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Hey everybody. In this episode, I have a fascinating conversation with Heather Dreves who shares some secrets on how to get returns from your real estate without being an expert.

Grant
Everybody, this is Grant, Welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio in the house with me today is Heather Dreves of Secured Investment Corp. Now someone reached out to me and said, Hey, have you taken a look at Heather's profile. And when I reviewed it, I started to realize, hey, there's some things that she's talking about that I've been able to dip my toe in, in the real estate space. And when I saw what she was doing, I thought, oh gosh, this would be really fun for us to hear more about the unique solution that they're bringing to clients. So let me take a breath and say welcome, Heather.

Heather
Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Grant
Very good to have you here. And you know, when we were talking before we got started, I think you probably live in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, which is awesome. So thanks for coming out of the cocoon of beauty where you guys live, talking with the rest of us. Okay, so first things first. Tell me a little bit about how your dreams and what got you going into this business area in real estate?

Heather
Yeah, well, I think everybody has a story, right? Like, a lot of us started with something else. And then was led down a path that was probably a better calling, per se. I went to college to be a teacher and decided I really liked my children but wasn't really interested in spending all day with everybody else's kids. That's it.

Grant
That's good to find out. 

Heather
Yeah, yeah. Well, my kids gonna test it out. They're like, You were terrible at helping us with homework. But anyway, so stayed home with our kids for a long time, we were kind of entrepreneurs and my husband was running an indoor soccer center facility. But I had a very good friend of mine that was in the private money industry. So when our youngest son was in school full time, I decided to go back out into the adult world. And he's like, you know, come to work for me. I said, I have no idea what you do I have a mortgage, is it the same thing? He's like, No, come down to my office. So long story short, 20 years ago, walked in there and just, it blew my mind. I had no idea that one, if you were a real estate investor, you could get funding outside of a bank and traditional sources. And two, I had no idea that you could invest money that way. I thought everybody went to a financial advisor, everybody, you know, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, like I just I was, my eyes were wide open.

Grant
I mean, that's such an uncommon knowledge just right there. Even some of our listeners will be like, wait a minute backup, say that phrase again, you can do what say that one more time.

Heather
So you can buy real estate, and get funding for real estate transactions outside of a bank. So you can acquire what we would call private money lending to buy real estate, a lot less restrictive than a bank, you know, they typically private lenders will look at what we call an after repair value, which banks don't do, you know, they want to know what's that property worth as it sits, and that's the most they're gonna lend on it. private lenders are much more creative. And they can look at a property and say, hey, I can see the value you're going to add, and I can see your vision. Absolutely will end on that. And so, that was mind blowing to me first. And then I started started with working with investors that said, you know, I've got money in the stock market, but I also want to invest in real estate. But here's the deal. I don't want to own the real estate. I don't want to rehab the house. I don't want to deal with a tenant and toilet but I want to reap the benefits of that.

Grant
So intended for more passive participation. Is that the idea?

Heather
Absolutely. Yep. So I'll huge majority of my clients, you know, have been active real estate investors in the past. They like real estate as an asset class. Again, they don't want to do it themselves, but they want To be the lender per se, and so there was this opportunity to match active real estate investors with people that are looking for a more passive Path to Wealth and and match the two and it benefits everybody. Right?

Grant
So what's the what's the typical profile of someone coming to service like this?

Heather
I would say on the borrower's the active investor side, you know, there there are people fixing and flipping, and they're everything from the guy that has a full time job that's doing it on the weekend to the very active clients that are for like 100 houses, really now they don't want to deal with a bank. There's too many restrictions. You know, we obviously have a very clearly defined guideline process and underwriting process, but it's much different than a thing. We're we're focusing on the asset, and then also focusing our attention on the borrower, we're making sure that they have the financial wherewithal to actually finish the deal. Can they make the payments, you know, all those things, we look at credit. But then on the on the passive side, the clients I mostly deal with there, you know, one of the niches I've really gotten involved with is high net worth dentist right now.

Grant
Did you say dentists?

Heather
Dentists.

Grant
Okay, I did not expect you to say dentists.

Heather
Well, here's the thing. They have tons of capital, right? Yeah, they have no time to manage their money invested, you know, and a lot of times their biggest asset is their business, they'll sell their practice, when they retire. Now, they have this influx of massive capital. Oh, interesting. A lot of them are very educated with real estate, but they don't have the time to do it. And so I would say that the profile for my passive people are people that have started to create some wealth for themselves, and they want to either create cash flow, so maybe they're retiring. And they don't want to tap into what they've saved, but they want to live off their earnings. Got it, or a new niche I've really I'm pretty excited about is our growth minded clients. So you know, I don't know how much you know, about a real estate fund. But for a long time, you had to be a high net worth accredited investor to even ever think of investing in these types of funds that we're talking about REITs. Yeah, well, we are similar to a REIT. But we are a privately managed real estate. Oh, interesting. Okay, got it. Well, we're privately managed, but the model is the same. It's real estate assets, throwing off profit. And that's how people make money as off their earnings. But 10 years ago, you could only open that type of fund up, if you were what's called an accredited investor. That's the only people that could invest. So you had to have a million dollars in assets over income of $200,000 a year 300. As a couple. We feel really passionate, we think everybody should have the opportunity create wealth. So four years ago, we actually have the ability to open up what's called a Regulation A fund, and anybody can invest in it. We started our minimum at $1,000. And it's open to anybody, and we pride ourselves on this, it took a long time to get approved for this spot.

Grant
That's fascinating. Okay, that's the first I've heard of something like that. How many organizations do that? 

Heather
I mean, I haven't heard of anyone, not many that are a real estate fund. Most of the time, they're a crowdfunding platform. So you're, you know, you're investing in a platform, that's an angel investor, or they, they provide business loans. There are only a few real estate funds in the United States that were approved for that. So it's pretty uncommon.

Grant
That is, wow, that's very interesting. Okay, that must have taken a lot of effort to get that I mean, so that's feels like that's such an untapped market too. Huge market.

Heather
What we cater to is we work with a lot of clients that have 401k Is that they didn't move from a previous employer have small Ira balances, you know, they funded it with six grand and, and then they never did anything with it. This is a great opportunity for those kinds of funds. You can roll those accounts over to self directed custodians. So they're still tax deferred, you're not, you're not taking a distribution on it, okay? You're just, you're just now deciding where you want to invest it instead of having a financial advisor or a money manager, and I'm not here to tell you to people to pull all their money out from their financial advisor, really, it's just a way to diversify. And it gives people the ability with small dollars to invest in real estate because a lot of people think, well, I've got to have, you know, a couple 100 grand to buy real estate, no, you don't, you could invest in a fund that's investing in real estate and you reap the benefits of it and you have zero headaches. 

Grant
That's, that's awesome. So let me say back to you because it sounds almost too good to be true. Okay. You're telling me that someone could take their four When k or whatever other capital they have, there's not a bar, a minimum bar, they can roll that into this investment fund investment fund is going to be making the investment decisions, as well as managing the properties. And these people then just participate that investment participate in sort of a passive, passive return is that you said?

Heather
Yep, yep.

Grant
That's really awesome. 

Heather
Average yields are eight to 9%. We've managed funds for 10 years. So we have a really good track record. They are very regulated by the SEC. So there is a another set of eyes overseeing it. And they're fully audited funds.

Grant
Okay. Okay. Then what's the risk side?

Heather
Well, the risk side is, you know, not any different than any other investment, right risk is the market shift values decrease, I will tell you that our funds are a little bit different than most in the sense that we focus around residential real estate, okay. And we were not what people would call a syndication where we're investing in apartment complexes, we focus our investments around single family up to four units, all in the affordable housing market space. So we do two things with the funds. So part of the fund, we lend the money out. So real estate investors that are wanting to fix and flip we'll lend them money, we take a first lien against their property. So worst case scenario, they don't pay, we foreclose on the house. And now we own a house with 30% equity in it because we don't lend more than 70% of the the other portion of the fund we buy real estate, specifically in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington. So we invest in projects locally. We don't preach people trying to manage a rehab five states over and we don't do it either. So that's our model.

Grant
So are all of your properties in that area, then?

Heather
Yes, all the hard assets that we buy are only local, we went out is nationwide.

Grant
Because I've worked with I've worked with some groups that will take the approach of the look for places in the US where the volatility of the real estate market is small. The intent is to create a cash flow through sort of this renter model, if you get appreciation on the property great, but it's not about that it's more about sort of that rental cashflow. How different are you from from something like that? 

Heather
Well, we look at all of that. And that's another reason that we stay in the affordable housing market space. Because let's let's say that, you know, our exit is to rehab a house and flip it and the profits flow back into the fund and the market shifts. When you're in that affordable housing market space, you have a huge opportunity to cash flow that property in the event that you need to write out, you know, values decreasing. So we're much like that. And I think you'll have to be as a fund manager, you have to be nimble, you have to have multiple strategies. If you start relying on one stream of income for that fund, you're in big trouble when things change. And so we're much like that I you know, in the past, we've done very well, fixing and flipping, and our clients have done very well fixing and flipping, we're right now educating our clients that hey, some markets are turning like in an inflationary time, real estate's a great place to be. But it's also a great place to be for rental market. And so we're seeing a ton of opportunity for cash flowing properties. And so we're starting to add that to our to our portfolio.

Grant
So a couple minutes ago, you were talking about another class of investor that sort of a high growth or high high growth minded and then I think I may have entered interrupted you on that. What is it about them that you find interesting?

Heather
Well, the nice thing about our funds is when people make a decision to deploy capital through our funds, they can set their accounts up however they want. So what I mean by that is, they can either set their accounts up to reinvest their earnings. So earnings are paid out monthly. So we pay out all profit, which is really different than most real estate funds. Because if you're investing in a fund that's buying an apartment complex, for example, typically your returns are realized five years down the road, you get the benefit of depreciation, which is great, but you don't typically see your high yields till they sell that property. Right, right. Are our funds cash flowing? So we're lending on loans or paying off or buying properties? We're selling them. So all those earnings or profit are paid out every month? So you can either reinvest your earnings and roll them back into your equity membership, which is yeah, if you're working with self directed IRAs, that is an awesome option because you don't have these dollars going back. All right, and then they sit there and deploy until you have enough so you can reinvest for more growth minded clients, or for my guys that are looking for cash flow, you know, retired sold their practice trying to replace their income. They liked the monthly model because they're getting, you know, the earnings. Yeah.

Grant
So on the property, so sorry, Heather, quick question on the property itself when it's purchased, is it the fund that is on the property that owns the property? Or is it you know, allocated to the individual?

Heather
No, the fund owns the prop. Yep. Any loans that we originate? The fund is the lien holder. And that that's another thing is these are tangible assets. So risk is, at the end of the day, the markets go haywire, we just start liquidating assets and paying people off would be worst case. Right?

Grant
And that's how that's very interesting. Because, you know, I, currently, my wife and I, we invest in properties, but we do it where we're the first in other words, it's, it's, it's on us, right? So we have property managers that certainly take care of it, because we really like that, you know, cash flow kind of idea, right? And you want to be sort of passive with it, for sure. But at the end of the day, it's it's my name on it, right. And I think that's a unique thing about what you're describing there. I'm listening to a gun, though, that would distribute the risk, right, and spread it around there a little bit as as the individual investor.

Heather
Very cool, right. And that's what you know, a lot of people like, I have a large percentage of my clients have done real estate in the past, they've owned rentals they've owned, they've funded notes, they've fixed and flip, they, you know, developed and they're kind of at the point where they've, they've got capital now, and they don't want they want to retire. They, they want to, they want to golf, and they, they don't want to hear from a tenant that their toilets plugged in the middle of the night, you know, even though you're using a property manager at the end of the day, it's still you paying for it. That's right. That's right. You know, that's where I think there's benefit there. And then also for our clients that have smaller dollars that, you know, our husband and wife both working full time with kids, they don't have time to be rehabbing a house, this is a way that they can start to put that money to work for them. And it's shocking how quick it grows, especially your tax deferred accounts, self directed IRAs, and self directed 401. K's are like, people don't talk about it enough. It's, you know, you can do traditional, you can do Roth, if you're not working currently, for the employer that provided the 401, you can roll that over and start deploying that capital. So there's just so many other options out there that I just don't think people are aware of.

Grant
What's your take on potential impact to this model with, you know, interest rates slowly nicking up there from the feds and such any any concerns there?

Heather
We do. We talk about it. We meet multiple times a week, there's three fund managers to include myself, I think what we're already seeing, I mean, our market is a little different. It's still very hot, but we're starting to see it take longer for houses to sell. I think prices are going to stabilize. I don't know that we're going to see a I don't think we're going to see a downturn like 2008. I don't think that's going to happen. banks aren't lending at 120% of value. But at some point, I would I think homeownership is going to be affected and there's going to be a huge opportunity in the rental market.

Grant
I think it'd be a soft landing, right?

Heather
Yeah, yeah. Well, there has to be right. Yeah. You you can't have interest rates as low as they were in values increasing at the pace that they were.

Grant
No, it's crazy, right. Especially what the last. I think you're saying before we started chatting wasn't like you've seen it just in the market year and 40% valuation increase just in the last two years. Is that right?

Heather
Yep.

Grant
Yeah, boy, that's in the Wall Street. Yeah, that's better than this.

Heather
We bought a little house close to my office down here. My our younger son was going to call it there's actually a small junior college here. And three and a half years ago, we bought it for 200. And I was sweating bullets. I thought, oh my god, we're just overpaying for this house. The house next to it just sold for 450. I was like, Why didn't we buy like five of five of these? Yeah, I was thinking but you know, it's but but again, that shows you that a lot of locals in this market are selling because it's a huge opportunity, right? They'll never make as much money but now they're displaced. And that's why as a as a fund management team, we're saying hey, multifamily, small multifamily. We have several duplex projects going and for plexes because people have to have somewhere to live and at the prices that have increased here, you know, most of the locals can't afford it. And so they're going to be you know, looking for housing. So we think that that the housing market right now, is it the opportunities in rentals?

Grant
Yeah, that makes sense. Quick question about your clients in terms of preparing them. So given that some of these models are new to a certain group of people, what do you guys do in terms of getting people up to speed or educating them? Is that some of the things that your organization does?

Heather
Yeah. So the interesting thing about our company is we actually are an education company. First and foremost, we put on so it's interesting, we used to put on live events, like maybe at most for a month, usually two to three will COVID hit. And as everybody else in the education space that did live events, quickly, you're either closing down or you're pivoting saying how do we still pull this off? So what's really cool about that is we went live with all these these events, webinars, podcasts, online live events, and now we put on anywhere from three to four a week. So yeah, so and they're everything. They're from a grant, you want to buy a piece of real estate, we're going to teach you how to rehab it too. Hey, Grant, you want to be a loan broker? We'll teach you how to do that. I am mostly involved with a lot of webinars where I just did one last week, and it was all about how to buy a note how to educate people about how to buy a mortgage, or what some people call a first lien. How do you do your due diligence, what do you look for? And so we just, we really believe in helping our clients be the most educated they can to make the best decision, you know, and and so a lot of webinars, we have one tonight, we do every first Monday of the month, called our CEO, fireside. And that's all going to be focused about around the rental market. So education, just tons of online, tons of education.

Grant
Perfect. And where would someone go to find those webinars?

Heather
So they if they're want to learn more about the passive investing side of things, I would send them to our main website, which is at secured investment Corp, no plural in their secured investment Corp. There they're going to learn there's tons of webinars, different podcasts I've been on. And that's more your education about passive investing. If they are a more active real estate investor, they want to go find the deals they want to make offers, they should visit our website at Lee Arnold System of real estate.

Grant
Sorry. Did you say Lee Arnold?

Heather
System of real estate system real estate? Got it? Okay. All right. Yeah, that's awesome. Kind of two different paths, it kind of just depends on what they're really trying to accomplish. I mean, that's what I talk with my clients is like, what are you trying to accomplish? How much time do you have? And how much capital do you have to actually commit to that? And then that typically dictates what path they're going to take?

Grant
Is it pretty evenly split? Or do you see more people going passive? What's What do you observe? And

Heather
I'd say it's pretty evenly split. Honestly, you know, I think for a long time, it was heavier on the, you know, everybody, you know, you got HGTV, and they make rehabbing look like it's I've I've rehabbed and I never looked like anybody on HGTV, and my husband and I almost divorced each other. So I said, I thought we were going to be like, Chip and Joanna, like, this was a thing. I was like, Oh, it was good. Like, that was a big buyer, you know, through COVID, you know, you couldn't get into buy houses, you couldn't get the county out there. Now you're having supply chain issues, you can't get materials. So I think it has started to shift a little a lot of people have left employers through COVID. And now they've got these 401k sitting there. And they're going What am I going to do with this? So I think that's created a lot of opportunity and interest in the passive side of it. So I think it's right now it's probably 5050 5050

Grant
Awesome. Okay, while Heather, you've just been incredible sharing these, these experiences that your organization's had and the value that you're bringing, I have a quick question. Are you still doing CrossFit?

Heather
I am I'm getting back into it. I kind of fell off the CrossFit wagon. Last year we moved we were, you know, again, developing five acres like it was going to be the big glamorous thing. So yeah, I not as much as I was but I'm getting back to it regularly.

Grant
That's awesome. I love your story and what it is you're doing for the market and for people changing lives and given them a livelihood to build on all the like you said all the nest eggs they've developed in a way that's got a sounds like a lot of risk taken out for the people. So that's amazing.

Heather
We're here To educate people and give them a pathway to create, you know, generational wealth for themselves. And we just strongly don't agree with the fact that you have to be a high net worth individual to take advantage of this. So we pride ourselves on the fact that we we have a real estate fund with people with as little as $1,000 can invest in. Yeah, people have to start somewhere, they really do. 

Grant
Well, and you may have a free, you may use the phrase there that I love, which is around generational wealth. And sometimes that gets in the popular culture that's not talked about much. But for people that are being intentional with what they're trying to do for their families, those kinds of strategies mean a lot. So the fact you've made it accessible to the masses, and you're helping them solve that generational wealth problem. That's that's really awesome vision that you guys have any last comments that you'd like to share?

Heather
No, I mean, I guess I what I would like to share is if you have any interest, or you want to become more educated about self directed IRAs, and 401, K's just for clarification, we are not an IRA custodian. I'm not a tax professional. But I know a lot about those accounts. And I would encourage anybody, if you even have a small interest in it, get a hold of me and my team, you can get a hold of me at our website at security investment corp.com. And we'd love to give you some references for you know how you can set those types of accounts up if there's one thing people take away from this this presentation is that there is opportunity for investment through tax deferred accounts.

Grant
Very cool. Wow, what a great, great service you guys are providing Heather, thank you for taking the time with me here today. I appreciate that. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of Financial investing radio and until next time, go check out Secured Investment Corp.

Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback.

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial Investing Radio. So in this episode, I have the opportunity for a second interview with Jerremy Newsome. What's interesting about this with Jerremy is he's got this organization called Real Life Trading. And he's got this. I love his mantra. It's basically they're there to enrich lives, and he gives away tons of free financial investing and trading courses, just gives it away. He feels like like this should be available to everybody. And he told me and it wasn't part of the interview afterwards, we were talking about it. He told me about an upcoming deal he's got I think it's on May 5th. If you go to reallifetrading.com/funding.

What he's doing is he's given you an opportunity to get $200,000 to invest, you got to prove yourself, you got to follow some rules, otherwise, they'll they'll fund your account. Kind of an interesting, interesting deal there. Today, though, in this conversation, Jerremy and I are talking about crypto trading, adding it to your portfolio.

Everybody welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. So I went and got on my knees and begged and pleaded to one more time to get in the house. Mr. Jerremy Newsome first of all, thank you, Jerremy, for taking the time to be here.

Jerremy
Man, my pleasure. You're so welcome. And I'm honored. This is my privilege as well. So thank you for having me.

Grant
So you and I spoke, I don't know, few weeks ago, and since we spoke, I went and I checked more of his stuff out, you guys get to check his stuff out. I want I checked out his stuff. And I went on to his site real life trading.com. And, and he's got all this free content out there. It's incredible. I've spent 1000s and 1000s of dollars for that kind of training before I was amazed you had that out there. And I've knocked out your first three courses on it. And I have to tell you, first of all, you're an awesome educator. And second of all, you really know the markets and you teach them well. And third, I've been applying as techniques and it's made a direct impact on my on my trading activity. So okay, there you go. That's my hero worship.

Jerremy
Thanks, dude. It means a lot to me that you did that because you're a man of your word. You said you're going to and you did it. Yeah, that's phenomenal. 

Grant
Yep, sure did. Sure did. Okay. So what happened then is after Jerremy and I talked last time, I said, Gosh, that went really well. Are there other topics that you cover? And we're texting back and forth? He's like crypto and like, serious. Okay, of course, that's before I gone through your training courses. Now. I realize oh, yeah, you definitely are gonna, you know, knock it out of the park and crypto. So we wanted to discuss crypto in this world that has so much controversy around it. Some are like all in on it something it's you know, the devil's mother. It's just got all sorts of different views on it. But bottom line, let's start with what's attracting people to crypto. What are your thoughts there?

Jerremy
You know, that's a good question. And I think what attracts most people, and this is probably a slightly unfortunate answer, but that's okay. It's just like explosive games. I think that's what attracts people to it, because they're like, well, this thing is brand new. They heard about Bitcoin, they probably saw it somewhere around five to $10,000. Back in 2017. It's all up to 20,000. And now it's at 34,000. And so they're just there, they're doing the math right. People are like wow, there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of returns to be made. And same thing with NF T's are same thing with just active crypto trading like there are ridiculous ridiculous numbers and some huge success stories that have happened in crypto for sure.

Grant
Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about how much money I have to have in order to trade you know, options or or to be buying stocks or Doing futures, they each have their own requirements. What does it mean for crypto? If you want to get into that world? What do you need to have in your bank?

Jerremy
So that's what's cool, I think probably later down the line, but certainly, an aspect that will attract people is you can start with any amount of money, there's no regulation on how much money you have to have. So for example, as you mentioned, you have to have $25,000, the day trade, right at least, if it's if it's in a margin account, and if you're here in the US, but you have to have a certain amount of money to place a certain amount of trades in a certain period of time. Well, with crypto, you don't any amount of money, what 100 bucks doesn't matter. And what's incredible about that is you do have the opportunity, in my opinion to then offer new insights to new individuals, right? Maybe their children, young adults, maybe their 1415. Kids can trade this stuff, right? You can give, you can create your own account, put three 400 bucks in there and let a child go wild and see how they can trade because there is no if you don't use margin, which is pretty hard to do actually in crypto. So if you don't over leverage yourself, which again, is very difficult to do, the chances of you losing all of your investment are pretty small. And the chances of you losing more than you invested. If you don't use margins are pretty much zero, at least to my knowledge. I haven't heard anyone doing that yet. Therefore, it allows really an experienced individuals to get experience through the through the school of hard knocks, you know, why not? But with any amount of money, man, that's incredible.

Grant
In fact, on that point, just real quick. So when when we talk crypto, what are the what are the main instruments that you're referring to?

Jerremy
Man instruments I would say like the the decentralized, peer to peer currency that most people will probably heard about Bitcoin, you have a theory of them. There's a very popular website called coin market cap.com, coin market cap.com. And any individual can go there's free and they can kind of scroll through and determine and visually identify what are some of the larger coins, tokens projects? What are people doing? And how are they doing it. And it allows them to really just see what's out there because from a market capitalization standpoint, it's a market capitalization, meaning how big is this asset, I usually stay in the top 30. So if I'm trading something, if I'm putting my own currency into it, my bitcoin or US dollars, whatever, if I'm buying a token or a project, I'm usually staying in the top 30. So that I can assure myself of liquidity, which means the ability to sell, right, so there's almost always a buyer on the other side of the screen.

Grant 
In fact, I got involved real early on some of the Bitcoin stuff, but there wasn't as much liquidity back then. And that turned out to be good and bad, right? Those those a lot of that's overcome, certainly, obviously in the Bitcoin area. But that's great advice to stay on the top end of those is I've come to get to know you and your mission, which is to enrich lives, right? I love that about your mission. In the fact that you're you're taking Kryptos away to teach younger people about this, right? These are things that are not taught in school, right? How do you actually go about making money? Right, and how do you go about building wealth and growing it? Those are critical lessons learned? And I know that you've done some I haven't seen it. But I've heard that you've done some things around education for younger people on this. Can you talk about that? And have you done it in the crypto area as well?

Jerremy
I have. So I came up with a book not too long ago called a stock stock market journey. How to make sure kids win at life every day. And in that book, actually kind of blend in the nuances of currency. And talk about money is a fluid discussion because I mean, it is right it's a universal language. It's something that it's borderless, money is and it changes from border border, oftentimes, but allowing kids to realize that this is like a video game, you have to learn it, you have to play it, you're gonna lose, just like in a video game that you're not always gonna pass the level or whatever you might initially. But as it gets harder you get to determined you increase your skills and your capabilities through that difficulty to come out on the other side proficient at this game. So my take is yeah, I've created a live course that I did in March. So March is kids month, every month in my company. So I did a live educational event for children. And after that, it was a week long and at the end I today an offered a mentorship program for children and their parents to go through with one of my mentors so that they can learn together. It's kind of like a like a spring break at night. Learn and just understand more of it. because my thought Aussie grant is not going to change your life, and are they going to become full time stock traders? Probably not. But they will start to see the world differently. And they'll believe different beliefs now, because they will see that money can be created easily doesn't mean that you always have to choose that route. But it's at least a choice that is available to you.

Grant
Yeah, I love the fact that you're you're providing that for for these people. You got an awesome mission. Okay. All right. Let me get back to successful crypto trader. What does that mean? How do you do that? Well, like what does it mean to be successful? crypto?

Jerremy
Yeah, I mean, valid question, I think, I think success. For me personally, I define the word success as the opportunity to recognize or did I recognize an opportunity, like, That's it, if I recognize opportunity, I'm successful, I made it easy for myself to achieve success. But from a monetary standpoint, I mean, like, if you're actively trading, if you're successful, you haven't blown out your account, right, you haven't lost tons and tons of money, you still have capital around, but you are able to increase your currency that you're trading with, to better your life or the life of others around you. That's essentially it. Right? That's, that's the, I would say, an ulterior motive of success is for people to figure out a way to help others with their success. Either teach it, provide it, give it away, donate it, expand it, offer it something. So if you're a trading and you're able to carve out metal sell something of the day, if you made $600 Extra, or you made a $600 profitable trade, so 600 US dollar increase when you do 200 days a year. That's $120,000. Extra. Like, that's bomba, that's the number three significant, so tour data of the year. So we're not even talking. This is a 24/7 365 job. There's like no 200. So you're doing it's a third of the week that you can sit in and look at a good trade every other three days you find a good setup, make 600 bucks like $120,000 extra year, that's magnificent change you have as life changing and up and people do have the opportunity grant all over the world to participate in crypto, because you can do with the euro, you can do it with the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar, the British pound, any type of currency can be transacted and use through crypto. So it's a really fantastic tool.

Grant
Do you have a favorite that you typically pursue or trade?

Jerremy
I do? Yeah. So one of my favorites. It is a theory a theory was one of my favorite Kryptos for sure. But also there's another one that's a little bit less known called Cosmos, which is, which is Adam and so Adam ATO himself spelled, Adam pays a 5% yield to kind of like, is it through Coinbase. So Coinbase is a publicly traded FDIC insured company at this point. And Coinbase allows traders to have a position and Adam and just receive 5%, just like it would in a bank well used to write well, you can just kind of leave your money in the bank and just get like a free 5% return on your interest or a CD or whatever. Pretty fantastic. And that's because it's a very volatile asset class and moves up and down a lot. And so when you're leaving your money on the exchange, the exchange of the broker is able to go back on their on their side, and trade and transact with it. Just like a bank will take your money entering transact with it's really cool.

Grant
With 5%. Really? Yeah. 5% ROI. Okay, so now you can take all your money out of your CDs where you're getting point 0.002%, right. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. That is That's amazing. So in terms of crypto platforms, crypto trading platforms, do you have I mean, you mentioned using Coinbase? Or what do you what do you use them?

Jerremy
Yep. So I can definitely give you a few, Coinbase is absolutely usable. It's really easy, super effective. I like it. A lot of traders like it. A lot of individuals use it, but it is more of a what I would refer to as like a longer term. For crypto, you don't want to actually try it. The fees are a little bit higher. It's a little more clunky. clunky in the sense of it doesn't have a lot of advanced features to use. So I do use additional advanced features and other cryptos trade platforms, ones called Coinbase Pro. So it's their upgraded version of their main platform. So you can actually trade you can set limits, you can set stops, you can do all the advanced features that you want and Then if you want to level up from Coinbase Pro, there's a platform called Kraken, K R A K E N. And all these exchanges are very easy to transfer the money back and forth. Kraken is working on an IPO right now, which is they're gonna come out in the market, hopefully in the next few months. So you have a lot of opportunities to anyone, right? This is here in the US. I mean, you can open up an account been an account and like four minutes, if you're bout technology, three minutes, if you're fast, it's really easy to use. It's super easy. You can download on the app store you can use on an iPhone. I mean, it's, it's available everywhere now.

Grant
That's awesome. What a great, I'll check out crack and I've used the Coinbase stuff. But it wasn't the Pro. And yeah, I came back going oh, clunky, slow. And I couldn't couldn't control my trades very much. And this isn't the Yeah, yeah, but it's good for longer term. 

Jerremy
Like you said, the CD thing that's kind of what I tell people is like, hey, just treat like, essentially treat like a CD. You know, look at it, play with it. Like, have a have a long term, just you're buying slowly over time. Right? You buy and just sits there you treat like a savings account. Just keep buying, don't touch it. Don't buy anything. Don't do anything weird with it, just slowly buy over time. Let it accumulate, treat it just like a savings account of money come out of your bank into Coinbase great way to use it put into Adam get a 5% yield. Good times.

Grant
Awesome strategy, talking about strategies. And of course, your training material you do awesome talk talking about different trading strategies, do the typical sort of S&P 500 trading strategies that lots of people talk about? Do they apply in the crypto world?

Jerremy
Great question. Not fully. I mean, depends on what you want. Obviously, we're talking about but so crypto doesn't have very fluid option trading right now. So options are essentially insurance contracts where they protect your downside, help you leverage your upside things that nature. They are offer, but it's really more for international individuals right now. So the US is getting on board eventually with that process. However, long term strategies like buy the dip, buy long term, like take some money and accumulate over every few months. Absolutely. That works like so long, the longer term strategies that can definitely be effective and certainly be useful to think about some other ones. Just try to think of other like really aggressive strategies. I mean, I personally don't trade Kryptos on a small term timeframe. So I say small term, I mean, like, on a 15 minute chart or less. So I don't day trade Kryptos. And here's why Kryptos can very easily move 10% a day. Like that's simple for a cryptocurrency to do which is wild. But as I mentioned earlier, that's why people are interested in them. I don't go less than 15 minute chart because I don't want to capture a 1% gain or 1% Return on something that could move 20% When 10% On Tesla or Advanced Micro Devices or Apple, I'll trade those on a daily basis, but they're not going to move 10% A day 99.99% of the time. So I'm looking for one to 2% pulled out the market, right capture that cash flow, but on on Kryptos. I am more of what's called a swing trader. So I'm usually in for three to six weeks is like kind of like my preferred timeframe.

Grant
Oh, awesome. Awesome. Okay, so what about alignment with the s&p, do you see anything there happening between crypto and s&p alignment?

Jerremy
Ah, that's a good question, man. Yes, I kind of do actually. I've been noticing or at least it seems to me that Kryptos actually kind of leading the stock market a little bit. And the stock market as of right now has been a little bit of a laggard or a little bit of a weaker position. Not overall but in general, or specifically. So to come up with an example Aetherium and Bitcoin are down about 40%. Pay Pal is down 70 squares down 65 Facebook is down 45. Right. Netflix is down 75% Boston Beer Company is down 80% You have some companies are down 85% like Roku. I mean, some individual companies names are getting absolutely decimated. But big coin in theory, we're only down 30%. It's like well, relatively speaking, that's not terrible. And that's actually started before that wasn't like early November. And most of the stocks, the bigger names at least big broader market, s&p, NASDAQ they started selling off late November. So I kind of see Kryptos as almost as almost a leading approach like if I see strength in crypto, I'll have ventually assumed literally strengthened the stock market, sometimes at the same day. And I think that's because people are going to, again, slowly peel some money into crypto, the total market cap of cryptocurrencies on a like, again, accumulative basis right now is almost 2 trillion, 2 trillion now really? I'm sure Yeah, but but that's not a lot, right. That's the market cap of Apple, Apple. Yeah, that's one Google. That's one apple. Like, that's nothing essentially. So if you take, I think, I think there was a stat that said, the overall retirement savings in all of us, like, if you take the US, you take every single dollar in retirement accounts right now and average them together. It's like 36 trillion, which is a lot. If we take 10% of that 3.6 trillion, and put it into the crypto markets, I mean, crypto market triple, essentially overnight. So that's the grand your larger term I get at actual sizable money starts flooding into these Kryptos, they likely will go a little bit higher. And so that's why I kind of think that the crypto market almost right now leads the stock market.

Grant
It just looks amazing in the fact that it hasn't pulled back on such high weakness, I was reviewing some of the various stocks just last night that you were mentioning, and I was looking on the monthly charts, the the massive pull backs, and I started thinking, this is starting to feel like buy time. You know, when it's down this far back, you're like, wait a minute, this is probably what what's your take on that?

Jerremy
You're not wrong, man, you're not wrong. I do. I think that the way, there's a very popular term, I don't don't try to catch a falling knife. But my my definition of a falling knife generally is if you are trying to catch it, right, don't try to catch it with both hands. So keep keep one of your hands alive. So throw a little bit of money at it don't get super super aggressive. Take a little sizeable chunk so let's let's say have 100,000 our portfolio and unit put some money in the Netflix throw five grand at it over a week or over a month I don't take five grand go okay. Oh man go by Netflix spread it out. Because right now Commission's are free generally, in 98% of trading platforms like your Commission's are free. So you can buy and sell by 500 bucks on Monday by 700 bucks next Tuesday by 800 bucks, the third Thursday of next month, and slowly tiptoe into some of these positions. So it kind of allows you to a lower your cost basis a little bit. But really, and also be adjust. It does, it allows you to kind of understand and see and accumulate without being fearful and upset and scared. Because most people they're used to buying something and once they buy it, that's the bottom right, that's the lowest price ever. So if you buy candy bars, like you're not really worried about the candy bar you buy a house is like very, very frequently, house price goes up, if you buy a car, they feel like the price isn't going down because they don't notice that. If you buy a stock, you're you're not gonna get in at the low, like it's gonna go lower than wherever you bought it always 99.99% of the time, you're never gonna press the button near the bottom. Yeah, it's not gonna happen.

Grant
So tough to find the find the low I love that counsel, the spread it out, distribute the risks, try to get control the cost basis or lowered as much as you can. That makes a ton of sense. Okay, so final comments on crypto for helping someone to get started. Any thoughts on that?

Jerremy
Um, to get started, so I do offer education on crypto. I know right before we talked on the webinar, you mentioned that you might dive into that program as well. It is a valuable program, it is extremely useful. I teach people a little bit about what I look for when I'm trading crypto and like what what patterns I'm looking for and how I get in and how I pyramid into a position. But the good news is, I mean, go to YouTube University, right, which is just youtube.com. And any questions you have typing a how to and then how to trade Bitcoin, how to trade and how to trade, you will find so much information because education shouldn't be free. Right? The information I give away in crypto isn't necessarily education is more like how I do it and my perspective, my opinions which are valuable because I do quite well in crypto trading. And so I want people to kind of understand and see the way that someone can approach it. So for me, yeah, just go study, like spend 10 hours over the next year. Hour month learning a little bit more about it. Because it's knowledge right applied knowledge is power. If you just sit there and say I don't have the time I don't have the money. I'm not smart enough. You're leaving a lot of games, both monetary financial emotional on the table and that's not what you want.

Grant
Yeah, I love that guidance, because one of the things that you've pointed out some of your trading area, your trading training that I went through and by Either way, Have I mentioned everyone yet? It's got good material? If not, I'll just say it's worth your time to study because the approach is very balanced. It's, you know, get some into some long term. And here's an approach on how you do some long term investing. And then, and then maybe there's some medium term stuff. And then okay, you're going to go after some cash flow stuff, which is where I do some of my day trading activities there. I think you have a great balance on that, Jerremy, and I think my audience will benefit from that as well. So it would be real life trading.com. And then on there, there's going to be some links, what links will they follow to get to the crypto stuff?

Jerremy
Yeah. So just go through all the education, there's if you click on trading, and you'll see courses, just click on courses and start growing and going through all the courses there's tons of, there's tons of them out there, there's a lot available, one of my favorite ones, which you're like a lot grant as you get to it is hedging with options. So the hedging with Options program is just about how to essentially create cash flow from stocks using options and how to protect yourself on the downside, especially if you want to be in a company long term. But yeah, the crypto program, just under courses, check it out. It's very valuable, it's extremely useful. And you will get really great insight just not only on the future, and what applications and what systems can be disrupted, right, with Blockchain technology, but also how you can take advantage of any individual here can take advantage of it without being a coder, or a weird nerd or programmer, if that's one of your fears. You don't have to know any of that, to take advantage of this market, or just be in a space, just like you, man, just like me, we have to study. We're dumb. Put yourself in front of educational platform, videos, books, YouTube, podcasts, whatever it is, and study, spend a bit of time. So you could apply knowledge because at this point, my friends as we go forward, if you have internet, you have income, you have access to income, and that is a global endeavor that can change the world for the better. That's a great statement.

Grant
If you have the internet, you have income. That's a good one. I got to put that on a plaque. Okay. All right, baby. Jerremy, thank you so much for joining me here today. I appreciate that. I know you made some adjustments to your schedule to make this possible. So thanks for doing that. Any last comments before we wrap?

Jerremy
You know, the best one is, it's never the perfect time to start anything. I think a lot of us and I'm 100% guilty of this everyone isn't mature should be. There's never a time you're like alright, march 15 of 2027. You know, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna take four hours, I'm gonna learn this stuff. Five years from now and I'm a little bit more wealthy when I'm a little bit richer, when whatever is happening. There's never a perfect time is going to be a little bit painful, it's gonna be a little bit scary is essentially irrelevant of what it is that you're doing or why you're doing it or how you're doing it. What I can say is this, if you start something, consistency is what pays off, consistent and intentional wins the race. And if you stay consistent if you stay intentional, if you really focus on your personal growth and your personal mental prosperity, absolute game changing life will become incredible.

Grant
I love that. Thanks. Thanks for taking the time to go over that. And for joining us here today on ClickAI Radio. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, everyone go get some crypto from Jerremy Newsome.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI  Radio.

Grant
Everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. My name is Grant Larsen. And today I have in the house, one of those unique people that understands some of the fascinating ways to build and protect your wealth. I'm excited to have with me here today, Seth Hicks. Welcome, Seth.

Seth
Thank you so much Grant, glad to be here.

Grant
So when you reached out to me, and you started to say, hey, could we talk I started to look into what it was you're doing. I mean, I'm hearing words like private banking and asset protection expert, you hear some of that stuff? And you think, Oh, wow, do I have to have an advanced degree, right in financial management to understand this stuff. But what occurred to me is that I've seen some of these principles before, they don't seem to be well known by most. And so what I'm excited about is the opportunity through this channel here for you to continue to get your voice out there and say, here's a way that you can build and protect yourself. So first of all, how did you get into this?

Seth
Well, I practice law for about 25 years now, and have structured transactions, commercial real estate transactions, business, acquisitions, and sales. And kind of help people keep what they make, so to speak. And when I met my now partner, Vance Lowe, the principle of private banking strategies, it floored me to find how easy it was to make a few changes, and effectively do 100%. better job. And so what I mean by that is private banking strategies, we use whole life insurance policies that are structured in a way to have a high cash value, and in the appropriate structure and appropriate jurisdiction. They're statutorily exempted and protect it, much like a homestead in certain states and many of the same state. So, for example, in the southern states, you've got a post Civil War air legislation where...

Grant
It goes that far back post Civil War? All right, absolutely.

Seth
Yeah. So private banking goes back as far as Civil War era. And even before that precedes branch banking, it precedes the the type of current culture banking that we have. And the post Civil War era statutes protected their their citizens, the state citizens from Northern carpetbagging. So for example, yeah, for so for, like example, in Texas, and Oklahoma and Florida. And a lot of those states, south of the Mason Dixon Line, you have laws that protect homesteads. So in the event that there's a liability, and someone has a homestead that they've declared, it is 100% protected from being taken from them. And that was a product of the Civil War.

Grant
So let me ask you this, when you talk about how you know protection from having it taken, I'm assuming you're talking about scenarios like maybe bankruptcy scenario, or something else where you owe other people but you've got this protective layer that no one could actually come in and take that foundation from you. Is that right?

Seth
That's right. A lot of our clients, you know, higher net worth, some of some are ultra high net worth, and many are blue collar, but they have created strategies to keep what they make. I mean, no one wants to effectively work hard to earn money and then and then lose it. So those type of folks who gravitate towards structures where they're able to keep what they make, so for example, if you've got a homestead You're in Texas or in Florida, and you want to use it as a vault, and you don't have any debt on it and you're able to pay the property taxes, year after year, then it is 100% exempted from creditors or from outside taking.

Grant
So that's an important baseline is that it does need to be debt free, you have to have no mortgage on that or any liens against that. That'd be right.

Seth
Sure, yeah, you've got to if you've got a, you know, a loan with a traditional bank, they have a right to the mortgage payments or, and so they will effectively if not paid, foreclose on that, and those rights are obviously superior. But if you're if you're in a position where you're able to, for example, use your own private bank, through the cash value in your own policies, and purchase and acquire your home, or other assets through that entity, you would do the same structure, you mean, obviously, your bank and part of the cycle is getting the money back. And that's something that the Vance prides himself on his teaching people how to get the money back, you've probably heard some of that, and your private banking, that's one of the reasons that people do it, they effectively take the banking equation back into their own law into their own become the bank.

Grant
So as the flow is something like this, you get one of these Whole Life policies, it takes some time for you to build up some cash value, but then that cash value becomes something you can leverage and use for either purchasing other assets or leveraging it and other investments, so to speak. And that has some protection wrapped around it, is that what you're describing?

Seth
That's exactly what I'm describing. And like I said, a lot of our clients are higher net worth or even ultra high net worth. And when they capitalize their bank, they are, they're able to do a lot more with it right out of the gate. But for the blue collar guy, you're right, it's a, it's a steady increase that you use. A lot of folks use this as a retirement strategy, because the ins and outs are not a taxable event. And if any of the audience wants to dig on that it's internal revenue code 7702. And what that basically outlines is that your whole life policies, your your cash in and your cash out, are not taxable events. So compare that with like an IRA or a 401 K, that someone's been socking money into. When you take those distributions. Well, if you take them too soon, you're penalized you penalized if you take them too late, you're penalized. Yeah, and it would take them right in that the right time. You're still paying taxes, I'm still paying taxes on it. 

Grant
So every single cash transaction on the cash value, no tax, no taxation on that, right. That's, that's amazing. How blue collar person or someone that's not old truck, how do they get started then Is it is it I hate to say as simple as but Is it as simple as getting started with your whole life policy earlier in your life than later? So you can begin building out that cash value is is that the number one thing are what else would you do?

Seth
You know, I wouldn't say age is the number one determined to factor. In fact, we've got an article and a podcast that we've produced that says, you know, you're never too old to start private banking. And here's why. And we go through the outlines the benefits and values, which include asset protection, tax free growth, financial privacy, no taxation on the legacy value. So if you're leaving high value to heirs and benefits, beneficiaries, don't pay any taxes on that transaction, even if it's ultra high. So there's some value there, depending on what your primary motivations and focus are. And the age of course, if you start earlier, you're going to accrue a much greater and higher value as you you know, as you go year after year, but let me give you an example. We've got one of our favorite clients is as a woman in Texas, who was a single mom, and she started out with a $5,000 annual whole life policy and she made she made that contribution for a few years and and then use that cash value to as a downpayment into an investment property. Oh really? So she purchased this investment property as and then she also had third party financing of course, she began to develop cash flow from that and she paid her bank, her private bank back and as that cash value increased in a crate increased, she did The exact same thing, she rinsed and repeated the process with the second investment property. And now she has a million dollar equity portfolio in real estate from where she started at $5,000 leverage. Now, we've been, you know, she's had the benefit of an appreciating real estate market, she's had good investments, but it illustrates the principle that you can actually start in that small of an amount and and multiply that seed into something that really brings a large harvest.

Grant
That's fascinating. One of the things I noticed from you was, I think you call it the Seven Pillars of private banking strategies. Can you speak to that for a moment? What are those?

Seth
Sure, the first, the first pillar we've been talking about is asset protection. And the second pillar is tax free growth, which is we also referenced that compare that to a 401 K, or an IRA, you may have tax free growth inside, but you're going to pay taxes when it comes out. And we've got some illustrations that kind of compare those two things and show you you know, which comes out ahead, and it may look like a contributions from an employer and other matching proceeds will come out ahead. But in overtime, they really don't. So you've with inside the policy, you've got compounding growth, and you've got a tax free growth. And you've got a financial privacy. third pillar is financial privacy. Whereas compare that to a bank, for example, who has to KYC know their customer, know your customer, they want to understand, you know, every aspect of money in and money out, you going to try to take out or put in a large cash, for example, a 510 $1,000 Cash, I'm into your Wells Fargo or Bank of America account. And they want to, you know, cross examine you on 50 questions about why you're using cash, where, you know, that doesn't happen in a private contract with the life insurance companies, we use it, it's totally private, and they don't raise their hand and go, Hey, there's a large transaction in or out, and they're not required to by the IRS Code 7702

Grant
And it's just not part of their business model, right?

Seth
It's not part of their business model. No. And so it's interesting to point out this is kind of a little sidebar, but the largest players are the largest clients of the life insurance companies, or the centralized banks, like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. I think the last time I looked at Wells Fargo has a 20 plus billion dollar annual premium for life insurance policies that they hold on employees and, and others. So if, you know, gives you some insight.

Grant
That's huge. Okay, so right, so asset protection, tax free growth.

Seth
Tax free growth, financial privacy, privacy, the big one is velocity of money. And once philosophy of money, we describe that a little bit and in the the example that I gave our audience with the woman who started with a $5,000 premium, and then when she had enough to make a down payment on an investment property, she did so and so she she paid a premium dollar into the whole life policy, she borrowed that same dollar out to make a downpayment, she purchased a piece of real estate with that dollar, she got a rental dollar back from the tenant, and she paid her bank back on the note and deed of trust. And that's the velocity of money. It's the multiple touches within your own economy of the same dollar. And I mean, I'm simplifying it there with $1 but that's effectively the transaction.

Grant
Now that like you said earlier, it's the rinse and repeat principle right meaning absolutely cut it out. She's liquidated it used it acquired some capital back repaid herself and now she's she's reset to do again, right? That's absolutely. When every

Seth
When every dollar that she pays back into her bank, Grant, it increases the cash value, dollar for dollar. So you've got that that loan from your bank coming out. And when you recycle that rental cash flow back in or that business cash flow, or that cryptocurrency sell, or whatever your investment might be back into your bank, your cash value goes right back up to whatever you've put in. And so you and I both know that banks they make money by lending money. So Wells Fargo with and Bank of America orca Chase and these large centralized banks, they put their money to work by making good loans. They make loans that are secured, they make loans that are collateralized. And they, ultimately they want that cash flow with an interest rate. Well, it's the same principle with your own private bank. And you want to make a good loan to the borrower, whether it's your business, whether it's your brother, whether it's whatever a third party, you want to make a good loan, make sure it's collateralized and secure in the chief got an investment, cash flow, and an ROI on that loan coming back to your bank. And there's that cash flow increases again, you do the same thing. So you begin to think like a banker, you think like a banker?

Grant
Yeah. Because that's so liberating, right to people to be able to be on that side of the table. Right? making those choices. Alright, and then what's the fifth? So there were seven? So I was four. What's the fifth one?

Yeah, I'm looking at the seven pillars.

Seth
So guaranteed financing. Yeah, it financing. So let's say that you're that you've you've you've done like our our hypo example with a woman there. And she's gone through a number of years, but she only started with 5000. Remember, now let's say that she's got 100,000, in total cash value. And she's in a state like Texas, where you can buy an investment property for 100,000. Or she could lever into multiple properties on like an 8020, split, for example, you know, she could buy five properties with 20%, down and put 20,000 down on five properties that cost $100,000, financed the other 80%. And she's building cash flow on all five of those, and actually getting a much higher ROI. And in that example, what you what she would be doing was effectively using leverage to increase the ability to invest in multiple assets. And when her cash value stacks up high enough, she could take out the third party lenders, or she could continue to use that strategy of leverage. And that really depends on someone's their own risk tolerance, their own investment strategy, some folks, they you know, that they're going to eliminate those third party loans. And they're going to take that cash value and just totally take out the third party debt. And so the only debt that would remain on that particular real estate asset would be their, their own private bank. So the guaranteed financing part means you don't go to the bank, and you don't have to qualify, you don't have to go through any type of you know, yeah, because you're the bank. Yeah, you're the bank. Yeah. So you make sure you look that guy in the mirror, and you make sure that you're making a good loan on a good asset. And you do that. So but I described the principle of leverage, because a lot of times people get ahead on that concept of leverage, as opposed to just buying one property for $100,000. And let's say you're making 2000 a month, you got 24,000 in gross cash flow, versus, you know, if you spread that across five properties, and you got 24,000 times five life and cash flow, so you know, and you're able to just knock those debts out a lot faster. That's the velocity of money and guaranteed financing working together. Yeah.

Grant
And written replenishments faster. Okay. All right, number six, and seven, what are those on your seven pillars?

Seth
So guaranteed compounding it tax free growth is the part inside your policy that that cash value and your premium dollars, they are compounding inside the policy annually, and there's no taxable event. And so I think it was Einstein who said the, you know, the compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world or something along that line. And if you're not, you're not getting compounding interest, then you're making a mistake. So you don't get compounding interest in your centralized banks. You don't get compounding interest in various other investments or formats. But in this these policies you do. So that's, that's something that is very distinguishable and it also takes out the market risk with your policies and the values in there, you're not subject to market risk. So this is not universal life. This is not indexed. Universal Life or any type of risk transfer. To the the owner of the policy or to us, you're not taking on market risk. But in those types of policies Universal Life or index, Universal Life, ual 

Grant
You, you are taking on market risk and one of the things? That's right, so being in control of the risk, right, that's absolutely mental aspect.

Seth
Absolutely, if you're going to use your cash value and put it to work and investment, you should be the one that's able to identify that risk and not have it subject to equity market risk. So it never goes backwards, you're going to only see a steady prodding forward with this compounding growth. And after a certain number of years, it starts to go more parabolic. And that's, that's really the beauty of this. And the magic of it. Some folks, they they locked this stuff up for retirement strategy. And you know, some are using it for the leverage.

Grant
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I've seen some financial people describe that risk control paradigm with a with a pyramid, right, and they'll describe it, you know, in the, in the manner that you want to have more control. So you start, you start, you should start these sorts of strategies first and get that established. And then and then over time, as you go up the pyramid, you have less control over it higher risk, potentially higher returns, but that might be where you're doing some you're, you know, trading or investing or self directed activities. And a lot of people invert that pyramid, right, that's a well, they'll start with that self directed trading or investing. It's, you know, high risk, low control, and then blow out what capital they have, when instead, turn that the other way around, start with these foundational approaches that you're describing, and then build on top of that. Does that make any sense?

Seth
Amen, absolutely does. Sometimes will, will describe that as, you know, Hare and tortoise paradigm. And some people go, Well, this isn't, you know, I can make this much here. And I make 12% Over here, I can make 15%. Well, no, you really can't over 30 years, and likely there's going to be a risk factor there that may blow you out. Totally.

Grant
Yeah. And the loss of control that absolutely, yeah. Now. Yeah.

Seth
I mean, you've got this third party risk, whenever you've got, you know, a transfer of your money to someone else. That's, you know, you've got that risk that counterparty risk, whereas this, these insurance companies, they don't fail. I mean, they've been paying dividends, since before the Civil War, year after year, through the Great Depression through the Civil War through every economic upturn and downturn that there is. And it's, it's just one of the reasons why grant is because there's a cash reserve requirement of one to one, as opposed to a cash reserve requirement at a Wells Fargo of maybe 10% or less. Yeah, so they take they take $1 In deposit, and they're able to lend out 10, or perhaps even 50, depending on what their total asset bases and that's, that's funny math. You just print money out of thin air, and then they're able to loan the printed money at an interest rate, and they're making money on something they never even received a receipt.

Grant
Fascinating, right? The before I ever heard about this approach of this technique, one, I have to tell you my origin story of learning about this for the first time, it was my wife was driving our minivan. It was when our kids were little. And she was backing out of the garage and kids were bouncing around everywhere. And you know, I would have made the same mistake, but she wasn't watching. And she was turning around and talking to the kids. Hey, kids sit down, she backs out and just wax the mirror off of the side of that house right on the minivan. And so you know, I come home from work. She's like, many of the mirrors hanging off the side. So I look at it go well, it was a really old minivan, really old minivan. And I was like, Well, okay, let me go get it fixed. And so I took it over to the dealer. And I had this thought goes through my mind. And the thought was wait, rather than because at the time, I think auto loans were going to like 4% or 5% or something like that. And at the time, our house had been paid off, but I decided to take out a home equity loan to do some fix ups on the home and it was running. The interest rate at that time was like half a percent on this home equity loan. And so I'm in there They're looking at getting the car fixed. And I'm going to dealer and all sudden I go, let me go look at the floor, showroom, and I walked over, you know, I pull out my home equity checkbook, and I just pay for it right there, boom, and I get this car course still today it's a joke if dad goes to fix the mirror comes home with the new car. So I come back with the, with this car. And oh, by the way, I'm driving back thinking, I'm a banker, man, I just, I'm a banker, I just, I just floated this thing myself, and got home. And of course, guy, you know, paid that off at a much less interest rate. A few years after that. I heard this principle you're talking about you've been discussing here. And it clicked, I went, wait, wait, that's kind of what I did. Right. But it wasn't using a whole life. But the whole principle is, let's put the people in charge. Right? Not not some other policy or program that larger organizations are bestowing upon you but rather put us the people in the driver's seat, so to speak, and be able to make those decisions themselves. And I think that that's really liberating. 

Seth
That's absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right. And that that's exactly the same principle is you're you're taking back the banking equation, you're becoming you're operating a private family bank that has generational value, and and has you where you are able to touch the same dollars that you make multiple times like we described in one of our examples and and you're that velocity, really accelerate your wealth curve. And without the taxation issues. And without the the asset protection risk, you're able to transfer assets generation to generation and take a whole nother opens up a whole nother doorway. So that brings us to our seventh pillar, which is legacy value, and the tax free transfer of these policies and the death benefits to the next generation or Asian officials. Wow. Yeah, tax free. So think about this, for example, there's a guy who most people know named Prince, and the or the artist, formerly known as Prince, he was a pop rock, yeah, seeing are pretty pretty well known. And he died not too long ago with an estate value of about $200 million. And he was a resident of Minnesota, ironically, and he had no private banking structure in place, he had really no estate tax planning structures in place. And between the federal government and the state of Minnesota, they took over $100 million of that 200 million, and in taxation and estate taxes, and his beneficiaries and heirs, you know, are left holding the short end of the stick, that none of that would have occurred with proper planning, or that same money in a private banking situation. And then, I've heard, I was reading some articles on Suze Orman who's a supposedly financial guru. And she talks about private banking on occasion, and she, she really has no concept of what it really does. And in this interview article with the guy from New York Times, she says, You know, I'm so worried or concerned about my, my partner, being left with less than half of my estate. And I think at the time of the article, she worked about 65 million. And so her partner, she said, is going to, you know, have have to, you know, take 30 million or whatever, instead of 35. And she didn't know how to overcome that problem. And I thought, this is really unbelievable, in the sense that it's such an easy solution. And we kind of we talked about this kind of off off recording about it's literally the stroke of a pen that you can accomplish these values and these benefits the Seven Pillars without having to be, you know, a black belt. And in any particular one one realm.

Grant
Financial genius, you just have to know that that's available that it's there. Absolutely.

Seth
Yeah. So you enter the policies, you fund your policies, you keep funding your policies, and you enjoy the these benefits. It's really not rocket science. It's more just of learning that it's there. And it it it blew my mind. It was an epiphany to me. Yeah, having practice law for decades and then and then seeing this was available. I thought it can be that easy. It can't be that easy to with the stroke of a pen to protect assets, but it is I mean, it's it's codified law and these contracts grant or it's worth mentioning that there they are regulated state by state. So each state has their own statutes that govern the the law, the protection, you're gonna need to protect it right. 

Grant
So some states better than others are worse, right?

Seth
Absolutely. And it's, it's kind of like the post Civil War era statutes in southern states. They protect their citizens, life insurance policies, they protect their citizens homesteads many times in comparison to other northern states or western states. So it is,

Grant
wow, that's huge. Okay, so, all right, I've really enjoyed the conversation, if you were to point people to a place to go to learn more about this, Seth, where you're going to point him to?

Seth
It's really easy, you go to our website, https://privatebankingstrategies.com, that's https://privatebankingstrategies.com. And there in you're going to find a an offer. And you can read a book that we wrote that that tells you about secrets that banks don't want you to know, effectively. And I like to call it a red pill book. And it spots issues that people may or may not be aware of. And it's it's amazes me, how many folks don't really understand what the banking folks are doing to them. You know, and with regards to mortgage rates, with regards to all sorts of issues, you just so this red pill book is something that pops up there for you. And you've put your contact information, your name and your email, and, and you can listen to the book on audio, or you can take it in a written form. And that's really the where we start. On our website, Grant, we've got a pretty wide volume of resources from podcasts that dive into particular pillars, or how to how the banking operates, to blog articles, and then our emails that will come to you also address certain issues like the Dodd Frank Act, and what how why does that matter to you?

Are, are your are your, you know, is your cash safe? And and it's centralized bank, why or why not? You know, our, there's simple things that you can do to protect yourself. So we try to add value. And those emails that come out to folks, we try to help them make a decision that this is, you know, for them or not for them. And it's really that simple. So you just hit the website, private banking strategies.com. You can have the book for free, all the podcast, all the emails for free. And if those things resonate with you, then you can schedule an exploratory call with Vance and start to get into the nitty gritty of it into what it means. 

Grant
Wow, Seth, thank you so much for taking the time here today with us and with our audience here. Very enlightening. It feels like we're popping out of the matrix right with with red pill. I love the analogy. Thanks again for joining and for going over this today. Everyone. Take a look at what it is that Seth is talking about https://privatebankingstrategies.com

Thanks again for joining in everybody and until next time, become your own private banker.

Seth
Thank you, Grant.

Thank you for joining Grant on Financial Investing Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Grant
Welcome everybody. In this episode I speak with Jerremy Newsom who has a system for giving back

Everybody welcome to another episode of Financial investing radio. All right today we have in the house. Mr. Jerremy Alexander Newsome coming to us all the way from Nashville, Tennessee. He is a long term successful investor and trader and he's been gracious enough to spend some time with me today, talking about some of the unique things around what he has done and how he's benefiting the market and investors and traders. So first of all, welcome Jerremy. And please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Jerremy
Thank you so much, man. It's always an honor to pour into like minded individuals I love that everyone here is interested in investing and growing their minds and therefore growing their bank account. My name is Jerremy Newsome. It's spelled with two R's. My dad's name was Jerry. So it stands for Jerry and me. That was Oh, that's awesome. Thanks, Mom. Yeah, man, I love the stock market. I love trading. I do love investing, right? Everything from long term buy and hold to day trading options and everything in between. I think that the liquid markets are extremely fascinating. And one of the things that I spend the majority of my time doing is helping other people learn how to do it themselves, right how to generate cash flow, using the markets, so that they can live the life that they want to live and help me people they want to help.

Grant
I love that. So one of the things that triggered me to want to be able to talk with you is when when I had the opportunity to interview I was looking at something about you in your background that sort of caught my eye in terms of what you started with. I'm not gonna give it away but would you back up and just talked about how this all got started? How did what got you thinking Let me do trading. Let me do investing. What was it that can get us that sort of the beginning?

Jerremy
Yeah, dude. The craziest thing it was a movie, a Tom Hanks film 1994 Academy Award winning film Forrest Gump. And I was watching that at six years old. And I was watching with my dad and my oldest brother, Jerry, Roger. And by apresenta way through the movie, Forrest Gump says that him and Lieutenant Dan invested into a fruit company and they no longer had to worry about money anymore. So I asked my dad, I was like, what is the fruit company was investing because when I mean we were poor, financially, we were very happy family had a great incredible childhood. But we were very poor. We we were at the time living in a single wide trailer tree house. Doesn't. It's not nearly as glamorous as it might sound. What I mean, okay, a tree house. A bunch of single wide trailers thrown into a tree house. Yeah, really?

Grant
Wow. That's a story right there.

Jerremy
That was a story. My dad was a creative builder. And I lived in there for from age three until 12. And so anyway, we're watching this film. I connect with that because I was like, Well, I would love to not worry about money anymore. I know a lot of my family members or somebody that we stressed about and worry about. I would like to not have that be an issue. When I asked my dad what's investing what's the fruit company? My dad goes on to tell me about Apple and how the stock market works I was like let's do this the Forrest Gump investing model Dad Come on, let's do it. And you know, he did the normal dad routine, right? Like yeah, this is a movie.

Yep. It's but I asked my dad was like, Is Apple a real company? Can you actually invest in it? I begged him and begged and begged him and he said, Listen, if you bring me some money, I'll match it dollar for dollar and we'll buy some shares of Apple. So I went and picked blackberries, door to door and made 1500 bucks in the summer of 1994 some blackberries. And so true to his word. We bought $3,000 worth of Apple in 1994.

Grant
Man you bootstrapped it. I loved your initiative. Uh, you know, the fact that you really wanted it you went after sold blackberries, right? Like, we just want to pick them out of gardens kind of thing sold and door to door.

Jerremy
Yeah, yeah, just exactly. So they grow wild in South Georgia. And so I just walk around up and down the streets and find BlackBerry pouches and put them in plastic bags or buckets or whatever. I could find them and just wrap them up and then go to go to Door Door and sell them. And the thing is, though, I sold them $1 bag, organic handpicked blackberries. 35% cheaper than they sold stores and had a six year old no shoes, no shirt jean shorts at a high closing rate. Yeah, grandma's would give me 10-20 bucks. You know, I think I was cutest thing in the world. And that was it.

Grant
You know your audience? That's awesome. Yeah. But you know, your dad's brilliant to where he, he saw that. Hey, you know what, I'll support you in this. But I also want you to take some ownership as well. I think that's a great, great learning, right for your kids.

Jerremy
I love that you brought that up, man. You're 100% Right. And I'm assuming that you're a father. I can probably I can make...

Grant
Six kids six grandkids actually two more grandkids, almost eight grandkids. Yes. Big family.

Jerremy
Good for you, man. Good for you. That's incredible. And yeah, so you're absolutely right. It was an ownership thing where it's like, Listen, you want this bad enough? Prove me how bad you want it? And I did. And then he Yeah, he was true to his word.

Grant
Big time. I love that. And I know, I know, you've mentioned this before we got started. But I feel like this is this is the right time to bring this up. You just released something for kids phone is that?

Jerremy
Ah, yeah. No, thank you, man. We talked about that just a few minutes ago. You're absolutely right, I have a brand new book that just hit Amazon. That's the only place you can buy right now. I'm sure it'll be in bookstores eventually. But it's called a stock market journey, how to make sure your kids win every day in real life. And so if you just type in stock market journey into into Amazon, you'll see a pop up and a man. So that's it's a stock market education book for kids, which is very rare. And it's more or less like it doesn't exist. I was told by a person forever ago, like a business mentor. Don't do that. Don't waste your time. There's no demand, like kids aren't trading stock market. Like why teaching? Yeah, I was like, Well, I want to know. I mean, there's someone else wants to know.

Grant
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Some of my own kids have done that as well. So I love the fact that you created that book. Okay, so So backing up here. So you have this experience you you got the got the edge, got the bug, committed your time, got the apple investment going. Alright, you've got this sentence in your headshot piece, who shared to me I love it says retiring on $3,000 how to grow a modest investment into a comfortable retirement. But that tells me as you're thinking about us as people in general, right, you're not looking at Gee, it's gonna take lots of money to pull this off. If you do it right. You can bring you can lower that bar to get going with this. Can you talk about this?

Jerremy
Yeah, so essentially, I teach people how to leverage their funds to do day trading, and to be in a position where they're comfortable, where they're not risking insane, insane amounts of money. Because you can leverage money very easily, right? Money is the easiest asset to come by. Now, most people don't think that's accurate, especially if you're not extremely wealthy. But it is like like, if you buy a house, you didn't have to come up with all that money. You went ask the bank and the bank gave the money. And so now you're paying the bank back plus interest, but you are living in a house and 100 or 200 or $3,000 that you didn't have to come up with up front, you got the money, right? That's a resourcefulness going out and getting a bank. But there's other ways to get houses, owner financing, asking your parents, whatever, right there's a million ways to buy a house. So for me when it comes to actively trading the market, most people don't know that leveraged funds exist. And when they hear leveraged funds, like I'm about to lose all of my money. There are mathematical formulas. Second grade math, I'm not very smart at math grant, I'm like a, my IQ is a high 93. And I use second grade math over and over and over to ensure that I never lose more than 1% of my account on any trade. So for me, you can take $3,000 And you can actually get access to $100,000 in day trading, buying power right using the leverage funds and only lose 30 bucks per trade and 30 bucks per trade is 1% of $3,000 Even though you have leveraged $100,000 available so it's it's incredible what's available out there and I wrote a book also called money grows on trees, teaching people these concepts and letting people know that this does exist items and processes And then, you know, companies out there know how to use their money and how to leverage it and give it away for people who might want to grow into a substantial sum of money.

Grant 
So that's interesting that, you know, you identified putting that risk management in place upfront that that seems to be sort of the common theme across a lot of traders that are real successful and having the discipline to say, You know what, I'm not gonna go past that $30, and I'm gonna diversify this, is that the basic strategy across a lot of different trading positions in different markets? Or how do you approach it?

Jerremy
You're not incorrect. That's absolutely one way. Another way that I do it is you create the calculation ahead of time, so you have your 1% of your portfolio. And for me, I'm taking this from a active trading perspective. So I say active trading, I'm a full time legit, professional stock trader, and I'm in front of the computer, trading maybe 10 hours a week, maybe during the time I'm studying, I'm reading I'm listening. I'm doing podcasts I'm, I'm talking people much smarter and much wiser than me like you asking them, Hey, what are the macro economic challenges are going to face America because of Ukraine or because of COVID. I'm asking other people things that's using them some spending, most of my time doing is listening to veterans, people have been doing this for 20 3040 years, getting their their knowledge and their expertise. So the math, for example, is let's say you have a $3,000 investment. 1% of $3,000 is $30. Well, the math behind the risk is if you buy Apple at 180. And you're like, Okay, if Apple goes down to 179. Get me out. So you're risking $1? Well, if you know your risk is 3030 divided by that dollar equals you can buy 30 shares of Apple. So even though your investment in this scenario is well over $4,000, you're only going to lose 30. If it doesn't work. Now, let's say Apple goes from 180 to 190, you make $10 per share risking $1, right you your risk reward is 10 to one you just made $300, even though you only risked 30, that 300 bucks. So it could be cash flow grants could be huge for somebody, right? That could be a car payment, that could be an electricity bill, that could be all forms of items that they might need. That could be groceries, and that could happen in an hour. Right? Like that tray could happen in an hour and or 15 minutes sometimes. And it's amazing how quickly the markets can move.

Grant
Yeah, it is amazing. And with that sort of control risk, and that potential for upside being much more than what the risk is you're taking on. So you're leveraging options, It would be my guess to do something like this, is that right?

Jerremy
You absolutely can leverage options. And I do and I know how I'm very versed in options. But I do generally 99.9% of the time instruct most of my clients to start with stock because it's easier. And stock margin and startup stock leverage is super, super available to anyone who wants it, essentially. And yeah, it's amazing what's available out there.

Grant
That is amazing how long then you typically in positions as you help people do this. So so your your coach student would be one that would come in take your system, they're in front of the computer, they're leveraging their their $3,000. And they might be in a position for like you said 15 minutes or an hour. It's certainly shorter timeframes, right? Not they're not holding anything overnight, or do they?

Jerremy
Very good question. Right. So the leveraged accounts to leverage trading, this is a day trade system. If you're going to hold overnight, I almost never suggest using leverage, though. If you have $3,000 to your name, like you're going to put $3,000 in you're only going to invest, right what you can afford to lose if you're going to hold for long periods of time. And so yeah, absolutely, man, this is a day trade system. But I do I love long term investing love long term. It is an incredible way for wealth generation and for asset appreciation. But I think day trading is really cool for cash flow, right? Because investing is like Well, it's great, but now I'm 65 What now? Well, what if you're 33? Or what if you're 29? Or what if you're 48 and you got a few $100 or 10s of 1000s or a few 1000 And you're like well I would like to make $400 Next week though Can I do that? I was like yeah, that's that's day trading there are systems available that can do this.

Grant
That's That's fascinating. So so with the the talked about the difference between fear and greed, those doggone emotions, alright, what's the secret? sauce here. Jerremy, how do you control those?

Jerremy
Awesome question, man. So good. I mean, it's, it is controlled to an extent, but it's also a lot of self knowledge and introspection. Because, for me, I don't believe that most market participants are greedy. Now I know that's a very, very popular term, right? I mean, Warren Buffett says buy when others are fearful and sell and they're greedy. And so on and so forth. There's a lot of the markets are controlled by fear and greed. There's tons of fear and greed baked into the system. But here's the challenge with that is inherently, the majority of market participants don't want to be greedy, right? They're God fearing church, attending people that are 57 with, you know, a few kids maybe a grandchild or two on the way, and they want to give to charities, and they want to donate and they want to help build orphanages and, and hospitals. They want to donate money to the zoo and protect pandas. Like, if you give money away, Grant, by definition, you're not greedy. Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry. But that's like just the exact opposite of greed. You can't give money away and be greedy. It's impossible. So therefore, what we do is if people tell themselves, I'm greedy, and greedy and greedy, they're not going to want to make any more money. Because nobody wants to be greedy. So we have to remove these really weird, crazy subconscious beliefs that we have internally about money and about growth. I call it financial optimism, or monetary zealousness rather than greed. Yeah. Or money.

Grant
What about on the other side? Jerremy, what are your thoughts there around fear the management of that?

Jerremy
So fear? I mean, that doesn't go away. And fear comes down to having more and more certainty. That is a piece of it. So you do not have education? Thankfully, there is a company out there that teaches you for free, which is my company, I don't charge anything for these systems, or this education for this knowledge is I just gave it away.

Grant
I mean, you don't charge? That's amazing. You don't?

Jerremy
Yeah, no, it's totally free. Because I want people to be able to experience it, and to understand it, and to learn it, so that they can really figure out they want to do it or not, or to what level because if I'm being honest, I've made a lot of money, millions of dollars in the markets. I'm good. You know, I don't need anyone's money. Specifically, I love money, I'm not pushing it away, I'll absolutely charge you for things. But education is not one of them. I feel like I feel like education should be free. And so I create a free platform, people can learn my system entirely for free. And the piece of the real massive distinction that you're giving about fear is it is a knowledge thing. A lot of people are afraid of I'm just gonna use guns as an example. Okay, well, I grew up around guns, I don't have many, but I'm very comfortable knowing that if I hold the gun, how it works. Yeah, and I know how to put a safety on, I know that it by itself isn't harmful. Just like a car by itself is a harmful you put a drunk driver behind that vehicle. Now it's a weapon. So weapons aren't. Money is a tool, right? Money is a it's like a brick can be thrown through a window or it can build a church. Same thing with guns into the car are all tools. And once you understand more, you have more certainty, you have more education, that fear will slowly start to dissipate. And it won't go away entirely forever. But you will have and you'll replace your replace that with different fears over time.

Grant
Oh, that's awesome. I love the altruistic aspect of this. It's sort of a gift back and feels like what you're doing right to the community. Right. Okay. Let me let me improve the education of people. I actually think that Well, let's talk to the other side of that. Then, with that giving back can you speak to what are the outcomes been to your audience and the people that have gone through the systems? Can you speak of successes and things where people have had their lives changed?

Jerremy
Yeah, man. I mean, the first one that came to mind is a really good friend of mine. His name is Matt DeLong. He's actually my business partner, mentor of mine, when my best friends he's a little bit older than me. 45 years old, has two kids. They're both in college and he was a business owner. A little bit of money, started day trading and losing his face. I mean, he was hemorrhaging money, because he had no idea what to do. Just just losing money all you click the button, boop. He's gone by because there was a siphon. And he didn't know what to do. And so he pumped the brakes. He said he sought out assistance, a coach and mentor and he met with me and pay me for my time said hey, man, I'll buy some food or whatever. Let's let me Cafe this out. So come full circle. That was four years ago, four and a half, five years ago, he now can trade profitably consistently and have an income. And now that his kids are out the house, he is fully financially sustainable, where he doesn't have to draw off of his retirement or he, you know, he does not working right, he sold his business. Him and his wife are able to foster children well, and to be a real force for good by going on mission trips, and by donating to charities and him and I ended up creating a foundation together called Real Life Foundation. And so one of our main goals is to end human trafficking. And so we donate hundreds of 1000s of dollars towards that foundation, and we just we work on Yeah, man. Yeah. So he has time to pour into the world using his gifts and his skills tests with your technology, because he doesn't have to be working 70 hours a week anymore behind the desk, which that was that was the case. That's what he's doing years ago.

Grant
Yeah. So it's interesting. You mentioned what's called Real Life Foundation. Yep. It sounds similar to as it Oh, you are like operation Underground Railroad?

Jerremy
Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's our main as who we support as one of our main go to www.reallifefoundation.org . Like we do the in human trafficking by connecting directly with Tim Ballard.

Grant
Yeah, that's awesome. Wow, Jerremy, that's, that's really, really cool. Okay, so you're going after leveraging the benefits from this investing and trading strategies, you're tying it back into, I see two huge givebacks from you guys, man, obviously, the free education but going after that human trafficking problem. That's what's our massive problems to pursue? Oh my gosh, that's, that's incredible. Okay, so, so real quick question. You mostly do this in stocks? Is that right? Are you doing things like futures and stuff like that?

Jerremy
Very valid question. I have traded futures. I probably do four or five futures trades a month. Nothing too ridiculous. I do trade cryptocurrencies. I know how to trade foreign currencies. I know how to trade bonds and how to trade commodities. But I mostly trade stocks and options. I would say crypto but it's almost identical. They move very, very, very, very similar. And for me, I tell all the people like It's like Lebron James. Right? He plays basketball. Really? Well. Yeah. I don't know about his football game, or his golf or his baseball, but he's not making money doing those things. So I picked a career path that I understood, I focused on that career path exclusively.

Grant
With stocks and you doing more and more with crypto. And that's such a popular instrument nowadays. Do you do much there then?

Jerremy
I do. I do for numerous reasons. But one of them specifically being that people can do with any amount of money from anywhere in the world. And it really does open a lot of doors to let's say underserved countries that are they're still developing these developing nations, you can give anyone their $10 or let them earn 10 $20. And they can trade crypto and might make $1 a week. But in that world, or that country, that location, that could be a huge return for them. And those opportunities exists. And that's something that I think the crypto markets have allowed to, to really pour pour into other people.

Grant
So for people that are listening to this podcast that are brand new to trading, what tip would you give them to get started?

Jerremy
Most people are brand new, that's the good news. You don't meet many full time day traders who actually make money it's it is a little bit of a rare career path, but it is actually a legit career. And if you are new to it, number one trade companies that you know, know exactly how they make money. So don't trade like random biotech, pharmaceutical companies traded Apple trade, Google trade, Tesla trading normal companies that you know, how they how they interact and what they are. That's the first step for sure. Second step, while you're doing it, start with a small amount of money or pay per trade, right, you can trade virtually, and just practice without any real money at risk at all. Just so you learn a little bit more about it. That's always a very widely accepted form of education. And then yeah, number three, educate yourself right? It doesn't have to be my company. There's tons of websites and articles and YouTube channels that will educate individuals on how on how to trade but the very first star is have a have your mindset and your understanding that it is is achievable and is possible for anyone and yes, it might take 10 years. But what doesn't what doesn't take a long time to be really really, really amazing at it. If you see a professional basketball player, yeah, they make millions of dollars a year, but they pin planks and six. Yeah, now they're 20. Right? 

Grant
Yep. So with regards to a call to action, where would you send people? someone's like, hey, I want to learn more about this. I want to get connected with Jerremy in his system, where are you going to send them?

Jerremy
Absolutely the best call to action, go to https://www.reallifetrading.com/ and click on the beginner's tab. And again, you'll notice that it's free. There's no sales pitch in the presentation. It's just like, hey, man, here's the content, enjoy, go through it, and start there. And I have my email everywhere. I have contact pages everywhere. It's a very easy, user friendly website, and we have a connection teams or reach out to you just to see if you need any help. If you have any questions, we offer free coaching and it's an amazing opportunity for people to learn.

Grant
It is amazing. Thanks for your time today. Any final comments for we for wrap up?

Jerremy
Oh, final comments. This was my dad told me, I asked him what I should be when I grew up when I was about 14 years old. And he said son, study money, study money, study money. I didn't know it at the time was like I don't know what that means. But looking at it now that's that's good advice. Because I think the four most widely under underrated and least talked about but most important subjects on planet Earth are sex, money, religion, and politics. And the least divisive of those four is probably money. So study that one and the other three will start to slowly work themselves out. And you'll start to get into a position where you can hire help and coaches and mentors and, and assistance. You can be in positions where you can change your life dramatically and very quickly using money for the tool that it is, which is an expansion tool of your heart.

Grant
That's awesome, awesome advice. Jerremy, thank you so much for taking the time with us today. Really appreciate that. All the insights you shared, everyone thanks for listening to another episode of Financial Investing Radio and until next time, get some real life trading.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Welcome, everybody. In this episode, we learn the secrets of systematic growth for your portfolio.

Grant
Okay, everybody, welcome to another episode of Financial investing Radio, I'm excited to have in the house with me today, Mr. Adrian Reid coming all the way from Australia, which is fascinating to me that I have this opportunity to get connected with this professional trader on the other side of the planet, literally from where I'm sitting at the moment. First of all, Adrian, welcome.

Adrian
I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me on the call. And isn't this just a fantastic part of the world? You know, we we can communicate from the other side of the world we can we can help traders from all over the world. And there's just really no boundaries now.

Grant
There really isn't. I love that. And what I love is your willingness to get on and share tidbits and insights, right to help the everyday trader who's really trying to figure out how can I grow my portfolio in a way that's going to manage risk? And I know you've got some excellent insights on that. But before we get into that, would you mind stepping back and sort of thinking, what's your origin? How did you get into trading? What even brought you to that part of the world at this point?

Adrian
Yeah, absolutely. Sure. So I've been trading for about 20 years or so now, plus or minus, let's say, six months. And What first got me interested in was actually well, before that, well, before that, my family had a board game, in, in our holiday house, called the stock market game. And I have these amazing, fascinating memories of playing the stock market game becoming a paper billionaire by going around the board and buying lows and selling highs and collecting dividends and stock splits and all of these things. And it was just fascinating. Like, oh, this is this is the best thing ever, was my recollection as an eight year old. Now, I didn't trade or invest for a long time after that. But that was sort of my first memory of the stock market. Wow. And when I started work, I pretty quickly came to the realization that I didn't want to be in the corporate world forever. You know, I was commuting. I was working extremely long hours, I had a lot of high stress right from day one of my first job. And I said to my dad at the time, oh, it basically is this one. It's like, Aha, yeah, I don't want to do this forever. So what do I have to do to not have to do this forever. And we talked about investing, and we talked about stocks and the stock market and real estate and other forms of investing. And so I just started down that, that journey. And when I first came across some money, you know, from from work, I started, I started buying stocks. And I did the typical thing. You know, I didn't actually know anything, but I didn't know that I didn't know anything. So I bought stocks in companies that I recognized that I thought were big names, good companies. 

Grant
And now this is gonna go up, right? 

Adrian
Yeah, yeah, this is gonna go up. This is a great story. And there's a big company, um, you know, I recognize that this is gonna work and I'm smart. So therefore, I should make money. And of course, what happens? You know, I bought in exactly the wrong time it went down. I lost money. Very, very cool at the peak, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I look, I played around with that for a period of time. And it took me three years of trying lots of different styles. Before I actually started making money on it in the corner. I tried that fundamental animal.

Grant
First of all, that's impressive that you were able to, so you didn't trade to the point where you lost all your capital, right? You are at least wise enough not or did you at times, say hey, I blew it all out. I gotta rebuild.

Adrian
Oh, I had no look. Absolutely. I have never blown up an account. So when I think one thing that I've really got, that I did well, from the very beginning was always very cautious about risk. And this is critical, right? Because if you blow up your account, the problem is you've got to then go back to work, you know, save money, and that takes time and You've got to build up the courage and that takes time and you're gonna put the money in the market and and then try again. And then chances are you blow it up again. So as soon as you blow up and lose your money, you've just wasted months and months and months. So from the very beginning, I took small trades, small positions, low risk. And I had learned a little bit about risk control from some of the books I read. And for three years, I was able to survive and on my account sort of went sideways and down a bit and sideways and down a bit, but never really made any gains. But the thing that turned the corner was I, I read a series of books called Market Wizards, which no doubt you've read or seen. And Market Wizards is fantastic, because it's a series of interviews with professional traders who have done extremely, extremely well. And as I was reading through it, I realized that all of these traders have their own unique style. And some of them really were like, really resonated with me. And some of them were like, it was an alien from another planet. And what I realized by reading through those interviews is I had to find a style that really fit me suited my personality. And the one that resonated, the ones that resume the most were the systematic traders, the ones that have rules and did tests to check those rules worked, and then followed those rules. And the reason I resonated is because they didn't spend every waking and sleeping hour staring at the screen. Mm hmm. They spent 15-20 minutes, 30 minutes a day running their rules, placing the trades and that was it. And that's what I needed. Yeah, because I was working a job I you know, I didn't have enough capital to live on my trading back then. Yeah. And so I started trading systematically. And you know, I took three months off work to develop my first trading system.

Grant
Really? Yeah. So you took some sort of sabbaticals?

Adrian
Yeah, I just I just said, Look, this is, I want to do this. And so I took three months off, and they my boss basically laughed at me and said, Good luck with that, you know, trading. Okay. Yeah, right, right. So I didn't get a whole lot of support them from from anyone else apart from my wife and my family. But you know what, when I implemented my first trading system, my results basically turned around on a dime. So if you look back at my equity curve, you can pinpoint to the month where that trading system went live. And that's because all of a sudden, I was consistent, and profitable, I had an edge. And from then on, it's just a matter of patience, of continuous improvement, and adding capital, and then eventually to get there.

Grant
So let me ask you this, in terms of the trading system that you've developed and matured over time, what's your general timeframe? And are you in your positions for a few days? Several months? I mean, what's, what range do you trade?

Adrian
Yeah, this is a good question. This comes back to the idea of it's got to fit your personality. So I'm a fairly patient sort of person, I don't like frantic activity, I don't like you know, really fast paced decisions in high stress. So I'm, I'm a longer term, sort of hold. My my favorite style is long term trend following. So that could be I could be in a position for many months. But I'm quite, I'm quick, systematically to cut my losses. So if I if I, if I enter a trade and hits my stop loss on day one, I'm out, I don't care. I'm very comfortable with that. So trend following is my natural kind of place that I gravitate to. But I have shorter term systems and mean reversion systems that are quite short term, because now having evolved as a trader and got comfortable with what the markets can do, and how they move, I can trade other styles outside my sort of natural center, if you like. 

Grant
So the key for us is to establish that main style of trading get good at that make that consistent, once you've got that producing now look at considering other styles that I hear you right?

Adrian
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think as humans, we, we have a natural sort of center or personality or style that will fit best with us. And let's face it, trading is kind of hard, emotionally. And so if you're, if you're challenging yourself with a style that doesn't fit, and the market is challenging you with all of the, you know, the volatility, the ups and downs, the uncertainty, it's pretty difficult to stick to the rules. But if you have rules that are somewhat natural for you, they fit you and you follow them, then you can learn all the emotional essence from the market deal with those and then branch out. I think that's key.

Grant
Well, so earlier, when you made the comment, hey, you went to your corporate job, and it was stressful. The thought that went through my mind was trading can be stressful. So what is it that protects you, right? It's a different kind of stress. How do you equate the two stresses? I've got corporate job, let's say and their stress is there. But wait a minute, I've got training in the stress. How are those different In your mind,

Adrian
I find that different, the types of stress are different in terms of the duration, intensity, and how much control you have over it. So in the corporate world, what I found was, I was just under constant pressure to do more and more and more and more and more and more, and anything that I could produce, the corporate machine still wanted more. And if I wanted to perform even better next time and get a bigger bonus, then I had to produce more. So it was relentless. Whereas in the market, and it's also externally imposed, you can't do much about it, apart from resigned from the job, if you no longer like it, you know, it's sort of outside your control is what I think you don't feel.

I felt that way. Now, in the market, the market is also outside our control, we cannot control the market. But we can control certain things which are really, really important. We can control whether we are in the market or not. And we do that through our system rules that we trade with, we can control how big our positions are. So that whether or not the volatility causes stress or not. So if you position size very aggressively, you're going to have more stress and more stomach acid in your life. If you position size conservatively, you're gonna have less. So we can also control what strategies we use. If you're long, lonely, and you're highly leveraged, it's going to be amazing and pretty stress free in the middle of a bull market, that the end of a bull market as it's turning, it's going to be extremely stressful. But if you're long only, you don't use that much leverage. And you've got some some short term systems and some long term systems, and you can make money from a bear market. And you can make money when the market turns because you've got different strategies, then some of that stress is really dealt with, because you're diversified in a way I saw.

Grant
So if someone's new to trading, does it make sense for them to approach it that way? From the beginning? Or do they still need to get really good at say, their first initial personality style related system? And then over time, then build that more equitable approach to trading?

Adrian
I get really good question I, I think the answer is you've got to start somewhere. And in order to start, you've got to make sure it's not too overwhelming. So I would say start with one system, or one strategy that you can quickly build confidence with. And it really helps to have a guide to kind of step you through that. But if you've got a like someone to model or someone to follow, you can quickly move from one simple strategy to a diversified portfolio. And so, you know, I teach traders and I teach a lot of brand new traders, and I've taken people from knowing absolutely nothing to a very diversified portfolio in a couple of months. So it really is just, oh, wow, a couple of months yet. Because when you when you are given a set of rules that work, and you're given the tools and knowledge to test and evaluate those rules for yourself, so you can build confidence in them, then you can start trading. And then you just you start trading one set of rules, then you get another set of rules, and you test and evaluate that. And then you can start trading now, and then the next set and the next set. So you can pretty quickly build a portfolio of strategies, if you're not trying to figure everything out on your own. Right.

Grant
Okay, so you started to address some of the questions I had for you, which is how long does it take for someone to get proficient using your system? And it sounds like the first part is they could begin some level of proficiency within two months. Is that accurate? 

Adrian
And for both a completely new trader who is motivated and willing to learn and willing to ask questions can be up and running in in with a system in a month or less, then with a portfolio of systems within two to three months.

Grant
And when you look at that person going after a portfolio, what sort of capital do they need to bring to to this trading style.

Adrian
So my style is all systematic, and each system is a diversified portfolio of instrumental positions that are hold so what let's say one of my trend following systems in stocks, that makes money as stocks just continue up on their their long trend and then when stocks turn around and go down, it gets out and takes you to cash, that system might hold 20 simultaneous positions. Okay, now, if you're trading the Australian market, the Australian market has this unfortunate rule where each trade has to be $500 in value. You can't place a new trade for $200 It's five Under dollar minimum, so for that system on Australian, you need $10,000 to trade it properly, but in the US not so. And in the Asian markets not so so. So you really, you can start with just a couple $100 Or a couple $1,000 If you choose the right market. And this is one of the reasons why the cryptocurrency market is so great, because you can you can trade a diversified portfolio in the crypto markets with very small positions, and there's no minimums, and the costs are very, very small to trade it. So you really capital isn't really a barrier to entry anymore. It's it's really the learning that is the barrier to entry, you've got to have rules that give you an edge. And you've got to have absolute confidence in those rules. That's what you need to win really.

Grant
So the biggest challenge that seems over the years in the years that I've been trading as, as the discipline trader mentality, right, the ability to stick with those rules. So what tips or techniques do you have for, for sticking with the rules, right? Not letting the emotions overcome saying, Hey, I'm just going to take the loss, not doing revenge trading, etc. Right? What What are your tips for sticking with the rules?

Adrian
Yeah, this is this is great, because when I before I, before I became a systematic trader, I was a discretion. I did discretionary technical analysis, and I did fundamental analysis, and I really struggled emotionally. And systematic trading really helped. Because there was no, there's no ambiguity. If you have a system, which is objective that tells you if A and B and C happens you buy if D or E happens you sell, you don't have to wonder, is it a buy signal? Or is it a sell signal? So I think most people will benefit hugely by trading systematically, rather than with discretion. That's the first thing. Second thing is your system won't make money all the time, and it won't be profitable on every trade. It's the the your account is gonna go up and down gradually on a path to building your wealth. So you've got to be comfortable as the account swings around. And the biggest trick to getting comfort is building confidence in the rules. So we have our rules, like I can give you the best trading rules in the world. But if you haven't tested and evaluated them for yourself, then when they start losing money and going into drawdown, it's gonna be really hard for you to keep following them. Right? If you've tested them, and you know, okay, for this set of rules, a 15% drawdown is perfectly normal, or three or five losses in a row was perfectly normal. And if I just keep falling it, I'll come out the other side, if you've done that work, not me telling you that's the case you actually doing the testing, then you can sit comfortably knowing this is perfectly normal.

Grant
So do you provide the traders with a certain level of back testing tips and techniques to prove that out?

Adrian
Yes, absolutely. I think this is the the most important thing, because what what most people ask is, what stock should I buy? What crypto token should I buy? The next level of question? It's a very basic question. Next level of evolution is what rules should I follow? Yep. And if someone asks you what rules should you follow? They've evolved beyond keep trying to get tips, right? They're trying to get a process. The Evolution above that is I these are my rules. And I have confidence in them, because I've tested them. And I've evaluated them. So the most important part of my program, my teaching is actually the the back testing, the evaluation, the optimization, improvement of systems, yes, I give systems, but I don't want you to believe and trust me that those systems work. I want to give you the skills and tools to make that decision for yourself. So you can actually follow them in good times and bad. Does that make sense?

Grant
Oh, total total sense. Yeah. That way that you have a greater probability of being disciplined of sticking with that system and not not bailing when you shouldn't? Or not being able to get back in when you should? That's, that's right. Yeah, yeah. critical aspect for them. So when you think about the portfolio's you've talked about you doing stocks? You doing crypto? Do you do have an approach where you separate the portfolio across those? Or is is crypto always part of it? Or do you just focus in crypto with some of your trading strategies, but different ones in stocks? I know it's a long question. And how do you distinguish between the two trading?

Adrian
Yeah, it's a good question. It's a good question. And one of the one of the things I realized when I started researching into systems is that different markets move and behave differently. So you know, gold moves differently to oil moves differently to the stock indices moves differently to the Australian stock market. So my rules are developed for each market. Now a great set of rules will probably work on several markets, but you design it for a certain market. So I have rules for the Australian stock market rules for the Hong Kong Stock market rules for the US stock market. And I have rules for the crypto markets and then different. What I have that sits above all of those systems is a capital allocation model. And I say, okay, for my portfolio, I have this X percent in system one y percent in system two, Zed percent in system three, and so on. And each day, when I'm calculating the size for my positions, I go all the way to the top and say, Okay, how much money do I have in my accounts? What are the percentages for each system? And then within each system, how do I size each trade. And by cascading it down like that, you do a couple of things, you make sure you stay diversified, you don't get concentrated, you make sure your risk on each trade is low, and red linked to the amount of capital you've got in that system and in in total in your account. So the systems are all separate, but they essentially trade a common pool of money and have an allocation to each system, which keeps everything safe and balanced.

Grant
Okay, so. So having that in place, then it makes total sense to, to organize it that way. And it sounds like because I've traded lots of different markets like you having the rules that are that are unique to market makes total sense. Because each one of them has different personalities, even with the same let's say it's us base stocks, then even even each of those have their own sort of personality and characteristics. And so the question is, you know, trading apples gonna behave differently than trading IBM, right? Or whatever, right, that they all have that? So my question is, what in your trading system in terms of your rules? How far down do you get? Do you get to individual stock sort of rules, or you keep it to sort of industry or sector rules, how far down you go with that.

Adrian
So for me, personally, I usually go down to a market, I trade one set of rules that would be applied to a, an entire market or a subset of that market, like, I have a set of rules that would be applied to stocks in the s&p 500, I have a set of rules that would be applied to the entire US stock market. So NASDAQ, Amex NYSC, not pink sheets, for instance, I have a set of rules that isn't applied to the entire Hong Kong market, and the entire Australian market. So I sort of play at that level, you can develop systems at a lower level. But the trouble is, the lower you go, the less trades you get in your back tests, the less confidence you have that the rules really work.

Grant
Yeah, that's what I was wondering about your comment about back testing, I started thinking, Oh, wow, because I know the personalities of some better than others, I obviously don't trade all of them. And after a while you find a few that you feel like you start to understand. So you focus on those, I started like, wow, if you're gonna do that back testing against each of those different types of personalities, that's that's a lot of work. To do that back testing.

Adrian
The back testing is probably not as much work as you think. Because the the way, the way I do it is I have a subscription to a data provider, which gives me all of the stock history for all of the stocks on all of the markets. Okay, I put that into some trading software, I use Amy broker, there's other software, but Amy broker is probably one of the best, best value trading sort of back testing software's. And in the software, I codify the rules and the portfolio management principles and rules in the position sizing. And then I can back test using those rules on the entire market all at the same time. So once I've coded to run a backtest, over 30 years of history, over 1000s of stocks listed on the US market takes about a minute. Oh, really? Wow. Okay, so we're not doing this manually? Oh, guess. It's not just a matter of pressing the backtest button and saying, oh, it's profitable. There's steps you need to go through in the analysis to validate Oh, it's profitable, it's stable, the rules are all significant. I haven't over optimized or fine tune my system to particular trades or the past data. So back testing is really a process. But the labor intensive stuff is taken out of it by the software.

Grant
So that makes it it makes total sense. Because I've both written code on as well as use multiple back testing systems. And I know they can become quite involved. My question is now with that back testing strategy that you have, as you then go to apply it, is it the human that's clicking the button, or do you do leverage software that actually says Oh, well, hey, here's the point to actually execute based on these rules. And therefore it executes that for you.

Adrian
Yeah, it can be both. So on the crypto side, my trading is 100% automated, I literally, I don't do anything, I just monitor that the program, the algorithm is working. And I get a report at the end of each day saying these are the trades you placed. And I just make sure that that's all, you know, in line. On the stock side, it depends on the style of the type of stocks you're trading. So if you're trading extremely high liquidity stocks, like let's say you only traded stocks in the S&P 500, it's pretty easy to fully automate that one. It's less troublesome to fully automate that. And I won't say too easy because there's a bit of tech involved in the automation, if you're trading penny stocks, or smaller caps, where there's a little more risk of slippage, and you want to be a bit more careful with your entries, probably less wise to trust that to a piece of software to place your trades for you. So I do most of my I do my stock trading manually. Okay, but I'm moving to automation on that side for selected systems, not for every system. Yes, but I think the advantage is, on the stock side, I'm only trading once a day or once a week. And so it still takes very little time, even though the execution is not automated, I literally spend 15 to 20 minutes a day, placing orders. And that's all I do on my trading, it's really quite quick when you trade systematically.

Grant
That's amazing. So if I pull it back then to you got a brand new trader, they're gonna put in about two months of effort before they can maybe get a portfolio in place. I'm assuming initially, that's probably manual trading activities, but over time, then they take on more and more automated capabilities. Is that fair?

Adrian
Yeah, they could if they wanted to, if they were comfortable with the technology to do so, as some people are not, you know, they're not programmers by background. And some of those, you know, the API's or that is it's not straightforward. So you don't have to do that. I've traded for 20 years, and I'm still doing some trades manually, that, you know, 1520 minutes a day doesn't stress me out too much. So I'm okay with that.

Grant
Yeah, yeah. If you are stressed out, Adrian, then yeah, I'd say well, wait a minute. No, that's not stress 15 to 20 minutes. Um, so quick question. When you talk about the profile of your, you know, the students, the people that you take through this, can you describe a few profiles of people that tend to do well at this,or I have literally taken all sorts.

Adrian
So, you know, I have on one extreme, the people who gravitate most naturally to systematic trading, and typically, typically analytical types, engineers, scientists, accountants, people who are comfortable with computers in code. And they will typically pick it up very quickly, they'll they'll see the value in the analysis, they won't be stressed out by the the software, the analytical work or the coding. And they'll be off to the races very, very quickly. But at the other end of the extreme, I've taught artists, people with adult someone with a dog walking business, some people who are stay at home moms stay at home dads, who with with no analytical background, so it works for all sorts. But the common the common drive or factor amongst all of them, is you is desire. You've got to and fascination, you've got to really want to learn to trade the markets. What I say to people, when they come to me say can you teach me to trade say, Well, yes, but why do you want to learn? And what do you think about the markets and people who say, Oh, look, I just think I, I should invest? I don't really know anything. And stock seems easier than property because I've got no money. I say, You know what, it's probably gonna be a hard journey for that person. But for someone who comes to me and says, Look, I just, I just love the way the markets move up and down. It's, it's kind of fascinating to me. I've tried, but I lost money. And I don't know why. And I just want to learn, you know, that person will succeed ultimately with the right guidance.

Grant
Awesome. That that's wonderful. Okay, so if someone wanted to find you, how do they find you? What's what's a call to action here so they can get

Adrian
Yeah, absolutely. So the the business in the website is enlightened stock trading and for your listeners, Grant, I've put together a page with some kind of free free content and courses just to get people started. So EnlightenedStockTrading.com/FIR, register there and they'll get a bunch of cheat sheets about how to avoid losing how to make money and how to build confidence in your systems and a course on the millionaire trader code which gets your mind right and shows you the path to success.

Grant
Excellent. Wow. Thank you for doing that. I didn't know you're going to do that. I appreciate that.

Adrian
Yeah, no pleasure. It's exciting because you You know, what I want most of all, is to stop people from getting into the market uninformed, and just losing their money. Because a little bit of education will keep people alive. And a little bit more education will actually show you how to make money. So, you know, what I'm aiming for is, first of all, make sure people who get into the markets just don't lose everything in the next two weeks, because that happens more often than you'd think. So absolutely. With that do people can be in the game.

Grant
And with the increased volatility in the market today, does the systematic trading, you still fill fill work? Well, I mean, it's obviously not. It's not that secular bull market that we've experienced over the last, you know, plus, you know, decade or more, right. So that's change. Any thoughts on that?

Adrian
Yeah, the key here is diversification. So you don't want to as you evolve as a trader, you'll become more and more diversified. And you can make money for more different market conditions, you can make money from quiet up markets, from volatile sideways markets, you can make money from volatile downward market, you just need the right set of rules. So none of the market conditions need to be scary. It's just a matter of finding rules that work and applying them consistently. And that can those rules turn themselves on and off. Well, at least in my world, I create the systems to turn himself on and off when the time is right. So my long side trend following turns off when the market isn't in a bull phase. So I'm not going to keep taking signals all the way down in the bear market, because that's just silly. It's low probability. But I will sell stock short when the indices, rollover, and everything is clearly going down. And I'll hold the short positions until the market comes up, or until I've got a decent profit and then hits my profit target. So it doesn't matter what the markets doing, you can have a systematic approach that works.

Grant
Great. I wanted to make sure that point came out that this is not just about because earlier we talked about, oh, well, I put it in I think the long term, the reality is for the different market conditions, you have the set of rules to handle what the current market conditions are. So that's key.

Adrian
Yeah, absolutely. That's really, really important. You've got to diversify. No one method doesn't matter what you're trading or investing in no one thing is your path to wealth. You need to have different strategies, different approaches, and systematic trading is no different.

Grant
Adrian, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. I know it's, it's already tomorrow. It's Saturday. From the future in Australia. It is from the future. What's the market look like? Yeah, just let me know. Right.

Adrian
I'm fortunately markets closed in the future because it's Saturday.

Grant
Ah, that's right. That's right. Well, Adrian, thank you for taking the time, especially on your weekend. I appreciate you doing that. And I look forward to chatting with you again, because I'd like to do a follow up with you in some time. And everyone please take a look at that call to action that you shared on that URL. What's that URL? One more time?

Adrian  
It's EnlightenedStockTrading.com/FIR

Grant
Thank you very much. Okay, everyone. Thanks for joining. And until next time, get some systematic trading.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com.

In this episode, we take a look at the question Can AI Be Used to Automate the Mundane?

Grant
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So welcome, I am excited to bring into the show today someone that it's taken me several times trying to get to this, busy busy guy. This is Evan Ryan. Evan, I hope I said your name right, right. Because I've said some people's names wrong. It's not Yvonne right or not right on? Is it Evan Ryan? Right?

Evan
It is Evan Ryan. Yeah, you got it in the right order. Most of the time, it's in the opposite order to flip it around.

Grant
Right. Um, founders CEO, King, of Teammate AI, right.

Evan
I just tried to go by founder. Okay.

Grant
Awesome. All right. Tell us a bit about yourself, Evan, what's brought you to this point. And anyway, thanks for joining the show. All right. Let me stop talking. Go ahead.

Evan
Well, Grant, thanks for having me. We were talking before we started recording, I just hit it off from the first second, at least in my opinion, I'm having a wonderful time. So really with me, I didn't really notice this. But throughout my entire childhood, I really had zero tolerance for boring stuff. I was somebody who just really likes doing fun things. And I like doing things that are that are entertaining, that are challenging, that are fascinating, that are motivating. But I don't like doing things that are boring. And I will basically do anything that I can to avoid doing boring stuff. And of course, now Hindsight is 2020. But that's sort of how I view a lot of my childhood. Well, in 2016, I went to a conference where they had this guy by the name of Jeremy Howard. And at the time, or a year or two prior, he was the number one ranked AI researcher in the world. He was talking about all this stuff that you could do with AI. And he, he mentioned that he had this company that could correctly diagnose cancer from MRIs and CT scans. Cool better than a team of board certified doctors. Oh, this isn't 2016. Yeah, so I was just about to graduate from college. I was thinking that oh my gosh, like, this is just the coolest thing I've ever heard. I basically went into AI the next day. Did you really? Wow. Yeah, it was it was really sort of powerful and transformative. Over the next couple of years of sort of iterating around well, what what do I really want to do inside of AI? You know, how do I want to define AI? First of all, there's sort of no definition that everybody can agree upon. I really found that, you know, I hate doing boring stuff. I bet a lot of other people hate doing boring stuff, too. Yeah, yeah. So and so now we all know the pattern there for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And what I've found is really interesting is, you know, one of the biggest conversation topics around AI right now is will AI take all of our jobs?

Grant
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I hear that so many times. Yes.

Evan
I mean, there are like so many ways to answer that with the answer, in my opinion, being No. But what I found is really exciting is when I bring people into the creative process about how can they automate the mundane, the boring, repeatable on their days, they're so excited, like the first time in a while that they felt like, wow, the future is so much bigger than my past. So for the last several years, we've been automating, we've been automating tasks and automating processes for small and medium sized businesses.

Grant
So let me back up. So you hear this guy speak. You're like AI is the place to go. Your passion is let me take boring out of life. So you're leveraging AI to do that to remove the boring. I remember my dad is really what got me into the, into the technology industry. He was in it if you can believe it, right? So he was like one of the early early pioneers in some of this stuff. And he I remember him using the phrase Boolean shift a lot. He would always talk like, oh, technology is a Boolean shift. And I'm like, What are you talking about? What's a Boolean shift, you know? But this is kind of a Boolean shift with AI something, it's going to totally replace us. But in fact, I think it's a shift to the right, where it starts to automate more and more capabilities. It does require us to re retool. But that's good. Because every big shift, you know, throughout our whole economic history, right, as a country, and as innovation continues to grow, we have to keep shifting to the right terms of the skill sets that are important and critical. So I don't see it as, as this big day AI is gonna come take over, and we're all gonna sit around and become people like on E. What is it Wally, that movie Wally? Right, where they sit around doing nothing? Right, I don't think is that, but I do think it is a shift in terms of the capabilities that will bring and therefore we'll get skilled up in other areas. What are your thoughts on that?

Evan
Well, I have a question first before, before I answer that, do you have a memory of when you were a child, where you first saw technology, do something and you're like, holy, holy smokes.

Grant
I do it was that this will highlight the age difference between you and I, it was my, my dad worked in this. So there used to be a competitor to IBM. They're called Control Data Corp, and my dad worked for them. He'd worked on some of the big mainframe systems. And I remember one time, he took me into one of their big mainframe centers, right, and we walk into this room and the fans are running. And the big computers are, and the disk, you know, the tape drive is going, you know, like, just like you see on the old movies, right? And the big disk drives worrying. And my dad sits down and starts coding some things on it. And the computer starts interacting with me saying my name and helped me, you know, asking me questions. And I remember leaning up to and going, this is what I'm gonna do. I don't know everything that just happened there. But I want to be a part of this. So yes, that that was my technology origin story. Yeah.

Evan
Yeah. For me. So outside of seeing this, like this was years ago, when I was like a small child. I remember my best friend was sending out invitations to a fourth of July, a fourth of July party in the United States. And, and he mailmerge at like age eight, e mail merge, like 500 contacts. Oh, that's everything that is just insane. Like, as incredible as mail merging. And AJ at AJ. Also, like, what is this thing? mailmerge? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's so fun to like, kind of think about, you know, there's this like, one time where at some point, you're like, I wonder what else it can do? This is just the beginning. Yeah. But to answer your question, you know, will we will we all end up just kind of like sitting around or being artists all day? I don't think so. The example that I use is, you know, right now you and I are talking over zoom. It took me three clicks in order to get into our zoom meeting. Right? And so what if I went, what if we went back to the 1950s. And we said that in 70 years, you're going to be able to talk to virtually anybody in the world, you'll be able to see their face, the audio quality will be crystal clear. And I'll cost you essentially nothing. But all 1.5 million telephone switchboard, switchboard operators will lose their jobs.

Grant
Yeah, yeah, it's it's true. Yeah, that Yeah, right. Yeah, no, people like, like, There's no way.

Evan
Right, and, and so there's always been this sort of technological destruction that has taken place. Even back when we humans created the waterwheel. And now you didn't have as many people moving water to generate power generate electricity, or when we created ladders, and, you know, there are all sorts of different pieces of technology that we've had, over the last several 1000 years that have changed the way that we worked. This is just another one, I think it's a bigger shift than then some of the other ones. But, you know, the printing press did the same thing. There are all sorts of people that were just writing books, they were writing the Bible over and over and over and over again. Well, they lost their job pretty darn fast. Yet we have more people on the planet than ever before, and more people are employed than ever.

Grant
To do this. I remember one of the startups that I was involved with earlier in my career in Silicon Valley, we're trying to solve the problem of we want to be able to allow software engineers and designers to design systems remotely over the Internet, right. And so in order to do that, we have some some design tools, but we got to make that accessible and you need to be able to manipulate it remotely. Right. This is before there's a lot of big fat network pipes. You know, you know, everyone's got high bandwidth, right. So we were trying to figure out how to get this to work. We ended up getting it to work, but the cost was prohibitive. Right Just so dang grim. So when I think about the progress of technology, it's lots of trying over and over again until you get to this point where enough of the complexity can be abstracted away so that ultimately the end user sees this simplicity enough to say it's adoptable for both ease of use as well as cost perspective. I think we're right there. They I, I think we're doing similar thing, right to go through the same round, which is, can I take some techniques that are advanced that have some value, but you don't have to have massive data science background in order to get the benefits from that, and I see that shift taking place where more and more of it can then become accessible to others? As the cost drops dramatically?

Evan
I've seen similar things, I I couldn't agree more. You know, I think AI is sort of one of those things that for a decade or two was promised but under delivered, no, yeah. And now it's so it's like it's coming in with a vengeance. And the tools that are being made are super intuitive. The use cases that are being documented, and copied and repeated are ones that affect a lot of people. And I think people are really opening their minds to the idea that they don't have to do things the same way that they always have, just because that's how it's always been done. So I think it's kind of a combination of a huge mindset shift. But also just the tools are flat out better than they've ever been before. And they're finally usable to the point where you can automate things and you can create API's with button clicks instead of with raw code.

Grant
Yeah, yeah. Which is, which is fascinating. I think it's bringing an order of magnitude capability, and will continue to do that, to the kinds of problems that we can solve it. And it's just, I think, at the crux of it right in others is you look to the future, if you can continue to provide this time to this kind of computational power. And add that in the future to things like quantum, when we start blending both of those, I think the kinds of problems we can solve becomes quite large. But let me pull it back to tell me about the problems you're specifically solving with teammate AI. So So you got into this space, you're looking to go solve some problems with AI, you want to make things simple, what are you making simple?

Evan
You know, we really love to help entrepreneurial companies, and primarily companies where the executive team really wants to grow, they really would love to grow, they'd love to grow five or 10x, and the next decade or two decades, or even shorter, but they can't bear the idea of doing it while radically increasing their payroll. Right. And the most common complaint that we hear is not you know, I have the wrong team or my team doesn't do great work. It's that my team is underutilized because they have too much stuff on their plate. And so what we really try to automate the problems that we try to solve, are really helping these team members helping these employees identify what are the things that you do in a day that you hate the most, let's not automate the stuff that you love, let's automate the stuff that you hate. And then we'll figure out together how we can automate this so that you never have to deal with it again. And so we do that with with companies, basically, across every industry. The the question, the second question that I get the most often is, what industries does AI work in? And my answer is always well, you know, AI is a little like electricity, like, sure there's the electric company. But every every company was benefited. And every industry was benefited by electricity. And it's kind of a similar thing. Yeah, you know, there's sort of no gift that you can give people that's more valuable than their time, in my opinion.

Grant
What would be some use cases that you're applying it to? Is it? Is it things like bookkeeping, is it, you know, mundane, you know, administrative tasks? Or is it in other areas that you're applying AI?

Evan
So every company is a little different? I mean, of course, there's like bookkeeping and accounts receivable, and how can we send invoices out of our ERP smoother or submit website forms for invoicing smoother. But there's also a lot of reporting, sort of data collection, data crunching and then putting that into a human readable format. That way, people aren't in charge of trying to figure out what the data says. Instead, the computer tells you what the most important things are to look for. We use AI to write newspaper articles, write and publish newspaper articles for media outlets across the country. Regardless of your feelings of the media, it costs too much money in order to be able to write an article especially for info journalism, like what happened in the local sporting events. So we're doing that all across the country and all across the world, all the way to multi day processes where maybe We're using machine vision to look at images and see, well, are there any defects in the products that we're working with right now? If there are defects, what are the defects and let's report back to the supplier, let's report it back to whoever's responsible in order to be able to get that quality control, like up to speed and up to where we needed to be. So we do the boring in the mundane like accounts receivable, we also do the really sexy and complex machine vision. And we're reporting back with here. Here's the percentage of products that you shipped us, for example, that that were manufactured properly or are up to spec.

Grant
That's quite a, that's quite a wide range of use cases. That's, that's amazing. Are you building your machine vision work off of the Open CV material or your you did this all by hand?

Evan
We use Fast AI's library, which Fast AI was the not for profit that was founded by Jeremy Howard. So basically, Jeremy was telling me in this conference, you know, here's all the great things that you can do about AI, by the way, I have a free and open course. And we found that their library is just absolutely unbelievable. So we'll try as hard as we can to be able to, to be able to build it from scratch. And the reason for that we originally did not try to do that we originally tried to use a lot of the open source. Yeah. But the reason was really interesting. It was that, especially when, when the process that we were automating wasn't related to customer acquisition, lead generation. Yeah, what was happening a lot of times was our was our clients who would get this new capability called this AI that saving, you know, hours or days per week in some cases, and they'd say something to the effect of, you know, everybody else in our industry faces the same problem. Could we license this to everybody else in our industry? Wow. Well, now they had this old legacy business, that they flipped into a software as a service business. And we realized really fast that we that we had to be able to make sure that our solution scaled to more than just one user. Mm hmm.

Grant
Amazing. So what's been some of the outcomes, you've noticed now that you've been out doing this across a range of companies, what, what's been the impact to them?

Evan
What's most exciting for me is that all companies are unique, yet all companies are the same. So they all have product delivery, they all have accounting, and bookkeeping, they all have sales and customer acquisition, they all have customer service. And so they all have these sort of functions, that interplay really nicely together. But largely, they're the same. The real differentiator, among a lot of companies is things like their supply chain, their product and their product delivery. So being able to help a wide swath of companies get clarity surrounding, you know, AI isn't just for Silicon Valley. It's not just for Tesla, and Mehta and Apple and Google, right. That's been really exciting. I think that there's a real market shift going on among employees, I think employees really have a smaller and smaller tolerance for doing stuff that's boring and doesn't move the ball forward. And companies are really incentivized right now, to outsource a lot of the work to AI in order to be able to retain their best talent. And so that's been one of the really, really interesting things. I think that's come out of the last six months.

Grant
Now, I guess I could imagine it would be something like removing them in the mundane so that you can tap into their creative, right, I think that's really sort of what you're after, right? It's try to exploit opportunities to get more creativity from your people. I would imagine in today's market, too, with a lot of attrition taking place and the challenges with hiring, that this also can be beneficial. It's is it part of a play to help people stay in their jobs where you could take some of the mundane out of it, and therefore allow them to do more creative and enjoyable things in their work?

Evan
It absolutely is. That's actually one of the biggest reasons why a lot of companies decide to work with us right now is because they know that they if it can create a work experience, that's five times better than what it is right now. That key employee might not go looking for an extra $10,000 A year or an extra 20 grand, or for new opportunities just because it doesn't feel like a right fit anymore. And so we're seeing that all the time. We're also seeing on the flip side of it, a lot of companies that are having problems hiring, or they're having problems retaining employees, just overall, maybe they have a 3040 50% attrition rate on new hires in any particular role. They're starting to ask the question, Well, I wonder why. Like, maybe it's us. That's the problem. And it's not them. That's the problem. And so all of those tasks that used to be hired, are now being automated instead. That way they can hire for those more creative and fascinating and motivating roles. I mean, I don't know anybody I don't know anybody who wakes up on a Monday morning looking forward to doing the same stuff they've done for the last five years.

Grant
Yeah, if they do well, yeah, that's another conversation. But sounds like you use a range of things from RPA to some custom built AI work, you guys have developed is your sort of toolset is that, right?

Evan
Yeah, whatever it takes to get the job done. A lot of times customers will have specifications. But, you know, Microsoft Power automates a really powerful tool. And there's a lot that you can do with 1000 lines of Python code, right, and with a great AWS or Azure suite. And so we do use, we have a handy and a really kind of wide tool belt. But what we find is that we're using the same tool sort of over and over again, which is really handy, I think, overall, and it makes it so that the tools are getting better over time.

Grant
They are Yeah, they're definitely getting better. Okay, so for our audience, what would be a call to action for them? If they were wanting to learn more about you and your organization and what you're doing?

Evan
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing would be head to automation secrets that teammate ai.com, there, you can get a free copy of my new book, AI is your teammate. And really what it does is it kind of helps distill down what are the mindsets necessary in order to be able to use AI in your world, whether you're a business owner and entrepreneur and executive or an employee? And how can you make it happen? You know, there's a lot of sort of how to guides for how do you make automation happen, but I've tend to find that they're all either way too high level, like, AI can only be used for chatbots on your website, or cybersecurity, or they're literally showing you lines of code. And so how can you make it happen, no matter what your level of technical capabilities are? So I would head there, no matter what, get a teammate, or you can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere where you find books.

Grant
Oh, that's cool. So when you think about a bell curve in terms of the amount of time that someone would commit to working with a group like yourself, what does that look like, you know, the bell curve is or the efforts or the projects you do with them? Is it a two week four week, eight week? What does that look like?

Evan
I you know, for for relatively small automations. If you're if you're using a tool, like Zapier, for example, that would be two to four weeks. So very, very short, you could wake up this month, you have a lot of stuff on your plate that you hate. And by next quarter, you could have saved 510 20 hours a week, depending on what your job description looks like, all the way to six months to a year depending on if you have a if you have a really complicated sort of project that you need to automate.

Grant
Gotcha. Gotcha. Very cool. Okay. What questions do you have for me, you said you wanted to ask me some questions before we started?

Evan
I do want to ask you, yeah, what do you see? You know, so you do it a different type of like a eyes and really what we specialize in? We don't try to do a lot of the predictive the predictive modeling. Yeah. What are you seeing in the marketplace? On the predictive side?

Grant
Yeah. So on the predictive side, I'm definitely working in that space. Not so much in the CV area, but more in terms of predictive analytics itself. So you know, taking things like oh, how can I? How can I address stockout? problems, right, my supply chain? Or, oh, what can I do to increase sales? That is probably the number one use case that I see. Right, which is, hey, we're just trying to grow the business? And what are the conditions that are driving the best sales situation? Or how can I take costs out of my business? So efficiency plays? That's probably the second sort of style of problems that organizations need to solve. And similar to what you're describing, in all cases, it's Can I do it with the same amount or fewer resources? Right, I can't be adding more resources to this. In most cases, there's this FOMO aspect, which is there's this fear of the unknown, what is it that the AI can see that I can't write, because lots of times our brains are wired to see only just a few factors or variables. And then once we get too many dimensions out, our brain sort of gives out AI really exploits that well. And so casting as wide a net as possible, that makes sense for that business outcome. You're trying to target where it sells or whatever, and letting the AI help you to see all of those all those far reaching variables and pulling that in and saying actually, it's, it's the combination of these other factors as well means that this is when your sales take place. If it's this salesperson, during this time of the month to this particular market. You know, when the weather is clear in San Diego, whatever it might be, right? Those conditions tend to drive higher sales, whatever the situation, it's that watching business owners have that aha moment to go. Oh, okay. And that's, that's real satisfying, because then they go in and start tweaking their business, right, just enough to say, hey, it was worth the effort to discover them. One more thing, while I'm monologuing on this, there's that part. And then there's the other part, which is I find that AI, it can bring so many predictive insights, that it cripples the organization, right? It comes back and says, here's all the drivers, and here's all the factors, but it gives you, you know, 20 of them, and you're like, oh, okay, what am I gonna do with 20? Right? How do I figure and so that's the other key part of what we do, which is, we then say, oh, let's prioritize these into a series of incremental steps that moves the organization one step at a time. Otherwise, people get changed fatigue, right, it's too much to keep trying to, you know, do it all at once. So we take the insights that are predictive, go after those that have the highest probability as it relates to the business outcome, and then just go do one or two of those, and then rebuild, because contacts, you know, business shit, and business drift occurs, data drift occurs. And so you then refactor the the model again and gives you fresh insights. So how's that for a long answer? That's what I'm saying?

Evan
Well, that's actually you kind of touched on one of the follow ups that I wanted to ask, which is, we spend a lot of our time with the end users with the end employees, it sounds to me like you spend a lot of your time with the C suite. Is that correct?

Grant
We do, but it depends on the organization. And who's been tasked, in many cases, will we start with a C suite. And I'll tell you why. One of the challenges, I believe, with a lot of the AI platforms today is is the over over focus on model accuracy, right getting a 90% accurate, now, don't get me wrong, the model has got to be, you know, really accurate, but when it's done outside of the context of your business operations, then it means I could end up producing an AI model that's so efficient, that my business is not actually able to deal with or handle it may be bringing me too many deals, such that it actually increases the cost of goods sold, that it actually ends up hurting my business. And so it really needs this combination of a sufficient, efficient model connected to what are my business costs, my operations, my you know, the the amount of resources I have available, and that's why it needs to go a step at a time, right, you just keep going one step at a time to improve or grow it. So sometimes it's with the data, people. But if you do it outside of the context of those business questions, then it tends not to be as effective on the ROI.

Evan
That's a that's one of the things I was gonna ask, are you seeing that there are sometimes negative consequences where the AI is so good? Yeah, you know, that people either you have a change management problem where people's preconceived notions of why things happened was actually incorrect. And now you have to retrain, or something like that, where, you know, the like what you said, the cost of goods rises so much, because it's so efficient at acquiring new customers or getting more sales, that that the business wasn't ready to scale to that level? Do you see that that happens more often than not? Or is that a sort of a corner case?

Grant
I don't know, I don't think it's corner case. It's, it's a fair, fair amount of the cases, though, enough to be a worry, right, that if I don't take change management into consideration, as I roll out AI, then then my probabilities of success dropped dramatically that just because I have the insights from Ai, in my opinion, is only 70% of the way there, then you got to get that, you know, last mile and and the last mile is the successful rollout and adoption of this, and sometimes it's a cultural thing you're running into, people are worried, oh, I'm gonna lose my job. Others are like, Oh, this is gonna change my job. And then others are, well, we embrace it. But now we run into a money problem. And the money problem is that our business operations can't handle this adjustment. Or maybe the AI got it wrong, and the business can't handle that adjustment either. Right? Doesn't mean that it's always right. And so in either case, it can have that financial impact. And if we're not, if we're not taming the AI enough in the context of business operations, then it ends up creating a problem. So there's several hurdles after you get just those those predictive insights.

Evan
Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about hearing hearing your world which your world is just is so radically different than mine, I mean, with us, we have a pretty set, you know, this set of criteria. We're going to automate this process Is this process we've mapped out exactly what the steps are in the process, and then we build a computer to do it. with you what I think is interesting is, I hear all the time, that this concept of what we want to use data to make better decisions. Oh, yeah. And, like, there, I always think, you know, there's part of that that's true. But there's also part of it, that's like, you are thinking that the human should be making a decision right now.

Grant
I like to view this more as augmented intelligence. I know we say AI. But I think a should be augmented. It's really the state of where the practice is, I think in AI, to say that we're going to give all decision making rights over to some AI model and just blindly trust that I think that's naive in today's AI. Now, you know, they're getting better and better. But I work a lot of organizations where the majority, the AI model is early. And so it's growing, the need for a lot more cognitive support from the humans, to ensure that this thing is naturally moving in a way that is reliable, and truly predictable. And otherwise, I think you could just hand it off and say, I give all all decisioning rights over to the AI, I think that's foolish, you have the ability and need the ability, even after you've deployed an AI model to come back and vote on the impact of that insight. And that's important, because we want to continue to refine the training and retraining of the AI. Hey, what you just shared with me that predictive insight actually didn't pan out, that guidance really needs to come back into the models.

Evan
Yeah, I think, you know, the AI at the end of the day, like the algorithms, they make a prediction and they make a recommendation, but they never, they never make a decision. Now, humans either a prediction or recommendation, the human needs to make a decision. So the AI can provide all sorts of information, and it can provide recommendations. But But yeah, I don't it's not ready yet to to just understand how the world works and understand where you're going, what your objectives are, and then just say, this is right. It's not it's not quite otherwise. I know. I know, a lot of senior managers who are going to have really bad days. AI can do that. So what are some of your what are some of your sweet spots? What are the things that were the projects where you know, you know, that you can hit it out of the park?

Grant
Yeah, it's, like I said, it's in medium sized organizations typically trying to solve, you know, a revenue sales problem, right? That's definitely a sweet spot and supply chain areas, right? That's where they're looking to say, Hey, I'm trying to make sure I can, can keep inventory coming in at the right pace or the right rate, which is a serious problem now. But you know, we've also seen it in even in the current talent management shortages that's going on, which is, can I use it to help me understand the probabilities of, you know, certain groups or individuals who are candidates for leaving early right, and the cost and impact to an organization when that happens? Those are the types of use cases where typically we get involved. Those are, those are great questions, for sure. Okay. All right. This has been awesome. Yeah, you haven't. Thank you.

Evan
This has been great Grant.

Grant
Yeah, thanks for your questions. Any final statement before we wrap up about Teammate AI?

Evan
You can grab AI as your teammate on Amazon or at automationsecretsteamai.com. But mostly, I just hope that everybody has a future that's far, far bigger than their past, and far better than their past. Thanks for having me, Grant. Really appreciate this one.

Grant
Thank you for your time, everybody. Thanks for joining another episode of clique AI radio. And until next time, get some Teammate AI.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Grant
Welcome everybody. In this episode, we take a look at the four pitfalls to AI ethics and are they solvable?

Okay, hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So glad to have in the house today Plainsight AI. What a privilege. Elizabeth Spears with us here today. Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth
Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me back.

Grant
Thanks for coming back. You know, when we were talking last time, you threw out this wonderful topic around pitfalls around AI ethics. And it's such a common sort of drop phrase, everyone's like, oh, there's ethics issues around AI. Let's, let's shy away from it. Therefore, it's got a problem, right? And I loved how you came back. And it was after our episode, it's like he pulled me aside in the hallway. Metaphorically like "Grant, let's have a topic on the pitfalls around these some of these ethical topics here". So I, you hooked me I was like, Oh, perfect. That's, that's a wonderful idea with that.

Elizabeth
So typically, I think there's, there's so many sort of high level conversations about ethics and AI, but, but I feel like we don't dig into the details very often of kind of when that happens, and how to deal with it. And like you said, it's kind of the common pitfalls.

Grant
It is. And, you know, it's interesting is the, in the AI world in particular, it seems like so many of the ethical arguments come up around the image, style of AI, right, you know, ways in which people have misused or abused AI, right for either bad use cases or other sort of secret or bad approaches. So this is like you are the perfect person to talk about this and, and cast the dagger in the heart of some of these mythical ethical things, or maybe not right. All right. Oh, yeah. Alright, so let's talk through some of these. So common pitfalls. So there were four areas that you and I sort of bantered about, he came back he said, Okay, let's talk about bias. Let's talk about inaccuracy in models, a bit about fraud, and then perhaps something around legal or ethical consent violations. Those were four that we started with, we don't have to stay on those. But let's tee up bias. Let's talk about ethical problems around bias. All right.

Elizabeth
So I mean, there's really there's several types of bias. And, and often the biased and inaccuracies can kind of conflate because they can sort of cause each other. But we have I have some examples of of both. And then again, somewhere, some where it's it's really biased and inaccuracies that are happening. But one example or one type is not modeling your problem correctly, and in particular, to simply so I'll start with the example. So you want to detect safety in a crosswalk, right, relatively simple kind of thing. And, and you want to make sure that no one is sitting in this crosswalk. Because that would be now generally be a problem. It's a problem. So, so you do body pose detection, right? And if you aren't thinking about this problem holistically, you say, All right, I'm going to do sitting versus standing. Now the problem with that is what about a person in a wheelchair? So then you would be detecting kind of a perceived problem because you think someone sitting in the middle of a crosswalk but but it's really just about accurately defining that problem. And then and then making sure that's reflected in your labeling process. And and that kind of flows. into another whole set of problems, which is when your test data and your kind of labeling process are a mismatch with your production environment. So one of the things that we really encourage for our customers is, is collecting as much production close as close to possible, or ideally just production data that you'll be running your models on, instead of having sort of these very different test data sets that then you'll then you'll kind of deploy into production. And there can be these mismatches. And sometimes that's a really difficult thing to accomplish.

Grant
Yeah, so I was gonna ask you on that, you know, in the world of generative AI, where that's becoming more and more of a thing, and in the app, the appetite for sort of generating or producing that test data is the premise that because I've heard some argue, wait, generative AI actually helps me to overcome and avoid some of the bias issues, but it sounds like you might be proposing just the opposite.

Elizabeth
It actually works both ways. So um, so creating synthetic data can really help when you want to avoid data bias, and you don't have enough production data to, to do that well. And so you can do, you can, you can do that in a number of different ways. data augmentation is one way so taking your original data and say, flipping it, or changing the colors in it, etc. So taking an original dataset and trying to make it more diverse and kind of cover more cases than you maybe would originally to make your model more robust. Another another kind of way of doing that is synthetic data creation. So an example there would be, you have a 3d environment, in one of these, you know, game engine type things like Unreal or blender, you know, there's, there's a few, and you have, say, I want to detect something, and it's usually in a residential setting, right. So you can have a whole environment of different, you know, housing types, and it would be really hard to get that data, you know, without having generated it, right, because you don't have cameras in everybody's houses, right. So in those cases, what we encourage is, pilots, so you before, really, you know, deploying this thing, and, and letting it free in the world, you you use that synthetic data, but then you make sure that you're piloting that in your set in your real world setting as long as possible to, you know, sets out any issues that you might come across.

Grant
So let's go back to that first example you shared where you got the crosswalk, you have the pedestrians, and now you need to make sure you've got different poses, like you said, someone you know, sitting down on the road or laying on the rug, certainly using generative AI to create different postures of those. But But what about, hey, if the introduction, is something brand new, such as, like you said, the wheelchair or some other sort of foreign object? Is the generative AI going to help you solve for that? Or do you need to you need to lead lead it a bit?

Elizabeth
It absolutely can. Right? So yeah, it's, it's basically anything that you can model in a 3d environment. And so you can definitely model someone in a wheelchair in a 3d environment. And, and Tesla uses this method really often because it's hard to simulate every kind of crash scenario, right? I mean, sorry, it's hard to have real data from every kind of crash scenario. And so they're trying to model again, they're trying to model their problem as robustly as possible. And so in some of those cases, they are like, you know, all of these types of things could happen, let's get more data around that the most efficient, and kind of most possible way of doing that is with synthetic data.

Grant
Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So that's a key approach for addressing the this bias problem. Are there any other techniques besides this generative, you know, training data approach? What else could you use to overcome the bias?

Elizabeth
Yeah, so. So another type kind of is when you have, like I was saying a mismatch in test and production data. So a lot of people even you know, computer vision, people sometimes don't know how much this matters. When it's things like, for example, working with a live video. So in those cases, bitrate matters, FPS matters, your resizing algorithm and your image encoding. And so you'll have, in many cases, you're collecting data in the first place for your test data differently than it's going to run in production. And people can forget about that. And so this is a place where, you know, having a platform like plain sight, can really help because that process is standardized, right? So the way you're pulling in that data, that is the same data that you're labeling, and it's the same data that you're, then you know, inferencing on, because you're pulling live data from those cameras, and it's all it's all managed in one place and to end. So that's, that's another strategy. And another thing that happens is when there are researchers that will be working on a model for like, two years, right, and they have this corpus of test data, but something happens in the meantime, right? So it's like, phone imaging has advanced in those in that time, so then your your input is a little different, or like the factory that they were trying to model, the the floor layout changed, right. And they didn't totally realize that the model had somewhat memorized that floor layout. And so you'll get these problems where you have this, you know, what you think is a really robust model, you drop it into production, and you don't know you have a problem until you drop it into production. So that's another reason that we really emphasize having pilots, and then also having a lot of different perspectives on vetting those pilots, right. So you, ideally, you can find a subject matter expert in the area outside of your company to, you know, take take a look at your data and what's coming out of it. And you have kind of a group of people really thinking deeply about, you know, the consistency of your data, how you're modeling your problem, and making sure that kind of all of those, all of those things are covered?

Grant
Well, in reducing cycle time from this initial set of training, to, to sort of validation of that pilot is crucial to this because as you're pointing out, even even if you even if you keep that cycle time short, and you do lots of iterations on it, some assumptions may change. How do you help? How to me what's the techniques for, you know, keeping someone looking at those assumptions? Like you said, maybe it's a change in camera phone technology, or it's a change of the layout? Like I said, as technology people, Einsteins we get so focused on oh, we're just pushing towards the solution, we sort of forget that part. How do you how do you get someone? Is that just a cultural thing? Is it a AI engineering thing, that someone's got a, you know, a role in the process? To do that?

Elizabeth
I think it's both. So I think the first thing is organizations really need to think deeply about their process for computer vision and AI. Right. And, and some of the things that I've already mentioned, need to be part of that process, right? So you want to research your users in advance, or your use cases in advance and try to think through that full Problem Set holistically. You want to you want to be really, really clear about your labeling, right? So you can introduce bias, just through your labeling process if humans themselves are introducing it, right? Exactly. If you have some people labeling something a little bit differently than other people. So like on the edge of an image, if you have a person on the edge, do you count that as a person? Or is it or you know, or as another person? Or is it not counted? How far in the view do they have to be? So there's, there's all a lot of gray area where you really just need to be very familiar with your data. And, and be really clear, as a company on how you're going to process that.

Grant
So this labeling boundaries, but then backing up, there's the label ontology or taxonomy itself, right, which is, yeah, that itself could just be introducing bias also, right.

Elizabeth
Yeah. And then back to kind of what we're saying about how to ensure how to really think through some of these problems, is you can also make sure that that as a as a company, you have a process where you, you have multi passes, multiple passes on, on that annotated data, and then multiple passes on the actual inference data, right. So you have a process where you're really checking. Another thing that we've talked about internally, recently is you know, we have a pipeline for deploying your computer vision. And one of the things that can be really, really important in a lot of these cases is making sure that there is a human in the loop that there is some human supervision. To make sure that you're, you're, again, you weren't servicing bias that you didn't under your you didn't anticipate, or your your model hasn't drifted over time, things like that. And so something we've considered is being able to kick off just in that process, have it built in that you can kick off a human, like a task for a person, right? So it's, it's just built in.

Grant
And so it no matter what you do that thing is this, it's just as a governance function, is that what you're getting?

Elizabeth
Kind of so it's like, it's like a processing pipeline for your data. And, and so you can have things like, Alright, at this step, I'm gonna augment my data, and at this step, I'm gonna, you know, run an inference on it, or flip it or whatever it is, right? And so, in that you could make sure that you kick off a task for a human to check, right, or, or whatever the case may be. Yep. Yep. So there's several good, so good process maturity, is another technique for how do we help overcome bias as well as inaccurate models? And I'm assuming you're, you're almost bundling both of those into that right? In Yeah, both right.

And, and like you said, they're the another way is reducing that time, and also making sure that you're working on production data whenever possible. So reducing the this, this is where the platform can help as well. Because when you you know, you aren't off in research land, without production data for two years, but you have a system where it makes it really easy to connect cameras, and just work on on real production data, then two things, you're, you're reducing the time that it takes to kind of go full circle on on labeling and training and testing. And then also you you have it all in one place. And that's that's one of the problems that we solve, right? Because, in many cases, computer vision engineers or, or data scientists, they're kind of working on the they don't have the full pipeline to work on the problem. So they have this test dataset, and they're working on it somewhat separately from where it will be deployed in production. And so we try to join those two things.

Grant
Yeah, I think that's one of the real strengths of the platform of your platform, the plain side platform is this reduction of the cycle, so that I can actually be testing and validating against production scenarios, and then take that feedback. And then augmenting that with the great governance processes you talked about. Both of those are critical. Let's let's talk a little bit and talk about fraud is, you know, certainly in this in computer vision, holy smokes, fraud has been probably one of the key areas that, you know, the bad guys have gone after, right? All right, what what can you do to overcome this and deal with this?

Elizabeth
You know, it can really become a cat and mouse game. And I think the conversation about fraud boils down to, it's not clear, it boils down to is it better than the alternative? Right? So it's not clear that just because there could be some fraud in the computer vision solution, it may or may not be true that there could be more fraud and another solution, right. So so the example is, technically, you used to be able to and I think with some phones, you still can 3d print a face to defraud your facial detection to unlock your phone. Yeah. And there is and so then they've, you know, done a lot of things, advancements, so this is harder to do, which, like there's a liveliness detector, I think they use their eyes, your eyes for that. And then you know, there's a few but you could still use a mask. So again, it's it's this cat and mouse game. And another place is is you know, there are models that can understand text to speech. And then there are models that you can put on top of that, that can make that speech sound like other voices, right? So the the big category here is deep fakes. But it's, you know, you can you can make your voice sound like someone else's voice. And there are banks and other things like that, that use voice as a as a method for authentication. Right, right.

Grant
I'm sure I'm sure we've all seen the the Google duplex demo or scenarios right. says a few years from now, right? I mean, that technology obviously continues to mature.

Elizabeth
Exactly. And so, so then the question is Okay, if I can 3d print a face and or a mask and unlock someone's phone, is that is that is that harder than actually someone just finding my, you know, four to six digit phone, you know, numerical code to unlock my phone. So, you know, so I think there it really becomes a balance of which thing is is harder to defraud and in fraud in general, you know, if you think about cybersecurity, and, and everywhere that you're trying to combat this, it's a it's a cat and mouse game, right? People are getting, you know, people are figure out the vulnerabilities in what exists and then and then people have to get better at defending it. So well. So the argument is, if I if I can say back to the argument is, yeah, it exists. But hey, how's this different from so many other technologies or techniques, where again, you got fraudsters trying to break in? This is just part of the business today? Right. That's where it is?

Grant
Yeah, I think it becomes a, an evaluation of is it? Does it cause more or less of a fraud problem? And then it's, it's really just about evaluating the use of technology on an even plane? Right. So it's not it's not about should you use AI? Because it causes fraud? It's should you use any particular method or technology because there's a fraud issue and what's gonna cause the least fraud? Right, a more specific use case?

Elizabeth
Yeah.

Grant
Yep. Okay, so So fraud. So, uh, you and I had talked about some potential techniques out there. Like there's a Facebook Instagram technology algorithm. Right. I think it's called seer. I think it came out not too long ago. It's a it's an ultra large vision model. It takes in more than a billion variables. P believe that. That's, that's a lot. A lot of massive. I mean, I've built some AI models, but not with a billion. That's incredible. So are you familiar with that? Have you looked into that at all SEER itself?

Elizabeth
Yeah, so So this, basically, this method where you can look, basically to try to address bias through distorting of images? Yeah, yeah. So I can give you a good example of something that actually we've worked on, I'm going to chase change the case a little bit to kind of anonymize it. But so in a lab setting, we were working on some special imaging to detect whether there was a bacteria in, in in samples, or not, right. And in this case, we were collecting samples from many labs across the country. And one thing that could be different in them was the color of kind of the substrate that the sample was just in, it was essentially a preservative. Wow. And so but but those, there are a few different colors. And they were used kind of widely. And so it wasn't generally thought that, you know, this would be a problem. But so the model was built and all the data was processed. And there was a really high accuracy. But what happened, and what they found out was that the, there was a correlation with the color and whether the bacteria was present or not. And it was just a kind of a chance correlation, right. But if you had had something like that, that image distortion, so if you took the color out automatically, or you mess with the color, then that would have taken that bias out of that model. And then as a second thing happened, actually, which was when the, the the people in the lab, were taking the samples out of the freezer, they would take all of them at once. And they were just kind of bordered. And so they would do all of the positives first and all of the negative second. And machine learning is just it's a really amazing pattern detector, right? Like that is that is what it is about. Yeah. And so again, they were finding a correlation just between the weather it was hot, more thawed or not. And that was correlating with whether it was positive or not. So, you know, some of this really comes back to what you learn in science fair and putting together a really Your robust scientific method and making sure you're handling all of your very variables really carefully. And, and, and, and clearly and you know what's going into your model. And you can control for that as much as possible. So, so yeah, that I mean that Facebook method is, can be really valuable in a lot of cases to suss out some of these correlations that you may just not know are there.

Grant
Yeah, I think what's cool is they open source that right, I think it's called swag SwaaV. Yeah. Which is awesome. The they figured that out and made that open source so that obviously, the larger community needs something like this course help deal with some of this, this bias challenge. Interesting. Okay, that's cool. So all right. I was I was I really wanted to ask you about your thoughts on that approach. So I'm glad to hear you validate that.

Elizabeth
Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, there really has to be a process, especially in a in a model like that, where you try to break it in any possible way that you can, right, there has to be a whole separate process where you think through any variable that there could be and so if there's a model that's, that has, you know, so many just out of the box, that's a really good, great place to start.

Grant
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Okay. And then the last category here, around ethical violations, any thoughts on that?

Elizabeth
Addressing that overcoming that, you know, I think that really just comes down to when you need permission to be doing something, I need to make sure that you're doing it right, or you're getting it. And that, you know, obviously that happens in cases where there's facial recognition and making sure that people know that that's going on, and that's similar to being kind of videotaped at all right. And so that one's fairly straightforward. But sometimes people need to, you know, when you're putting together your ethics position, you need to make sure that you're really remembering that that's there. And you're checking every single time that you don't have an issue.

Grant
Yeah, permissions. And there's this notion, I'll come up with a term that feels like permission creep, right. It's called scope, right? It's like, well, you may have gotten permission to do this part of it. But you kind of find yourself also using the data stuff over here right to maybe solve other other problems, and that that's a problem in some some people's minds for sure. I was very good point. Yeah, various articles, people out there talk about that part of it sort of creeping along, and how do you help ensure that what it is I gave you the data for what we're using it for? Is just for its, you know, you know, permitted intended purpose, right? That was a challenge for sure. Okay, so you've been more than fair with your time here today with us, Elizabeth, gay, dry, any conclusions? What's the top secret answer to the overcoming the four pitfalls here of AI ethical?

Elizabeth
So one thing I have to add, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about data bias without talking about data diversity in data balance, right. And so, you know, obviously, the, the simple example there is fruit. So if you are looking at if you have a dataset with seven apples, one banana, and seven oranges, it's going to be worse at detecting the banana. But the more real world example that happens is in hospitals, right? So they, in the healthcare system, in general, we have a problem with being able to share data, even even anonymized data. So when a hospital is doing is building a model, there have been problems where a can be they, they have bias in their dataset, right. So in in a certain location, you can have something like if you're coming in with a cough in one area, it may be most likely that you have a cold, cold, but in another area, it may be more accurate to start evaluating for asthma, right.

Grant
So that kind of thing can come up so it if you if you take a model that's done in one hospital and try to apply it elsewhere, then again, that's a place where you can visit, is that kind of like a form of confirmation bias, meaning, you know, you have the same symptom, but you come into two different parts of the hospital and, well, this person's coughing and you know, you're in the respiratory area. So they immediately think it's one thing but now you go to another part of the hospital. Well, yeah, a cough is a symptom for that to suddenly you know, that's what they think you have.

Elizabeth
That's a great point. It really it's sort of the machine learning version. that?

Grant
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a confirmation bias sort of view. It's like yeah, oh, this is, uh, but it how many variables does it take for you to actually have true confirmation? Right? But with this example from Facebook a billion, but how many do you need to have?

Elizabeth
I think it's really it's less about the variables. And it's more about your data balance and making sure that you're training on the same data that's going to be used in production. So it you know, it's less of a problem, if you are, you know, only deploying that model at one hospital. But if you want to deploy it elsewhere, you need data from everywhere, right? Or, or wherever you're, you're planning to deploy it. So So again, it really comes back to that data balance and making sure your test data and your production data are kind of in line.

Grant
Are there any of these ethical biases we've talked about that are not solvable?

Elizabeth
Um, that's a good question. I think Ah, maybe dancer, are you? Are you running? I think there are definitely some that can be really hard. So, so something that we touched on, you talked about, you know, is there inherently a, are our supervised models more inherently more biased than unsupervised? And like, the answer there is, is probably yes. Because you're T you're a human is explicitly teaching a model what's important in that image? And so you know, that that thing can be exactly what you're looking for. Right? You want to make sure there's not a safety issue or whatever it is. But, but, but just it's a human process. So there can be things there that you don't catch.

Grant
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's that's been a question on my mind for a while, which is the implicit impact of bias on supervised versus non supervisory, or work with another group called Aible, have you run into Aible, they're one of the AutoML providers out there. And more on sort of the predictive analytics side of AI, right. They're not doing anything with with computer vision, they have this capability, where they'll look at, but it's always supervised data, but what they're trying to the problem you're trying to solve is, okay, you got a lot of data. Just give me tone, give me signal. In other words, before I spend too much time, trying to, you know, do some training and guiding the model, just do a quick look into that data set and tell me, is there any toner signal where these particular supervised elements, they can draw early correlation to outcome or predictive capabilities. And the idea is that as the world of data keeps getting larger and larger, our time as humans doesn't keep getting larger and larger. So we need to reduce what's the total set of stuff we're looking at, dismiss these other pieces, they're irrelevant to, you know, being predictive. And then you can focus on the things that are important. Anything like that in the computer vision world?

Elizabeth
So So I was thinking I was trying so unsupervised learning is less common in, in computer vision. But, but, but one of the things that can happen is just the data that exists in the world is bias. Right? So So an example is say you want to predict what a human might do at any one time. And you want to use an unsupervised method for that. So say you want to scrape the internet of videos. If you look at the videos on YouTube, the videos that people upload are inherently biased. So if you look at security view videos, they're like, almost all fights, right. So your model, because that's what humans think, is interesting. And as you know, uploaded it in a security video. And so I mean, not almost all but a lot of Yeah, yeah, he's inherently what humans think are interesting. And so there are places like that where just inherently your data set is kind of biased because we're human. So So again, it's another place that you have to be pretty careful.

Grant
Yeah. Okay, so sounds like the problems are I'm gonna say I'm doing Air quotes. These are solvable, but it takes some discipline and rigor.

Elizabeth
Yeah, okay. And and it's just so important for organizations to kind of sit down and really think through their, their ethical use of of AI and how they're going to approach that and get a policy together and make sure they're really kind of living those policies.

Grant
Excellent. Okay. Elizabeth, thank you for your time today. Any final comments? Any parting shots?

Elizabeth
Um, no, I think I appreciate you having me on. That was a really fun conversation. And yeah, I always enjoy chatting with you.

Grant
Likewise, Elizabeth, thank you for your time. Thank you everyone for joining and this episode. Until next time, get some ethics for your AI.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we take a look at how to get AI signal on your business.

Hi Everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So you are busy running your business, right? And of course, you often wonder, is there any way for me to work smarter, not just harder? Well, years ago, and one of my startups I was working 100 hour workweeks absolutely crazy. And I was trying to keep everything moving for right, we had a very challenging client, that really took up 80% of our energy and the other 20% of the energy was spent on other clients, as well as all the administrative things right that it takes to run a business. One night, while we were writing and testing a bunch of code. I looked at my teammates and exclaimed, ah, there's got to be a better way. And they agreed. So we decided to step back and we looked at the assumptions on which we're operating.

Number one, could we adjust the clients expectations, and number two, perhaps we could look at all the information at our disposal and look for insights, things that we weren't seeing. So we did both of those. And of course, at the time, we did not have AI, but we perform something that you might call AI signal. So the takeaway from the story is that by addressing both of those items, of course, we dramatically improve the outcome of the business. Number one, with regards to adjusting the expectations. This was, of course, one of those common sense functions. That should have been done months earlier. And of course, I'll chalk that one up as a life lesson. But number two, looking at our data and searching for insights, we found some clues that told us how to improve. So what is AI signal? Well, it's, it's similar to tipping your toe in the water before fully committing.

Alright, so that reminds me of a backpacking story. When our kids were younger, we were backpacking, in the flat tops wilderness area of Colorado, and it was still early in the summer. And so there's plenty of snowpack melt, you know, coming down through the streams, and, you know, AI signal, we had to cross the stream, right, we couldn't find a way across, it was much too wide to jump. But we knew we had to get in and get over to the other side. So AI signal would be similar to testing the temperature of this fast moving water before hopping in, as well as getting a sense of how deep the stream is, and how fast the water is moving. Well. Did we do any of that? No. And so you know, we would have saved ourselves some emotional as well as physical heartache, if we would have tested out the conditions first. So instead, we took a run at it and jumped as far as possible, right. Meanwhile, the fast and very cold moving stream just switched, you know, with this downstream, right. So don't do it that way, obviously. Now, this, of course, applies to your business. And especially when it comes to AI, get some AI signal first on your business data to put your toe in the water.

So let's look at an example. Imagine, imagine you have one or more systems as part of running your business, it might be a CRM, with sales data, you also might have a lead management system. And now they may or may not be connected to each other, when in fact, let's say they're not connected. Now, you only have so much time, obviously, and resources each week as a business owner. And so the question is, how can you improve the use of your scarce commodity of time each week? Well, one way to help you do this to fine tune quickly is to look for a signal. Well, what does this look like? Well, lets you know when you do an AI project. If you don't use a turnkey provider, like ClickAI, then you're gonna do the work of cleaning up the data and getting it ready for AI. This is is and can be a really significant effort on your part. And it interrupts Of course, all of your other business operations.

But what if you could find out if there's enough predictive behavior in your data before you even spent the time to clean it up? So this is what AI signal is, right? It's an AI technique to preview your not so prepared data and run enough AI on it to determine if there's some signal in it that could ultimately be used to one, improve your efficiencies and to grow your sales. Now, in the example that I gave above, you know, you may decide to look for signal in your lead management data. And separately, you may decide to look for signal in your CRM data. But if there's enough signal in the data in one or both of those systems, you may want to knit those together, or have a turnkey provider and that those together for you. So for example, if your CRM CRM system has a history of sales and refunds and things like that, imagine the value of connecting your leads data to your sales data, of course, so you could see through the AI, things which could translate leads into either sales or refunds, you really want to know both right? The kinds of leads that is going to ultimately translate into refunds, the ones to ignore now, of course, it all starts with just getting AI signal.

That's a, it's a powerful first step that lets you know if your data has AI potential, and if so, which data elements are the biggest contributors, that's incredibly powerful. This is, this is better than taking your car to the mechanic shop where the signal may be spend more money in these areas. It's more like having a gold mine and the mining engineer stating, hey, in this part of the mind is a vein of gold. And over here in this other cavern, there's another vein of gold. Alright, now you know where to focus and where to dig. So once you've course commenced with mining the material, but the real question is, what do you do with the material meaning with the goal meaning with the insights you receive? Well, getting an AI signal is exciting, of course. And it's dramatically time saving, it'll save you a ton of time just to know where the gold is. But getting the AI gold is even more exciting, and even more impactful now, using the quote unquote AI gold to grow your business and of course, improve the value of your business opens a lot of doors. All right, everybody. Thanks again for joining. Until next time. Check your business for AI signal. It's the fastest route to business value.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Hey in this episode we take a look at how you can use the technology half-life to build your business.

Everybody, welcome to another episode of click AI radio. So thinking about half life, technology half life, what does that mean your business? And how quickly are things changing? It's interesting in terms of the you know, different organizations have different views on how fast things are changing sort of the, the sort of the pop culture, if you will, of technology tends to treat it like things are changing quickly. And that and that that certainly feels that way for lots of us. It's interesting, though, to see the different viewpoints on it. Let's let's take a quick look at this. So here's one and that this comes from culture.io. Right, they talked about how digital transformation is more successful with a positive shift in culture, in fact, goes on to say 80% of enterprises will change their culture as a way to accelerate their digital transformation strategy. That's actually a Gartner statement. So the point here is that, hey, if if you are if technology is changing a lot, and it's, you know, impacting your business, you better change your culture.

Alright, let's check off the box for the culture statement. Let's move on from here. So how fast is technology changing? Or what pace or rate are things changing? Singularity hub.com has got this interesting viewpoint where they they show the growth in the DNA sequence data over years, right, where they show the Internet backbone bandwidth over you know, over the years, all of these are course up and to the right in terms of you know, what we see on the graph, right? Or the number of bits per second, you know, over the years, right, or the number of bits per second per dollar, right? So you end up getting more and more, more and more data for your dollar. Alright, so these logarithmic charts come from Ray Kurzweil Neil's 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near right, and it's attempting to show that certain things are growing exponentially. All right. However, there's other views. This comes from itI, f.org. They've gotten an opposing view, they're they're making comments like, Well, wait a minute, is a really changing that quick. They make this comment, they say, Look, if technological change actually were speeding up, one would expect to see an increase in patents and productivity, but we don't. All right, they also go on to say from 2006 to 2015, US utility patents increased just 3.8% per year. And then they go on to talk about productivity, growth, so the productivity improvements of labor. So from 1980, in the US productivity, annual annual productivity growth in US was about 1.5% 1995 was up 2.5%. And, and from 2007, and 2017.

It was only 1%, which is interesting, showing that the actual productivity, even though all these new technological wizardry, cool things are around us, as our productivity actually increasing. Well, they go on to make this interesting comment. I'm just going to read this right here. They make this point right here, they say, look, many technologies today are nowhere near half patent or penetrating half of the American homes a decade after they first commercialized. So they go on to point out that Fitbits came out in 2007. You know, consumer 3d printers in 2010, VR 3d goggles, 2015, none of them are anywhere near 50% market penetration. So the question is, well, so Alright, maybe maybe there's this increase of many new different types of technologies, but in terms of their adoption, and the impact in our lives and making us more productive. These guys are arguing that it's not really making a difference there. What is changing or growing fast, and this comes according to hosting tribunals. dot com, they have an interesting set of stats, he pointed out that what is growing is things like, like the number of smart devices, right? As well as the number of hosting services and, and and the number of websites, right and the amount of data and those are things that all tend to be increasing and growing, what up to almost 2 billion websites now. But some say that, that can only 75% of those websites aren't active. And so while there's still a lot of stuff out there and a lot of data growing, the real question is, is it making us more productive? And is it doing more for us and helping us to become better? What we are getting is a lot more data. So here's something from MIT, MIT said, Look, when it comes to changes, right, in terms of the amount of changes that are taking place, from their perspective, they felt like it's varies based on the industry. So it says from a low 2% per year for the mechanical skin can you know skin hair treatment, skin treatment, hair removal wrinkles, to a high of 216% per year for the dynamic information exchange and support systems. Their point is this. The rate of change from 2% to 216% varies across different industry. So one industry might see tons of new technologies, new changes, whereas the other hardly sees anything changing or it's changing very slowly. And even if things are changing, are they really making things better? Well, here's one of the challenges. With the increase in terms of numbers of technologies and things that are out there again, things have to be adopted to really make a difference.

The one thing that folks are seeing is that there's a half life, that's taking place, there's a half life of the technology because of the numbers of things that are changing. So in general, we see that their half life is going down. And the other thing that's that's happening in terms of Half Life is around the skills of the people. And so this comes from emeritus.org blog, there talks about the half life of employee skills. I'm just going to quote here, World Economic Forum research in 2017, said that the half life of a skill is about five years, that was in 2017. And then by the end of 2021, was estimated to be down to four years now that those were just employee skills in general, some feel that the that that number is lower for technology skills, I've seen some folks say it's down to even three years. So if the half life of your technology skills, let's say that it is around three years, so you spend your time as an organization, you you're investing in the technological skills, so you're going to use technology to help compete, but the half life is, let's say three years for that. What that means is of course got to keep keep ahead of that curve. And as a small to medium business owner that starts to become fairly expensive value proposition. Here's, here's another piece right here, it says of the existing 25 million software developers 50% will witness the half life phenomenon to their skills. So means that without additional upskilling, only about 12 point 5 million of them are going to be suitable for jobs that we need to have them do by 2025.

So that's a shortfall of about 18 point 5 million jobs. Alright, let me say it another way. So you're small to medium business owner, you're trying to use technology to be competitive, but the half life of technology is reducing whether or not it's making you more productive. That's another argument, as well as the half life of the skills of the people to bring the technology down to three to four years, that starts to become really expensive. So while it can be argued that the technological pace of change varies in different industries, it can also be argued that access to the skilled teams to leverage AI for your business is like fighting a drying or fight fighting around a drying waterhole in the Sahara Desert, right? It means that, you know, less and less water, you know, everyone's fighting for the last little bits or drops of it. As an SMB owner, though, I'm going to suggest that it's critical to not play the game of building your AI technology team using your scarce resources. So what I am suggesting, though, is that with the advent of democratized AI, and there's a bunch of platforms out there, like with ClickAI and able with Plainsight AI, who I've had them on here, before, you know you should take advantage of these platforms. And the benefit is that you abstracting the AI complexities away from you, while delivering the benefits and the values that AI has to offer. So the argument is this, given the democratization of AI that's available given the half life of skills for the people and the half life of technology itself, why would you do or take another approach without using democratized AI? So as always start with your business use cases and then of course, leverage democratize AI rather than investing in technologies with with you know, such a short to HalfLife Alright everybody, thanks for joining and until next time, spend your half life wisely.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com, now.

Hey, AI where are my results? In this episode, we take a look at some of the fundamental principles to getting results for your business using AI.

Hey, this is Grant, Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so I've been thinking about this issue around AI and the ability or inability of businesses to get the results from their AI efforts. So I'm gonna quote here again from Bernard Maher's book, it's called artificial intelligence in practice, he actually points out some interesting, he's got a series of use cases, or case studies, I should say, with their various use cases where AI has been applied, and what some of the outcomes or the results of those arms is going to pull from one of these here, this was a Kimberly Clark experience, where they were looking to produce some, some AI insights based on their customer data. Alright, so customer segmentation problem, how do we go after the market and try to improve our targeting with our marketing efforts and use AI to understand where to go with that. So what they did was, as they applied the AI, they ended up increasing their signup rates by 17%. And then they ran some other campaigns to optimize targeting of customers, this was for their dipende brand, and they saw a 24% increase in conversions. So how did they do that? Well, they they did it mostly by producing content, that more closely aligned with the customer profiles, that the AI predicted would be more responsive. So there's a great a great use case here, right in terms of applying AI to to this sort of marketing problem and customer segmentation area. Now, these customers, what they also found, was it, they ended up becoming more likely to be long term repeat buyers. So it's one thing to have an increase in conversions and sales, but to turn them into longer term buyers. That's a real bonus. Certainly, it also had the had the downstream effect of making them more likely to give positive recommendations to friends and family. So this is a great example of of successes for AI, right, it's a great use case for where we would apply it, and the kinds of sort of long term benefits that we want from AI.

Of course, what we're finding is more and more market leading companies are transitioning into tech companies. And if we're not thinking of becoming a tech company, it actually is continues to move to our disadvantage. So it's essential that we do that, of course, we want to be competitive and, and even stay ahead of the pack, if you will. But turns out that AI driven Analytics is a lot more powerful than the you know, traditional business intelligence solutions are out there previously, and still certainly in use today by a lot of organizations that are focusing a course on customer segmentation. But the real point is, by applying AI ultimately into the space of doing custom customer segmentation, the AI is able to see things of course that difficult for our brains to get get get wrapped around. But it's also has another impact that we're seeing, and that is that the businesses that are competing, of course, as our businesses each compete in the pool and the talent pool and the challenges we face at this time of year not producing this at the beginning of 2022 when we've got a lot of not only supply chain challenges, but resourcing problems and a lot of competition for talent in our businesses. You know, building our business in tech savvy ways and leveraging the the technologies such as AI, of course to help us to be more competitive. Those also tend to attract a certain type of talent to our to our companies also. So it's a it's important part of building our representation, a reputation and our branding.

But I want to talk about But the other side of it, right, so that sounds like you know, roses and apple pie and motherhood and so forth, right? Everything's great. Turns out, of course, as we all know, AI has had its failures. But I found that particularly interesting view of this from the I triple e.org site, they were describing some AI failures. And it's interesting, as you look at the different set of failures, typically, it's it seems to be a lot in some of these areas where, where there's, you know, AI is being used in these use cases that are, you know, pushing the edge and the envelope, which, of course, is what we should be doing for our r&d. But you know, when I think about AI, my focus is more on how can I apply it to benefit my business, right, to improve my customer service to increase my revenues, my profitability, my efficiencies, and so forth? Well, it turns out that a lot of these are fairly r&d centric, use cases, that IEEE sort of points out not surprising, given that it's IEEE but I'm just gonna point out some of these right, and then and then take, hopefully point out some takeaways. Number one was brittleness, they felt like AI is quite brittle, especially this was in a computer visioning use case. And that as as the as the world of the imaging kept changing, then they had to do a lot of a lot of AI rework so so brittleness of AI models, in some use cases, that's That's true statement. So is that a failure? Well, it might be, I guess, right, depending on your use case, number two, the embedded bias problem, I touched on that earlier, especially when I was having a conversation recently with a couple of the organizations that I've done some interviews with, so I'm not going to drill more on to that. This is something that we have to be mindful of, as we're building our AI models to help our businesses. Number three, catastrophic forgetting, that's an interesting phrase right there catastrophic for getting in here, they point out the double deep fake problem, right. And, and here, they're discussing how, you know, bad actors in the market, who are doing this deep fake work. And, you know, organizations trying to compete against that the constant retraining of AI models to include not only new deep fake techniques, but also the need to deal with previous and older styles of deep fake.

This certainly is critical. Is it a failure? I don't know, I kind of look at that as the cost of doing business conceptually, right? That if we're in that world, where we got to keep figuring out which we do, how to address this deep fake problem. But nevertheless, AI models are, you know, if you don't include the data in your retrained model, then yes, it can, quote unquote, forget old stuff. So it's not like our cognitive brains were well, I guess depends how old you are. Then you don't forget things as humans, right. Okay, number four explainability. This is a challenge with AI. And in particular, it's a challenge as it relates to giving X explanations for results. And predictions can sometimes be be difficult to do, right, where there's some of these questions. And predictions that come out are hard to to explain how it is that this was arrived at. And as a result, I'm going to give a suggestion on this here in a moment to help address some of this stuff. I think explainability is a real challenge for so is it a failure? It's it's it's a challenge for sure. Number five Quantifying uncertainty. So hey, here we go. Once again, having sufficient data sets that deal with fringe or edge use cases is critical. This is a, I guess, maybe a failure in the sense that sometimes as humans, we don't do that. And we focus on the Happy Day scenarios. But turns out, our brains and real life have to constantly be dealing with all the other fringe cases as well. So it does put the onus on us as business owners to make sure that we're collecting as wide a set of data as possible. And that not necessarily means more and more data means more coverage of you know, the different use cases of data out there that we have number six common sense this was a failure, the I triple C I triple E was pointing out common sense meaning turns out AI lacks common sense. Sometimes us as humans lack common sense in any event, the ability, of course, to reach some logical, acceptable conclusions, right based on our, you know, vast understanding and context of everyday knowledge. You know, a lot of times we take that for granted and well AI doesn't really have that at least in our current current maturity levels of AI, we just don't have that. as such. I think one of the things that I've seen and how I tend to view it as I work with organizations is this AI stuff really should be looked at as augmented intelligence.

So the bottom line is, Do not throw your brain away, right this stuff is, is AI stuff in our Yes, we should look at it as it's going to be bringing insights Bhutia, challenge it, right. And so when it comes into us with some insights, we should look at in terms of the realm of possibility, as well, turns out one more number seven terms of failures, what I triple E was pointing out was math. He said, Well, look, you know, simple number crunching tends not to be handled so well with AI. So in addition to not throwing your brain away, don't throw away your old calculator, right? Or, of course, all of your old, you know, sequential linear software, right? That's doing real stuff today, running your business in the economy and such. So AI's got its place, and these seven, quote unquote, failure areas, I think, have that I think there's some some techniques that we can use to get around some of it. Not all of it, but some of it, but what it does is it pushes us into a set of use cases, where, excuse me, we can still get AI value. So to get the best insights from your AI, I think the net net is somewhere in this area, a letter A, I decided not to do a number one, letter A define your Chris questioning, right, which drives focused AI model preparation. So it means we got to think we got to think about the business and not about the technology. As we're as we're organizing, what we're going to go do with AI that has has to happen. Be not number two, but be I guess, here we go be. So when it comes to data, be prepared to continually add to your data set and rebuild your models, this notion that you know, build it once and it's done kind of thing that that needs to go away. And then see, use AI like an augmented intelligence tool, as I pointed out earlier, right? So use an AI platform as part of this that can take your feedback to influence the AI model. You are the brains.

Alright, and so as you're getting some insight or predictions on things to do, be sure to come back and inform what was the impact of that was a positive? Was it negative that do what we expected? We need the AI models to continue to be informed and learn from this. Alright, so AI does a great job identifying insights on correlations, of course that are difficult for our brains to see, but we should review it as business owners within the context of our business. Right, we got to keep that in mind and evaluate the veracity of applying that insight to our business. I had to get the veracity word in there just shouted intelligent earlier look at the very the can we actually take this insight and apply to our business? Right? That's really what we're after, not just to have the, you know, the aha moment. Oh, that's great insight. But hey, can I make some concrete adjustments, it's going to change my business and actually bring some bring some benefits about so a I want its approach approached right, using the techniques that I mentioned above my experiences, it really can't help our business. But the industry is also gathering context on the failure scenarios. And so of course, we're going to be best served if we take that into consideration, no doubt about that. So I was looking at something else here. medium.com, you can find some interesting blog, articles and such out there. It pointed out, okay, let's say that, is there a single point of failure for AI. And I found this to be an interesting point that was made here on this particular piece here. Is there a single point of failure for AI and there was this blog on medium.com. That suggests there is and as I reviewed it, I thought, Hmm, interesting. So this piece suggests that to get started with AI, you should not choose a company wide AI implementation, but rather a proof of concept that gets the company accustomed to the new normal, right in my experience, the new normal includes the following activities.

These are going to sound like the ABC items I just mentioned. I'm going to use 123. Now just switch it up number one, alright, the new normal if you're going to go apply AI Think about doing these things. Number one clarity in the questions, the business questions or seeking from the AI. Sound familiar? Number two, data curation doesn't have to be perfect, but you got to have for thought and organization on your data. And of course, its potential relevance to the questions you're asking. And number three, a mindset of iterative AI model refinement over time. Alright, so I think I've said those three things several ways in this episode. All right, so let's get to the point of this particular piece here. Is there a single reason for AI project failure? And you hear all sorts of stats out there, right? Maybe half of the projects fail? Or some say 85% of the projects fail? Is there a golden thread? According to this particular bar, blog, or article? They stay? They say, yes. And the answer is expectation management. Right? So organizations have of course, said amazing things to me about what they expect from their AI. This has to be managed early in the process. So I agree with the sentiment, right? It's certainly not as quantifiable, right? It's not to say, Oh, the, you know, common point of failure is you didn't have clean data or enough data or whatever. Certainly, the best practices are we got to have that data and etc, etc. But expectation management is really an interesting point on that. And I agree with that. As I've reviewed this thought about this right, I've developed a guide for smart steps to business outcomes with AI. If you're interested in that, reach out to me click ai radio.com Just join my email list. I'll make sure you get get that to you. Hey, everyone, thanks for joining and until next time, then edge manage manage your AI expectations to achieve the results which are there to benefit your business using AI.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your free ebook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.