The Asset Class

We’re in the largest transfer of wealth in history, and the opportunity goes to those who recognize what’s happening instead of standing by as innocent bystanders. Jesse and Earl open with a real tax question: how do you soundly account for $650,000 of inventory sitting in a yard? If the materials were already expensed when purchased, the accrual accounting already captured them the compliance piece is a CPA question, but the strategy, like the heavy-machinery play, often comes at the problem from a different direction. Buy $400,000 of equipment at 10% down, take 100% bonus depreciation under 168K, and lease it out so the income covers the financing without adding new debt exposure.

The centerpiece is ownership. Social media eroded social skills and COVID deepened the divide, so businesses that bring people physically together are poised to flourish and there’s a Renaissance happening. Bookstores are up roughly 60% year over year over five years, and vinyl is right behind it. The reason ties back to the show’s core: if you don’t own your means of entertainment, how reliable is it? You buy a game disc and the fine print says you’re leasing it. Streaming albums change a week later Kanye swaps songs and the version you loved is gone. Accounts get banned for life, tracks blacked out in a settlement. People are saying forget it: vinyl, books, and media-owner towers to actually own what they care about. Owning your media is a hedge against future prices Netflix went from $5 in the mailbox to tiered HD plans with ads, Amazon Prime added a $2.99 ad-free fee, all to squeeze more from existing customers for their investors. And it extends to your own content: an intentional portfolio of intellectual property pays back in perpetuity, because a years-old clip can catch steam and propel new business. Most people only rent digital real estate. Build your own.

The tax gem: the NAICS code. Earl’s long used it for capital reclassify a real estate investor as an educator and go from $20,000 to $250,000 in funding. Now he’s applying it on the front side for taxes too, because an S-Corp election (not an entity it’s a form) pays a reasonable wage tied to your NAICS code, and a lower-paid classification means a smaller W-2, a bigger K-1, and 10 to 30 thousand saved on FICA. Win on both ends.

Geopolitically, we’re the boiling frog: a third carrier group and 10,000 troops to Iran, the US financing one day’s oil through sanctioned Russia, and election-delay talk abroad in Ukraine and Israel. Good people with glaring blind spots cling to it because the consequences haven’t reached them yet until a daughter has fewer rights than she was born with, or ICE comes for the family that waved the flags.

Make it into the rooms, then build your own. A year in, we’re in the 50s.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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On Earl's born day, it's still another day in the grind. Both brothers open on why John Roman's "are you working on your perfect day?" exercise, and the truth that if your work isn't purposeful, you only do it long enough to escape it. Success is never on sale. The price is the price; the only question is how fast you pay it, because opportunity cost is the tax added on top. You can do hard things. Look at difficult differently.

Self-investment is the through-line. Every opportunity Jesse and Earl ever converted came from how they viewed it where others saw "why me," they saw "I'm about to figure that out." That investment rarely came with an immediate financial return, and being okay with that is the point. Jesse's first task was learning to speak better five books on any subject puts you in the top 1%. Earl's weak link in his vertical was a CPA with no strategy, so he decided to become the best company instead of just finding one. What keeps them pushing through lean seasons: Think and Grow Rich miss a meal if you must, never miss a chance to learn and Cardone's 10X rule, because you create a future self instead of a fantasy. The brain is a computer running the software of the books you read, the company you keep, and the conversations you have with yourself. Jesse names the heaviest price honestly: physical presence with his daughters. Everyone says they'd die for their kids will you win for them?

The wealth teaching goes deep on generations. First-generation wealth is the easiest a life insurance policy, an aleatory three-party contract that's technically a trust, passing tax-free wealth forward. Cover the mortgage first so a million-dollar policy isn't gutted to $400K. Get living benefits so a heart attack or stroke pays out tax-free while you're alive. But drop millions on an heir with no software and you've handed them the lottery 97% of winners end up in debt. Second-generation wealth requires governance: spendthrift clauses (Shaq's two-degree rule, Alan Iverson's payout at 55), boards, and the Rockefeller waterfall where policies buy more policies across generations. Insure babies at six weeks, take policy loans to fund college and pay yourself back, and route every win back into the family trust. The Morgans called private equity "sound family business." The family office legal, tax, fiduciary, and capital-stacking under one roof runs $500K to $4M a year, and firms like tax erasers act as a micro or fractional version so the cost spreads across many.

Protect the asset through entity structure. Earl's setting up trusts now one to shield a family member's lawsuit settlement from Medicare clawback, one for his CDFI's nonprofit requirement because once you know the game, you play to win.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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Jesse reports from Cincinnati, week one with a $7 million contractor after just finishing a $2 million one both facing the same issues. Trades-based businesses are the frontier to financial liberation because we always need things built and repaired, so the only question is how effective the processes are. The common theme: owners are prisoners of their own passion, missing the tricks of the trade.

The bid math is the centerpiece. Pull a number out of the sky and you've killed yourself before you break ground the staff, the materials, the equipment all have to be paid regardless of what you charged. Earl's realization lands it: if you don't accurately account for labor, you can have no profit, not just show none. And labor isn't only wages it's the employee burden of payroll taxes, workers' comp, insurance, and paid sick leave. Man-hour math matters: a five-day job with two people costs a different amount than five days with five people, and planning by days instead of man-hours is a fool's errand. Standard material markups, inspecting deliveries, the scissor lift the contractor forgot to scope, the hole that took five hours instead of one all of it eats profit when it's not planned. The project manager owns on-time, on-budget, and the close-out post-mortem feeds the next bid. Clearly communicated change orders protect you when you break ground and hit rock you couldn't have known was there.

Then the market. Nike, Oracle, and De Beers growth darlings a decade ago, free falls now. De Beers, the greatest marketing company ever (a diamond is forever, one month's salary to six to a year), down 91%. Nike down ~90% from its high. Apple in flux: a new product-focused CEO but the largest IP lawsuit in history $5.7 billion over haptic feedback. Build portfolios like a business owner: assess risk, hedge with a short-term and a long-term book, and know that the wealthiest traders make three to six trades a month. Buy and hold is where the wealth lives. And the shovel play Home Depot is up roughly 47,000% from IPO because every DIY warrior and contractor has to restock. During the 1849 gold rush, the real fortune went to Levi Strauss selling denim. When everyone runs to mine gold, think about how to sell a shovel.

The housing market is a dumpster fire millions behind on payments, the fewest new buyers since the 60s, and fake equity baked in from COVID money printing. Real estate is a liability until you force it to produce.

Trump TV peaked at 3,000 viewers and Fox broke solidarity. The banana in the tailpipe could still happen a third time. The most important office is citizen vote, and hold your own party accountable.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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Back to the foundation. Jesse and Earl lay down why tax planning isn't just important it's critical and how it connects to everything shaking in the world. A CPA is a bona fide scorekeeper and referee for the IRS. After Enron and Martha Stewart, the compliance officer legally can't be the tax strategist there has to be a line in the sand. When a client says their CPA works harder for the IRS than for them, that's the job title. Your dentist has a stronger follow-up game than most tax professionals, and that once-a-year gap is where fortunes are made or lost.

Would you rather pay tax on the seed or the harvest? Every farmer says the seed your harvest should always be greater. A 401k isn't a retirement plan, it's a tax code, and "qualified" means qualified to generate revenue for the government. Eight out of ten times you shouldn't have too much money in those incarcerated funds, because you're trading a low-tax event for a high-tax one sometimes 800% more in taxes by waiting until 70. With the national debt now larger than GDP, future rates near 50% aren't a stretch. Instead of Roth conversions, Earl runs Roth accelerations pairing a tax strategy with the move so the money comes out with no taxes and lands in tax-free, liquid instruments. That's a 20-to-50% annual boost, or 5 to 15 fewer years of work.

The greatest resource in building a business, outside capital, is human capital and the relationships behind it. America has isolated itself from decades of alliances Canada, the EU, the trade routes through the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea and the cost of goods reflects it. You can't control that, so control what you can: production costs through cost accounting. Gas at $4.47, diesel at $6.51 nationally and near $10 in California. Track supplies as a percentage of revenue, work a preferred vendor list to negotiate net-60 or net-90 terms that protect cash flow, and plan the labor. Master the skill, build the system, and reduce the years you have to grind.

The mindset shift: get past the boss title. Ross anthems and CEO chains don't serve entrepreneurship. What was Warren Buffett's title at Berkshire? Him. Jesse doesn't want to own the businesses—ownership means owning the liability and exposure. Structure it right with trusts and reporting lines, control everything, own nothing. That's where super wealth and stewardship live, past hustler, past owner.

Earl closes on John Hope Bryant's frame high confidence, low self-esteem and the opportunity to define Black culture and a unified mission the way Ice Cube's Contract for Black America tried to.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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De Beers just lost nearly 91% of its stock value while Nigeria eyes a possible trillion-dollar IPO on its oil company. Earl frames it as a Shakespearean foil two opposite forces intensified by sitting in the same room. He walks the history: Cecil Rhodes understood supply and demand where everyone else just raced to mine more, so he cornered the market, built the fenced-in labor camps that previewed apartheid, and studied America's perfected system of racism first. Lab-grown diamonds are up 1,000% because people won't buy an artificially inflated blood diamond when they don't even have health insurance.

All roads point back to Africa the youngest population, the most land and resources, and a map that shrinks it six to ten times through the Mercator projection. The US was the lone vote against depicting Africa proportionally. China's covert genius flag-planted across the continent for years, commandeering airports and oil when nations defaulted, and part of why gas sits at $4.31 is China stockpiling so much it stopped taking oil off the market. France's former comptroller admitted that losing its grip on Cameroon and others would make France a third-world country within two years.

The Ghana play is all but written. Dubai fell off the map with Iran War instability no citizenship, unclear insurance on structures, and the risk America's behavior could get your assets reclaimed. Ghana returns two years of rent up front, real ROI, and Jesse intends to build actual business and trade infrastructure there, driven by the right incentives. African innovation came from European stifling: no centralized banks forced a savings culture, and blockchain projects like Cardano's bank-the-unbanked mission, Starlink satellites, and Akon's rural electrification are bringing hundreds of millions onto the market.

The centerpiece: evasion versus avoidance. Avoidance is legally using the revenue code to not overpay. Evasion lands you in prison and intentionality doesn't always save you. Wesley Snipes hired a top CPA, offered to make it right, and still went to jail as a scapegoat. Fat Joe too. That's why you do your own research. Nobody can do it for you you're in the driver's seat, responsible right or wrong. Don't blindly follow an unlicensed guru like Dave Ramsey into a class-action lawsuit; get a second opinion and use discernment.

You can lead the horse to water. Jesse corrected a client mid-hire: I haven't built a damn thing we built it together, and the ownership rests with you.

If you rely on the system to hold you up, you drown. Invest in becoming your own greatest asset.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

theassetclass.us/classmates

A full year in 52 episodes when the average podcast dies at three. Jesse and Earl open on the real foundation of wealth: health. Earl walks through his father's ordeal after the VA issued the wrong prescription and left him temporarily diabetic, and the scramble it triggered around the estate. Is there a will? A trust? Are you on the deed? Without it, the house lands in probate the most expensive, drawn out way to end up in a trust anyway. In trust we trust. Nearly every asset you know is a trust with something moving inside it, and getting the structure right from the beginning always beats reverse engineering it through the pain later. Begin with the end in mind.

Small things stack into stacks of money. Own your domain, run a real email instead of a hotmail, keep three bank accounts money in, money out, taxes and hand the lender the clean one so a square number tells them you're organized and risk-averse. In the funding game it's ten check marks, and the website and email domain are pivotal. On the report side, a haphazardly categorized P&L isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

AI is coming for a wave of jobs, and the people not paying attention will feel it. The move is to be the one providing the jobs building businesses that solve problems not losing one.

The heart of the episode is intentional networking. Earl breaks down his sales origin: 18 years old, network marketing, learning to prospect a stranger in an elevator and set the meeting on the spot. His father's charge if you're going to shovel shit, be the best shit shoveler they've ever seen turned every job into value delivered, and none of it made sense until viewed backwards. Steve Jobs took a random calligraphy class that became Apple's typography 18 years later. Life is a series of events that only make sense in reverse.

Jesse's confession lands the theme: he can hold a long-form conversation but hadn't intentionally built his quick talking points the 30-second exchange that changes everything and the weekly accountability with Earl and Ronnie is what forced him to design it. People do business with those they know, like, and trust, so show up, follow up, and speak less while listening more. Want to know your ultimate net worth? Look at the network around you.

Reading list: Crucial Conversations, Everyone Communicates Few Connect, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Value given freely comes back in unquantifiable ways.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

theassetclass.us/classmates

Jesse and Earl open on the EYL backlash rippling through Invest Fest. The community turned on Rashad and the brothers, calling the event overpriced and scammy $250 for three days when people pay $400 for one night of Usher with zero financial literacy attached. Earl breaks down why the reaction was overboard: they brought BlackRock, Invesco, and Fidelity straight to our community, built one of the biggest business conferences in the world, and let people sell out food trucks and stand in front of 10,000 for the first time. Blackout is after-hours, shot from the hip not the politically impartial Earn Your Leisure. Farrakhan said it: to lead Black people you have to love them more than they hate themselves. One mistake out of 3,000 videos and grace evaporates. Audit your circle. If your success sounds like a brag instead of a breakthrough to the people around you, that's a cage a Julius Caesar trap where your own inner circle takes you down. You can't cancel someone who never took anyone's money to be controlled.

The centerpiece: two business owners both paying themselves $150,000. Owner A is in the office five to six hours a week systems and a leadership team run it, and he focuses on lifestyle and growth. Owner B works 85 hours, washes the dishes, and spends that salary right back on gas, eating out, and the chiropractor. At sale time, Owner A gets a 4x or 5x multiplier. Owner B gets offered $30,000, because a buyer has to undo everything, build the SOPs, the marketing, the cash flow analysis, the estate and buy-sell plans, and refinance out the dumb debt. Same money, radically different realities.

The fix starts before you ever open QuickBooks. Accounting is the language of business refusing to learn it is moving to a country and declaring you won't learn the language. Track how long it takes to perform the core jobs customers pay for, pull materials from the bank statement, and you've got your gross margin and a standard to hold your team to. J. Paul Getty said he'd rather have 1% of the effort of 100 men than 100% of his own now make those 100 half as good as you and no one can compete.

Overseas, the escalation trap is playing out: strikes on Iran, missiles at Jordan and the UAE, the CIA director back in Moscow warning Putin off tactical nukes and NATO. Crypto mining concentrated near Iran, China in our telecom backdoors, food and power warnings at home.

No luxuries for three years. Stack and wait for the correction. One person's doom and gloom is another's "it's finally happening."

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

theassetclass.us/classmates

Earl opens with day-one game from his CDFI certification community development financial institutions that can place capital at 3% or lower, sometimes 0%, on a sound plan. Not the Shark Tank fantasy of capturing 1% of a trillion-dollar market. Real frameworks, the kind Jesse builds, that make the capital worth lending.

Then the through line: lead with value or don't bother walking in the room. Commission breath stinks, and people smell it immediately. Your network has to be bigger than your client base and your prospect base combined. Earl breaks down what the elite sales rooms actually teach it's never about telling, it's about asking better questions, never yes-or-no, guiding the person through their own evolution for their benefit, not just yours. That's how Jesse shifts a paradigm until an owner realizes they don't have a business, they have a hustle, and starts asking the questions that let him serve them.

Earl walks the qualifying process you can't force anybody to move until they see the pain themselves. The woman "getting killed" on taxes who paid $2,000: you don't have a tax problem, you have an opportunity to make money. The heir paying $3 million a year who wouldn't sign six forms to save $2 million, because he never learned the weight of a dollar. Pass down the portfolio and the management plan, not a playground of assets to burn.

The centerpiece: how much protection does an LLC actually give you? Kinda however that judge feels. The corporate veil gets pierced 93% of the time, and a Wyoming series LLC won't save you when you're sued in Iowa and one tiny accounting error makes everything public record. Jesse's clean breakdown of leaseback structure flows straight into Earl's aircraft and building tax strategy. You can't be cheap on your way to wealth: real trust, life insurance, corporate charters, and a buy-sell plan before death, disagreement, divorce, or lack of discernment kills the business.

Jesse's operational gem: the attendance policy every single client needed and never had. Defined work hours, positive overtime, a notification chain, and a point system built on the power of choice. Owners can recite thirty years of their team's football stats but freeze at the scorecard for the business they bleed for.

Easy to do is easy not to do. The gym works look around. Suffering with a clear vision of the exit stops being sacrifice and becomes investment, because it's already monetized in your head.

The rules are published. The game is public access. We just close the gap.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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People admire the outcome and have zero appreciation for the process. They see what you produced and say that's what I want but do they want the brick wall of adversity you had to walk through to get it? Ain't no way around it, over it, or under it. Mediocre people get on Facebook to be validated in how they feel. Exceptional people hunt for answers, SOPs, and strategies. Jesse and Earl open on the part of the story nobody wants to sit in.

Jesse's client just had the first day in recent memory his phone didn't blow up because a leadership team with measurable targets is now in place. KPIs tied to job descriptions and clearly accepted performance expectations pull the emotion out of running the business, and that's what gives it real market value. Remove the owner from the daily hustle and a true business keeps thriving.

Earl breaks down the communication shift that changed everything: Simon Sinek's why how what. Lead with the technology and you sell a TiVo to nobody. Lead with who the person is and what they sacrifice, and it's a completely different psychological experience. 65% of Americans work in a small business, and 93% of those owners overpay taxes even the ones with a CPA because everyone's working in silos and nobody's making one dollar do the work of four. It took Earl four years to understand the craft and two to communicate it simply. Start simple, then elevate. The confused mind does nothing.

Then the reckoning. America has been the guardian and the bully of the world, and cheap goods rode on that dominance. Now Iran has blown up the Middle East bases that serviced our carriers, sailors are stuck at sea 250 days instead of 90, and allies watching us call our own troops losers are quietly rerouting to China, India, and Pakistan. China's been in our phone systems for two years through the same backdoors police forced open.

The auto loan bomb: nearly 30% of truck and SUV owners are behind, scaling toward 42%. Ford killed the $25K car, and value, cost, and price are three different things. One woman's payment jumped from $200 to $800 on the same vehicle. Tranches 1 through 3 stay protected even if 42% default so protect yourself and get out from under it before the reset.

China's a decade ahead on battery tech. We may get forced green just to survive.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

theassetclass.us/classmates

Fresh off Invest Fest, Jesse and Earl bring the motivated energy back to the core question: what's your most valuable asset? Most people list their 401k, their life insurance, maybe some real estate. Nobody lists themselves. Earl asks non-entrepreneurs to write down everything they love, and they get ten deep before it hits them they never wrote their own name. If you lost everything, how long would it take to rebuild your mindset, your will, your coachability, your speed of execution? That's the ultimate driver of every external asset you'll ever acquire.

Jesse opens on the $2 million prison the small business owner grinding 60 to 70 hours a week, missing the games and the dinners, navigating a hustle factory they built themselves. The liberation is systems and a leadership team that understands the assignment, so the business has enterprise value even when the owner steps out.

Earl breaks down the M&A blind spots sellers brag about without realizing they're liabilities. "This client is 60% of my business and named his son after me" isn't loyalty it's a concentration risk that could vanish overnight. "Nobody knows this business better than me" means you never built SOPs to duplicate yourself. Jesse layers in sales trend analysis: segment revenue by customer and lead source, know where your budget actually produces, and stop getting caught by seasonality. First slow September surprises you, second one you didn't learn, third one you made a choice.

The Invest Fest recap: a VIP room where every conversation led with value, the brother converting plastic into fuel, Sensei Jay's discipline, and the disappointment of watching people chatter through former Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. That opened a real debate on how we treat our legends hip-hop aging out its greats while rock and roll reveres theirs and how fast public opinion swings on figures like Jay-Z. Earl invokes Malcolm X: the Black man is easy to tear down because his own people will help you do it.

Resilience is the through line. Everybody on that stage got knocked down and got back up. Doubt your limits, not yourself it's footprints on the moon. And Earl's networking gem: are you free or are you not free? Be direct, not thirsty, and people respect the plan.

Each one, teach one. Stay dangerous.

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