Financial Friday: When the Government Gets Involved

0:00Welcome to the Real Power Family Radio Show, brought to you by Family Success Triangle. Where we talk about how we achieved financial freedom in two years, by the time we were 30. If we can do it, so can you. We will bring you the people who can help you achieve financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom. Learn how we integrated our business, investing and homeschooling into everyday life. Now, here is the Real Power Family, Eric, Lila, Devon, and Ethan. Welcome to the Real Power Family Radio Show, I'm your host, Eric Wollman, and the whole family, Lila, Devon, and Ethan are here for this. I believe this is our first financial Friday of the year, isn't it? It is. Wow. Wow. Man, talk about it here. Now these numbers, they're a week and a half old. I can't believe how crazy pricing has been. We've been predicting it. I called this, and if you haven't already signed up for our free newsletter, make sure

1:02you sign up right away. I have my predictions coming out for 2026. I'm going to review what I did right, what I did wrong in 2025, and I know one of my big pushes was to buy Silver Faster. Well, as of a few weeks ago, Silver was up a hundred and twenty-nine percent. Wow. If you literally, oh, I think just in the month of December, it was up like a third. Wow. That is a very good yearly increase, no matter how you look at things, and we had that in one month. So anybody that bought the real power family Silver Rounds is probably really happy right now because it was much cheaper when we first came out with them. Yeah. Mom, where could they have gotten those real power family Silver Rounds from American Gold Exchange at AMERGold.com? Get your real power Silver Rounds today. Don't wait. Just do it. Silver, they could have been one of the first five people to email us, and Lila, have you gone through the emails? I have.

2:03Do we say that coming out while we're recording this early, but have we maxed out the quota or is there still at least one left? We have not. So if you're still listening, you can still try to get in by emailing info at clearskytrainer.com. Don't wait. Just do it. You can get a free book, a free ounce of silver. I'll ship it to you, just email us, and we'll go back through the spam, make sure we didn't miss anything, and tell us which one of our family books you want. And heck, if it takes too long to get in, I might throw in some other swag. We just ordered. I don't know when it's coming in, but if it comes in before I ship the stuff out, we will throw in some other freebies too. So yes, I know there's a lot of people listening to this and you think, oh, I'm not going to win. Email us. You would be surprised because a lot of people listen to these. It might be a week or two later that they're listening to this. And all you get to do is be the first one. So don't think just because you're not listening live at 7 a.m. on the brushwood media network

3:03that you can't win. Yeah, you got to take action, though. That's the important part. It really is. And that comes down to Devon. We're basically here because we have a good family and we made some money, right? Those are some of the biggest things. So what is some of the most important things for you in order to make money? And why do you want to make money to be rich? Do you want to brag about being a millionaire? No, that doesn't really matter. What matters is the freedom that it gets me, the ability to go where I want, with whomever I want, whenever I want. That's what's really important. That's what we're really striving for with making more money. We want the time freedom and the location freedom, the financial freedom. Like don't dad, you talk about in your book, Family Success Triangle? Absolutely. It is all about time with the family. And you know, over Christmas, I got to see my mom twice, which is, but we went to her house Christmas, even then she came to our house on Christmas day.

4:06And I think we've done that the last couple of years. It's working out quite nicely. She doesn't stress so much about making all this food and making everything perfect. And she can just start coming over to our house. And it can be our problem to make all the food and stuff. She just had to show up with her husband and have fun. But we did that and congratulations, mom, for the first time, maybe in years. You won two games of Uno and a row and really slaughtered me. Of course, Nick, sorry, I think you're on a winnings or a long streak for. He thinks when we play Uno, it's to get the highest score, oh boy. I got the highest score on Christmas Eve. I do remember that. Yes. I was doing what it's all about. It's not if you win or lose until you win, then it's all about winning something like that. Yeah. It's not a competition, but I did better than you at least once. Yeah. No, it's to have fun and, you know, this fun-justing with your family. And I remember how many years did we just have to hope we had the same day off because we

5:12were both working in medicine. Yeah. In the emergency room, you were on the floor, so you knew you were going to work Christmas even in your day or vice versa. And it was really nice when they aligned or if we were on different shifts, it was awful if you were working day shifts because that was always second shift pretty much. Yes. And how many years, you know, all those years in the army that you never knew, even if I wasn't working, it's not like you can take time off and come home when you're many states away or in a different country. You might get the day off, but it doesn't mean you get to spend it with your family. And we were watching, was it Operation Christmas Drop? We watched a lot of Christmas movies in last week or so. And the guy, the whole thing was about family and he kept losing internet connection. Well, how cool would that be to have been in the army? I was, you know, active duty in the 90s. And we had to wait in line to get to a phone. I actually hooked up a Mars phone out of budding communications. So I was making phone calls bouncing it through satellites to talk to my mom when I was

6:15there. And I maybe do that once a week, but it was not like you have FaceTime on your phone now. It was just and trying to get, can you imagine Grandma being quiet for five seconds when she says something and she has to wait for five seconds. I was trying to teach her radio etiquette like, and then you say over and don't speak again, but two, three seconds later, she's like, are you still there? And by that time, my voice is finally getting to her. There was a lag. It was quite fun. Oh boy. Wow. We're spoiled now with all this technology. That's really. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Does it say the fun of old technology? And here's the thing. Yeah. Well, everybody's life is getting better, Ethan. The kings and queens could not imagine how good you have it when you're in trouble. Like I mean, think about people nowadays. We have just essentially a hunk of metal in our hand that we can use to talk to. Anyone anywhere around the world in the matter of pretty much seconds, we can get into

7:15a vehicle and drive at speeds that probably would have been considered unimaginable not that long ago. Yeah. 120 years ago, give or take to drive, you know, how many hundreds of miles do some people drive? If they're going on a road trip, you know, how far is Tennessee and just 10 hours we can make it all the way down to Tennessee? How many, you know, how long might they have planned for a trek that long couple hundred years ago? And now everybody said, we'll never make it into space. What would we do without NASA? And you know, NASA hasn't actually gone to space for a long time. They couldn't. Elon had to save the astronauts and Biden wouldn't let anything good happen or his administration wouldn't let anything good happen for Elon because Elon was supporting Trump. So they left those astronauts up on the space station for months longer. And then Trump immediately said, yeah, go and got them down. But look at this now without government, how many times, how many astronauts, if you can

8:21call with that, you know, like low orbit, but what is it blue origin? I think it's the name where they just, they go into inner space, if not outer space, but they cross the line. And we've had, you know, that singers and movie stars and they just sent the first kind of wheelchair up there. Well, just the fact that Elon can now land a rocket is such a huge step forward for space that it's unreal to watch him be able to do that because for how many tens, how many generations have we gone through so far? What since the 60s that we weren't able to do any of this stuff? The technologies because the government doesn't care about money when you spend your money are very careful. Yes. When you sit down somebody else's money, then you're a little bit less careful. But when you're spending a group of people's money that you don't even know, you're incredibly wasteful. And they said, we would never get to space.

9:22I remember people crying, oh no, the sky's falling, we'll never go to space again. If NASA doesn't get these budget increases, look at how many people you got to wonder. How far along would we be if we never had a NASA? If we just turned it loose to a bunch of billionaires who I might say they were all little boys once and most little boys, I mean, maybe there's a couple of little girls too, but they all had that little boy dream of doing something crazy like going to the moon or maybe writing it on a fire engine. But some of them thought bigger and wanted to go to the moon. How many people are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make this happen without taking a penny out of my paycheck without using our taxes? And if we just continue to allow these companies that really desperately want to do something, look at what Carnegie did. People are crying that, oh, if we don't do, you know, if we lose property taxes, all the librarians are shut down. Do you know the Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, the robber baron, I still don't know when they

10:26call them that, they did the greatest things in the world, okay? Henry Ford created driving for the common man at people that created steel. Can you imagine how many steel roofs, steel barns and steel skyscrapers do we have? We couldn't have without that. Let's not forget about oil and standard oil. What did the Titan do to allow us all to drive that 10 hours to Tennessee, where we could never have gone down there, you know, even a couple times a year. It would have just been ridiculous without modern day cars. These are the things that private industry have done. And let's not forget Carnegie is the one that started the library system pretty much. He massively funded it. So we don't need the government to do this. But wait, right after this break, I'll tell you what Bernie Sanders wants to do to make sure we're protecting America. We'll be right back. Ethan, you're known for being the youngest teenager on the real power family radio show on the Brushwood Media Network.

11:28You're also known for being quite successful and you're only 15. How'd you do that? Well, you've always taught me to buy more hard assets faster. And one of those hard assets that I've bought is the real power family silver round from American Gold Exchange. Get your real power family silver rounds by going to AMERgold.com or calling 800-613-9323. Welcome back to the real power family radio show where a lot of people seem to be down on. A lot of people say, oh, we need to tax the rich and take stuff from them, even the ones that actually produce a lot and make the world how much better. And not all of them are good. Some of them are, though, and yet dad, what's Bernie Sanders' new thing? Well, he understands, and I absolutely agree with him. We're spending far too much money on data centers. I believe, and this is, I have a feeling there's going to be a section of my newsletter

12:34coming up about how we're wasting so much money in data centers, and how that's going to hurt an awful lot of people that are blindly investing in a 401k and trusting a money manager, because all the algorithms are saying, buy more of the three biggest companies. It's just a terrible positive feedback loop that's going to hurt an awful lot of retirees. And I've heard the guy, he's sharp, he's old, he should not be in Congress, not because of his age, but because he's been there for 50 years or more. I don't think anybody should spend more than a decade there, and maybe two terms as a senator, so 12 years, but that being said, I just heard an interview with him, and going back while I am absolutely totally against being a socialist, he's a smart guy, and while he does say some crazy things, I would say that about every politician out there. So if you think about it, he probably really does believe he's trying to protect Americans.

13:37Well, maybe that's why he shouldn't be in the Senate for 50 or 60 years, because you start to think that you need to protect us. Look, when you quit protecting us and wasting our money through NASA, now we have a plane that takes off, flies it up, where you're using the most of the energy, and then it takes off, and drops a spaceship, if you will, and then that parachute's back down, and I think everything's reused there. Look at Elon, who learned a land, so he has the same rocket ship, but it actually comes down in lands. How many boosters did we drop into the ocean that we'll never recover, or try and reuse again? You need hundreds, thousands, millions of different ideas, and at least a handful of those that can fund, or get funding, or fund themselves. Well, if you look at a date, let me see if I can find this, I found a chart on that in 2023, can you believe it was just 2023, like two years ago, Chech, GPT was launched, Evan. Wow, and we're already two years into this, and it's not really any better. I mean, it's been

14:42dragging out. You guys couldn't imagine living without the internet, could you? Not really. I remember when I asked my dad, I'm like, but dad, I know nobody knows everything in the world, but where is all the information in the world? There's got to be one place. Where do I go to find all the information in the world? And you know what his answer was? Well, I guess the library of Congress, and in 1980, something, that was probably a good answer, don't you think, Lila? Absolutely. My parents would have probably told me to go look at the encyclopedia, so I think your dad's answer was much better. Oh, yeah, we were away past the dictionary encyclopedia, but I was asking very hard question. I mean, there's got to be someplace that all the information on Earth is stored, or some series of places. And well, now that's probably the internet, and there's a lot of bad information there. But if you have an arbiter that decides this is right and this is wrong, well, then you end up with something awful like Wikipedia. Yes, you've got to be willing to take the bad with the good. Right. So if I'm looking, they're working on data centers, and the data

15:47centers, they were collecting information to use so they could sell us more faster. There's a limit, and I don't know if we've got there, but most things go in an S curve. Okay, they go up real slow, and then they shoot up exponentially, and then they continue to grow slowly. So if you look, somebody's ruler lost says that the same amount of time it takes to hit 10% adoption, which for the internet was at 16 years, 10 years, I don't know, but it would, you know, it took to get to 10% adoption. In the next same amount of time, it goes from 10 to 90%. Wow. Wow. And so if you look, we're really starting to get in. It'd be interesting to see exactly where we are, but I bet it's around the 10% mark for Bitcoin. I remember when I was investing in thinking, wow, when we make it to 1% adoption, I mean, Bitcoin will be worth a lot. It might get up to $5,000 or something. We're a little bit past that now. We're a little past set now,

16:49and people, but they're all brand newcomers. If you look at the last four-year cycle, a friend of mine, George, was listening to me, and he heard, throw money in Bitcoin, because he can afford it. He didn't hear even, hey, it's high right now, but as long as you hold it for at least four or five years, you should be fine. It might go down. I'm sure I told him over and over. It's going to go down. It always has wild swings. Count on it going down, but I'm sure as soon as it got back up, he held it for four years, and when it got back up, because he probably bought right at the top, then he sold it as soon as he could get his money back out and missed all of the exponential gains. Well, we have the same thing going on now. We cans are selling because it's down to around $88,000. But if you look at the beginning of the year, I'm interested to see what I predicted. I think I predicted it would be over $75,000 or $80,000. I'll talk about that when I have exact numbers. I don't want to make anything up, but how is it that they can read this free newsletter

17:52Ethan, which is available at realpowerfamily.com. So make sure you just sign up at realparapheramely.com. I think it's the second thing on there right after Property Taxes, maybe the third. And if you had read it in Twicken Action, right Devon? Right, because you have to take action, otherwise it doesn't really matter. You would have made a lot more money. If you're not already retired and spending all the time you want your family and playing games so your mom can beat you at cards, then you would have enough time to do that next year. Let's take a quick break so everybody can sign up at realpowerfamily.com for the free newsletter. And we will be back and talk about some more brilliant decisions. And I'm going to more thoroughly cover what Bernie said after this. I am Ethan Wolwyn from The Real Power Family. My book The Treehouse is a story about a group of teenagers looking for a place to their own with some scrap wood and a lot of help from their friends and neighbors. They built a treehouse relationships and a dream that turned

18:55into a business. Get a copy of The Treehouse by Ethan Wolwyn on Amazon today. And don't forget to listen to my family on The Real Power Family Radio Show on The Brushwood Media Network. Weekdays at 7 a.m. Eastern time. Welcome back to The Real Power Family Radio Show. Today we have been talking a little bit about technology and Eric. We didn't get to what Bernie Sanders said. Can you go over that? Yeah. So it starts with in 2023, Jet, Jet GPT started. And almost exactly the same time that the tech bros must have realized we need a lot more space. And the standard opinion, at least for a lot of people, maybe governments and private business is you've got to be the first and whomever wins. Nobody else will ever catch up. You can call it reaching the singularity, but they're training it on stupid things. I mean, it was so bad it couldn't do basic math when and they because of the way they were teaching it. I think we need somebody to come in and teach it in a totally different way. And sometimes starting over from scratch is wildly, it's like that's

20:01what Apple did, Devon. What did you have to say? That it's not just how they train it. It's what it is at its core, Dan, because what people think of it, like it's AI, like you would see in the Terminator series or the Matrix, or it's just another being. But at the end of the day, whatever you feed into it, it's just trying to give you what a response should look like for that, regardless of accuracy. Why would it care about accuracy? It's just because I didn't program it. And I don't know how you would get it to care about that. And yet, perhaps people do, if they really want to get to another stage of it, take a step back and look at it more. But go ahead, Dad. Well, the last time I programmed a computer, I was using basic. So they're probably not calling me into help with this. Probably not if they have any sense at all. No, I see that, you know, if you look at how much money is going into it, this chart shows that we have had a man,

21:03a wild drop off. Well, what happened in 2023? We had COVID-19, but it didn't start until halfway through 2020. So you got like March of 2020, people were starting to lock down and stuff. Nobody is challenging the paradigm. It takes a couple of years. If you look two years later, well, three years later, we were back to work. Really, a lot of people didn't go back to work. And some companies do remember the headlines. You boys were old enough to read this. And they're like, oh, yeah, we decided it's safer and easier. And some companies immediately made the switch. We're shrinking with our leases coming due. And these are three and five year leases frequently. So they signed a lease on half the amount of space that they had before. I think Joseph was telling us how they gave up an entire floor of a building that they had always used. And even though they were growing, they just let people work from home. And then some CEOs were saying, no, people need to come back to work. But even now, we're a little bit more relaxed. We realized

22:09people could do bookkeeping. I'm like, well, keep all the checks and everything in the office. But if she needs to stay at home with a sick kid or she's sick, then she can do all the bills that come in through email or just stuff like that, right? We're finding out. So we want people in the office. But if they're not there, we figured out ways to work around it. So if you figure, it took, you know, a year of idiotic lockdowns. And then a year of figuring out what's going to happen. And even though people were going back to work probably a year after that, that puts us right about the same time chat GPT. So here we are in 2023. And many more people are realizing whoa, office vacancies at almost 20%. And we don't need this. So what do you do if you have way too much vacancy? If you quit building office space at the same note, builders need jobs. And what's some of the hardest things, Devon, for managing this, it's not like when something breaks,

23:11it's not that we don't want to have somebody that are like, immediately, I want them there the minute after if it's reported, it would be so nice for somebody just ring the doorbell a minute later. And that's totally unrealistic. And one of the hardest things is hiring people. So we have enough staff. I mean, we've been constantly hiring people from more than 15 years. People will work for three, four, five years and be fantastic. We've had people there for more than a dozen years. And then all of a sudden they have a major life change. And they often move to Florida to take care of their mom or I mean, we've had people get into drugs. We've had people start drinking. We've had, you know, those problems, but they're very rare. Really most of the time, it's a major family shift, a death in the family. Somebody gets ill. I have to move away. And how many people have we have retired, Lila? We were just talking about Jim. I'm thrilled that he's retired, but I liked it better when he was retired in Ohio. And it's still worked a couple of days a week, so he didn't get bored. We miss you, Jim.

24:12Yes. If somebody's going to leave me, I'd prefer they do it because they started their own business and that business is booming. That's the best way to lose somebody that works for you. Right. Well, here's the thing with the lack of need for office buildings and the increase to need for data centers, it's almost a perfect. If I inverted the one graph and later on top of the other, they almost match perfectly. Wow. Wow. And so you can see that the increase in data centers went from a couple of billion in construction. Let's see. I don't think I have that device in here, but they went from a couple billion in construction, if I'm not mistaken, to like 20 billion. Or they're merging it. Yeah. Now they're over 40 billion for data centers. We might be around 42. Wow. And the office construction has dropped. So it might be around 45, but they have almost met. And if they keep going this year, they're going to dramatically crossover. So we're spending

25:15we more building data centers than we are office buildings. That tells you multiple things. It tells you that they expect there to be more growth in computing power. Maybe it'll be AI, maybe it'll be storage, whatever. Then there is in manpower that works in offices. Thinking about we've got the construction workers, they're building almost exactly the same amount of stuff. So it tells me construction stands steady. They've just converted from building offices to building testing warehouses. So maybe you have instead of needing more steel workers for high rises or may scenario, maybe you need a lot more electrical because I have to imagine these are seriously electrical heavy, which brings me to if you're looking for a job and want to go to school, go become an electrician. It seems to me like for the next few decades, that could literally be one of the best things ever. If you want a job or you go to work and make a higher salary with

26:17no college education, I think you could be way, way ahead than getting a master's in business degree. What do you think, Ethan? I mean, maybe I don't know. I'm not going to you're not going to take a guess. I will. I will take a guess and say that any trade, especially in electrician, will likely be better than a lot of college, graduate college. Okay. Yeah, especially business. But if you look what we've already told you that silver's up over a hundred. It was up 129 percent when I worked it out today. It's sitting over $70. It actually broke 72. And when this comes out in a few days, it could be higher than that or it could be, I don't know where it'll be, but we're looking at $70 silver. When, I mean, we were buying 30 and $35 silver in the beginning of 2025. So I'm a little bit chart. Where was it at the beginning of 25? Okay. And according to

27:18Dana from American Gold Exchange, he says gold is up 66 percent. Remember, these are a few weeks ago and it went up so much it's actually more than this now. Silver 129 platinum and platinum. Platinum is up 118 percent and palladium 95 percent. Now I have never, I own a couple ounces of platinum. It turned out when I bought it, which was 16 years ago. When I first started getting the metals, I didn't know so much what I was doing. I bought a couple ounces. I've never added or subtracted from that. I just thought, well, if it does skyrocket for some crazy reason, it'd be nice to own two ounces. As it turns out, I would have made, I would have done a lot better just buying gold. Gold is the true no counter party risk, the easiest thing to do. And I think silver, silver and gold flow a lot together, but they also silvers an industrial metal. If you're looking, what does this mean? It doesn't mean silver is up 129 percent and gold's up 66 percent. It means

28:19the purchasing power of the United States dollar is down almost 130 percent based on silver. If you look, the amount of labor going into construction is going, it's the same for these commercial buildings, but the commercial is changing from office building to data center. So we're still putting it just like we were talking about our business. Our limiting reagents sometimes is labor. We just can't find. I mean, we could pay an obscene amount and pay a lot more for labor, but then we couldn't rent them at the rates that people can afford to pay in Ohio right now today. So you got to start with what is the most people can pay? And that's, you know, 25 or 33 percent their gross income. And then you figure out, well, what are the mortgage rates? All these things go into what happens. And when they change laws and pass laws and make it harder and add in inspections and stuff like North Kent. Oh, we're dangerously close to our Supreme Court earring there. Can't wait

29:21for that. Yeah, all of these things are additive. And you figure out, well, it cost me $500 a month to rent this house out like all in. I've got to pay 500. Well, I rent it for a thousand, absolutely. But what if people can't pay a thousand? Well, I rent it for 750 for sure. I'll do that. What if they can't pay 750? Can I rent it for 600? Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, as long as I can hire management, hire out maintenance, and I'm not the one swinging the hammer to try and squeeze out $100. I'll do that. Well, would you take a $50 markup? Uh, at my stage of life, I would, but I couldn't do that at the beginning because one bad problem that I didn't first say I didn't know enough to predict all the problems. And when I had a bad problem, that would wipe out. I mean, that's only a few hundred dollars a year. So new people couldn't possibly afford. And if they did do it, then either stuff didn't get fixed. And they were called slum lords. And everybody looked bad and their life was miserable and so was attendance. Or maybe some of them got lucky and

30:26bought enough more that they could survive on it. And nine other properties would cover the first problem. These are all things that go into what it costs to rent your apartment or your house. And you have to take a huge step back and see the big picture. So if you look, we can't build much more. And I know I'm over for a break. We can't build many more data centers any faster. Bernie, he wants to stop the construction of these data centers. It just, you know, slow it down for a while. So I'm going to talk about how I absolutely agree with him. And I think that the government should never have anything to do with that right after this break. Brushwood media network. Have you or a loved one been affected by inflation? Yes. We have the product for you. Hard assets that hold their value like the real power family silk around are available at American Gold Exchange. You can visit American Gold Exchange at AMERgold.com or by calling 1-800-61-3-932-3.

31:37Welcome back to the real power family radio show today's financial Friday. We've been talking well about finances and the government. And dad, you wanted to talk more about what Bernie Sanders said, right? Once again, I think he's a very smart person. I don't agree with his socialistic views, but that doesn't detract from the fact that I think he's very smart and with it. And just like NASA, the government should not have a monopoly. They should not be able to tell you if I want to go out and build a data center. Hey, that's my problem if I go broke. And if it weren't for the moral hazard of the government bailing out all of these banks with taxpayer dollars, mind you. If business owners make a decision, this is not capitalism. This is cronyism. If they're right business owners, they make terrible decisions and they accidentally get lucky like that, you know, landlord that just bought his first house, they get to keep all the profits. If you grow to a trillion dollar company and you go broke, then you go cry to the government

32:40and say, Oh, well, I'm going to have to lay off all these people. And Leah Eccoka actually wrote a book about it, which is a pretty decent book. I mean, he sold me. And the one thing he should have had an entire section over moral hazard because that bailout of Chrysler was one of the very first. Nobody thinks back or remembers that. That was one of the very first. The first one I can remember at least of a government bailout of a private company. And that set up the terms, you know, all of the bailouts in the future. And if you would have had a section on moral hazard that by doing this and not letting us take the pill of making terrible decisions for whatever reason, we got unlucky. The market changed or we just hired the wrong people and made bad decisions. Doesn't matter if you socialize the losses in the government pays for them to keep you in business, then we have bad businesses. Now, I think Chrysler, they did actually do a turnaround, but that set up how many of these others. I mean, then we're giving the banks billions of dollars.

33:42They're not using it to save the savers money that thought they were safe when they had money in the bank. They used it to give out billion dollar or, you know, billions of dollars, hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of bonuses to all their employees. And then tried to hide that from the general people, the taxpayers. If people knew just how much they got and the news media is in on it, they should have any decent investigative reporter should have been out there during the bailouts in 2010 saying, Hey, this CEO just got a million dollar bonus. Hey, look at this guy. He just got this bonus. I think people would have been nauseated by the fact if they were to break down. Hey, this is the total amount of taxes you're paying. And this portion of it, even though it was, you know, 0.1 percent went to bailing out the auto industry. This portion went to bailing out the banking industry. You've got to let people fail. We need to have a recession. It's awful for the people they laid off. It's terrible. I get that. And it's

34:44going to be way worse now. If we would have had the recession that we needed to have, we almost had it in 2019. And COVID, ironically, all the money they injected into, they might have been better off to let the market crash right before the election. And Trump might have actively lost. And if he did actually lose because of the economy, I don't think he would have ever come back. But that whole COVID thing, I think, was very political. Well, obviously it turned out to be that way. And so if you're looking at the decisions people made, the government's doing the same thing, that the big corporations are doing. They're working so much together. And we came up with a term I couldn't imagine ever having in a capitalist society too big to fail. But this happened back. Was that the 80s? I'm almost certain that was the 80s with Leahyakoka. He left Ford, went to Chrysler, turned it around, wrote a book. I still see the book. It's got a red cover. It's probably

35:45right behind me somewhere. But yeah, I read that book. It was a very good book. Wow, 1979. Oh, good guess. So, listen to this. I remember that. I was five years old when that happened. I remember he was the first CEO on five that I ever remembered actually came on and said, look, basically we screwed up. And this is what we're doing different by a car from us. And then during the 80s, my mom worked for GMAC financing. And she just couldn't believe how cheap it was to buy a car. It was 8.8% interest. And then it was 7.7. And then six points. It just kept coming down 1.1%. And she couldn't believe. And that's the job that she had in financing during that time where we had astronomically high interest rates. But the bottom line is we still had a lot more capitalism back then and not croniness them. And what burning is saying is, no, we put too much money into AI stocks. Yeah, I absolutely agree. We're building too much AI data centers.

36:47I don't know. But I do know for sure that if we are, if Microsoft wants to build the data centers and then they end up not being able to use them, then they lose money. If they lose too much money, they go broke. And as long as my text, I'll just don't bail them out. I'm okay with that. And if they keep building a bunch and they build a lot more than Amazon and it turns out they were right, then they'll make a lot more money. So I don't care if it's Apple or IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, which one of these companies is long as they are capitalizing on the profits and actually realizing the losses. It's got to come out of their pockets and not the taxpayers. Isn't that the benefit of capitalism? People can go out and they can try and do whatever they want pretty much to make money. And if it works out, then they can make a lot of money off of it. And if they fail, then, well, they fail. And that comes out of their pocket. It shouldn't come out of anyone else's.

37:47We shouldn't have these bailouts that are going to cost people like the taxpayers dollars to do, for these companies to just go out and do whatever. Exactly. And at the same note, if they want to make bad decisions, this should not have to be said. But if you want to build these data centers, anybody that looks at this can see way too much money has been dumped into AI. And part of that is the hard construction data center. At least with a data center, you got a brick and mortar building or some type of building, right? So maybe that's better. I believe, you know what, we'll take a break and I'll tell you, I think some people are going to dramatically improve their lives with a, I think AI is going to make a lot of money. And I don't think I think just like every cryptocurrency with the exception of Bitcoin, every one of these AI giants that is worth so much now, they're all going broke or they're going to lose, they might not go bankrupt, but they're going

38:48to lose a lot of money. Maybe one will succeed. Maybe one will turn out to be the Bitcoin of AI. And unlike Bitcoin, that was easy to predict from the very beginning. It had to be Bitcoin. You know, within a couple of years, you could look back and say, well, well, here's the problem. They all have a single point of failure. This one doesn't. And it's limited to all these things. There's no way I just don't know enough. Maybe a lot of people think they do. Let's see who's actually right with the AI and the data centers and everything. But I think billions are going to be lost because they put their money into the wrong company just like we saw in the 1990s with the dot com bubble. We are there again. It's feeling a lot like 1999. They are literally parting like it's 1999 all over again. This time with AI. So Devon, if you want to know what it was like in 1999, this financially speaking economically speaking is the closest you might ever get. We'll be right back.

39:52Every parent wants their kids to be successful. And today's world, getting them the right knowledge to do this can be a challenge. My husband and I decided to homeschool our kids and give them a financial and real world education rather than making them memorize things they would probably never use. Our results are kids who became financially free before they could drive with no money or credit from us. Now at 16 and 13, they co-host our Real Power Family Radio Show and Devon is in his third year of college. How can you give your kids a head start like this? Check out our book, Family Success Triangle, which outlines the lessons we taught our kids. We want you to achieve amazing results at any age. Get your copy of Family Success Triangle on Amazon today. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at Real Power Family and listen to the Real Power Family Radio Show Monday through Friday at 7 a.m. on the Brushwood Media Network. Welcome back to the Real Power Family Radio Show where in AI, we're partying like it's 1999 or at least that's what my dad was just saying before break. And yeah, that seems accurate. There is a lot

40:59of Ethan Woods, the term for March generation. There's a lot of hype behind it. A lot of hopes and dreams that it's going to become something someday. And so let's throw a whole lot into AI. What could possibly go wrong? I think it's a terrible misallocation of resources. And when you get the government to tell you what you're allowed to do a knot and that goes all the way down to buying permits for your property. Either you're going to hurt your neighbors and the people around you or you are not. You should be allowed to do whatever you want if you're not hurting your neighbors. That's why I love these counties that we work in where they have absolutely no zoning. It is just nuts trying to figure out government gets a portion of my money. And my mom just had a house burn to thankfully not hurt. But actually it was months ago. And the insurance company wants to grossly overpay for the work that needs done. And they want to do all this because nobody ever complains if you grossly overpay. Well, that's why insurance rates are up so high because there

42:03was a fire in one room. I don't even know if it spread anywhere else. And they wanted to basically gut the entire house is what I heard from it. I think one said we should just tear it down. And it's a fire in one room. That's insane. That's ridiculous. It's like, oh no, you got a paper cut. I'm sorry. We're going to have to amputate your entire right arm. Exactly. Make sure you're right. Not this one on the left. Oh boy. We're not going to get into doctors and problems there. No, if you look when you allow this to go a creative moral hazard. So you pay too much. So people don't complain. Eventually we're paying for all that with the markup so they can buy the office building. And even though they're paying a lot less and office building rent, you don't see your insurance rates going down. And then they blame it on hurricanes and stuff. Well, we haven't really had a lot of those recently. Oh, well, it's the fires out what? Why am I paying for a house in California that burned down because they had terrible thing? I would rather be much more localized. Well, no, it's better for us. Yeah, it's better for the insurance company if you spread

43:06it out all over America, but it's not better. If you look, if you look at the one type of policy, my agent said, oh, yeah, he goes, they didn't do so great with that type of policy. So your rates are going to go up again. I go, but I haven't had a claiming years. I'm like one of their, you know, biggest money makers. Well, we had a lot of roofs. I go, I never turn in a roof because, oh, yeah, look at your deductible. It would be stupid to turn in literally if the whole roof is destroyed. You just don't do that. And even if you did, it only cost a grander to because you have like a $5,000 deductible. And so they really, if I only paid for myself, which is why I started to self-insure. That's why I don't insure through an agent, many of my buildings. If I don't abs, if I'm not absolutely forced to because of a bank, if they're free and clear, I've private money or something, then I talk to the lenders and we come to an agreement on what will I do if anything happened to your security in this loan. And bam, it saves me enough that I can lose a house every single year. I make enough extra by not paying all that insurance that I can pay cash for one more house

44:10every single year and turn into a rental. But that is the moral hazard on the insurance side, which is also driving up rents. They're doing the same thing as the government. They're paying way too much so people don't complain. And that has eventually led to driving prices up, right, Ethan? Right. And I was going to say, isn't this just another reason of why people need to look at where is their money going? Because you looked at the insurance, I don't know, it was a while ago, a couple years. And you realized that with the amount you were paying for insurance because you had whatever type of insurance on like every building, you could literally burn down a house every year. And I think still not save as much money as if you just canceled most of your insurance. Right. And that's assuming that your claims didn't go up from burning a house down every year. And also ignoring the fact that that's insurance fraud, I think. Yeah, but if it accidentally did, then there would probably look at me and say, nobody is that unlucky. It must be arson and put me in jail. But really, if a house burned down every year for

45:15five years, then it was selectly, they just dropped me. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't have insurance anymore either way. Yeah. So these are the things. If you really want to improve your life this year, you got to step back and see the big picture. And you can just believe the government that food prices are up 26% since 2020. Think about that. Five full years. Okay. Since 2020, officially food prices only went up 26%. Have you been, and I don't go to McDonald's, but if you've been to McDonald's or any of the other fast food joints, how about whole foods if you want to go to the opposite end of the spectrum? Did you know that fast food prices are up 77% even though they say we're only spending 26% more? So there's another great thing that we don't eat. We just saved all of that. Because I assure you our income is an up 77%. Neither is most other people's out there. All right. A final thing when the government gets involved. What if they make a mistake, Lila?

46:17Yeah. They don't know enough to their mistakes very well. Well, tell me about what you have. We're going to jump over to property taxes because Pacific Legal Foundation who represented us when we sued the CDC during COVID and beat them. They take on very high profile cases where people are just incredibly wronged. Tell me what you found on PLF. Well, the punk family got hit with an improper tax bill. They should not have had this tax bill. And it was so the government screwed up. Correct. Okay. And it was for like $2,300, which included interest in fees. But rather than own up to its mistake, it confiscated the whole home for a tax that should never have been due. They didn't confiscate it for $2,300. They kept hacking on a whole bunch of things eventually. And so what did they, was it like this one where ours that we bought on 7th Street, it was worth 40 grand. And over 7-year period, they tripled the value and said it was worth 120. But then it won up for tax sale,

47:20and they sold it to us for like 42. Right. And that's what happened to the pungs. They kept raising the price saying it was worth almost 200 grand. But when they auctioned it off, it only sold for $76,000. And of that, they pocketed every penny regardless of the fact that the pungs owed way less than that. So we're trying to prove that, and I don't think there's any way they could ever get their house back. And they'll never get the $176,000 that the government said it was worth and taxed them on. Realized unrealized capital gains, which turned into they really are unreal. I believe that if they sold it for 79,000, just like the house we bought, they sold for 40,000. And first off, only 20 grand in taxes, maybe 23 were owed. So the other 20 grand should have went to the seller. But they don't, if the seller doesn't come in and ask, they don't get that money. Which I think is wrong because the government should never be taking that, that's against the constitution right there. If you owe $20 to somebody at the end of the year, if they haven't

48:24cast your check, if you mailed the check, but it didn't make it to him and Washington, what do you have to do? You have to send it to another government agency called unclaimed funds. Yes, which is crazy. So what about this, you know, $20,000? I once had a thing, you know, you can go and call these people and say, Hey, I can get this money for you. It's really easy to get it. Sign this and give me half of it. And who wouldn't give away? They didn't, they don't know. They're owed this 40,000. So if they say, Hey, sign this piece of paper, I'll get you 40 grand, but I get to keep 20 of it. Who wouldn't do that? Because they didn't even know they were owed it. And it seems terrible for the people doing that. And I don't know what the right, I think maybe 10% would be a lot better than 50%. But that is actually one thing that you can do to make money. It's just look for these. Look through all the tax sales and figure out who it was and then you skip trace or track down the people that used to live there and say, Yeah, you're house sold for a lot more. But the thing is it either was never worth 100 in your example, 189 or they, they should

49:29have to decrease the property taxes as they were never worth more than what they sold it for the whole time through. And you say the first 2,300 was illegitimate. And if that was illegitimate, then all of the fines, fees and penalties are illegitimate. Correct. And they still sold it and sold their house from them. And kept the whole lady green and didn't give them. Yeah, I mean, obviously, if the government is actually owed something, you know, given to Caesar, what is owed to Caesar, but then not a penny more, I think is how the phrase goes, something along those lines. Yeah. And some politicians just know what's that anything? I don't think we should know the government anything though. For the house that we own and we bought and we paid off the mortgage and now we're still paying rent to the government in the form of property taxes. Yeah. And the government that gets the money, gets to tell us what they think our house is worth. And when it goes to a sale and the worst part is it goes to a sale, they don't even lower the property. If they can only sell it for 80,000 and they think it's worth 190, the next buyer is still paying

50:32taxes on 190,000. But you personally sold well, that's not an arms like sale. They're telling us how much money we should pay them on a house that we own. We paid off. We own the land. It's ridiculous. Lila, what is the moral of the story that if you want to do what we're doing here in Ohio, you can go to x0htax.com and figure out where a signing location is because we are getting onto our ballot to get rid of property taxes here in the state of Ohio. Property taxes are so grossly illegitimate. They're unconstitutional. They're just flat out, not right. You got one, there is bad as the FISA court, which I think is absolutely awful. There are no elected judges. You do not get to do this. They arbitrarily raise as much as they want. And even when they're proven wrong in an open auction to the public, they say, oh yeah, but that doesn't count. It's not arms like you still have to pay this much in taxes. But I mean, just in 2025, I disputed like 100

51:38properties had almost everyone reduced. So a third of my properties I got reduced to a reasonable level. Most people don't know how to do that and aren't willing to put in the work. But we pulled comps and had broker's price opinions written. I even talked to some appraisers. We just did all of this work in both Ohio and Tennessee. So it is possible, but you got to stay on top and tell them, look, you can lie and steal this money from me in property taxes, but not that much money. I'm only giving you this much. And you can actually do that some and the only way to really make it fair is you're not constantly paying for the government and they can't take it. And like Lyla said in this one case, which will absolutely go to the Supreme Court, I can't imagine they'll throw up their hands and say, oops, we're sorry. There was another case in another state like that where they forced them to give the money back because here in Ohio, you have to call and ask for the money and probably fall out paperwork, but they'll give it to you. And other states, if they sort of an auction, they just got to keep it no matter what. And that was challenged in beaten

52:41in the state Supreme Court, I think a year or so ago. We need to never be keeping more. Yeah, we need to nationwide go after this and stop what they're doing. And one of the ways really the only absolute total fairway is to absolutely get rid of all property taxes. You will still have libraries and firefighters. The vast majority of this goes to the school system. And let's not forget that the school just got a 40% raise last year. And they're saying, oh, no, we can't give that. It's not like we're taking 40% away. We're just not giving them the massive raise. If you look at all the property tax bills that came through in Ohio, the net of all the tax bills that are supposed to help us actually increased property taxes on about half of the properties out there. Not quite a 30 to 40%. So if you are a homeowner, you get a teeny little break. But if you rent a home, the property taxes on that rental went up 10% over the next couple of years. So

53:46that's why you've got to go find a way. Sign in petition. If you're in Ohio, go to xohtax.com. Go to realpowerfinley.com. It's the first link on there. We're very active getting signatures for this so we can get rid of this because that is leading to increased and housing prices for everybody. And guess what? Unless you're black rock, your landlord's not too big to fail. So you are going to have to absorb that through rent raises. Wrap us up. If you want to learn more about the Pung family and their case, you can go to pacificlegal.org. Devon, keep fighting and sign the petition at axohtax.com. Ethan, don't forget to email in info at clearskytrainer.com to get your free ounce of silver assuming you make it. And thus for the first five, only to do it. So get one sent out at least we'll send you something. I promise. And make sure you go out there, look at the big picture and sign up for our free newsletter at realpowerfinley.com. So you can get

54:51some of the ideas that have made us so much money throughout the years. We'll be back on Monday with more insights and our opinion on life. Talk to you then. We hope you enjoyed the real power family radio show brought to you by family success triangle. We want you and your family to be financially free so you can go where you want when you want with whomever you want. Learn how we can help you live the life you've always dreamed of at realpowerfamily.com. To hear more, subscribe to real power family on YouTube. Until next time, go out and make the world a better place.