with that one i just love the human aspect of it right and i think that like what we're starting to understand is uh legacy media has been so focused on like what's the story and not so much on like let me tell the let me let the people of the story tell their own story right it's a it's a new way to do it you guys are doing a great job there any any um specific story that you guys have covered there that really stands out to you is like man that was either one an awesome story or two you kind of walked away and we're just like i'm so glad i decided to do this yeah great question it's funny you front-running me a bit because i got a piece coming out um the details it's a whole season but i will say this the one that uh that sticks out

the most um is probably the very first episode um that we did where it was like we literally got the first advice because the first true episode was was me and jason uh the ceo and it's liam Miko and again I want to make this our podcast is not scripted right there's only one scripted question that we ask at the end and that's what makes it so dope is like the guests trust me right because we just sit down we turn on the cameras and we have a conversation and Leanne is telling her story and I'm literally listening to the woman version of my own life first generation high school graduate grew up poor like you know and she's a white woman who's a lesbian but and she's being interviewed by a black man right we grew up on different sides

of the country but that humanity and that story we were almost one right and i'm just i mean we got so lost in the conversation and when we got we got we rapped everybody was like oh that was dope like you know i mean it was just so real so it to me right then it was like all right we're on to something here because we got so far away from our business, but just into what made her, her. And then I'm like, man, she had the same experience that I had. And then you start to realize that poverty and poor is not a color, right? It's not, it's a condition. You know what I mean? And even for those of us that reached the quote unquote heights of financial services, we all have a story. So it was pretty neat. Yeah. I love that. Um, and then you, uh, you,

are the person or one of the people who helped me edit a piece that I recently wrote. And, you know, you and I were talking and I said to you, look, I think I've got these unique life experiences that helps me understand as a white dude, how to talk about some of these issues that most people just never see, right? And it was, I've literally stood with a gun in a war zone, right? And I've also been next to a bunch of black teammates in college, who just frankly, just racist ass situations that happened. And I wrote this thing, I sent it to you and you came back to me and I loved it because the advice you gave was not the grammatical stuff, right? It was much deeper and more important than that around like, hey, let's use some more kind of important quotes, right?

Let's look at this type of framework. And so maybe talk a little just about, there's so many people right now who are online, who are watching kind of, I'll call it 2020 chaos happen. So you've got the coronavirus occurs, then you've got the economic shock, then you've got the civil rights and kind of all the police brutality protests, and even turning into riots in some cases. And it just feels like social media makes it seem like the world's ending. We know it's not ending. We know we live in the most prosperous time in human history. But it also feels like a lot of the people who are standing up and saying things don't come out of the finance world as much so maybe talk a little bit about kind of how you see uh the world today and then also um you

know kind of the interaction or the intersection with uh finance right so i'm glad you brought that up because i was going to bring it up eventually um the piece that you wrote was fantastic and again kudos to you for using your voice at a time when so many with that look like you and have the platform that you have want to hide and so kudos to you for that for reaching out just be like yo man, read this over, right? And I'll be honest, I was like, man, you probably want to say black and not minority a lot, right? Like you want to leave, this is a black issue, you know what I mean? So, you know, those are, and it sucks we can't tell the DNP story right now too, but whatever. So this fits so nice right here. But honestly though, like, thank you for doing that because

again, it brings light to everything that is going on. And yes, we are in a time where we're still in the middle of the greatest wealth transfer the world has ever seen. We're in the middle now, again, which is the civil rights movement of this era. There's tremendous income inequality, financial illiteracy, so many different issues. And again, like you said, right now, those of us with a platform have a responsibility. Yes, we'll address the issue, but to be more solution oriented. And I will also say those of us that are Black that have been in financial services already knew that these were issues. I've been saying this forever, right? for the last 18 years, I've been saying this and screaming into the forest, but now it's become a

thing. So let's just address some of the issues, right? Our business, right? And I say ours as a financial advisor, $17 billion, the financial services industry spends on marketing financial services, less than 1% on financial education. That's sickening, right? When you look at almost half of the population do not own stock. Let's not forget for one second, this is an economic issue. Also, financial advisors are complicit. We sell our services to the rich, don't necessarily give our time to the poor, right? And then when you look at the numbers, the Poor People's Campaign of America says there's roughly 140 million people in this country that are considered poor, right? You look at the numbers before COVID were 50 million, quote unquote, working poor, right? All of these different numbers, the almost 20% that are unbanked, all of these different things, again, which is why I've never been more bullish on crypto than I am right now. So I think what we see is civil unrest, but within it are seeds of resolution, right, of solution and people who want to be effective in uniting, right, of bringing really core solutions to the problem. So that's what I feel like I want to do. But I don't think we get there unless there are people, again, like yourself, who address some of the, again, this is systemic and structural, right?

So we got to put those together and also embracing our history. I just got done with a panel where I was saying this. Oh, well, financial services is very, you know, male, pale and stale as they say, okay, well, let's go all the way back to the origin of Wall Street. Slaves built Wall Street, and then they turned around and sold them. And then in 1711, the United States government says New York City is the hub for all things slavery. Now, you want your good old slave, go down to New York City, right? So, and then there's this whole thing about Black Wall Street. No, Black Wall Street has always, Wall Street has always been Black. Like, we were the first commodity sold, and it wasn't until coffee came, and it was a big thing, and they're like, okay, well, let's move on to something that is more lucrative and or cleaner, and that's when the slave trade eventually left New York City. So I think until we start to dig into the muck here, right, and really start to address some of these issues, we won't progress. But again, you're starting to see some of the Confederate statues come down and some, you know, a lot of other conversations now that are being had, people are having conversations like this, the piece that you wrote, we got to get uncomfortable a little bit, and then we'll move on. Last thing I'll say is, it is incredibly funny to me that and I think this is why you're able to stand up and take internet bullets because you've taken real bullets like literally went into field with a gun. So it's like, it's, it's super powerful when you stand up and say that because again, you know, people look at you and go, man, he has a lot more to lose than I, but he's standing up and taking a stand. And the financial services industry has dropped the ball here. It's been sad, but again, kudos to you for what you've done and making room for the conversation. And now it's incumbent upon those of us that are Black, especially Black males, to now take this and say, OK, well, what are we going to do to make it better for our communities?

Yeah, what's interesting to me about the entire situation, right? And when I say entire situation, there's a race element, there's a police brutality element, there's an economic element, and they're very, very intertwined. So I'm not going to try to unpack, you know, piece of it, but they're all very intertwined is really what we end up getting is it's all actually overlaid with a poverty, like lens, right? And so what ends up happening is you can take that poverty lens and you can literally apply it to the economic situation.

Obviously, you can apply it to the race side, you can apply it to the police brutality side. And one of the things that I've been thinking more and more about is you can't solve a problem unless you identify that it exists, right? So okay, so that's pretty easy. then two is where i think i've been um maybe not i disappointed probably the right word actually is there's a lot of people who they don't want to have a realization of the truth right i tweeted the other day and i said that um in order to actually seek the truth right and i'm paraphrasing what i said it was something like you got to be able to have the uncomfortable conversations you

got to explore all the options right and it just feels and that by the way works in both directions right because here's the other piece that i will say this um that i think is important to kind of keep us intellectually honest is we get in a world where everyone's protesting police brutality and then we see a situation where a cop shoots somebody and i always say okay details really matter because actually there's certain situations where like if you're shooting at a cop and a cop shoots back and kills you i'm probably not going to be up in the street you know protesting about police brutality if a cop shoots an unarmed man i'm gonna be really pissed right and so like like The nuances matter and it's not so much blanket statements, but I do feel like on the economic

side, you nailed it. Financial education has been non-existent, right? I mean, just absolutely non-existent across socioeconomic status, but who it really predominantly hurts is that bottom 50% that doesn't own stocks, that can't come with $400 emergency payment. Like they continue, and some of these people have actually DM'd me and literally said to me. I feel like I cannot get ahead. And I try to say, look, I can't give you financial advice, but let me just understand a little bit more about your situation. And almost always they are doing

things that play right into the hands of a system that has stacked the deck against them, right? They're living in all cash. They don't make investments. They spend more than they make, like all these things. So maybe talk a little bit about just like, we know it's a problem. How do we start to solve this? Like, what are the things that we can do as an industry? And really it's just humans to try to solve some of these problems. Yeah, I love how, I love you ask this because I get so fired up about it and it's my life's mission now. So let's zoom out a little bit, right? And I know a lot of people have said, you know, they wanted to make the distinction between protesters, rioters, and looters. I want to focus on the looters for a second.

Look at what, and again, it's disgusting, but again, everything has its place, as my mother would say, right? But let's just look at what they're stealing. They're running after their gods, Gucci, Prada, Fendi, the idolatry in this country. And what we made them believe is important to them are things, not educating them enough to say, a Rolex, a Gucci bag comes out of you. So we've put nothing in them. So now we're looking at the mirror of our failings. Also, that's one side. Then they go steal their needs, right? They go to a Walmart and they're stealing from there, right? Toilet paper, dog food, whatever the case may be. That is, again, a mirror of where our failings are as a country, no matter how you feel about it. And anybody that's staring in the mirror

and honest with yourself, there's some things about yourself that may be a little uncomfortable. I got this little patch over here I need to get rid of, right? So it's a very uncomfortable thing. Again, I think we all agree we don't want to tear down neighborhoods. We don't want to steal. But that's how, when you look at the poverty in Detroit, that I have seen poverty all over this country. You have not seen poverty until you've seen squalor in Detroit, and then you go to Beverly Hills and you look at the difference. And there's a man that's worth $100 billion in this country, and there are people literally who don't have clean water. That's what you're seeing in the streets right now. Now, okay, great, Tyrone, you addressed the issue. How do we fix it? So now we have to focus on solutions. Three E's. Exposure, education, empowerment. Our business likes to lead with the big E, the middle E, because CFA, CFP, Wharton, Kellogg, the whole deal. Let me prove how smart I am. No one cares, right? If I can see it, I can be it. So expose me to what it is, right, Mr. Whoever. How did you get what you got? Expose me to that. Give me the blueprint, right? Because I tell people this all the time. If all I give you is

money, I robbed you. But if I give you that money, and in turn give you the blueprint on how to turn that dollar into $2, and then how I was in the position to give you that dollar, I robbed you if I just gave you money. I did you no benefit. So I think that's the one thing that our industry does very poorly, right? And I think someone actually said this on a podcast, shout out to Emlyn. He said, our business has done a good job of getting the numbers right and the people wrong. And I think he nailed it with that one. And so now let's go to exposure. Now you look at 31% of African Americans in this country do not own stock, right? 31, I mean, 31% do, right? So you have 60, almost 70% that don't. That's an access problem. That's an exposure problem, which is wink, wink, why I'm so fired up about Cash App. Not only can you get Bitcoin, but you can get fractional shares of stock through the app. Like, that's powerful. Robinhood, for all of the people that want to bash it, Robinhood is access. I don't care what you think about whatever they're doing or people day trading and beating Warren Buffett. That's access for people that have never had access before. So now, yes, we have a responsibility. Now I've exposed you. Now I have to educate you. But there's two types of ignorance. Ignorance, I just don't know. And then ignorance told me, and I don't give a crap. Right? So I think we have to then go in, expose them, educate them. Now, the biggest part is the last E, which is empowerment.

After I've done those two, I have to empower you. Meaning what? I'm going to give you a network. I'm going to give you continued resources. I'm going to give your school technology. Probably lack Wi-Fi. You probably lack tools that you need. I'm going to give you books.

We're going to create some type of scholarship to come back. We're going to bank black in that community. Or we're going to bank period in that community. So now when we need to do financial literacy or financial education in that city, you know what banks answer to? really big deposits. So when you put really big deposits, you go give us some resources for these kids in this school, right? Not that same school where the parents have put all the resources or whatever, this one here. So now we're getting into schools earlier. Oh, by the way, financial advisors should give up an hour of their time per day to go into these schools, support the teachers,

help them with lesson plans or whatever, not to change the curriculum, but we have to be more you know accessible and then i think the last piece of the empowerment is think about this if all of the black stone black rock bank of america morgan merrill all of them put in a fund and they said all right take all the over for one for one year we're going to take all the overdraft fees put it in the fund we're going to up that you know 700 billion that we spend on you know financial education you know to a billion and we're going to put that in a fund and then we're going to spend this to simply educate, you know, a particular area or city just for a test case. And then we can spread that all over America. Take 25 of the best financial advisors,

all denominations, all backgrounds, all creeds, all religions, and have a tour, go all the way around the country, instead of us going to all these fancy conferences and drinking ourselves silly. And there's S&P palm trees in the lobby, right? And then really start to educate people. And then, oh, by the way, there's some telefinance, what we call people in the most impoverished areas in this country. Is there anything that we can help you with from a budgeting standpoint, personal finance standpoint? Do you understand how your SNAP or your EBT card works, right? Are you getting Social Security? All these other things. Are you up to date on your taxes? Are you going to a tax preparer versus an actual CPA? All of these things, granular, right? And then you go into an area like the South Bronx where half of the people in the South Bronx are unbanked, and then you start to get really proximate and go, okay, this is why they use payday lenders and check cashing places in the post office. And then until we get proximate to their condition, we can't help them. So then we can give them the resources that they need and then say, okay, well, you lack identity, you lack a bank account. If you lack these things, you can't do anything else.

so we have to get you these resources build infrastructure around you and then oh by the way you'll learn that these people are severely illiterate in terms of what it means what is a maiden name what is a debit what is a credit

who cares about your Roth conversion we can like we got to get away from that so we have to get on people's eye level and financial advice and again I'm going long-winded here but I'm super fired up about it we do a terrible job of giving people financial advice a snapshot right where you are

college graduate high school graduate, mother of five, whatever it is, right? Father of two and, you know, corporate executive. Meet people right where they are and give them the advice in that moment. If we do a better job of that, taking the advice to the people, as opposed to spending all this money and then just saying, oh, they'll come. We have it here, right? It's like, if that's the case, then, and I just had a conversation with Hester Pierce, and she was like, are you aware of investor.gov? I'm like, I'm not, and I feel terrible because I'm a financial advisor, but she was like, check out investor.gov. There's a wealth of information there. People don't know

that's there. They built it. But if it's not being brought to the people, how do they know it's going to help them? Yeah. And I think that one of the things that's really interesting to me is I've always said to people, many of the folks that you're talking about have the skills. They don't know they have the skills. They don't know what to do, but they actually have the skills. And I'll give you a great example. So, uh, when I was in my mid twenties, there was a program in North Carolina that would go into the local high schools, right? And they pretty much were trying to pick, uh, any public school within a certain radius, whatever. And, uh, they would try to introduce entrepreneurship classes, right? And the class was, uh, we're going to go for a week.

It's an hour every morning. And at the end, we're going to have you quote unquote, start a business. So what most high schools that have an entrepreneurship class, it's like an after school activity, whatever, they somehow got in and they got an hour of time dedicated in the morning while the students were there. And, uh, I went, I think two or three times during this program. And, uh, every time I would go, a lot of them were old white guys, right? They were teaching this stuff and they were trying to help. And I would always say to them, uh, I want those three guys. And it was always, always the kids in the back of the class that were sleeping, that were doing whatever. And when I'd get back there, uh, they would always ask me, why do you

want to work with them? They're the troublemakers of the class, whatever I said, cause I got to do the least amount of work to get them to build a business. They already know how to build a business, right? And especially in high school, as you got up into the juniors and seniors and stuff, there was literally one time when a kid was like, yeah, I deal drugs. And I was like, great. You already know how to, guess what? We're going to just switch out the product. You already understand demand. You understand supply. You understand supply. Like you got it, dude. Absolutely. Maybe let's not sell something that's illegal. I'm going to maybe get you in jail. Like we can start with a t-shirt, right? And you start to like understand. And what I saw

was he was the most interested kid out of anyone i ever saw in that program and it was because he already had kind of entrepreneurship bug now that's not for everybody but at the same time there's a lot of kids especially today with social media they want the things as you described right they want the gucci bag they want the car they want the house they want whatever but nobody is there to tell them this is how you get it right and this is how you kind of backwards plan off of it and then um you know one of the things that cracks me up is people in tech uh all have the same thing. If I say to you, Hey, how do you build, you know, a hundred million dollar business, you basically start doing math backwards, right? Okay. Well, if I need a hundred million dollars,

how much is that a month? You know, what product can I sell? What's the margins? And you start doing math. Most people don't think that way, right? They literally just say, Hey, I can't do that. Right. Or how do you buy it? I can't do that. I couldn't afford that. It almost feels like the exposure is the thing that drives the curiosity and we'll kind of weed out the people who don't want to be there right the people who want to do this and they don't know it's possible the second you show them it's possible then it's game on right and what it feels like uh and i'd love to hear your thoughts it's like once you start in a community with exposing some portion of people and they're the first to be exposed if it works correctly eventually that becomes the

standard the expectation absolutely right it's kind of like hey this is what we do and that's true of going to college that's true of financial education of whatever but you guys start with exposure it feels like. Yeah, 100%. It all starts with exposure. And this is what I yell about on Twitter. It's like, I get all the other things that you folks are talking about, but they're just not exposed. Again, I am exhibit A. I was 26 years old. I literally walked by the New York Stock Exchange and didn't know what it was. And then when I got to the office, the gentleman who ultimately ended up my mentor was like, you know, that was the New York Stock Exchange. You just walk by. I had no clue. I'm 26. That's a disaster for myself and my family. Everything I've learned

about money, I've learned the last 14 years on Wall Street. That's literally a problem, right? And that is indicative of our education system and a lot of other things. But also, my parents had no choice because they didn't have it, right? So a lot of it is making sure that it starts in the home, but people say, oh, well, you blame the parents. Well, what'd you want my parents to do? they were just trying to keep the damn lights on. They're not worried about shares of freaking Amazon. You mean like they're just trying to make sure that, you know, my sister and I could eat and they could, so financial planning and all that stuff is meeting people where they are. But again, now that I was exposed, my nephews now who are one and two have portfolios better than,

you know what I mean? Probably I have, right? They own a ton of Bitcoin, right? Like, so these are things that now they're going to benefit because I was exposed, right? So, and my niece, right? So did my great nephew. So my niece, right? Their mother, she was exposed to me going to college. So guess what? She was the second college graduate and now she has her master's degree. See how that works, right? So if I see it now, oh, okay. And I, and it's funny, I was just telling us the other day when I started to get recruited for, for colleges and I started getting letters in the mail, I went to my high school coach. I'm like, what are these? Like, why are they calling my house, he was like, for college, I'm like, what do you, huh? You know what I mean? Like, what is this?

Why do they want to come to my house? Like, my mother will beat somebody up. You don't want to just come by my house for no reason. So he's like, no, they want to recruit you. Like, I had to learn that whole thing. I'd never known anybody who went to college before. So the exposure is a very big piece. And I think that is probably the simplest and cheapest part, because it's just simply exposing kids to that side, to this side, right? And I think, who was it? Can't think of his name now, but the CEO of Merck was just saying, the only reason he ended up doing what he was doing is because they decided to bus some kids to the other side of town where there's a program. And then he was part of that program. And now look, he's the CEO of one of the biggest

pharmaceutical companies in the world. Exposure matters. And I don't think we take that seriously enough. And so one of the things that I think is really important is when we talk about financial education, you're not talking about buy Amazon, buy this, sell this, short this, whatever. You're specifically talking about what I call like more structural education. This is how money works. This is why inflation works against you. Here's what certain assets can do. Even things like spend less than you make. Here's how a credit card works. Here's why you want to pay it off. Like that's the type of stuff you're talking about, right? Absolutely. You'll love this. i've been and it's so funny how this works i literally am not sitting here without investopedia

and i've been blessed enough to do some partnerships with investopedia early this year we're sitting down with caleb caleb silver shout to caleb over investopedia he said tyrone the number one search term on investopedia to a tune of a million page views a month is what is money that is the number one search term on investopedia really the number one like it's head and shoulders above everything else. What is money? Again, I want to talk about a failure as a country. The people literally don't know what money is. If you don't know what money is, how in the world do you do anything? So you're just operating blind. And literally he told me that and I stared at him and I was like, are you sees it? Million page view. What is money?

like so we have that and then there's this big gap of just wilderness and we expect people to get a job and then figure it out right figure out a mortgage figure out investments figure out your retirement figure all of these things out and then oh by the way we're going to dangle all of this prosperity and abundance when you look at you know the the the numbers right 42 million unemployed, yet the billionaires continue to get richer to a tune of whatever they all made collectively, right? It makes people feel, like you said, you get those DMs where people feel like they're falling farther behind, right? And again, I'm still in a situation where my life is a lot different from my family's and my friends and people that I know. So I know people

where $800 a month is a lot of money to them, right? And they're still in the struggle. so being very close to that you realize that the stock market's a liar and we know that right for the people that are invested and those of us that are privileged to have investment accounts of bitcoin and credit cards oh life is grand but the average person turning that on and going what i understand how in the world is that happening and i'm furloughed all i got right and that is the The stock market right now is the biggest indicator of the class issue that we have in this country. You thought the race issue was bad. The class issue, which we're going to – that's going to come to a head too.

The class issue is a bigger issue that we have to solve. It feels to me like this whole idea of the stock market going up and economic data getting worse ends really poorly. right and i don't know how it ends when it ends all that kind of stuff but what i do feel is really interesting is that it is the ultimate highlighting of why financial education matters right and and ultimately comes down to if you understand when money gets printed don't fight the fed right just okay cool we're printing you know that asset prices are going to rise get out of cash and get into assets that one piece of information which most people in finance it's like you know economics 101 type stuff literally is the difference between wealth and

poverty in 2020 100 right i mean it's just crazy to me that that's what we're talking about what let me ask you this uh what do you see is the first foray so somebody goes from uh what we'll call not well-educated or not educated at all on the financial side to, okay, I start to understand this stuff. What do they look to do? Do they want to buy stocks? Do they want to save? What do you see as some of the first actions that they normally go down and end up leading to being successful financially? Really, really good question. And I feel like I have a unique lens of this as an advisor. So one of the things that you constantly, and again, we realize one of the biggest issues here is debt, consumer debt, student loan debt, right? So a lot of questions

that you get is how do I manage just my financial life, right? And debt leads the conversation. I have X amount in student loans. I have X amount in credit cards. And one of the things, again, whether a client comes in and they have 5 million or they have $5, I say, let's go all the way back to square one answer two questions for me one what is your first memory of money is it your grandfather walking you down to the bank or is it scarcity like it was with me the landlord banging on the door right big difference how you operate as an adult the other thing is now what is your relationship with money right what does that look like now you get money what do you do is it in one hand and out the other is it immediately to save is it immediately to look for an opportunity to

flip like those are habits so I ask those two questions the next thing is I don't care who you are where you're from where you went to school your color your favorite whatever sports team give me three months of your checking account I'll know all I need to know about you how much you make where you spend it how you spend it how often you spend it I'll know everything about you do that for yourself and then I tell them I have them come back to me and they're like oh right I spend x amount of money eating out or I spend right because you had no idea you were just operating as if. So that's one of the things, just getting people to understand the basics and people just don't learn the basics of really what it means to budget, right? Really what it

means that personal finance to make sure that I have these different buckets for different things in my life. I've addressed the behavioral part of myself when it comes to money. Those are two big buckets. The last then is, okay. And here's the, here's the other thing is people say, well, okay, well, I don't have any leftover. Like, all right, fine, right? Visualize. Take a white piece of paper, draw a line down the middle. Everything that comes in, everything that goes out. Got a number over here. Let's look at that number. That's called discretionary income. If you have a number on the other side, we got some issues. So we can address that just to make sure people get even. But now what then do I do if I have that number over here? I have $100 left over,

right? And that's when you get the people DMing you. Are you going to buy airline stocks, right or whatever so you start to get into all right and i was just having this conversation about savings right now let's look at that you would want savings and savings makes sense and that's the ultimate goal six to one year of savings based on whether you're single married whatever cool savings is a privilege right from growing up in a house where savings was never a conversation because there was nothing to be saved. If you can save, it's a privilege. With that said, there's conversations with people who say, well, I have savings, but I have credit card debt. I have savings, but I have, you know, a $700 car payment. I have to say, well, why do you have

savings, right? You should use some of that savings to get yourself in a better situation financially. Go all the way back to what's your, let's take your credit cards. What is your debt service every month, right? It's costing you $600, $700 a month just to pay your credit card bill. So imagine if you took some of your savings or all pay that down. Now you're paying 200 a month in credit card bills. That leaves you a $500 buffer. Now you could direct that money to something else. We still haven't gotten to investments yet. We're just literally talking about managing your financial life. Right. And then you can start to direct that towards maybe a immediate savings bucket or directing that to other payments that you have. Again, so many different things that people have, looking at making sure to maximize their work benefits, which a lot of people don't do, right? So those are really the conversations that people want to get a hold of and understand. They just don't know how to manage the finances of their life, right? Well, how do I allocate my 401k, right? What is this withholdings thing, right? Do I withhold one or 10 or zero? No one knows that, right? There's no education on that. So it's really bare bones, basic personal finance. But I take everybody all the way back to the beginning of memory of money, your relationship with money. And let's just go bare bones budget, keep your little app. Let's actually look at it. And then we can start to address getting to that big shiny object in the corner, which is the crypto and the stock market. I was gonna ask, how does crypto and Bitcoin fit into this? really good question so and especially at the time right now i've i've never been more

bullish for bitcoin and crypto overall like i am incredibly fired up more now than i ever have for a lot of reasons especially d5 but we'll get to that but i think right now what you're seeing is when even younger clients when they look at their portfolio when they look at what's going on You see even people who've never uttered the term money printing, right? Like that comes up in the conversation. Well, how is the government coming up with the money for my stimulus check? They can give everybody $1,200, right? And then do all that. So people are understanding that concept. And then you start to talk to them about an asset that is not tied to any of that, right? And they're intrigued. They've heard about it. They read about it. So for me, it's just making sure people get a solid education and foundation on it. Again, like I said, as an advisor, I've never had to pitch Bitcoin in my life, right? Like it sells itself. It doesn't need us.

So it's just once that awareness comes about and it's like a, almost like the thing with Bitcoin, I think who was just saying this, uh, uh, it just wrote a piece and he was saying it's like, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Right. Um, but so I feel like moving forward, the way I look at it, long dated call option or store of value right now as we move forward in these uncertain times and you had just tweeted it's done everything it was supposed to do in this environment so right now it should be a part of a conversation that financial advisors are having with clients institutions pension funds whatever

this is what you were looking for because even myself on my walking talks i'm like listen y'all could have this parade bitcoin has never been in a recession right and then the world literally falls apart and then it's up so it's like what now again short time frame but this is what you wanted to see. Now, what is it going to do over the next five years? So I think right now, if we were ever going to pitch this or talk about it as something that's sustainable, as a cornerstone of a portfolio, a cornerstone of self-sovereignty, a cornerstone of getting away from the legacy banking system, a cornerstone of what it means to accumulate wealth and be a part of the greatest wealth transfer in history. Now we double down on the conversation about Bitcoin and especially

to those same people that we were saying were left out of the legacy system. Now it's important to get this in front of them at this very moment. It's interesting because maybe the last year or so I remember talking with a number of people about the idea that what if Bitcoin's adoption is the 180 degree opposite of how technology has previously been adopted. So if you think of most companies uh in the internet age they've built products in the united states they've penetrated the u.s market they have a big board meeting and say you know 2020 is the year of international expansion and they go and they open up all these other markets right yeah well bitcoin on day one was global anyone anywhere could use it uh and the decentralized nature helped but actually what

we've seen a lot of markets is uh areas that are developing or underdeveloped or not developed at all. That's where adoption occurs because people literally, to your point, they know the problems. You don't have to convince them that there's a problem. They actually know that the problem exists. Here's a solution. Exactly. What you're really describing is like, wait a minute, that's not a developed nation or developing nation thing. That's literally here in the United States. There's 20, 30% of the population, same situation. The second they hear about Bitcoin, they say, hey, that solves the problem that I've had. I just didn't even know that the solution existed. 100 percent. This is what I've been saying forever. Crypto is missing its product market fit in the U.S. Like there's there's millions of people that could use this. I walked into a Waffle House. Shout out to Waffle House. I'm a Waffle House lover. Shout out to Jason. I walked into a Waffle House in Charlotte and I had a buy BTC shirt on.

And the woman ringing up, she goes, buy BTC, what's that? I said, it's Bitcoin. She goes, oh, I know Bitcoin, that's in my cash app, right? And then I took the time to educate her on what it was. She's like, what is it? Can you explain it to me? Right? And I'm like, you give me another waffle for sure.

But I explained it to her and she got it right away because that group of people, they don't trust banks. Everything we're saying, crypto as opposed to before, it's those people. We need to take it to them. They don't trust banks. They realize it's super expensive for them to bank themselves and have commerce and interact outside of the legacy banking system. And oh, by the way, I was saying this, local Bitcoins is a gift to the inner city, especially those of us that are familiar with the SUSU, which is basically the first blockchain, if you ask me, it goes all the way back, right, to Dutch slaves in the 16th century, where we all, there's 10 people, we all put in a quote unquote hand, $100, right? And then everyone takes a turn getting the pot and then it's scheduled. I'll get mine this week. Pump gets his next week. There's no, we trust each other. There's no third party. All we know is we're in the same community. It's trustless. Cause I know, you know, I need to pay my rent. Don't jerk me. Right. And I know you need to pay your car note. I'm not going to jerk you.

And that's how it works. Right. And there's no, there's no credit checks. There's nothing. That's how the inner city and as Caribbean folks in every community has their own that's how they built they bought houses they bought cars they sent their kids to school like and we're completely unaware of that and then you add in local bitcoins anyone that is now there are people that let's just call them oracles right for the sake of this conversation that set up and run the susu they should be educated on local bitcoins because what it means for remittances what it means to be able to turn that money into bitcoin or into the local currency. It's Craigslist for Bitcoin. Like that should be pitched to the inner city and

all rural communities where they are in banking deserts. Why are we still on every crypto podcast and conference talking about Argentina and Africa? I love Africa. I love Argentina. But we have our own in this country that are sucking wind. They just don't have access to banking. Let's go help them and then we can go overseas and then take pictures and you know whatever act like we're doing this worldly good we can't but you take care again i was raised you take care of your home first then you go somewhere else so i just wish we would direct our focus and especially right now because we could pull so many people up with the power of blockchain um and the power of crypto but we just need to direct our focus a bit i'm not going to make you debate the uh uh upside or

downside of Waffle House but I will tell you I saw a tweet recently that said um you're telling me that Waffle House is better at uh solving conflict than the police are and I was dying right they were like Waffle House employees been solving conflict at 3 a.m with drunk people forever no guns no pawns no anything like they're good at it we might need to hire some of them right to going fully you go to a waffle house in the hood you know better them employees will wear you out you'll catch a serious beat down and they'll still make sure you get your waffle light where do financial advisors fit in all this right in terms of we know financial education is a problem we got to go solve that we know crypto can be a part right whether it's a small part

a big part whatever of the solution but where do financial advisors fit in and are we at a position where financial advisors can go do kind of the more traditional financial education, but they're not yet up to speed on Bitcoin and crypto, or there are more and more people getting up to speed? How do you look at the financial advisor part of all this? Great question. So financial advisors, again, I will admit I'm an advisor. We're complicit for the most part as an industry because we sell our services to the rich, like I said. But as far as crypto goes, if you look at when the year started, it was all about how do we get financial advisors in the pool. And I said that was going to be the theme of 2020. The last conference I was at, TD Ameritrade,

the whole show was there. Rick Edelman, Mike Novogratz, Matt Hogan, and myself. And I was the last to speak on crypto. I had a 50-minute presentation, and I spoke to financial advisors. I said, this is going to be way different from what you heard before. I'm not talking about no 1% allocation. I'm going to be talking about how this actually works into your practice, because I've built a full practice on crypto away from the traditional means, meaning I don't custody with TD my clients custody away from me so anyway the issue here is that everyone now is trying to figure out we fact is we're the gateway we're the gateway to billions of dollars right in some cases trillions of dollars of retail assets there's the problem is twofold one the legacy

uh and I'll say legacy crypto folks don't realize that advisors are uninterested until one they know they're not going to get sued or fired, and how do I get paid, right? So those are the things that are missing right now. So also, Tor Demeester, Pierre Richard, yourself, Stefan Levera, I can keep going. I love every single one of y'all. It means it falls on deaf ears to advisors. They just don't, and you probably have the most cachet amongst our group, but they just, the messenger matters here. So until financial advisors get the message from someone that they trust and the conversation around crypto is, here's how it works into your workflow. This is what custody looks like. And by the way, for financial advisors, the fidelity is at hard stop when it comes to custody.

I love Gemini. I love fidelity. It stops there. Why? For no other reason than trust. They trust Fidelity, and they have probably their firm's custody with Fidelity as well. And I've had great conversations with Sunaina, TD, and a few others. But what then needs to happen for financial advisors to really get serious about this, and again, is the education. So advisors don't want to be educated on what the halving is. They don't want to be educated on SHA-256. Keep that.

We need to be educated on, okay, give me some, right? and there was a, I can't think of her name, but the representative from Fidelity Digital Assets was just on with Nick Carter on the Brink podcast. She said, there's a couple of things that institutions care about. Three biggest things. That's the thing I care about. I don't care about all the hopium. What are the concerns? It's the same thing financial advisors have. The volatility, market manipulation, and then the last is fundamentals. How do I value it? So again, I love Coinmetrics. I love Delphi. Delphi, best in the game. Shout out to Delphi, right? They do the best research in the game. You cannot give that to a financial advisor. They can't draft it

and comprehend it and then pass that on, one, through their compliance, and two, onto a client. So we need to create content for them that they feel comfortable learning from. And Delphi is probably best in class there, right? And we've had some conversations with them. And then being able to pass that on to a client. So I think there's a, there's an education gap here that's not happening. And again, the messenger matters, right? Even, you know, with the best, the best in the crypto space, if you put them in a Merrill or Morgan or Goldman, right? The advisor is going to be like, right. But if you put someone that they trust, which is why an Edelman, a Ron Carson, a Marty Bicknell, Peter Malouk, Josh Brown, right? When those guys really start to come

to the pool and to the party, like, and Josh is dancing around it. I love them, but I'm like, come on, man, just come all in. Right. But until they really start to say, okay, we are literally going all in with our clients here. And I think a lot of it is, which is why advisors want a Bitcoin ETF, but also, okay, fine. We have a Bitcoin ETF. We figured that out. How do I then pull that into my model so that I can create a portfolio for a client that I can show them And I could do a financial plan and I could run through compliance and all these other things. No one are really addressing that issue. And why? Because they're not financial advisors. So they don't know our individual concerns and what clients are going to say, which is why I tell advisors a couple of things. Client walks in the door. I own $50,000 of Bitcoin. And you asked him where? Coinbase. Great. Best house, bad neighborhood. You should slide a hardware wallet across the table, crypto assets by Chris Berniski and say, we're going to get to that. But for right now, how much do you own? Why do you own it? Right. Go back to your investment policy statement, your risk tolerance. Go through all of that with the client. How tech savvy are they? Go through that whole thing. Then say, OK, well, we need to work on helping you get that off of Coinbase. Right. There's a trust in a state issue here. Right. That client needs to update their digital fiduciary. Right. What are they doing with the crypto cold storage? All these other things. Those are the things that not address for financial advisors. So the interest is there, but the conversation is not built for them.

No one's building for advisors. Education is not for advisors. But again, shout out to Delphi, Interaccess, a few others that are starting to come there. But until financial advisors are comfortable with that, FINRA, the SEC, give more guidance around where they could dance, it's a non-starter. Yeah. I mean, look, and some of this is just going to get solved by time. and some of it's going to be people actually taking the effort, right, to build some of this

stuff. I want to end the podcast with one question, which I think most people have. I'm going to leave it fairly open-ended because I think this applies to everything from the economic shock to the police brutality and civil rights to the financial education we're talking about, which is what can I do, right? And what can I do where I've seen people ask this question is around two things. One, how do I help? And in some form or fashion, they will also ask me, although they won't say it explicitly, what should I not do? Right. And they're very worried about kind of doing for the sake of doing, but doing the wrong thing. And so maybe you can kind of just from your seat, how do you see the, we'll call it quote unquote, average person that listens to the podcast on Twitter, et cetera. What can they do to be part of the solution? Great question. So again, we are going to come out of this with a wholehearted arm in arm effort by all people. But I think we have to start with, who are you, right? If you are black, we need more people in positions of power, right? We need people making the decision. So all of this money is raised right now. We can say, put it here. folks like myself with a platform we have to bring light to you know me me being told at one point if i'm going to make it on wall street i need to change my name from tyrone to tyler right being

called an n-word right to my face right like we need to speak truth to our situation and bring light to these things so i think it's a lot of it is dependent upon who you are but i would encourage all of us that are Black Americans. One is now we need to leverage our resources, connect with one another network, but we need to get in positions of power. We need to go get our own. We need economic empowerment. We need to bank Black, right? We need to really be supporting those that are in this business, right? Black advisors need to connect, Black surgeons, Black accountants, right? And we need to come together and build infrastructure to support our own communities. Because if you look at the data, we all know it's there, no matter what you

want to pull, right? America gets the flu. I mean, America gets sick. The Black community gets the flu. We've been affected most by COVID. All these things, we need to go get our own. If you're not Black and you want to be an advocate for this message, I think one of the things that I have been encouraging people to do is, again, you are a great example of that. Using your voice if you have one, right? And again, if you're my friend, you're my friend when I'm not in a room, right? And then you can say, oh, that joke was out of line, right? If that's you and you have that voice in that room, do that. If it's simply saying, like, I got DMs where they're like, Tyrone, look, I'm not going

to do anything publicly, but I will move a few million dollars to one United Bank, right, which is the largest Black bank in America. I'm with that. Everybody don't need to be public. The other thing is, if you want to do things in your community, do things that are going to be literally proactive and immediate right in the community right so that could be an after school program that could be youth services that could be going down to you know a homeless shelter whatever the case may be it's just literally saying and i tell people just walk in and say

what do you need oh we need socks we need this we need that like and and and that's how this starts to work you just literally got get out of your comfort zone and then i think the the next thing is this, and I make no secret about this, and I haven't. I am only sitting here, and this is fact, because of white people, especially a white woman who took a flyer on me when I interviewed for this job on Wall Street. At the time, I was a juvenile probation officer. And she sat in the chair, and she goes, how does being a juvenile probation officer going to help you on Wall Street? And I was like, that is a really good interview question. I'm like, I have no idea. But I don't remember how I answered the question, but she took a flyer on me, right? She's like, here's a little

black boy who is literally illiterate. We're going to help him. We're going to undergird him, help him develop his skills, right? And I think if everyone does that, because again, like I said, this is a class issue. This is a race issue. But if people stop feeling uncomfortable going to the other side of town, patronizing some of those businesses and going in there and transacting with them and getting into the community, right, then you'll find very unique ways to help. And I'll end it like this. If I'm drowning, I don't care about the color of the life preserver, man. You throw me a yellow life preserver and I'm drowning. I'm like, no, no, go get a red one. I don't like yellow. Right. So your color does not matter. Right. White people get uncomfortable going to

an all black school and like, Oh, I'm the only white one here. Well, guess what? It's like that for us every day. So just feel, you know, and if you are uncomfortable going into the, into the inner city or into mostly black community, DM me, I'll go with you. Right. Like I will go with you. I've made that commitment to all of my colleagues that you reached out to me. Like, listen, let me reach out to a black dude and be like, Hey, what should I say here? I'm like, no, use a Malcolm X cool right so it's so it's like just be comfortable reaching out and yes so long as you are open honest and and altruistic with your with your desire to help i'll go to the end of the world and so many like me will but i just think we need to get over having these tough conversations

again if you're going to donate donate effectively reach out like hey right wallstreetbound.org a really good organization. Again, these are, you can ask or DM me or you or whatever, we can start to shed light. If you put your dollars here, they're going to be effective because there have been so many boots on the ground doing this work for a very long time. And those of us that are in the trenches with them, their one issue is they're underfunded. They're underfunded. So we need to make sure that all of this, you know, Goldman pledged what, 10 million, which is a bad day of trading for them, right? Like that $10 million, we need to say, Goldman, put it here. Here's a program in New York City that have been helping inner city kids with financial literacy. They

need 50 grand. Could you spare it? Right? So if we don't do that, and that may just be simply DMing, emailing, connecting people. You don't have to be out front. You just connect the people that can get the people that are close to the issue. And that's how we'll get this solved. And again, kudos to you for making room for this conversation. And I think, and again, I promise I'm done here. That's the thing. That's how this gets fixed. Your megaphone is massive. If you don't take that seriously now and then use it to amplify a message, because the littlest things, it amazes me, the things that people pull out of your podcast that I see on Twitter. And I'm like, I'll go back to the interview. I'm like, where the hell did Travis Clayton say that? You know, but people listen and then they go act on that. So I think you make a room for this conversation is how it's fixed. Reaching out, you know, having different voices and people that look differently, different perspective is how it gets fixed. But more importantly, everybody go in your community. What can I do in my community right now? And if everyone does that, we'll pull each other out of this together. And then we'll find that one mind that is going to lead us out of this and is going to be the leader that this country is so void of. I love it. I'm going to leave you with something that I can't say who it is, but it's somebody that I really respect. And somebody I did not expect to say this to me once said to me, they said, the thing that everyone forgets is that living doesn't happen in ivory towers. It happens in the streets. and when they said that to me i had to sit and think for a second and i asked him a follow-up

question which is how do you internalize that every day and he said and he's literally sitting in an ivory tower pretty much and he said there are things that i do to never lose the pulse of what happens on the streets and i remember going home and thinking about it and i knew enough about the guy's life to understand it he wasn't talking about uh just philanthropic things either right he did plenty of that donate money time all this kind of stuff but he also understood culture comes from the street he understood that uh user behavior around technology and and understanding the investments he should and shouldn't make came from the streets right and all these things and i was recently reminded of this uh because uh plin and i went somewhere um and uh and when we were

there, it was a very different crowd than you would, uh, than you would expect. And it had nothing to do with race or any of that. It literally had to do with lifestyle, right? There was a small town. Uh, every single person we saw was obese, every single person. Right. And I'm not talking about like, Hey, that person should lose 10 pounds and be healthier. I'm talking about that person's a hundred pounds overweight type stuff. Right. And we started to look around and we were like what why is that why is it in this small town uh in a pretty rural area and then you see the food choices yep mcdonald's bojang right and you're gonna listen you're like every single place here is unhealthy like literally if you wanted to eat healthy you

can cook at home or that's it yep and by the way if you want to eat cheap the only thing that you can do is go to fast food so it's unhealthy and like and you can just see here's the lock-in right here it is but those are the same people that are spending tons of time on technology products culture right all this kind of stuff and so i think that like that one quote of living happens on the streets there's a stuck with me of um it is just as much valuable to the people that you are spending time with as it can be to the people who are donating the time the money the whatever right there are things to learn if that curiosity is there uh and so i always remind people that like it doesn't have to be a one-way street right you may actually go and extract more value than

you give by accident 100 right like and honestly that may be a good thing 100 100 man right all right where can uh where can people find you on the internet where do we want to send them All right, here's where we want to send them right off the bat at TR 401. That's where I live. That's where I chop it up with pop online. Also run to my website, Tyrone Ross.io. Also check out 401.run, which is my company site there. But yeah, between those three, you can get connected. And again, anybody that got feedback, want help, anything to want to partner to make this happen, hello at tyroneross.io. You can email me for sure.

You're a legend. Not only one for everything you do, but two, you came out with the long Bitcoin, short the bank. I had to, man. Again, for all you've done for me, amplifying my voice, the gratitude, the appreciation, I cannot express enough.

um you're doing God's work man he he's gonna he's gonna hold you up I appreciate you so much awesome all right we'll do it again soon no doubt man I appreciate you