The Jason Theory

S4 E11 - The Magic Trick That Empties Your Wallet: The Federal Reserve

• Jason Stratton • Season 4 • Episode 9

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We unpack how the Fed actually reduces your wealth, how it moves money, why mortgage rates can ignore rate cuts, and how deficits fuel inflation and widen the wealth gap. We conclude with a simple goal system for 2026 that replaces vague resolutions with concrete daily tasks.

• what the Federal Reserve is and how it operates
• how the 10-year Treasury drives mortgage rates
• why QE created money and stabilized banks
• how deficits raise risk premiums and long-term yields
• inflation as purchasing power loss, not pricier goods
• the trade-offs between spending cuts and higher taxes
• what QT is and why it cannot fix fiscal gaps
• a three-task daily system to hit clear goals
• quarterly reviews to adjust inputs and track progress
• practical market checks: rates, bonds, listings


SPEAKER_00:

The U.S. government right now has a$37 trillion deficit. The US government only collects$4.3 trillion in taxable dollars a year. However, the budget is$7 trillion. We have gone to a point now. Get a little bit off topic because it happened because of the Fed. We've gotten to a point now where the U.S. government is issuing bonds to pay just the interest on our deficit. The interest on our deficit is$1.2 trillion a year. So one-fourth of the money that we collect from all the taxpayers is just going to interest alone. That's it. What's the five P's? Do you remember it? Proper preparation prevents poor performance. There you go. It doesn't matter how much money we get, if we don't close, it's no money, right? So no close is no money. I'm everything that I am because of my dad's death. And I wouldn't be as successful without his death. Hello and welcome to the Jason Theory. This is going to be the last episode of 2025, which is the last episode of year four. If you told me four or five years ago I'd be still doing this, I would be like, wow. But I love it. I really appreciate everyone listening. This week, uh, we're going to tackle the Federal Reserve. And I think it's, I mean, I was going to do this no matter what. And then the Fed cut rates yesterday. Sorry, I got a little bit of a cold. And man, what a what a great way since everyone, you know, leans on the Fed, talks about the Fed, but what really is the Fed? And I think we're going to talk about the Federal Reserve. I'm going to go on some tangents on things the Fed has done that have caused other things to occur. And I think everyone should have a basic understanding of the Federal Reserve. And I'll tell you why. They supply the money. And here's the thing if you don't know, money is what you use to buy things. So if you're not bartering with like bison hide and you're using cash, our cash and the value of that cash is literally determined by the Federal Reserve, which is not, is not a government entity. The Federal Reserve is a private entity that is controlling our cash. So I really want to put that out there. Most people don't know that. So let's start with that. Now, what is the Fed? I'm going to read you the definition of the Fed, and then we'll talk about what the Fed really is. The Fed is the central banking system of the United States created by Congress to ensure a stable, flexible financial system, managing monetary policy like interest rates, and to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term rates. It operates through a board of governors, 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, and the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee. That's the people that change the rates, acting as a bank for banks. So before we start, let's just hit on that. This is a bank that's owned by banks that moderates banks. Now, if I'm a person that moderates myself to myself, I basically can dictate the rules to myself for myself. So I have an issue right off the bat that it is a private bank, a conglomerate of private banks that tell banks what they can borrow and not borrow. But we'll get into that. So the Fed was the Fed was established in 1913, which I think is interesting. Before the Fed, I found this amazing. Before the Fed, banks had their own currencies. So you had multiple currencies that are out there. And it really depended on how solvent those banks are, if that money was worth anything, right? So you had, I don't know if you've ever watched like really cool Western uh documentaries, but you had the Wells Fargo's and you had these and the Stagecoach. Like they all had their own money. And what the federal, what the government decided to do and Congress did is said, hey, listen, for stable growth, we need one bank note. So if you look at your dollar bill or your 50, or if you're a player, you have all hundreds in your wallet, whatever you've got, it's a Federal Reserve note. It is a bank note that is your cash, your tender. You know? So there used to be all these different ones. Now there's a centralized bank. So I do understand the need for that. And for a society and a capitalist society to work, you need to have one currency and it needs to be regulated in terms of this is what everyone can use everywhere. Um, so that's the first thing. That's where it started. There's 12 banks, the board of directors, which we talked about. Okay. Now, what I really want to focus in on is the last 25 years. I want to focus in on what the Fed has done since September 11th. Because what the Fed has done since September 11th, that policy is more active than whatever they did from 1913 to 2000, right? So, what I really want to talk about is the last 25 years and how involved the Fed has gotten. First and foremost, the Fed before 2008 affected monetary policy mostly by controlling interest rates. And as they control interest rates, banks either can lend more or lend less at a cheaper rate, right? The lower your interest rate is for anyone to borrow money, the more aggressive you're gonna be with that money. In other words, I really want you guys to understand this. As they lower rates, they want money to leave banks and go out into the market. So the lower the rates go, the more money people will spend because they'll borrow more because it's cheaper. Let's talk about housing. The lower rates go, the more you're gonna spend on a house because on a monthly basis, that note, that mortgage costs you less. So you can spend more money when you can you can buy a more expensive house when rates are at 3%, i.e. during the pandemic, than when they're at 8%, i.e. 2023-24. So that's how they kind of make sure that the market doesn't overheat. So when things are getting, when the market is starting to really tear and overheat, you don't want to have that happen. You want to stay, the market works best with a GDP around just around 4% and inflation, according to the Fed, at around two and a half. Now, when we were on the gold standard, there was no inflation because you had to have gold for every dollar. So let's let's talk about that for a second. We'll get back to that. So the US, like every other place, used to have what's called the gold standard, what Nixon took us off. The gold standard said is for every single dollar you have, there's got to be a dollar's worth of gold to back that currency. That's what makes the currency relevant. However, when things get bad and you need money, i.e. getting into the Vietnam War and trying to produce more cash to buy weapons and produce the wars and stuff like that, there wasn't enough gold. So Nixon took us off the gold standard so that we could make more money without having gold. Okay. We will get into how you make money out of nothing. We'll get into that too. So that's when we got off the gold standard, and that's when inflation started to occur. And there's an inflation number that is okay for the US government and the US, and there's inflation numbers that are not okay, right? Because inflation devalues the currency. We'll get into that. So let's go back to the Fed. So the Fed uses interest rates to pull money in and out of the economy. Not physically, not yet. They do do that, but not yet. How they do it is by raising interest rates so people spend less. Businesses can borrow less money because it costs more money to borrow that money, and that slows the economy. When the Fed lowers rates, they want money to get out of the banks and then go out, right? Because listen, when rates are at 8%, when you guys had mortgage rates, when we had mortgage rates at 8% and the overnight, people were getting four or five percent on their money in a bank, and it's guaranteed, right? So people are like, man, if I can get 5% on my money, I'll just leave my money in the bank. I won't take my money out and invest it in stocks and invest it in businesses and buy a car and buy this. I'm gonna hoard my money in the bank. That's what contracts the government. So that's what the Fed does. It raises and it lowers the overnight lending rate. That is the rate that banks have to pay to borrow money to then lend it out, right? So if the bank borrows money at 4%, they're not gonna lend it out at four, right? They're in the business of making money. They're gonna lend that money out at 5% to people. When the bank can borrow money overnight at 2%, they're gonna loan that money out at 3%, right? So when during the pandemic, when rates were at zero, people were getting loans for 2%. The bank was making 2% on the spread. Now, when it comes to interest rates and the Federal Reserve, okay, your mortgage rate is not tied to the Federal Reserve overnight lending. It will influence it, but it is not tied. What creates your mortgage rate is the 10-year treasury. That is the bond that creates the 30-year and all the mortgage rates. The 10-year bond is the benchmark on how people feel about the economy. When they think the economy's gonna suck, the 10-year drops. If they think the economy is stable, the 10-year will drop and it will hold its position. When they think the economy is heating up, sometimes that 10-year note goes up because they know they're gonna raise interest rates to slow down the thing. So the 10-year note. Now, what is the spread? The spread is what one price is versus the other. I'm not gonna assume you guys understand my vernacular. So the spread is the 10-year note, which let's say it's at three and a half. Where is the 30-year loan gonna be? Well, historically, the spread is between 1.5 and three. Here's the difference. If the Federal Reserve keeps lowering rates, but the traders see instability, they're the ones that buy and trade the bonds. That means that rates will not move because the 10-year is not gonna move. Case in point, the 30-year note, the 30-year, sorry, not 30 year, the 30-year mortgage has been pretty much at six for the last three interest rates cuts. But the but the government has the Federal Reserve has cut rates by 0.75 three times and a quarter point each. So the overnight lending has lowered, but the 30-year has stayed the same because the traders and the people buying the bonds do not feel comfortable yet. Now, where's that comfortability come from? It comes from the debt. The larger your national debt is, the larger your rates are gonna be. Why? Because you're paying a risk parameter for that debt. Let's just think about when, and if you want an example of this, think about when you when you get a credit card. When you go to get a credit card, what do they want to know? Your credit score, right? They want to know your debt, your credit score. When they evaluate you as a person, they spit out an interest rate. It's the same thing with the US government. When traders are trading the 10-year bond, which makes up your mortgage payment, they look at how solvent the company is that's giving the bonds. The US government right now has a$37 trillion deficit. The US government only collects$4.3 trillion in taxable dollars a year. However, the budget is$7 trillion. Think if you're if you're married or you're you have a whatever, you have a partner, or you're just sitting down and you're having a steak dinner with your friend. You're like, hey man, I made$200,000 this year. He's like, that's great. He's like, yeah, but I spent$450. He's gonna be like, dude, you're gonna go bankrupt. You're not gonna be able to survive. That's what we do every year. And that affects our interest rates. That affects our bonds because the people that buy these bonds want to make sure that the U.S. government is able to pay the bonds. We have gotten to a point now, get a little bit off topic, because it happened because of the Fed. We've gotten to a point now where the US government is issuing bonds to pay just the interest on our deficit. The interest on our deficit is 1.2 trillion a year. So one-fourth of the money that we collect from all the taxpayers is just going to interest alone. That's it. So that's what you really got to think about in terms of where we are. So how did we get here? All right. The main reason we got to where we are now is a plethora of things, right? A plethora. But the main issue when this all really started to unravel is in 2008 and what happened in 2008. All right, that's the banking crisis, right? That's when I don't know if what's the name of that movie? Get short. It's a shorty. The big short. I watched, I couldn't remember the name of it. If you haven't seen The Big Short and you're book reader, or you want to get it on tape, I did it on tape. I did it on the Audible, but it is a great movie. And basically what happened was the banks were taking enormous risks on credit swaps. And we're not going to get into that. But what it did was basically almost throw the U.S. into a depression. The fellow reserve chair at the time was a man named Bernanke. And what Bernanke did was something that has never been done before. And that's called quantitative easing. Quantitative easing had never occurred. I didn't know this. Quantitative easing had never occurred up into 2008. And what quantitative easing is and quantitative tightening is, was Bernanke's way to sidestep Congress because Congress couldn't figure out how to bail out the banks and make sure we don't go into uh a recession. So all the money that's spent, those are called propriations. All the appropriations that are spent, all the money that's spent, in theory, has to be voted on by Congress. Period. And it has to go through the proper steps. You bring it up and it's voted on. This we'll go small tangent. This is why we had a government shutdown. One side, and I'm not going to say what side, this side, or what side, one side did not want to go through the vetting process of voting for appropriations because they knew they didn't have the votes. So instead, they wanted to sidestep the votes and have the money be allocated without being voted on, which is against the rules. Just a side note. That's why there was a government shutdown, because they knew they wouldn't get the votes. That's a whole other Sean, that's a whole other one, right? That's a whole other, that's a whole other story. So what Bernanke did in 2008 is said, I got an idea. Now, the Fed cannot give the government money directly because there's a supposedly a break. They're supposed to be separate of each other. So what the government did is they issued bonds because we needed money, a ton of bonds. Now, up into 2008, this is bananas, the federal government, I'm sorry, the federal reserve, not government, the federal reserve, which is not part of the government, had issued$800 billion in cash. That's how much cash the Fed had made from thin air. And we'll talk about how they do thin air stuff. That's how much they'd made. Between 2008, now this is you can look all this shit up. Between 2008 and 2014, how much money do you think the Fed made out of thin air? Money that did not exist. 4.5 trillion. So from 1913 to 2008, 800 billion. From I Sean, wait, wait till I tell you you get all these stats, bro. From 2008 to 2014, 4.5 trillion. Now, how do you like what how's the Fed do this? How's the Federal Reserve? Now listen, we always say the Federal Reserve is printing money. That is a it's not true, but that's what people say. What the Federal Reserve does is here it is. The U.S. government needs money. They issue bonds. Bonds are basically an IOU. I like to think of a beautiful scene from Dumb and Dumber when he opens up a case and the guy goes, Where's the money? And it's just all these loose papers of IOUs. And Jim Carrey goes, This one's for 250 grand for the Lamborghini. This is a biggie. Don't lose it. And he says, We have everything accounted for. We're gonna pay you back. However, those two clowns on Dumb and Dumber had no way to make money. This is the U.S. government. The U.S. government does not make money. Does everybody understand that? They are not a business, they don't make money. Who makes money? The citizens. The citizens. When people say the government spends, I love how politicians do. Well, the government's gonna spend this much. No, the people are gonna spend this much. The government does not make money. I want everyone to understand that concept because we have a financial issue in this country of people understanding how things work. The government does not make money. The government issues bonds and people give them money. So who gives them money? That's the best part. The banks. We're not at the Federal Reserve yet. All these banks, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Chase, I'll Chase. Let's just use Goldman Sachs. The bonds are issued. Goldman Sachs buys$500 billion worth of bonds with a 4% return. Here's the best part. Goldman Sachs buys them. You know why? Because they know that they're gonna turn around in an hour and they're gonna sell these bonds at full. Maturity to the Federal Reserve. Now how's the Federal Reserve make money? Where do they get the money from? They don't. They literally hit a button and fictitiously make money and buy those bonds from Goldman Sachs. And all of a sudden, you've just devalued every US citizen's money. Because the only way that the government can make money is to devalue the money that's already out there. That's the only way. That's inflation. Right? So think about this. The US, one US dollar in 2020 is now worth 70 cents. So if you have a million dollars put away in four years, it lost 30% of its value. Now, here's the issue. The issue is the salaries don't keep up to inflation. Right? You want to know the last time that your salary outpaced inflation? 2019. And this month. So from 2019 to 2025, we all got poorer every month, every day. Why? This is brilliant. From 2020 to 2024. All right. Now let's let's do let's go back. We had 800 billion. That's all we had in currency that the Fed had made. The reserve. Then they stroke 4.5 trillion. And what do they do with that 4.5 trillion? They give it to the banks that lost all their money. And what do the banks do? First off, they have to cover their losses. They got to pay their CEO$10 million. How much of that money is making it to anybody other than redistributing everyone's wealth in America to all these banks that are propping up the government and making sure that the government gets into more debt. Okay, hold up. Sean, am I losing people here or am I? I'm good. Okay. So then if I start going crazy, let me know. And then in 2020 to 2025, so think about this. In 2014 to 2019, we had$4.5 trillion in money. In 2024, how much money do you think the Fed had put out there? 19 trillion. So I want to go over these numbers again. From 1913 to 2008, 800 billion. From 2008 to 2019, 4.5 trillion. From 2000 to 2000 to today, 19.5 trillion. So I took four, there's four trillion dollars out there in the US world, in overseas, whatever, 4.5 trillion dollars. I took that 4.5 trillion and I just fictitiously made another 15 trillion. What happens to your money? It drops by 30% because I just increased the money supply by 66%. That's why milk cost$9 a gallon. That's why gas cost$8 a gallon. Gas didn't become more expensive, people. Your dollar became worthless. That's how we lost all our wealth. That's how middle America got destroyed. I just want you guys to understand this. We're just printing money. The US government runs a$3 trillion deficit and it doesn't make money. So how is it going to make money? It has to issue bonds to banks that don't want the bonds that turn around and shoot them off to the Fed, and the Fed interjects money. That's quantitative easing, which had never been done since 2008. And that's the whip sauce that we're in in our environment right now. That's the whip sauce, right? And I brought this up on my podcast last week and that did people a couple weeks ago. What happens when you're insolvent? You either have to raise taxes, or what's the other thing? You have to get rid of spending. So when everyone's in an uproar because we're cutting stuff, we're either cutting the subsidies, right? In the last 12 years, taxpayers have paid$1.3 trillion in medical subsidies because of how the medicine industry is set up.$1.3 trillion, right? We've spent$10.8 trillion since 2001 just on wars. Just on wars. 10.3 trillion. We have no money. 5.8 trillion of that war money was sent to people so they could fight their own wars, proxy wars. This is what's happening. This is why we're in the situation that we're in. So what is then, get back on tape. What is quantitative tightening? Okay, quantitative tightening is what the Federal Reserve did when they realized that they whipsawed us, you know, when we when they interjected$19 trillion into the money and a sandwich ended up costing you$20 and gas went from$275 to$9. Quantitative tightening is we're not going to buy the bonds. We're going to let the bonds expire, and we're not going to let the government, the US government, reissue the bonds. The government can reissue the bonds. The Fed's not going to buy them. Because when the Fed buys the bonds from the intermediate bank, that's how money goes to there. Right. So their workaround is like, oh, we're not going to, we're not going to get involved with the government. That's Congress's job. Bernanke's like, Congress can't balance the budget. We can't survive. I don't want to get into a depression. I don't want to get another Great Depression. Because I will tell you, if we let this thing play out and we don't pull this money out of the system and we don't get control of our deficit, you know where we're headed. We're headed to a depression. That's what we're headed to. I mean, what they call it in 08, the Great Recession, you know, that's that's what happened. The problem is that we didn't let some of these banks fail that made terrible decisions, right? Because everyone is so tied in, because those banks are the ones that are buying the notes from the government and then turning around and the Fed's buying them because they're all in bed together. Right? So this is the issue. The main issue all stems from the deficit. The Fed wouldn't have to do quantitative easing and quantitative tightening if we literally could balance the budget. And everyone's like, oh, it's impossible to balance the budget. No, it's not. All of us have to balance our budgets. All of us. Why are we held liable? Why does the IRS send us summonings because we haven't balanced our budget? You know, think about that. If you're self-employed, I my taxes don't come out. I have to make sure I have money in my account to pay my taxes. If I don't pay my taxes, they'll garnish my shit. They can really make it bad for you. They could throw you in jail. Why isn't the US government? Why aren't the Congress? Why aren't they being held accountable to the same standard that we are? You know, I've brought this up in other podcasts. Why do we have crappy insurance that the government issues? But the people that are voting on our insurance, they don't have that insurance. Right? If they did, if they went to our public schools, if they had our insurance, they'd all have to deal with it. So, okay, I went off on a tangent. Let me get back on it. So quantitative tighten is opposite of quantitative easing. The quantitative tightening is basically pulling money out of the market. The whole thing that's crazy, the whole thing that's crazy is that the only reason that the government gets into wars, the government spends without thinking. I mean, we all have seen. Now, listen, you could say what you want about Elon running AI through spending and finding what they found, the doge. You can say what you want. Oh, I don't like it or I do like it. You can't deny the fact that we're spending millions and billions of dollars on insane stuff. Like, I don't need to know how a rat reacts on cocaine. I don't. And I think when you're in a deficit, that may be something that we don't need to do, right? That I know I'm picking out one thing. There's a thousand things. We have to cut programs to get the deficit under. What this all has to do with real estate is that the more that the deficit goes under, the stronger the dollar gets, the stronger the dollar gets, the stronger everyone's financial position gets, the stronger everyone's financial position gets, the better off America is as a people. And the less divide we have. You want to know why there's a massive divide between the rich and the poor? They'll tell you, well, these guys are privileged. No, man, it's the deficit and it's the crazy spending we're doing because that money is only staying with the elites. It's not making it down because it's not part of the economy, because it's being eaten up by banks, by deficits, and just to get through. That's why we can't continue. You don't think that people want health care for people? You don't think that we want a Social Security that has money in it? The problem is, is we're stealing all that money just to pay the deficits. And it's not the U.S. government that's doing too. We talked about Chicago. Chicago's doing the same thing. Everyone is operating in this deficit mode because people, the Fed is making money out of thin air. Now, listen, I am not an abolish Fed guy. I could get there, I I could listen to that, I can listen to that thing. I like both sides of it, but we can't make money out of nothing to continue these sins that we're doing. Because all that it's doing is making it worse and worse and worse, right? And what happens? You're gonna have at some point outlandish interest. You're gonna have stagflation, you're gonna have all these interests, these things that happen, because the dollar is garbage. Now, I had a really good discussion upstairs with one of the girls that work with us. And she's like, you know, isn't that what happened? And I'm not gonna get into it that hardcore, but she goes, but isn't that what happened with the Great Depression? The Great Depression, that's what happened. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, all these guys, they all got their rise to power on inflation because that's how terrible inflation is. Because inflation destroys people, and those people then look for some sort of answer and a scapegoat. And why did this happen? I'm not saying we're going there, but the Great Depression and what happened with inflation during that time and what happened with the with the economy is what led to that. We're not on that path. We just need to make sure that we start to attack this deficit. And if you think the great divide between the left and the right is because of XYZ, listen, the government can mask it and it can say it's over this and it's over this and it's over this. The great divide has to do with one thing, and that's the purchasing power of the dollar and what it's doing to half of our country because the money they have can't buy groceries. And it's not because groceries are more expensive, it's because the dollar is worthless. And people that have a ton of money, they can make it through that. And the people that don't can't. And the dollar is that reason that it's happening. All right, I want to hit a couple other things um before I talk about where we're going. Um the last thing I want to get into, I want to kind of um I think I think I kind of wrapped up the Fed. Just know that I think if you could take one thing from what I said, if it if there's three good things I want you to understand. Number one, the government, which is the largest employer in the world, does not make money. So government does not spend money. The people do that give it to the government. When the government cannot produce enough money, it goes into that deficit. When it hits a deficit, the only way that it can survive is issuing bonds and through the bank to the Federal Reserve, fake money, new money, is given to our government to increase our deficit spending. Right? This is a deficit-ran economy. That is what, if you look at the jobs that were produced in the last five years, job creation, other than this year, has literally been zero. It was all government deficit spending jobs. The government was literally just digging its hole into a bigger hole just to stay afloat and to keep people employed. If you cut all the people that shouldn't be working in the government, man, unemployment, wait till you see where it goes. And here's the problem: you have to because you don't have the money to pay these people. You have to scale back to government. Okay, so that's one. That's two. And number three, the Fed does not have money. It makes it out of thin air and then gives it to it. I also want you to know one last thing I forgot to bring up. The Federal Reserve also makes the interest on those bonds and the interest on lending money to these banks. The Federal Reserve makes at a minimum, these 12 banks at a minimum makes$100 billion a year. They made a, I couldn't find 24 or 25. I don't know why. I mean, 25 is not done yet. I couldn't find 24, but I went on the Federal Reserve's uh website um and in 2023 they made$180 billion. So the Federal Reserve made$180 billion making, this is the best part, making fake money and lending it to the US government. Think about that. Think if you could make fake money and hand it to somebody and then get interest on that money that never existed before you made it. It's fucking brilliant. It's like it's such a scam. It's brilliant. Um, so I the that's kind of all the stuff on that. Now, what I want to kind of get into is what which I always do is just the end of the year, our last podcast. I just really want to thank everybody for their for their listening and their questions and their DMing me. I really appreciate all of it. I want to get into 2026. I'm not going to get into predictions. For anyone that's in sales or for the real estate agents that listen to this, or someone that's just trying to maybe get in and be an entrepreneur. I just want to really take five minutes, 10 minutes, and talk about goal building. Everyone, and the only reason I'm going to say this is because, man, it how many emails have we gotten? 26, make your goals, do this, do this, do this. I just everyone asks me how Sophia and I do the business we do, and then how do I do what I do with three kids who all play sports, travel sports? I also coach two baseball teams, a travel team, which is a lot of work, and then a house team. Um, I do coach a little bit of basketball here and there. And people always ask me how I do it. And I say, very easy. You have to establish a goal. And I think the big problem that people do is people establish goals. Like my goal is to call five people a day. My goal is to do, you know, is to uh lift. My goal is to watch what I eat and maybe lose five pounds. My goal is maybe I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle as a younger guy. Like those are, I just want you to know, those are not goals. If you want to be successful, those are tasks. The goal is I want to do, I'm a$10 million agent and I want to do 15 or 20 million. That's the goal. The goal isn't to call people, those are the acts or the tasks that get you to the goal. So in 2025, what tasks on a daily occurrence did you do? And did those tasks end up giving you your goal? If they didn't, the tasks aren't right. If you have seven tasks, stop now. No one's got goddamn time to do seven things a day. You got a life, you gotta eat, you gotta get to the gym, you got calls to make. You can't do seven. I want you guys to do three tasks every day. You know, I have my tasks. I call five people every day or text. I get to the gym every day. That's a task. Because if you don't think your health and your mind help you in your work, that's a massive mistake. Massive. You have to be, you're one thing. Your mind is one with your body, right? How you eat, how you sleep is going to be it, is going to have a direct effect on how you perform in your work. Sean's exhausted today. He can't even move. He didn't sleep. So that I'm telling you, it's affecting his work. It's not, he's doing great. So the other task I have is I checked every day what's been listed in the markets I work, what's been closed, and what's been canceled. I want to know what's going on at my marketplace. I want to be an expert in that. My other task is I pull up CNBC, I see where the 10 years trading, I See what the bonds are doing, and where's gold? Those are the things that I do, those are my tasks. Those tasks, every year, knock on wood, every year, the last seven years, I've upped my production every year. And I want to tell you, not only have I upped my production every year, I've also worked less because my tasks have become part of my regimen, like brushing my teeth or getting out of bed. They are an impulse. If you throw a ball to me, I'm gonna catch it. So it's in my face, that's how I am with my tasks. Right? So if you don't do your tasks, you're not gonna hit your goal. So you need to make sure that your tasks produce your goal. Now I'm gonna tell you, I've talked about before the 12-week year. You should break your tasks quarterly. At the end of Q1, how much did you do last year? In 2025, how much did you with Q1? All right, well, I wanna beat that. Are you breaking up your quarters so you know how you're trending? I also like to do this because when I have bad months and they're the same bad months as last year, it keeps me confident and it keeps me grounded. Hey, I know last year July sucked. Oh, I know July will suck this year, but I still gonna do X, Y, and Z after then. You have to have tasks that establish your goals, not goals that don't have tasks to get to them. So I really want to lay that out for people for 2026 is just make sure, hey, these are the things I want to do. I want to start reaching out more. I want to start getting myself in better physical shape. I want to start eating better. I want to start cutting out sugar, anything else that can get you somewhat disruptive. And I want to be an expert in my field. Another thing you may want to do that I have as one of my tasks is I have lunch with a client or I stop by and see a client every other week. Now, us reaching out, I enjoy that because I love to see how people's lives are changing. I meet some people, oh, we're pregnant now or engaged. That happened last week. I love that stuff. You got to get invested in that stuff. So those are the those are the things for 2026 that I hope you really do. And once again, I hope that you understood what I talked about with the Fed. That's extremely important. I want to keep all that stuff real. Now, like I said, there is a need for a central bank, but we have to stop making money out of thin air because that is almost like a drug, right? And it's taking more and more and more and more to keep the government high. And we have to pull that back. And there is gonna be pain. So when you're watching the news and someone says, Oh, we cut this back, or we cut this back, and everyone's up in arms, guys. Just like me and you, we just can't go out and spend$100,000 a day. We don't have it. At some point, that credit card's gonna say no, there's gotta be some self-control, and there's gonna be programs that suffer. But once the suffering is over, it really then takes off. And I'm gonna leave you with one last thing. Uh, a lot of people would say, Hey, Clinton had a surplus. I just want everybody to understand Clinton never had a surplus. Clinton stole all the money from Social Security to pay off the debt that we had, and then made some crafty accounting and how the Social Security would catch up in the future. And let me tell you something, it never caught up. Because at the same time, people went from living from 63 to like 90. So all these little things we do that we shouldn't be doing, they all catch up to us. Now, Social Security is basically insolvent. So I'll leave you guys with that. I hope you had an amazing 2025. I hope what I talked about in terms of the Federal Reserve, you understand that you understand that no matter how much the Federal Reserve cuts rates, if if the risk premium is out there and people don't want to buy those bonds, those rates stay high. And I hope you have a great holiday and we'll see you guys in 26 for season five. Holy shit. Take off. Keep it real, guys. Bye.