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Episode #569 - Gear vs. Stuff with Michael Easter

Roger: 

The more you have, the more you are occupied. The less you have, the more free you are. 

-Mother Teresa. 


Hey there. 

Welcome to the Retirement Answer man show, the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to lean in and rock retirement. It is the holiday season and you are going to be receiving and giving a lot of stuff. It's a fun time of year to show your appreciation and thankfulness to others and to give. But our relationship with stuff can have second and third order consequences, not just in our life, but in our retirement. To talk about this today, I'm bringing on friend and awesome author Michael Easter to talk about the difference between gear and stuff to maybe inform our holiday giving. That's sort of the acute stage we're in now, but also, I want to connect the dots between how it can impact our retirement. In addition to that, we're going to answer some of your questions.

So, let's get this party started. I have talked about this topic before. It's been on my mind personally, so maybe that's why I'm thinking about it. I just recently watched a Netflix documentary called Buy Now, talking about modern commerce and how in many ways we are manipulated psychologically to consume more and how that's not healthy for us, the world or the environment. A lot of dots being connected there that have been front and center for me. I wanted to bring on Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, to talk about his concept of gear versus stuff to perhaps reframe our thinking around possessions. Now, this is obviously around the holidays. We're buying a lot of stuff for people. We receive a lot of stuff. This is something that's happening right now. Another reason I want to have this discussion as it relates to you and your retirement journey is if you are in your 50s or 60s, you have got some decades, you have likely collected a lot of stuff over time as you've gone through the different seasons of career changes and purchasing homes. Maybe you got married, maybe you've had children and all the stuff that goes along with that. Oftentimes in our investments, we collect a lot of different investments and accounts. We have cluttered closets in our investments as we do in our life. This is how we view retirement because we're used to having all of this stuff, and that stuff can sometimes trap us. 

As an example, I'm in Colorado right now, and I had to fly back for a meeting with a small coaching group of about five of us that we've walked life together for about four years. This was our final meeting for the year, and I didn't want to miss it. Before that meeting, I got there early so one of the members and I could have a drink before our celebration dinner, because I wanted to talk to them about stuff and their relationship with stuff. I thought it was particularly important because she has founded a business, the business is thriving, and it's really just taking off on its growth trajectory. She will be earning a lot more money than she did. She's hitting that part of a successful business. She has three young children, married, and lots going on. I wanted to speak some wisdom into her life. She's offered for me to do this, just like we all have with each other. My guidance to her was, be careful about your relationship with stuff and purchasing, particularly this person, because as you start to make more and more money and be successful, you can create a gilded cage that you may not be able to escape from. You buy a bigger house, you buy a nicer car, you get nicer things, you buy memberships, and all of a sudden you are serving your stuff more than they're serving you and you don't know how you got there. 

In our lives, we all grew up with this consumer culture, and oftentimes when you're in your 50s or 60s and you've just retired or ready to retire, and you got a lot of stuff. That means you have to have places for your stuff, you have to serve it, you have to store it, you have to keep it in the right temperature. If you have a lot of memberships, you have got to make sure you use them. If you have a second house, you feel obligated to use that. As Mother Teresa says, the more you have, the more you are occupied just by the management of your life, just like you would be if you had a lot of different accounts. The less you have, the freer you are. I think it's a healthy thing to look at this, not just because it's the holidays, but from a life standpoint. How you can structure your life so you can do the things you want to do and you decrease the friction of all the stuff that we have. So, let's have a chat with Michael Easter around the difference between gear versus stuff.

GEAR VERSUS STUFF WITH MICHAEL EASTER

Roger: A few weeks ago, I went on a little mini rant about gear verse stuff, and it's an important topic here. With the holidays coming, it's like, why the heck am I talking about this? Let's bring on the gentleman who really framed the concept in his amazing book, The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter. Michael, how are you?

Michael: I'm good, how are you? Thanks for having me. 

Roger: As always, you're fresh off of a great adventure, which we'll get into another time maybe. But gear, not stuff. Let's just talk about what that means and some of the core principles around that.

Michael: Let me first pull it back, the average home now contains 10,000 to 50,000 items. That is a ton of stuff in our houses. 10,000 to 50,000 items. Even like 100 years ago, 150 years ago, people didn't own that much. You had like a couple outfits. The average person had two outfits. You had a handful of tools that you used with a purpose. After the Industrial Revolution, we just got this machine that pumps out stuff for us to buy. We're surrounded in ads. I think that purchasing has moved outside of what it once was, which was I buy an item because it serves a utility. It has this higher purpose that is going to allow me to achieve an outcome or goal. That is what I would consider gear, stuff that you use for a higher purpose, to achieve a higher purpose, a goal. 

Now we have a lot of stuff where we buy things really just kind of for the sake of buying them, because we think we need them. Items you buy that you don't really need, which is actually quite a bit when you really unpack it. What's interesting too is that there's a lot of research that says that figuring out ways to creatively use what you already have is much more rewarding internally over the long term. Not only that, but it saves you money. In Scarcity Brain, I just started trying to get people to think differently about what they buy using the “Gear not stuff” framework.

Roger: No, it's a great answer and I think it can even be used in intellectual pursuits. I have an issue. I can just go buy the solution rather than find it in the things that I have and repurpose it. I think that diminishes us from a depth of thought standpoint. Watching a movie, you see Brad Pitt in the movie. Oh, how old is Brad Pitt? It used to be you would maybe have a sidebar conversation where you said, well, he was about this age when I saw him in this other movie, I was about this age when I saw that movie. You would actually do an intellectual exercise to figure it out, which creates a conversation because then you think about where you're at when you saw the movie, who you were with. It allows you to relive hopefully good memories. Nowadays we don't have as many of those discussions because you just ask Siri or Alexa. Elegant constraints can create amazing things.

Michael: Yeah, I agree. Humans are kind of evolved to try and gather as much information as we can. There's this scientist I talked to at Harvard who called us informivores. We just love to consume information. That's because that always gave us a survival advantage. The more information you had could be lifesaving potentially. We evolved to try and get as much information as possible. That was usually always a good thing. Now today, the average person in one day sees more information than a person from the 1400s would have seen in their entire life. We live in this sea of information and anything that pops into our minds, we can immediately Google it or watch some show about it or whatever it might be. Information has become faster and easier to access than ever. That obviously has a lot of upsides, but when you have a question that doesn't have a really simple answer, you have to go out and learn and explore. The quest for information, it really drove humans to explore the entire world. There's something really deeply rewarding to that. I think one of the big takeaways in my books is that you should think about how to add more exploration into your life. That could be as simple as we're at dinner and talking about how old Brad Pitt is. Instead of immediately bringing out the phone, we're going to work through it together.

A big example I use is people today who won't go to a restaurant without reading all the reviews, without looking at the menu, without figuring out exactly what they're going to order, without looking at the photos of the restaurant to figure out where they want to sit. The experience of going to the restaurant is all of a sudden not new, right? It's like everything is preprogrammed and preplanned because you had to search in Google for everything. If you can just figure out ways to like draw back from that in some ways, I think it can just lead to newer, fresher, more interesting experiences.

Roger: In talking about gear verse stuff related to the holidays, I just watched a movie called Buy Now that came out on Netflix and basically yes, there are all these products but we're also being, I'll just use the word manipulated to continue to consume. The number of shoes that are produced in a day, the number of iPhones or phones that are produced in a day. It's always a cycle of new. It feels like you're running into the wind in terms of trying to focus on utilitarian buy things that have a good use to them. Maybe that comes into Cal Newport's you know, getting out of that stream of social media and messaging. How do you manage that personally?

Michael: I haven't seen the documentary but when I was doing research for my books, a lot of websites, ah, ecommerce platforms have basically taken features pulled directly from casinos to get people to buy faster. A good example is a lot of websites you go on now that are ecommerce platforms, they'll have like a big wheel you spin. Okay, well casinos in Vegas have that same thing, it's called the big wheel game and they put it at the front of the casino because it's sucker's bet. Any local knows you never play the big wheel game. That is where they just grease all the tourists. But ecommerce platforms are putting that right on their website. You click it, you enter your email, you click it and then like it spins and spins and there's little slots with different discounts. it sounds stupid but those wheels were shown to increase conversion rates by seven folds because there's this belief like oh, I got this one time. Oh my God, I got the 50%. It's the biggest one. I better buy this thing now. But most of the time you don't need it, right?

I think one of the things that's really changed with purchasing is the speed. In the past, I'll just pick a random example, I need a new pencil. Don't love this one. What would I have to do? I would have to get in my car and I'd have to drive down to Target, Walmart, maybe some, some specialty pencil store if I was really into it. Then I would have to walk through that store, I would have to look at the pencils. I'd have to choose one, I'd have to check out, I drive home. It's like a big buy in of time. Well now I just Google pencils and I can get them on Amazon in like 30 seconds and it'll be here to me tomorrow. The faster you can do something, the more likely you are to do it. 

When you think about purchases, like how many times in your life have you had a list of things to buy at a store? You go down and you go, maybe I don't actually need that. I can do without that. Maybe the store just doesn't have it right and you're just like, I guess I don't need it. Your life goes on. Well, that no longer exists with the rise of the Internet. I think like kind of a takeaway for people there in terms of reducing the amount of purchases you make with stuff you don't need, is just to try and figure out ways to add friction and time in between the time where you think you want something and then you go to buy it. This could be like if it's an online item, you put it in your cart and then you make a rule, I'm going to wait 72 hours. What if I know that I can buy this thing in person, I'm just going to put it on my list for in person buys. Then whatever it is, once every two weeks I go out and I buy that stuff. But along the way, during that period, I guarantee like half of the things you write down that you think you need, you're probably not going to need and you're going to scratch them off your list and you're going to save yourself a lot of money.

Roger: Do you remember Imelda Marcos? She was the wife of the dictator in the Philippines in the 80s.

Michael: Oh, okay.

Roger: After the fall of the dictator or leader, she had like 200 pairs of shoes. I bet you here in 2024 that's not that unusual now or something almost to that level.

Michael: I mean, if you've ever watched any of the Real Housewives franchises and unfortunately, I can say I have, they all have like 500 pairs of shoes.

Roger: That's part of this consuming and needing more and more and more. 

Here's a question for you because we're talking about the holidays. We buy for ourselves, we buy for people that we care, care for. And my wife and her mom and her twin sister, one of their main hobbies is going to stores that's like, I would call that my mother in law's thing. That's part of her hobby. How do we not suck the joy out of things?

I'll use myself as an example. I am a fountain pen aficionado. I love fountain pens. there's a utility to them. But obviously having a basic pencil or pen is much more practical than having a fountain pen. Where is the line on those things? Or for you, it might be outdoor gear.

Michael: I think that it takes some introspection because the line is not black and white and it's not the same. It's very gray and the shade of gray that it is changes from person to person. I think for people there's a tendency to be like, okay, I'm into fountain pens, but I'm also into insert like 20 other things. Pick two, right? How much really nice insert 50 different things are you going to buy? 

For me, I spend money on concerts. That's a big thing for me. Like if a band is in town that I want to see, I'm going to go see that band. Like, it's just not even a question for me because I know that I derive more joy and value from that than I do from, you know, like this pen, which is like 15 bucks versus one that's like 1500 bucks. Right. I know that for me, the money would be much better spent on concerts or items that allow me to do those things.

Back to the gear, not stuff. Items that allow me to do things better that I love to do. Outdoor gear, trail running shoes. You brought up shoes. I have a bunch of trails running shoes and that's simply because I've never found one that I absolutely love. I've run in this one for like 250 miles. I'm going to try a new one and eventually I'll find that one. But when you look at my collection of shoes, you're like, this dude has a lot of trail running shoes. At the same time though, it's like, okay, well what are those trail running shoes helping me do? They help me do this thing that keeps me healthy over the long run and that totally keeps me relatively sane every week. that has all these ancillary benefits rather than just being there and in a way kind of being for public display.

One of the major drivers of buying stuff is boredom or stress. I think that that's one thing that humans are unique about is that we can use items as status tools. Everyone does this, I do it right. If everyone were reasonable, we'd all be driving around in Toyota Priuses. Makes sense. Maybe they'd make one that had all wheel drive. Then like you in Colorado, that's the one you would have and I just have the normal one in Vegas. But we have all these different varieties of cars and what the car you drive begins to represent your personality that you want to display to the world. I think that can sometimes begin to spiral out of control and you just end up with this big pile of bills because you're like, here's who I am, look at my things. Rather than like, here's who I am. Let's have a conversation.

Roger: In giving to others, this is actually my theme for this year of gear, not stuff for the gifts. I'm going to give higher quality gifts.  I just bought a hatchet for myself and it was an expensive hatchet and I felt weird buying it, but it will last forever. I'll never have to replace it. That's one less thing in the dumpster. It has a use. It'll help me when I go on my adventures. you end up buying higher quality things, but you're just buying less of them because you can justify the quality for travel. If you're into sewing, buy the right gear for sewing. Don't chinch on that gear to begin with.

Michael: Gift giving, I would say similar to you. I'm just going to buy you the one nice thing that I think will actually improve your life and that you'll use regularly. I won't say what I'm buying my wife because if she listens to this, it'll spoil Christmas. But it's something that's going to save her a lot, that she uses all the time, and it's going to save her a lot of time because she already uses a similar item nearly every day. By giving her this item, I'm like, guess what? I just bought you back, like, 15 minutes of your day every day. It's like, well, that seems like a good buy to me.

Roger: Yeah, I love this kind of theme for gift giving and thinking about purchasing because we end up getting trapped by our things, especially as you retire. Decluttering is a serious issue for people that are retiring and moving. Focus on things that have utility, things that are high quality, useful, and that actually are environmentally much more friendly. Then my kids know that the only gifts they can really get me are experiences. I have a knife over here. My son bought me a blacksmith experience, and he and I went and did blacksmithing and made a knife. Almost killed ourselves, but it was a blast. 

Michael: I think also just being aware of that, we live in a world where there's all these sorts of unseen mechanisms that lead us to buy things. I said this before, but I do think that one of the major drivers of, why people buy stuff is often it's boredom or it is stress. You're sitting on your couch, you're watching Netflix, you're like, yeah, the show kind of sucks. You pull out your phone, you see an ad on Instagram, you're like, oh, that's interesting. Then you get down this rabbit hole, and eventually you find yourself buying this random thing that had never popped into your mind and you don't need it, but you were bored. That's where you went with your boredom. Or you're at work and you get an email that stresses you out, and you start surfing online. We get hit with so many ads a day that you just get pushed into buying stuff as this relief from discomfort, which is either boredom or stress. Being aware of that and then also realizing that once that begins to happen there's just so many mechanisms that are pulling you in the direction of making the buy that we just have never had prior to this age. That explains why when you retire, you're going to have a lot of decluttering to do.

Roger: Think about quality, think about experiences, and understand the game that is being played in commerce so we can be better aware of it. This is a healthy way to think about Christmas

Michael: Yeah.

Roger: All right, buddy. I don't want to ruin Christmas for anybody, but this is a healthy way to think about it and it might bring you more joy for you and also for the people that you love.

Michael: Yeah hopefully!


LISTENER QUESTIONS

Roger: Now, it's time to answer some of your questions. Before we get to the questions, we have a couple corrections on, in this case, Roger's grammar. 

DAVID’S COMMENT ON VERSE AND VERSUS 

This is David. 

David says, 

“Hey Roger, I enjoy the show and I've heard you admit that you sometimes bungle words. It's a little bit more than sometimes.”

 David. I'm working on that. 

“Here's one I hear a lot from you. Verse, you use it improperly. Proper use would be I know the Bible chapter and verse, or the first verse of that song. What you mean is versus.

Example. How to decide between a Roth versus a traditional IRA versus is abbreviated is as vs. Like Alabama vs. LSU. 

By the way, you are not alone in making this error. Many people, especially young people, confuse these words. 

Thanks for reading this.” 

Thank you, David. Versus vs. verse. I got it. I know everybody understands the intent, but the more we all can use words as intended, the better we all communicate. I appreciate it, David.

MARY ON HOW TO ASK BETTER QUESTIONS

We have another piece of feedback from Mary where it's not correcting my grammar this time. She's referring to episode #559 where we talk about identity with the Rock Retirement Club coach extraordinaire, that's their words and I'll own them myself, Kevin Lyles and the book chapter he wrote on the topic. We'll have a link to that book in 6-Shot Saturday. It's a book by retirement coaches and Kevin wrote a chapter for that which is excellent on identity. If you're not signed up for the 6-Shot Saturday email, go to sixshotsaturday.com. It's a quick email we send out every Saturday morning with a recap of the show and links to resources we mentioned. The topic we talked about in the one she is referring to is about how to introduce yourself and how to ask better questions. We tend to ask a new person, like say at a holiday party, what do you do? 

Mary says, 

“I learned from an HR professional to ask what keeps you busy instead of what do you do? It's a very good all, purpose question.”

 I love that, Mary. Another one I heard recently that I like is what is it you love most about what you do? Even if you don't know what they do, what do you love most about what you do? It is a great way to get beyond the simple surface level discussions and learn something about someone that you may not have met before. 

So, thanks so much, Mary.

ARMAND ASKS WHY WE AREN’T DISCUSSING THE POTENTIAL ELIMINATION OF INCOME TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY

Our next question comes from Armand related to campaign promises now that we are past the election season, for now.

Armand says, 

“Hey, Roger.

In lieu of promises made by the President elect regarding the elimination of income tax on Social Security, I'm surprised that bloggers and podcasters aren't at least pondering this potential change. It would significantly benefit wealthier retirees in mid high tax brackets. I would welcome the opportunity to drop our reportable income by $90,000 per year. It would markedly decrease the tax burden on required minimum distributions. It would stir up the debate on the value of Roth conversions once again. Of course it would advance our national debt, but when has this ever stopped? Just food for thought.”

Armand is basically asking, hey, we've heard about these proposals, in this case on social eliminating the income tax, on Social Security, et cetera. why aren't we discussing that as financial thinkers when it comes to retirement?

I'll tell you Armand, here's the reason that I am not. A lot of stuff gets said obviously during election seasons about different tax schemes or proposed bills in Congress and even outside of election cycles, we get a lot of discussion around potential changes that get brought into the public discourse related to a bill that was filed or something from a senator or the President or one of the secretary or cabinet position members. But that's all talk. 

It's easy to talk about these proposed changes, but that is before it goes through the sausage making exercise of a democratic republic, where it goes through the House and the Senate and the Committee and then to the President. The majority of times these things never materialize, or they materialize in ways that are very different than the initial proposal. If we are going to manage our retirement, if you are going to manage your retirement, we only have so much time in our lives to work on making a feasible plan, making a resilient plan, or optimizing it. It is better to use that time, in my opinion, by focusing on what is and managing that so you can actually make effective changes. 

Once we start to strategize about promises made by a president elect coming out of a presidential election season where everybody's promising everything is going to lead us down a lot of paths where we'll waste a lot of time on things that likely will not happen, doesn't mean you don't stay aware of them and have them on the periphery in your vision. But as they start to get more serious and closer, then you can maybe pay more attention to them. I pay very little attention to proposed regulations or proposals in government because they're not reality. I'm too busy trying to manage retirement plans, in my case for clients, and I'm too busy trying to manage my own financial plan for my family and I can't waste time thinking about things that likely will never happen. So, I stick with reality. Let the media hype and the politicians hype proposals all day long and I'll start to deal with them when they become reality so I can actually do something. I think it's a time management technique that we could all could use and it also saves us a lot of angst in discussion about things that aren't that important.

TODD’S QUESTION ABOUT MASTER LIMITED PARTNERSHIP STOCKS

Our next question is an optimization question from Todd related to an asset class called a master limited partnership which generally trades on the New York Stock Exchange as a stock. 

Todd says, 

“Hey, I love your podcast. 

I have a potential topic that I rarely hear anyone discuss that could be of value to some investors. The topic is MLP stocks. That stands for master limited partner stocks. I have worked in the oil and gas industry where these are common and was blessed to receive these as part of compensation or else I would not have been exposed to them. They are low cost and have yields around 7 to 8%. At the same time there are tax benefits where all the dividends are not reported as income. 

Where it gets complicated and could be explained by you is the consequences on tax when you sell them. To be honest, I have not crossed this bridge and rely on the dividend as my retirement income.”

Todd, yeah, the master limited partnerships, I used to be very involved in them in the early 2000s, not so much anymore. 

Master limited partnership is generally used to fund and operate a pipeline or storage facility in the oil and gas industry. As an example, you will have an oil and gas entity that needs to get its product to market. It'll be a second, or second party that will build the pipeline and then operate the pipeline and then they will charge a toll on all the gas that goes through that pipeline. Gas, natural gas, and you can use all sorts of transportation. Then the master limited partnership is the entity that's used to own the pipeline, build the pipeline and operate the pipeline, and because of this special structure of a master limited partnership, the owners of the master limited partnership, which are the shareholders. Generally, these will be sold on the New York Stock Exchange and you can buy them just like you can buy a utility stock. They will pay you a large percentage of the tolls that they get from the transportation of the commodity. Part of that “dividend” that Todd called it is return of capital and part of it is taxable income and they can be funky that way. It's been a while since I've invested in these. I would be careful, I think, in using these as part of a portfolio. 

Now, Todd has been blessed and has worked in this space and received some, and he's living off the income. So, if you have a $20 stock of a master limited partnership and it pays an 8% dividend, the thing we have to remember is that dividend or the stock price will go down by the amount of the dividend when it is paid. It's no free lunch getting a dividend because the value of the portfolio will go down because some of the capital was received by the shareholder. So, it's not like a free lunch in that sense. 

Number two is because part of that distribution from the master limited partnership is not taxable, what happens over time is that goes to reduce your cost basis over time. Todd, when you get to settle some of these master limited partnerships, what will happen is your cost basis is getting lower and lower and lower so that when you do sell them, you're going to have a higher capital gains tax ultimately when you sell them. It can be complicated to figure out. 

Another quirky thing about master limited partnerships is that rather than receive a 1099 that actually quantifies dividends, et cetera, you receive a K1, which is a partnership. So those come in late, typically a lot later than a 1099 for tax purposes, and generally cost a little bit more when you have K ones doing your tax return. So, you have some friction there. 

Two things. Master limited partnerships generally use a lot of debt because they need to raise and borrow money to build and maintain these massive infrastructure projects like a pipeline or a storage facility. Generally, they own or they are leveraged a lot in order to pay that higher yield as well. So, it's going to have more interest rate risk, if I recall, and I haven't played in these in a while, that a lot of this debt is variable interest. When there is a lot of interest rate risk, the numbers can change very quickly on the payout ratio, and we saw this especially in 2008. There are some quirky things that there are more risks there than you might think. It's not like some magical thing.

Lastly, you have to be extremely careful to own this or any other type of partnership interest in a tax deferred account. UBTI stands for unrelated business taxable income. Every partnership and it doesn't have to be a master limited partnership, it could be a private partnership that owns houses or apartments or other. All will have or potentially have what's called UBTI, Unrelated business taxable income. If that gets above certain level, it can impact the tax deferred nature of a retirement account. So, you have to be very careful to use these in a significant way in a tax deferred account. 

Now, is there a place for these in a portfolio when you're trying to optimize your portfolio within a bigger retirement plan? Sure. This is a tool that you could use if you understand the nature of the tool and the place that it has within the overarching plan of your retirement. Is this a tool that materially changes the feasibility or resilience of a plan? I don't think so. This is going to be much more about optimization or potential optimization, and it's not going to have a material impact on your life and the feasibility of that plan. It's a little bit of a dealer's choice. Do you want the extra complication of understanding this fringe or small part of the market in order to potentially have better returns in your portfolio? That is a choice for you. This is where it comes down to how cluttered you want your closet to be. So, when you're building out your wardrobe, do you want to have that one thin, glittery tie? Does that need to be part of your wardrobe? or do you want to stick with the basics? This is an optimization question that each of us needs to answer for ourselves. 

I would say for the majority of people, Todd, that this is probably one of those things that will complicate things more than materially add to their retirement. 

Now let's go set a smart sprint. 

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

Now we're off to set a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life.

All right, in the next seven days, I want you to perhaps watch that documentary, Buy Now. Read Michael Easter's book, the Scarcity Brain, or just have a greater appreciation as you are purchasing this holiday season. Are you buying stuff? Are you buying gear that can enhance someone's life? Doesn't mean you don't buy the fun stuff for the stockings or whatever you want. But I think a greater awareness of this will help us to manage our possessions so they don't dominate us. 

I am in Colorado this week and I do not have my grandfather's journal with me. So next week we will continue reading into the record of his flight on a B17 Flying Fortress in World War II. 

I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season as always. I will see you next week.










The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All, performance reference is historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.