This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Bob Kuttner, who was the founding co-editor of the American Prospect. I will add, in addition, he is an alumni of the Bill Proxmire team, as I am at a later date, but he was a great mentor to me and, how do you say, managing to be connected to that experience. We've known each other for many, many years. He's an author. Most recently, he has a book called, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? And even more recently, The Stakes, 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy. Bob, I think you, first of all, thanks for joining me. And I must say, you've got your finger on the pulse of things. Other authors, other people talk to me, how do you say, with great reverence for your choice of topics, the things you explore. And it's really nice to be here today, despite the difficult circumstances that we have to address. So, as you look at the world, as you see it right now, in the middle of the pandemic, Biden administration, just after January 6th, and the storming of the capital, what do you see that frightens you? What do you see that inspires you? What do you not see that you'd like to see, as the world unfolds? I think the big question that's going to confront us for the next year or two is whether Biden can successfully govern and have a reasonably successful administration so that he solves some problems and reclaims some confidence in government, some confidence in the premise that activist government can help people's lives and a verge the typical wipeout that a new president experiences in the first midterm. The broader question, it seems to me, is whether faith in democracy generally and faith in the proposition that activist government can help offset the anomalies and the inequities of capitalism, whether that can be reclaimed because that premise has taken a beating over the past couple of decades, both in Europe and in the United States. I think the problem is that government, which is really, you know, if you look at the democratic left, if you look at American progressives going back to Teddy Roosevelt or you look to European social democrats going back to the same era, the entire proposition boils down to one idea, that if you have a strong democracy and you have an activist state, can serve as a counterweight to the unsavory tendencies of a market economy. And if you lose that, what have you got? Not a whole heck of a lot. So, there's no alternative but to reclaim that and a successful activist state and a strong democracy go together because you need a strong democracy in order to elect the people that we're going to carry out a Rooseveltian kind of program that then is necessary to manage a mixed economy so that the constructive parts of capitalism, namely the propensity to innovate and the value of incentives and the value of markets are not overwhelmed by the corrupt aspects of capitalism, the concentration of wealth, the concentration of power, the circular nature of concentrated wealth turning into concentrated power. And if you look at the past 20 years, democracy and the premise of activist government actually helping people have been whacked on both flanks. First of all, they've been whacked by the capture of government by economic elites and then in response to that, you've had frustrated people turning to neo-fascists. So, that's the mess that we are in. The big question is how do we begin to reclaim the possibility that we all experienced when we were young in the post-war era when the economy not only grew at a rapid clip but became more equal. It was an era of successful balance between the market part of the society and the democratic part of society. So, I guess for me the big question is what are the prospects of getting that back? And if you look at the entire North Atlantic area, Europe and the United States, interestingly enough, we have a better prospect of getting that back in the United States despite all the damage of Trump than we do anywhere else. If you take a tour of the horizon and you say, well, okay, where do we have a competent, moderately left-of-centered government anywhere in Western Europe? The answer is nowhere. Germany and France are about as good as it gets and they're reasonably competent center-right governments and the level of popular frustration is very, very high. If you look at the EU, it's like the Articles of Confederation. It's as if the founders of the EU said, how can we design a machinery of government that makes it almost impossible to govern? Because there are multiple veto groups and the Maastricht Treaty ended up being much more of a constraint on activist government than I think some of its sponsors expected. You look at all these cases before the European Court of Justice. When government tries to do something activist or when trade unions try to do something, it falls a foul of the four primary articles of the Maastricht Treaty, which is basically the constitution of the EU that you have to have completely free movement of capital, goods, services, and persons. Those principles have been used to bash new dealish kinds of stuff, although the EU is good on things like privacy and antitrust. If you want to build a society that is based on the premise that we need an activist state to temper capitalism, the EU is moving backwards, and the frustration of ordinary people has increased apace. So why am I modestly optimistic about the United States? Well, first of all, it's the only country in the North Atlantic area where a left-of-center government has even a very slender working majority. And we're seeing that play out right now where Biden has decided that he's going to have to go it alone. The Democrats are going to have to go it alone with this $1.9 trillion relief package. And we have just enough votes in the House. It passed 218 to 212, and in the Senate it's probably going to pass 5150. So it doesn't get any closer than that. But because of the press of events and because of the combined COVID emergency and economic emergency, Biden is governing more as a progressive than you or I would have expected, and I think than he expected. Part of this is because of the nature of the crisis that he faces. Part of it is because the progressive community has been very active in putting pressure on him. And interestingly enough, I would say most of that pressure has been constructive. Progressives have not been beating up on Biden. They've been beating up on the transition team every time the transition proposes to appoint somebody from Wall Street or from Silicon Valley. But they have withheld their hand in terms of whacking Biden because they want it to succeed. And of course, that's a legacy of the campaign where any qualms that some progressives might have had about Biden were tempered by the fact that the only goal was to get rid of Trump and to get Biden elected. And I think some of that is carried over. And so if you do a tour of Biden's appointments, you know, they go from very good to OK to not so great, but on the whole better than expected. I think in the climate area, that's the one absolute standout where everybody is appointed has been terrific. In the regulatory, financial regulatory area, Rob, that you and I care about, they've been pretty good, although the jury's out on a couple of them. I mean, Gary Gensler, having come out of Wall Street, knows exactly how the game is played, became a born-again regulator when he was the head of the CFTC, and now is going to be a great SEC chair. There's all kinds of buy play going on over who becomes the controller of the currency. And scarcely a day goes by that the Michael Barr camp doesn't leak something to Politico on how Barr's appointment is imminent, and yet Barr keeps twisting slowly in the wind. And so that's very, very contentious. But on the whole, I mean, if you look at the Council of Economic Advisers, if you look at Treasury, these have been pretty good appointments. And most of the domestic appointments have been pretty good as well. I think the pressure on Biden to appoint a very diverse team has had a secondary, somewhat unintended benefit as follows. If you look at the centrists or the center-right people at senior levels of the Biden administration, every one of them is a white guy. And if you look at the progressives, almost all of them are women or people of color. And so by going all in on diversity, he ended up with maybe more of a progressive administration than he might have otherwise gotten. So I feel pretty good about that. I feel pretty good about the initial package. I feel pretty good about the green infrastructure package. And I think the bullet that they're going to have to bite very, very soon, lest they be completely stymied by Republican wall-to-wall opposition, is why they scrapped the filibuster. And I think the good news there is that mansion, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has left the door open, even though he's previously on record saying that he doesn't want to scrap the filibuster. He's basically said that if Republicans start using the filibuster to block everything, which they will, he might revisit that. So I think there's going to be kind of a moment of reckoning a month, two months, three months in, where the Democrats just have to take that on, otherwise they will stymie Biden at every step of the way. Then you look at the other side of the aisle. The Republicans have some problems. I mean, they don't know what to do about the lunatic fringe that now represents about half of the parliamentary Republican Party. And probably represents two-thirds of the base, and probably represents three-quarters of the people who vote in Republican primaries. So you've got center-right chamber of commerce, business-round table Republicans being scared stiff of the Trump base with or without Trump. Even if Trump goes off to prison in New York State, the Trumpian base, the Tea Party base is all too alive and well, and some other furor will emerge as the next Trump. And God help us might even be more competent than Trump. So that's a very mixed story. I mean, on the one hand, it means that one of our two parties in a two-party system is now an anti-system party. It's as if the AFD in Germany were 46% of the vote. And that's not pretty. On the other hand, it means that the Republicans are going to be doing each other in, and the question is how successful they're going to be at doing each other in. And I think the optimist in me as a good progressive Democrat says, well, if you look at these swing districts, you've got about 30 Republicans in purple districts, swing districts, who did not vote to reject the electoral college results and therefore are going to be primaried. And if they get primaried by far-right Trumpists, who then become the candidate in 2022, the Democrats could pick up those seats. So I think, structurally, I think the Democrats are in line to lose some seats because of gerrymandering, but that may well be offset by the fact that they'll pick up some purple seats where Republicans dump moderates in favor of extremists. So I feel tolerably good about Biden beating the midterm jinx. I also think that Biden's going to have some tailwinds. The pandemic's going to be over. Some of the Biden recovery program will bear fruit. People will be feeling a lot better about the economy, and Biden will get some credit for that. Biden's also a likable guy, and I think his popularity ratings will probably hold up longer than the usual honeymoon period. And another really interesting question is whether he will peel off some Republicans on some of these infrastructure bills that will actually benefit people in red states. And whether if Biden has a really ingenious rural development program, whether that will peel off some Republican support, both in Congress and also for that matter at the base. I mean, if 5% of the people in this country who voted for Trump can say, you know what? Actually, Biden's doing more first than Trump ever did. You know, you're not going to peel off a lot of those because a lot of that is racist, and a lot of that is just a kind of sullen populism based on the fact that those people have been getting the short end of the stick for a very long time. They sense that Wall Street has captured both parties. It's going to take a lot to move many of them, but you only need to move a few of them to really reinforce the fact that the Republicans are the minority party. And of course the reason why the Republicans resort to all these anti-democratic tactics like gerrymandering and like voter suppression and like the filibuster is that they know they're the minority party, and the only way they can cling to power is by frustrating the will of the majority. So I feel better than I maybe ought to feel about the prospect of Biden having a successful enough administration in the first two years that he won't get wiped out in 2022. I think long-term the project of repairing faith in government, repairing faith in activist government, and repairing activist government's capacity to really solve problems, that's a tall order. And I think Biden is still partly captured by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. I mean, I spent a lot of the past six months reporting on who was in line for key appointments and really trying to embarrass them into not appointing bad people. And I've had some success. I mean, I did a piece back in March as soon as it was clear that Biden was going to be the nominee called the Biden DNR list as in do not reappoint. And I mentioned 12 people from the Clinton and Obama era who should not be back in government, and I'm happy to say 10 of them did not go back into government. The most important of whom was Larry Summers who was out with a piece in the Washington Post saying 1.9 trillion is too much money.  I mean, this is all payback. Biden not bringing him into the administration. And the economics is also lousy because he looks at the so-called output gap and says that the output gap is a lot less than the 1.9 trillion. But of course, most of the 1.9 trillion, even though macroeconomists use the word stimulus, most of the 1.9 trillion is not stimulus in the macroeconomic sense. It's let's put money into schools and let's put money into vaccine production and distribution and let's put money into state and local government so they don't have to lay off people. Only 420 billion of that, about a fifth of the total, is putting money directly into people's pockets and some of that money is going to go to pay down credit card debt. So the idea that Larry Summers, six months ago when he was still auditioning for a job, was saying, hey, we need a big stimulus, man. It's more important that we err on the high side than that we are on the low side. Now that he didn't get the job, he's being dog in the major, and the good news about that Washington Post column that got so much attention is that Summers has now, who was never great at tactics, has now burned his last bridge to the Biden administration and now he's never going to have any influence whatsoever. So that's kind of a silver lining. So I think the good news is that people like Summers and there are lots of them who are really the center right crowd that brought us deregulation and brought us the financial collapse and didn't get us out of the financial collapse sufficiently well, didn't use it as a basis for a strong enough Dodd-Frank Act. Most of those folks are not back in government. A few of them are. I worry about Silicon Valley's influence and there are a lot of Wall Street donors who have influence. So there is this undertow on Biden and yet the people making economic policy at the highest levels, Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council, they're pretty good. There are people who you or I might have appointed if we were in charge. So I'm reasonably pleased with where he is but he's really, he can't make any mistakes in terms of the strategy of dealing with the Republicans in Congress who are going to try and block anything he wants to do. I've been doing a lot of reading about what I will call analogous situations. I've been reading a lot of the work of a man named Ed Pavlich about how James Baldwin viewed the rise of the aggressive black power movement at the time Martin Luther King was killed. And I've been reading a book recently called The Recovery of Confidence by John W. Gardner who was the HEW Secretary under Lyndon Johnson despite being a Republican. And just, I wanted to flag those two works but what I sense is the Republicans may be in great danger because that radical populist group, particularly after January 6th, has ignited a fear and just as James Baldwin warned that Stokely Carmichael in that group who he quite liked and he understood their frustration but their militancy he thought would create a large coalition for what you might call stabilization, stronger law enforcement because everybody became afraid. And I sense right now that there is, say, since the pendulum started with approximately Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, there is a place now where people might vote for Democrats because they think it's safer and not in a national security sense but in the cohesion, in the social sustainability sense. And what I think is fascinating about that is businessmen, businessmen and women who think they have something to sell that's profitable probably should be afraid of a system that's disrupted and generates and they never get to realize their dream. So I think they're what you might call constructive, conservative, I don't mean liberal and conservative, but creating social continuity takes on a premium right now and that the only thing Biden probably does have to be scared of and this isn't about him personally, this is about the structure of the system is that if he's too aggressive, he's a via Wall Street, which might deserve it, it may chase money to supporting that Republican coalition. I'm really interested in watching how someone like Mitt Romney is going to perform in this context where he clearly is not a Trumpian, he is a Republican, was a candidate that didn't prevail. Where do the moderate Republicans go? I used to work for Pete Domenici. Where do the people like he and John Danforth, Nancy Casablan, how can they reemerge? It's a good question. I think some of them will defect to the Democratic Party. I don't want too many of them to defect to the Democratic Party because that will further increase the business influence in the Democratic Party and make the Democratic Party a more centrist party. I think some of them, like the Susan Collins or my governor in Massachusetts here at Charlie Baker, they're just fine being center-right Republicans. Although interestingly in Massachusetts, a Trumpist just got elected as state party chair of the Republican Party in Massachusetts. So although I don't think you're going to find too many Trumpers in the elected state or the state legislature. So I want to respond to your first point. I do think that people who are not hard-right are seeing Biden and a Democratic-led administration as a source of stability. And ordinary people were terrified by the invasion of the Capitol. And the good thing now is that law that we all, as good civil libertarians, love to hate, the USA Patriot Act, gave all kinds of police state authority to the U.S. government to do domestic surveillance and domestic anti-terrorism. And now happily those tools are being used against real domestic terrorists of the sort who invaded the Capitol. And it just happens that the Attorney General is Merrick Garland, and Garland's first big job was as associate deputy attorney general in charge of domestic terrorism. He was the guy who was running the Oklahoma City investigation. He was the guy running the unabomber investigation and the investigation of the bombing of the Atlantic in Atlanta. So this is a guy who knows in his bones how dangerous domestic terrorism is and knows exactly what to do to fight it in his Attorney General. So I do think there will be a kind of constructive association of the Biden administration with greater domestic tranquility, the point of phrase, and safety and stability. Now that is going to infuriate the hard-right. But I think there's the hard-right and then there's the violent-right. And I don't think all of the hard-right is the violent-right. I mean, you get a pretty good indicator of the relative size of the hard-right in the House Republican caucus based on the Liz Cheney vote. Only about a quarter of them, 40-something, voted to kick her out of her position as the number three person in the Republican House caucus. So that's an indication of the strength of the hard-right in the House. And I think the violent-right, the part of the right that supported the insurrection of the Capitol, that's even smaller. And to the extent that they're willing to resort to force, I trust Merrick Garland to shut them down. So I'm modestly optimistic on that front. The Biden administration does have the capacity to arrest and put out a business domestic terrorist. Now, it doesn't answer the question of where business goes. And it doesn't answer the question of whether Biden ought to spend a lot of chips on re-regulating Wall Street. I think the GameStop saga really reminds us, not as an evil in and of itself, but it's a good reminder of all the unfinished business of reform from the 2008 collapse. I just did my own interview with a guy whose name you'll remember, Lynn Turner, who was the chief accountant of the SEC back in the day, who really is a fond of wisdom of this stuff. And I said, Lynn, okay, what basic concerns do you have using the GameStop saga as a kind of a target of opportunity? What should this remind us of? The fact that there's too much leverage all over the financial economy? Yes, of course. The fact that insiders, traders have knowledge that ordinary investors don't have and can take advantage of them and corrupt markets? Yes, of course. The fact that there's not nearly enough disclosure. The whole Roosevelt era schema of financial regulation was partly based on prohibitions, but very substantially based on disclosure. And so Lynn's idea was let's have a year-long investigation spearheaded by the SEC, but with the help of the Treasury and the Fed and FSOC to really look at financial markets and look at where they're corrupt. Now, if that's attacking Wall Street, so be it. I mean, if that corruption is what Wall Street has come to, then I think a reform administration needs to go after it. That is not to say that we don't need the help of the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Rank Table in distancing Republicans from true crazies. And so this is going to be fascinating to watch how this plays out on the Republican side, but I think on balance, having a Republican Party this fragmented and this and each other's this much of each other's throws on net has to be good for the Biden administration. I heard a panel the other day where former Secretary Robert Rubin was talking about the medium term requirement for debt stability, which would be consistent with his historic reputation. And Joe Stiglitz and he were on together. But he said a couple of things that were quite fascinating, which alluded to the fact that American health care ranks, according to World Health Organization, about 38th best in the world. And yet we pay about, we pay, how would I put it? Most of the OECD pays about 40% of the amount Americans pay per capita. And so the question was, are there savings from a more efficient, better performing health care system, including the pharmaceutical industry, that could allow, how would I say, Rubin some comfort vis-a-vis the debt growth at the same time as improving what we have for people in the care of their lives? Similarly, military-industrial complex. When we've got all these priorities, including climate change, which is almost like a war from Mars, do we not need war preparation in the use of the state's resources to fight that war relative to modernizing the nuclear arsenal or adventures in other various places? I just made a three-part video with Daniel Ellsberg about the dangers that exist of a nuclear winter, and that this could be taken down, but we have to overcome some of what you might call the rent-seeking money politics and where are the democratic fiscal conservatives in taking on those battles? Well, let me start with an unkind word for Robert Rubin. I mean, God knows it doesn't take Robert Rubin to tell us that the American health system is not cost-effective and spends twice as much as the OECD average and gets half as much back. And I mean, people have been making that point for decades, and the problem is that we have a hyper-commercialized, fragmented health system. And it isn't just that we don't have a single-payer system, it's that we have a for-profit system, we have a commercial system. And so with a commercial system, you've got all kinds of middlemen making money off the system and not providing care and utilization reviewers and a huge amount of money spent on billing and on all kinds of stuff that adds no value. And of course, we're never going to have the votes for a single-payer system we've got people like Jacob Hacker making the argument that well, maybe we can get incrementally towards Medicare for all by allowing people at a certain age to buy into it, which I think is a good idea. So the problem is that nips and tucks around the edges don't fix the cost escalation and Obamacare, even though it helped upwards of 20 million people get care, it only made the system more complicated. And Medicaid is a much better deal if you fit the income limits than any of the policies you can buy under the Affordable Care Act, which have a blight of deductibles and co-pays. The whole promise that the competition would somehow reduce prices has not been realized because in so many counties in America there's only one provider who's offering policies under the Affordable Care Act. So it's a problem of incrementalism in a society where you have filibusters and even when Democrats have a working majority, they're not able to have the kind of reforms that we had in the Roosevelt era or the Johnson era when there were super normal majorities in both houses of Congress. Those were the only periods when we had that. And where both parties, candidates didn't need to raise so much money that the currency of votes was much more powerful than it is relative to the currency of dollars. Yeah, so on the whole question of the debt, I think given the very low interest rate environment, given the absence of inflation, given the history that countries have lived with much higher levels of debt and not had their economies tank, we're just going to have to live with higher levels of debt for a while until the economy recovers and until we have invested a lot of money in climate and infrastructure and other things that the society needs. The fact that Wall Street, not Wall Street, but corporate America spent so much money on stock buybacks and has so much cash that it doesn't know what to do with other than investing in Treasuries tells you that there are not enough opportunities for productive investment in the private economy and therefore it logically follows that the public economy ought to be doing the investment. This is Keynes 101 and it happens to particularly fit the current circumstances and if that means that the debt-to-GDP ratio has to go to 150%, so be it. I mean the interest rates are so low. Is it Austria that has 100-year bonds now that pay, I think, 0.88% or maybe you go back to consuls where the bonds are due to maturity? This is what the United States government ought to be doing. It ought to be borrowing very, very long, locking in these low interest rates and investing the money in public goods that are going to pay a higher rate of real return to the economy than anything that the private economy seems to be able to find to do with its money and if the short-term consequence of that is a higher debt-to-GDP ratio, that's no longer the kind of fearsome indicator that it used to be and I think solving the health crisis, the crisis of the health care system in the United States is its own separate challenge, quite independent of the debt ratio and if that's what it took Bob Rubin to focus on the health care crisis, okay, we'll take that, but there are two separate problems, I guess, two separate challenges. How much do we need to spend and invest? How much of that do we get from debt? How much of that do we get from tax reform? And then separately, what do we do about the mess that is the American health care system? Yeah, and the military question, it's an unstable world. We've talked about different dimensions of fear. Other times people are expressing, particularly people of color, the dangers of an overly weaponized law enforcement system and a cruel prison system, which even people on the right, like the Koch brothers, have started to back philanthropic initiatives to make the prison systems less profitable, less privatized, less costly and about training and healing so people don't go back to prison because they have the means to conduct a constructive and confident life during the time they're incarcerated. They're helped, not tortured. Let's start with the military and you also raised the question of China before we went on. Let me connect the two. So clearly we spend too much money on the military and clearly we have a challenge with China. My worry is that the challenge with China will be defined as a military challenge and will then become the basis for even more military spending. I think the China challenge is a geoeconomic challenge. It's a geopolitical challenge. They have a system of state-led capitalism where even if a company is nominally private, there's a miter from the Communist Party in the boardroom with that company and nothing of any consequences happens in China without the Communist Party agreeing to it. So we have a system of state-led quasi-capitalism that is phenomenally successful, that is connected to a system that is authoritarian, bordering on totalitarianism. And that violates every premise of Orthodox Economics 101. But the Chinese have figured out how to pull this off. And so on the level of industry and technology and the global trading system, what do we do about this? And I think the short answer is we take back or take forward a lot of technology, a lot of industry, we re-shore a lot of supply chains and we make sure that we're not cut out from the next generation of advanced production. There's a military dimension to this, but it's secondary. I mean, to the extent that national security concerns can be brought in as a rationale for a very forward-looking industrial policy, that's okay as long as the military guys don't take it over and turn it into a rationale to kind of get all dressed up for a potential shooting war with China. So China's a real problem and it needs to be understood correctly. Trump, I think, did us a kind of a favor. He understood that the WTO was not helpful. And so Trump has refused to appoint people to the so-called appellate body, which is the Court of Appeals of the WTO system. And as a consequence, it's basically shut down the WTO. So if the United States were to have an aggressive industrial policy to take back solar or take back wind, and China said, wait a minute, that's a violation of the WTO. I mean, it takes a lot of nerve for China in the first place to be bringing any complaint to the WTO, given that the China's entire industrial system is a front to the norms of the trading system. But the fact that the appellate body is out of business is a good thing. And until we figure out how to revise the rules and the norms of the trading system, we should go full speed ahead with Buy America and we should go full speed ahead with industrial policy and start targeting these industries in the future, which I think is something that Biden is sensitive to. And at the same time, we need to be cutting back the purely militaristic aspects of our military industrial complex. So this is tricky, because some of the elements of the military industrial complex are ingredients in taking back some key industries. So you have to be careful that they don't become the whole ballgame. Yeah. So the sense that you have is, I think, a very good one. I remember when I worked in the Republican Senate Budget Committee, about the time the Defense Appropriation Bill appeared, my staff leaders and the senators I worked with would say, we'll get ready for all of the anti-Soviet Union and anti-China articles to appear in the newspaper, because they're essentially marketing for passage of the appropriations bill. And I sense that, like you've said, animosity about suffering from globalization, integration, the exacerbation of income distribution, widening people being heard at the bottom, is now being transformed into a nationalistic hatred. And hopefully it doesn't take on a military guise or military shape as what you might call outlet for that anger. I think we have to correct the commercial system. And when I've met with Chinese leaders, essentially everybody but Xi Jinping over the years, what they've said to me is China is about four times the size of the United States population. When we started this, we were one-fortieth of the per capita income. And there were going to be adjustments. What America could make everyone better off, but they need internal transformation, transfers, to bring that about, we are powerless. At the same time, some people from Scandinavia came to see me and they said, we think, given the intensity of technological change in the Silicon Valley era, that the growth model used to be America deregulates, makes flexible its supply side, Europe is sclerotic with social protections. And then America always grows better because they reallocate things and shuffle around. But they said, that's changed. Now the scope and scale of the transformation between globalization and technical change, automation, machine learning is so vast that the population has become despondent. Things are going to break down in Trump-like nationalism and the European model is the better growth model. Because as they put it, and this was, Peter Goodman wrote this up in the New York Times, we don't protect jobs, we protect people. Meaning, if you're part of a dynamic evolution in Sweden, your health care, your children's education, your pension, and your retraining, we're all part of the social contract. But that involves a lot more collective leadership and responsibility from government than what we've experienced in the United States in recent years. You know, my only concern is that that describes the European social model as it existed about 30 years ago before the neoliberals got hold of it. That's right. And tragically in Sweden, a lot of the Swedish model has become more like the Anglo-Saxon model. It isn't what it used to be. And then you go into a downward spiral where it loses political support and then you get into a situation where there are weak coalition governments. You've got a Social Democratic Prime Minister presiding over a three-party government, one of which is center-center-right. And he's a great guy, but he can't do anything. And you've got a similar situation in Denmark. And so, yeah, it's better than the United States, but a lot of Europeans use the phrase of society of insiders and outsiders. The European social state is partial. I mean, in Germany, God help us under a Social Democratic government. The Social Democrats agreed to the so-called Hartz-Für reforms where labor protections were weakened and a lot of people were shundered off into so-called mini jobs and not given social protections. And so, you now have these European societies where if you have long-term contracts in primary industries or you're working for the public sector, you're still protected by the old social contract, but that's fewer and fewer people. And so, you have a fragmentation of the political system and you have a fragmentation of the consensus that we had during the post-war era. Now, and then you've got the EU, which is a recipe for political pluralism. So, whether Europe can take back this model that combines social protection with dynamism, with economic dynamism, it's a very open question. For Denmark, I think, and Sweden did this best. They're not doing it as well as they used to. They're doing it better than we do, certainly. And Germany's doing it better than we do. But the problem is, with about a 20-year lag, these countries, because of the infection of neoliberal ideas, are moving more in the direction of the United States than the United States is moving in the direction of them. Let me ask you a question about that. You wrote your book on Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism. Obviously, in the United States, we've seen some of the wear and tear from that, but is it not the case that what you might call capital and technology with wings can, how do I say, in a scope of a market much greater than the domain of the sovereign, they can start to dictate the terms of participation relative to labor, which is less freely mobile. Are we not in a place where governance, because, again, the scope of the market is larger than the domain of the sovereign, cannot protect its people? I remember being involved with the Detroit bankruptcy and people were talking about, what does it mean to have a state go bankrupt? You were taking people who had worked as municipal workers. They don't get Social Security. They don't get Medicaid. And they're having their benefits and pensions cut from 19,000 down to 12,000 after working for 40 years as part of a bankruptcy. You could raise the taxes on wealthy people and so forth and change the contract for the future. But what was interesting is the politicians said to me, well, we can't do that because the capital will get up and leave. And I showed them some things like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Bob Greenstein's group that said, that's not what happens. And they came back to me for real and they said, you're right, that's not what happens. What goes on is they go primary us from the right. We lose in the election and then they rescind the tax. So we say, why should we put ourself in harm's way? And so at some level, that mobility, that globalization, that turning tax evasion and that guidance with lobbying, where money can be kept offshore, weakens the republic, weakens the democracy. And I guess to close the loop from where I started this, Denmark and Sweden are subjected to those same forces of the weakening of the state as the United States. They may not have embraced them as wholeheartedly or maybe with a lag they've had to. But isn't globalization tearing away that what a nation state can do? Oh yeah, and I'm quite a radical on that subject. I mean, Danny Roderick, who I guess would not call himself a radical, is my hero here. If you have to choose between globalization and the capacity of the state to solve the problem of its citizens, you choose the state. You choose sovereignty. And globalization has to go in some respects. Now Denmark, very interesting little historical accident. A lot of the biggest Danish companies are owned by trusts. That means that private equity can't find. That means that they're not traded. So they stay Danish and they continue to believe in the Danish social contract. I think, for instance, it's entirely possible to say that we have certain social standards in this country and if you are going to try to export from ex-country to the United States and you don't have those social standards, you have unsafe working conditions or you have child labor, or it's an American company that off-shores production to Bangladesh, you can do that but you're going to pay a social tariff. You're going to pay a very stiff social tariff because we don't want to import your working conditions along with the products. And there's a huge divergence between elite opinion and mass opinion on that subject. You know, elite opinion says, oh my God, that's protectionist, that violates the comparative advantage. And 90% of ordinary people say, right on, man, let's have those social tariffs. I think social dumping is a real thing. And I think we've been much too casual about giving in to the race to the bottom kind of globalization. You see it, of course, in the attempt to regulate capital. And the United States is such a big market and such a big capital market that my belief is that a lot of capital has to stay here. A lot of capital wants to do business here. So you have this scandal of situation where the Dodd-Frank Act says that credit derivatives are going to be regulated and if you move them offshore but they are part of, you know, Citibank or Morgan Stanley or whoever, they're still going to be subject to U.S. regulation under Dodd-Frank. Then the Swaps Association says, well, guess what? We are not going to take responsibility for those swaps and we're going to book them in London or Frankfurt or Hong Kong or wherever. And that way we're not going to be subject to Dodd-Frank.  So, I mean, the ability of the United States to enforce its own financial regulations against a politically powerful Wall Street, that's trench warfare. It's always going to be trench warfare. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to regulate capital or, for that matter, regulate the terms of labor if we can just get a political coalition that's willing to do that. And the race to the bottom, of course, reflects the fact that we haven't had that kind of political coalition and even when we elect a Democrat, it is a Clinton Democrat or an Obama Democrat who is captured by the same forces of concentrated wealth. So we will see whether Biden is different. And of course, the question you raise in the hierarchy of things that we need to do that are imperative that we do, where does re-regulation of finance fit? Is that a fight that we can afford to take on or do we have to put that sort of in the second tier of things that we want to do because COVID or climate change or public infrastructure are more important? I would argue that if we don't get that under control, it makes it very difficult to do everything else. I'm going to agree with you emphatically. First of all, I want to point out that Michael Greenberger, who you and I both know well, has done tremendous work illuminating how to really... I am plagiarizing his article that I think you wonder what. Exactly. That's what I'm alluding to. Thank you for underwriting that fight. I felt like the point guard and you dunked the ball. But the tragedy is you can count the Mike Greenberger on the fingers of one hand. That's right. Because people with his knowledge and his sophistication of how financial markets work get systematically purged from the ranks of regulators. That's right. That's a really born story. Yes, of course. And so then when the time comes to appoint progressive regulators, the bench is very thin. And so you've got Gary Gensler. Great. All right, who else you got? The answer is, well, Wall Street can give you 400 people who can do that job but who have the wrong sensibility and the wrong mentality. Well, I think I want to come down the home stretch here back to the issue that you mentioned was climate change. Because some of that race to the bottom with foreign direct investment globalization was about migrating to the place where there were the least rigorous environmental standards. And we as a planet, destination or the place you're departing from or wherever, have the public good of reducing carbon. We can't afford to design over the next 30 years that tolerates people migrating to get away from environmental restrictions. If you were walking into the White House tonight, what would you be saying to the President and his core staff is the way we have to address climate change in the coming four to eight years? Well, I think very radically. I mean, I think we need to get away from fossil fuels and move towards all electric but all the electric needs to be generated by renewables. I think diplomatically the really interesting challenge with China is to agree to move forward on climate with China even as we agree to disagree on some of the divergences we have with China over whose industrial policy has what impact. And, you know, Biden is going after Putin on the latest imprisonment of dissenters even as we have just signed a five-year extension of arms control. So it shows that you can have disagreements and still make progress on areas that are of common interest. I think we may see the same thing with Iran. So, you know, climate and public investment in service of a green transformation, that needs to be absolutely top of mind. It also happens to create some jobs. It also happens to create some opportunities for redevelopment, rural redevelopment, where maybe we can take back some Trump voters. And the United States really has to be back in the position of a world leader on this rather than the world embarrassment that it was under Trump. Climate is not my main expertise, but I know enough about it to know that he's appointed very, very good people. And I'm very encouraged by that. You know, the former Michigan Governor Jennifer Grandholm is the energy secretary. I've met her and I hold her in very high regard. In addition, rebuilding the Midwest in the Green New Deal context may change some swing states and make the Democrats less vulnerable to what you might call Trumpian rage in places where the electoral votes have been in place. So, good economics and good politics go together, and this comes back to the filibuster. He's just got to get this through Congress. You can't do that on the budget resolution. You've got to get legislation to do it. You can't do it with executive orders. So, the filibuster elimination is going to dictate whether he can do any of the wonderful stuff that we want him to do, and I think that he wants to do. Yeah, and I think there's also a change in the mindset. I've recently been reading books like Eliot Janeway's The Struggle for Survival about FDR and the preparation for World War II. Naomi Klein's older brother Seth Klein has written a book called The Good War about how we have in Canada, which is a big fossil fuel producer, so there's both supply and demand side adjustments that need to be made. They have to look at the way in which Canada, which preceded the United States in entering World War II, mobilized their resources, and instead of saying the market will solve it, they say there is expertise. There's the equivalent of engineering sophistication. Out there in the private sector, and we need to mobilize that genius, but we need to direct what the results are. World War II when we finally got into it is the great model for this. The World War II scale mobilization that was technological and industrial as well as military, that has to be the model for a green mobilization. Well, we've covered a lot of different areas. Any final thoughts, anything come to mind that you'd like to... This is always a pleasure to have these conversations with you, and I think we are probably both a little more optimistic than we might have been two months ago, so that's good. Well, how would I say? We have a lot of children and grandchildren and so forth to care for, and how would I say? The urgency of now is, I think everyone understands, quite profound. So thanks for coming on today. Illuminating the nature of this challenge, and we'll just wait a few months and I'll call you back and we'll take a look at it a little bit further down the pipe. Well, you're welcome, and thanks for everything you do with INET. It's very important. Thank you.


Four, three, two, one, we are live. Hello, Adam. Hey, how are you, Ricky? Good. Thanks for doing this, man. Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So I want to start out, man, by just saying, thank you for all you do.  I appreciate it. And I love the relationship with everybody in the industry. This has just, it's been a fun ride. And I'm really enjoying making a lot of friends and having a lot of fun. Yeah. What did you do before this? Well, I've been with Remax for 15 years. And I worked my way through the company in those 15 years, everything from business consultants to regional vice president in California and Hawaii, Florida, in the mountain states, brand marketing, technology, was a chief operating officer. And then kind of came into the co-CEO and CEO position. But before I was at Remax, I used to run a SWAT team. So I was in law enforcement. Wow, where was that? I was in the south end of Denver here in Douglas County, Colorado. Yeah. Is it cold up there? Right now, it's a little cold. We had more snow this October and lower temperatures than we've had in a long time. But Colorado, you just wait 12 hours and the weather will change. So it should be nice tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. We're about to freeze to death down here in the 40s. That's, we were shorts in the 40s around here, man. So you came into the CEO position about two years ago? Yeah, 18, 19 months ago, something like that. So it'll be two years in February. Right. So you were already in the Remax system for so long. You were in the culture, you were in the dynamics, the direction, all that good stuff. So it wasn't really, it wasn't really a huge change for you necessarily. No, not a big learning curve. I mean, taking over CEO of a public company has a lot more dynamics than just kind of operating the company where you're dealing with analysts and quarterly, you know, the different investor calls and earnings calls, things like that. So probably, I don't know, about 30 to 40% of my day is, or of my gear is spent on public company items and the rest is spent on interaction with our amazing network and motto, mortgage or mortgage company and Booz or technology company stuff like that. Yeah. So I've talked to a lot of people about you coming on. Everybody had a lot of questions. One question I really liked was from a broker that kind of wanted to know, moving forward, what's the number one value that Remax brings like to their agents? And as she's trying to recruit more agents. So we look at our agents and understand that our agents are very high producers and we need to build an environment and maintain that environment and continue to expand the environment that helps them be as productive as they wanna be. And you really help that through essentially the four things that a great brand or great franchise brand brings, which the first one is obviously a brand. You gotta have a great brand that people trust and know. And then you have the three T's. So training, everybody needs training in our space and you shouldn't have to go look forward or really pay forward or anything like that. It should be quick and easy for you to get. You have marketing tools. So your company should market really well for you. And then you have technology that should help you be more efficient and generate more business and manage that business better with your time so you can spend better and more time doing the deals and having a closer bond with your customer base in order to increase that repeat and referral business. How do we view the other companies? Do we view them as competition or how are we better? Are we just not worried about them at all? We're just gonna do our thing and we know the value that we bring and we're not really worried about anything else. It's, I love this question because we have an amazing industry that we work in. It's extremely competitive, but it's extremely cooperative. So we compete like crazy for the listings and for the customers and then we cooperate to get the deals done.  So ultimately, when you look at it the person we compete with is ourself more than anything else. We compete with our emotion. We compete with the emotion of the transaction, the emotion of the consumer and how do we stabilize this process so that we're comfortable with each other? We build trust, we build confidence in closing the deal. So I would say that there are always gonna be other players in the marketplace but ultimately your biggest competitor is yourself in this space and that's your ability to navigate these relationships and the transactions with the relationships. Absolutely. What do you think a new agent coming in? A new agent coming into the industry there's all these options of all these different companies. How does a new agent navigate what company is the best fit for them and how to capitalize on all the different options that are out there? There's everything from the it costs nothing to work here to I mean, there's just such a variety there are no offices, offices. I mean, how does a new agent really navigate this new marketplace in terms of picking a brokerage? I look at our industry two ways.   So you can go and find an office that you can save all the money in the world but if you're worried about saving money you're not concerned about making money. So ultimately it boils down to what is your goal here? I wanna go out and be with the best and you see these super high producers you talk about your system zero to diamond. I'd be a new agent coming in going I wanna be diamond. How do I become diamond? You gotta go hang out with the people who are diamond. So save money or make money I'm in the make money side. The second piece is environment of productivity and that environment of productivity will help you set the bar and get over the bar and raise the bar and get over the bar. So that's why I think Remax is such an amazing organization is we're here to make money and we're here to raise the bar and we raise the bar by creating business efficiencies being with the best people coming up with the best ideas growing our relationships so that we can help provide that consultation to the consumer from a level of expertise instead of a level of dabbling in the business or being more concerned about saving money in your business than helping the consumer to the highest level. Yeah.  We're a growing name there. So we've made some great strides over the past couple of years since we reacquired the New York region and have done some new openings there of franchises and are seeing some age in a brokerage growth there. So we're not the most prevalent brand there by any means, but we're growing there and that's what I'm super excited about. But you're right, every marketplace is different. I just came from Europe. You want to talk about different? I sat down with people from 35 different countries. Every one of them is a different marketplace, but you know what they all have in common? They want to help people achieve their goals of home ownership and they're hard driving entrepreneurs that are affiliated with a company proven around the world to do that. So that's the exciting part. I know when I went to Brazil to speak at their R4 down there, I was blown away by the fact that they don't really have MLS. There's not really a system of, I mean, they really don't even have deeds and records and tax information. I mean, it's so different from how we operate here. It really blew my mind. So, and I couldn't imagine going to and talking to 35 different countries and learning the differences between all the different countries. You know what the cool part is, you as a human being, a kind human being who likes to help people achieve these goals will find a way to negotiate your way through the business environment in order to achieve that. And that's the cool part of being involved with an entrepreneurial company around the world is you see the different ways how they do it in Brazil or like Argentina has, you know, they have government challenges and things like that going on with that right now. But we have a great presence in Argentina and we're growing there. So you've got this, this fire in the belly that's driving the heart and this adaptive mindset to find your way through that. And that's the best part about just, you know, pick a market and go in there and go after it. And if you, you set those systems, daily habits in place and build relationships and you'll get there. Oh man, I could go to Brazil right now and can't speak a lick of Portuguese. I could go down there right now and start absolutely crushing it down there. I could be number one at no time. That place is incredible, man. You ever been there? I have not been to Brazil. I look forward to going at some point and I've got a standing invite to head down but I have not been there yet. I need to exercise that invite one of these days.  It's way, way better than I was. I mean, I just, it was, it blew my mind. But what I was getting at was the fact that my area, as opposed to New York, Remax is the best company. They're the highest producing company. We have three Remax franchises here locally and they are the three, you know, highest producing companies. I'm with the highest producing of those companies. And as, you know, I've been in the business 17 years and my entire goal the whole time was to get to Remax. You know, like that, they were the best. I wanted to be around the best agents, you know, and really what I realized, you know, coming up, losing everything, working for mom, Paul companies, you know, I was crushing it at the little companies, you know, as much as you can crush it at a little company. And I realized that it doesn't matter where you work. It just matters how you work. And but what I really realized when I came to Remax, I knew it the whole time is when you combine that work ethic that, you know, you can make it anywhere with a big brand.   Not only was I just had the brand to stand behind but I was around all the top producers, you know, and I had the number one agent in my state in 2013. He was in my office and I said, I can beat that guy. And the next year I beat him. I was number one the next year. But just being around that made me want to produce more. And it was, it's not a, it's not even competition.  I love it.  And that is, I mean, you've got this consistency of execution going on. You see those ingredients to make that amazing productivity in your business. And then you execute, execute, execute consistently over and over again. And it's just, it's interesting because it causes this attraction of other people that are like that. And that's really what, you know, Remax is based on. Dave always has said, you know, it's the power of association. Let's put a bunch of really high producers together and they're going to figure out a way to bring each other up. And that's the, that's the neatest part about being around here. You're going on iBuyers and, and, you know, can you hear me? I just got you back. Okay, cool. Take on, give me your take on the whole, let's just wrap it up into one kind of question move on to something else. But, you know, iBuyers and the pens and, you know, the technology, real estate companies that are disrupting the industry while they're losing millions of dollars and, you know, the direction of all this. It's, when you look at the marketplace as, as a whole, how many transactions are occurring and how many of those are actually being done by the disruptors, by the iBuyers, things like that. There's always been a portion of the marketplace that's been occupied by for sale by owners, by cash buyers, by people entering the market with a different business model that they're testing out. And that really takes up far less than 10% of the marketplace as a whole in the US and, you know, even less when you look at North America in general. So we have a lot of people that are focused on, oh my gosh, the iBuyers this or the iBuyers that and what they're missing is that other 90% opportunity out there, okay? I mean, it's, don't call these companies disruptors, call them distractors. Right. You know, is there a place in the market for people that want to buy leads or referrals from an iBuyer? Sure, absolutely. If that's part of your business model, go for it. Are we keeping an eye on it? Yes, but I have a responsibility to create the very best real estate company out there for my customers, people like yourself, who want to take and leverage the opportunity to business the training tools and technology in a world-class brand in order to go and serve the customer one-on-one human to human and provide, you know, that fiduciary duty, that consumer protection, the expertise and responsibility that we have to make sure that this industry, you know, maintains course to do good things for the consumer and, you know, affords the regulation and the aspects that do look out for their greatest investment in their life. So, you know, all those things in general, yep, they're out there in the marketplace. If, but I have to say, you get what you focus on. And, you know, we all know that to be true in business. If you're focusing on building great relationships with your repeat referral customer base and taking the leads that you have generated, however those may be, maybe they are from the iBuyers or whatever, and building fantastic relationships and serving them the best possible, greatest customer experience, you're gonna win in your marketplace all day long, regardless of the other noise that's happening. So, we keep a close eye on business intelligence. We're very in tune with that. We weigh the threats, the opportunities out there. And I just had a meeting with my business intelligence department, in fact, and looked at all these different business models. And we look at, okay, where are our opportunities and we're exercising our business weapons in the environment, which is our top producing agents, our awesome brokerages, motto mortgage, bouge, technology, things like that, and our marketing, our training, our tools to go out and execute. So, they're there, you know what you focus on? Focus on growing your business. And you look at it and go, oh, look, if I took my eye off of those distractions and I focused over here, I'm gonna increase my business. Like what your little sign says behind you, which I love, get 1% better every day, you continue to increase your business. So that's kind of my take on the competitive environment. Yeah, from what I understand, Zillow's goal, which is a huge goal from where they are to buy up X amount of properties with their iBuyer program is still, even at their huge goal, that they're probably not gonna be able to attain because it's so big, it's still gonna be like less than 1% or less than 1.5% of whatever the market share is in that particular market.   That's something that maybe you know, have some insight information on or can't comment, but I don't understand how some of these companies are surviving at the rate that they're losing money. But do you ever see rematch? So go ahead. There are two investment philosophies out there. There's one that says invest to grow and it's okay not to make money, as long as you're trying to grow, you're trying to absorb market share. And then there's one that is invest in your company to create margins and reinvestment in your company. We look at it as I have fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders and I also have fiduciary responsibility to my stakeholders to build the best company I can possibly build. So we take this invest to build a great company aspect. Others invest to try and gain market share aspect. And we know that that has a diffuse burns for so long before that whole philosophy explodes upon itself. Some companies emerge from that and create profitability, others don't. But we're in an environment socially where a lot of money is being invested in order to experiment in those things. And you know what? There's a lot of very intelligent business decision going into that and I absolutely respect that. But you're right. When you look at the portion of the marketplace that we're focusing on versus the portion of the marketplace that's occurring, we've always had low single digits that have been a cash buyer. Even at its maximum, we will still continue to see low single digits as cash buyer business models. And frankly, right now you look at the number of people using a real estate agent for listings and for sales is at an all time high. It's 90 to 93%. We haven't seen it that way in a long time. And frankly, we're in a seller's market still where you would think that for sale by owners would be popping out of the woodwork, but they're not. So it's a complicated infrequent individualized transaction which really strengthens the position of the real estate agent and the real estate industry model of expert, expert affiliation in order to complete the transaction. So there's a space for all these different business models there always has been, but we're happy with where we're at and we'll partner with who we need to partner with to help provide business to our agents. And you don't see me doing battle with any particular company out there. I feel like we're all on it together. We'll help each other, but I want my great agents to continue to be even better. Sure, sure. Why do you think that in this great market run that we've been in at this point that there are less for sale by owners than normal at this point in the market cycle? I think a lot of it has to do with the complications and the risk of the transaction. You can go on Google and you can look up disastrous real estate transactions and a fair amount of them that pop up are based around a for sale by owner or they're based around didn't get an inspection or they're based around, okay, we just kind of fudged things to make the deal happen which are not the tenants of a skilled agent who ensures that the eyes are dotted and the T's are crossed so that the regulatory environment is met. The risk environment is mitigated for the consumer. There are reasons why we have MLS rules. There are reasons why we have state licensing rules and it's to protect the consumer.  I mean, that's, you look at it and go, I need a new knee, all right. My cousin's gonna handle it for me or I'll go take care of it tomorrow night, something like that.  It's like, hey, I gotta rest it. Am I gonna end up going and taking care of it myself? No, you're not. You're gonna hire an expert to do it for you. So, I don't know why people do it themselves. It puzzles me. Again, we go back to the save more, make more concept, protect yourself, throw it all into the wind and hope something good happens. I like security for my family's financial investment. So, I couldn't answer it for you. There's always been somebody who wants to change their own oil. There's always been somebody that wants to paint their own house, do their own plumbing, wire their own house, whatever it might be. And then there are people who go, I wanna make sure it's done right by professional. And I think the majority of society says, I wanna make sure it's done right by professional. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you brought up a good point. Maybe it's the, how technology and information is so abundant now when they look up disasters or real estate stuff or seeing all these horror stories and it's scaring them into using an agent. Could be.  Sure, absolutely. And I know that's not what you meant to say. I wanna make sure that the consumer goes, I want a comfort-based relationship with ensuring that things are done the right way. And that's how we win this game, is by wrapping our arms around the consumer and making sure that they're comfortable with how we provide the best level service for them. And I know that's how you do business. It shouldn't be based on what's the worst thing that could happen to you, it should be based upon. Let me tell you what the best thing is that can happen for you by using a professional. Right, right. So new agent, new agent, first day in the business, come to work for any company, whatever, what should they focus on right out the gate? Focus on the opportunities. So many people go in and go, I need to get a deal. I need to get two deals. I look at it and go, do you know 100 people really well? Because I know that 100 raving fans can produce for you. Let's do the math here real quick. So 100 people, people move eight times a year. So out of 100 people, that's 12 transaction opportunities. And then people also know four others that are gonna buy or sell a house a year. So that's 400. So 400 plus 12, that's 412 possible deals out of 100 raving fans, close customers, great relationships. What you ought to be doing as a brand new agent, going out and building those 100 relationships and making sure that they know that you're there to help them and anybody that they know do a real estate transaction because the worst thing a new agent can do is be a secret agent. And this business is not a stand, you're not a cashier. You're not standing there waiting for a transaction to show up so you can check it out. You gotta go get them. And the best way to get them is to go build those relationships because when people know that you care as a human to human, they're more likely to talk to you about the real estate opportunities in their lives and their friends' lives. And that's where you're gonna start finding your business.  Facebook, start a Facebook group in your community, talk about the community, shoot videos, talk to all the business owners and start building yourself as a community expert. So you're working on your business relationships, those 100 true fans, you're working on your community relationships. And next thing you know, people will start talking about you and wanting to do business with you. Doesn't happen overnight, leave a little runway, have a little money in the bank to get going. But if you execute on those two things religiously for 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, you're gonna have a rocking business before you know it. I think so. And I think what you're trying to say here without saying it is, is to build a brand. Yes, build a brand, attach yourself to a trusted existing brand. Remax is a good opportunity for that. Use the tools that you have to leverage your time. That's why we provide technology. It's not about going, oh, I got great technology. It's about, I have great technology that gives me more time and helps me manage my relationships and transactions. It's what technology is about. And you know, get up every day and don't sit on the couch, go out and make it happen. Right, so would you say you're talking about your sphere, the hundred people that you already knew before you got into real estate? We're gonna go to those people. We're going to go deeper with those relationships. How would you approach these people? Because a lot of agents out there are scared to approach their sphere because they don't want their sphere to feel like they're trying to high-pressure men to buy and they're selling something or sounds like a car salesman or how do you approach your sphere? Maybe it's sphere that isn't really close friends or family. Maybe this is just somebody, an acquaintance or something. How would you say that new agents should approach their sphere in a low-pressure way to develop that relationship, to get those referrals? Because I agree with the agents that are scared. If they approach them the wrong way, it could scare them off. Yeah, that's a great point, Ricky. And I look at how you build your relationships in the business. You don't approach and sell. You're not going out and going, hey, Ricky, it's Adam. I just wanted to tell you, I'm a real estate agent now. Can I sell your house for you? I mean, that's not how it works. How it works is delivering value. So what do we got going on today? We have, we got Halloween going on today. Go deliver a bag of candy to all these hundred people that you know and go, I wasn't sure if you made it to the store soon enough. So as part of my outreach to the community, being a real estate agent around here, I bought bags of candy for all of my favorite people. So I wanted to drop one off here in case you run out tonight. Do that. I mean, that's a simple one. Go give somebody something and don't ask for the sale. Just say, look, as part of my real estate company outreach and they're gonna go, what? Real estate company? Yeah, I'm a real estate agent around here. Oh, okay, cool. If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them for you. If you know anybody who has any questions, love to answer those. You know, interest rates just changed the other day. All those did, those didn't affect your, you know, your mortgage rate, but everybody thinks they did, but they didn't. So, you know, let me help you if you need anything. I'm here for you. Have a nice day. Don't be pushy, give value. The next week, give value. The next week, give value. Shoot a video that has some value. It's just over at this new restaurant. They've got it. They just redid their menu. You might want to know about this. It's really good. Shoot a video, send it out to all your friends on Facebook Messenger or something like that.  But it's just, it's give value.  What can I give back to you? Oh, hey, I just heard my cousin's thinking about moving. Go talk to them. You know, something like that.  The jabbing's giving, the right hook is the, you know, the receiving of business. So it's what you're in it for, is to give. And if you give unconditionally, people will start giving unconditionally on the other side. And that's how your business starts to grow. Would you add anything to it?  And basically you say, go to restaurants and do everything else and be a media company. Is there anything, is there another layer of that, of anything else? Or would that be, you know, as a new agent, you looking at it from the outside, you know, thinking about what the best avenue for a new agent is, would you just hit your sphere for the first year and do social media? Or would you add any other layers of prospecting or business? You know, you could always go and find out who's, who wants to have an open house in the listings in your office and go sit in one of those open houses and just go meet people on a real estate level. Talk real estate with them, talk business with them, get used to that, know how to use the lingo, the jargon. And here's a really good one. When you sit on an open house, ask people when they come in, say, when it comes to buying a house, what do you think your biggest challenge is on? Ask them that and write down the exact words or record what they say, record a video of what they're saying, but write down those words and look for keywords that they're using. Take all the words that they've used and dump them in, go to wordclouds.com. Throw them all in there and it'll tell you what the number one word is that they're using, it'll rank all the words, my word. And then you know what words you can go back to the marketplace with because you might hear something that you're not familiar with, such as mortgage, scary, confusing, whatever it is. Use the words that they use when you talk to them. And then third or fourth open house, you're sitting on, people walk in, go, hey, how's it going? I'm Adam, let me know if you have any questions. Hey, I got a question for you because I'm hearing the common challenges of people looking for houses or this, this and this. Is that something you're experiencing? Because I have a little PDF document here that I came up with that'll help you overcome those challenges, give value based on those challenges. Be their guide, make them the hero in the journey and they'll fall in love with you. So, sitting in open houses to talk to those customers and finding out their challenges, that's a great way of adding to that, that additional angle of gaining some customers, but you're not going to gain customers unless you are delivering to customers, getting in front of customers, be it virtually or in person and talking the business with people so you know what to say. I think just stay busy, stay busy talking to people. Whoever talks to the most people with the best intentions and builds the biggest brand behind that, wins. Bingo, you got it. Bingo. So what's the top three most important daily activities for an agent? I personally think you need to, you need to focus on three things, okay? First of all, you have to focus on yourself. Everybody's like, what? I need to build my business. No, you need to focus on yourself. You need to start with a win. You need to start your day with positive forward momentum. I get up and I exercise first thing in the morning, I have nutrition, I love my dogs, I love my family. You got to have a sound body, sound mind in order to be effective in business. So you got to focus on yourself. You got to focus on your relationships. So, you know, telling your family members you love them. I tell my family members I love them so many times a day. I wave to people in traffic for letting me in so many times a day. I smile at so many people a day. By the way, none of those things cost you any money and they make you feel good. They make your heart feel good. So work on yourself, work on your relationships. Those relationships transfer over to those that are those 100 of your dream clients that are gonna help you build your business. And then the third thing you need to focus on is you have to work on your business every day. You have to create output in your business every day. You can't sit there and wait for the phone to ring because you will go out of business really quick. So output in your business is those items of value, those videos, social media posts, outreach to your customers. There has to be intentional time in your day, at least probably two to four hours minimum of hyper-focused time building your business every day because it's the people that win are those that can overcome that boredom of feeling like nothing's happening and consistently keep going. You will feel like nothing's happening. You will get frustrated.  And it will start paying off. That's incredible. I like those three things. So it's gonna be yourself, your relationships and work on your business every day. Yep. I like that. I like that. So what about recharging and so that you don't burn out because I have a lot of agents, especially in the beginning of your career and I was like this, even after I knock off at five or six o'clock or seven or whatever, I'm still thinking about real estate till I literally, I'm in bed laying there and my body's resting but I'm still thinking about it, worried about it, stressed about it, trying to figure out how I'm gonna succeed and that mental, staying in that mental state from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep will wear down on you over a couple of weeks or months or even a couple of days depending on who you are.  You just feel down. You don't feel like making the calls. You don't feel like anything's going right.   Yeah, that's a great question, Ricky. And a lot of that goes down to your psychological health. Here's the reality.  If you're not learning, you're in fear of dying and you're gonna figure out ways to start dying if you're not figuring out ways of growing and learning, okay? So, you know, when you look at our alternatives there, we can grow, we can die, or we can find some way of occupying our minds so that we're not doing either of those two things. We call that entertainment, okay? So, you know, a lot of people will go, I'm gonna watch a movie, I'm gonna turn on the news, I'm gonna turn on, you know, music, whatever it might be, I'm gonna read a book. I operate at one end of that spectrum. So when I'm not working, I'm learning. I love to learn because I feel like it makes the brain a fresh place. It gives you new ideas. It actually helps your business because it gives you things to approach people and talk about. Everybody wants an icebreaker. How do I go talk to somebody in the business? Walk up to them and go, hey, Ricky, I read this article the other day and I thought about you and I thought, I gotta tell you about this. So, you know, and people go, why did you think about me? I don't know, but it made me think about you.  Like, I know some really good business people who tell a story in their business and you're one of those Ricky, you know, and it might be Joe, a friend of yours. But the reality is you gotta be learning or you're dying. So, look at it this way, growth or death. And, you know, we're constantly growing, we're constantly dying. Your body and your mind only know one of those two things and you kind of coast in between by entertainment, although entertainment really is just an occupation of time. I'm not discounting the fact that people like to remove themselves from reality by watching a movie or playing a video game or reading a book or whatever. But try the growth part. Try growing. Most people don't read a book after they finish formal education for the rest of their life, which is weird to me because I try and read one, you know, like a month at least, sometimes three or four a month. But try growing something else to help you. You gotta activate the right chemicals in your brain and a great way to activate those chemicals is with gratitude.  Let me ask you this, you've survived every bad situation you've been through so far in life, haven't you? Yep, you're still around to see tomorrow occur. What are you grateful for?    Restful gratitude. So try to learn something. I have my gratitudes. I share my love with my family. I'm psychologically in a good place. I'm not polluting myself by going, I think I'm gonna go hit the bottle tonight before I go to bed and try to drink myself to sleep because I'm bummed about my business. Sorry, that can find me there. I'd rather go do push-ups. So, you know, it is, fact of life is we all hit frustration. You gotta know it is intentional to push yourself back in a good place where the ants start crawling around in your head.  The only way to do that is with positive thoughts, education, gratitude. I like it. So after work to get your mind off work, you learn and you're reading books and you're doing that sort of thing.  There's always a positive. I don't care how bad it is. Someone has all, there's someone who has it way worse than you. I don't care how bad you think it is. I mean, there's people with no limbs and who can't talk and are blind and, you know, have these diseases and stuff that it could be a million times worse than you making 45, I mean, there's agents making 45,000 a year that I'm sure public teachers would love to make.  So I like that. I like that a lot. Let's see, how much time we got here? About five minutes. Yep. I was gonna ask you about the books because they do say CEOs read more than anybody, normally about one book a month. So that's interesting that you brought that up. So that's something that you do. Do you find that CEOs read more than average people? I think so. You know, what's interesting though is, you know, the CEOs I talk to, we don't talk about books a lot, but I'm hungry for education, I'm hungry for learning. The super achievers that I do talk to do spend a great deal of time very intentional with their time.  And everybody that's a super achiever that I do talk to does spend time reading a book every day. And it's either an Audible or it's on Kindle or it's a real paper book. I've got a combination of those. And the beauty is when you start hanging out with people like this, which is why I love remax because you got, I mean, I went to an event of some of our very top people not long ago and I walked away from there with like three books. They go, have you read this? No, okay, it'll be at your desk when you get home. And we like send these to each other. So it's kind of fun. But yeah, if you haven't gone and read a book lately, go get one and read it. I'm not a fiction reader, I'm not into the story, I'm into the deconstruction of success, which is a lot of psychology, a lot of business fundamentals, things like that. I just had lunch with a professor from the business school here at University of Denver today. And we talked about books, talked about learning, we talked about what a CEO's do to raise the bar. It was part of it. So it sounded a lot like the conversation I'm having with you right now. So yeah.  Like it's introducing new ideas into your mind, which triggers ideas to help your business grow and to build the business and the industry and the company take it to a better place. Well, last question before I talk about your podcasts and stuff, what is the future of remax? I love it. So we're focused on two things right now in remax, okay? We're focused on business growth and we're focused on technology advancement. So my team is heavily focused on both of those things, helping agents grow their businesses through the tools training technology that we have to offer and the promotion of the brand. So intentionally focused on business growth, helping franchises, our brokerages grow agent count with producing agents and increasing the level of production of those agents. And the other piece is launching the world's greatest real estate technology. So we've started that, not long ago with Booge in the fall and we continue to launch, launch, launch and iterate, iterate, iterate. So we're all in on both of those things. So it's about making the business better. Better people doing better things more often and better technology helping them maximize their time and resources. Awesome, awesome. Guys, really appreciate you watching this and I wanted to shout out Adam's podcast, Start With The Wind, which I was on probably several months ago. I've been listening to this podcast. It's really, really good. It's not, it's 30 minute, it's mostly 30 minute shows, right? Yeah, we try to stay between like to low 20s. Sometimes we get up to 30 minutes. Right, right. So it's a good commute listen and there's been some incredible guests on there. You've had professional athletes, you've had huge business people and everything. Tell me a little bit about the podcast. I love it. We just hit our one year mark. So episode 52 just came out. It's a great recap of the year. And so go check it out. Start with the wind.com and start with a wind in the iTunes store or on Google Play. And you can also catch me on all the rest of the social media or remax Adam Contos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. And we got a lot of, you know, just business principles. Wait is to be better. And that's what it's about. We're all in this business together. Let's all be the best we can be in it. Something I want to ask you to before we go about the podcast, you know, you're probably one of the only CEOs that has a podcast. Am I wrong? I think a few others might have them is what the rumor one of the few, that's why I say one of the few that actually have a podcast.  So I truly believe in digital transparency. I think business leaders, I'm a business leader, you're a business leader, Ricky. Business leaders are watching this.  They want to know who and why your business is what it is. And I think that's the best way for me to share my thoughts and feelings on it as well as if I can get somebody to do an act of kindness during the day to share their love, share a smile, a wave in traffic, whatever it might be or just go do an extra push up and be better. That's fulfilling to me as a human being and as a business leader. Well, let me just say that I love the fact that you do a podcast and that it's focused around real estate and I love what you're doing on Instagram too. Thank you. I think the content that coupled with the podcast is really tremendous play for you and I just, I love what you're doing there. So you guys go check him out on Instagram, remix Adam Contos and start with the Wynn podcast everywhere where podcasts are are. And man, I appreciate your time today. Hey, it's my pleasure, Ricky. And I just wanna say from myself and my team here at Remax headquarters, thanks for all you do. We appreciate you, your professionalism and your daily activities to raise the bar in this space and make everybody better that you come in contact with. Thank you so much for that. And I'll see you in Vegas. Sounds good, Ricky, take care. Amen.


My name is Winola Kingamkono, I was introduced, and I'm from Tanzania. This is my second time here, I was here eight years ago, 2015, presented Goomzo, and also my background is in information systems, I love computers and video games. For those who don't know, Dalesalam is this tiny city, but very popular in East Africa. And Dalesalam has over six million people who are working day-to-day jobs to survive. And one of the people who lives in Dalesalam is this guy, his name is Amani, Amani is an Uber driver, and I met him about two years ago, and I met him because he was one of the first people to use our platform we were testing. And one of the things that Amani constantly says to us is that he doesn't want to hear about buying our pay letter, and I know you are curious why is that. First of all, the six million people that live in Dalesalam, like so many other cities in Africa, are struggling with achieving their financial needs. This is because, first of all, the purchasing power is very limited, but also because of this they end up having unhealthy financial habits. And what does this lead to? This leads for them to take loans, however, because as I said, poor financial habits low purchasing power, that means they can't pay back these loans. And this affects over 80% of the population in Dalesalam. And this is not unique to Dalesalam alone. Over 300 million earners in Africa are also affected by this similar challenge. And so, as Tunzar, our mission is quite simple. We want to transform the financial habits of everyday Africans. How are we going to do that? What we have learned is that, first of all, saving is about psychology, while of course, having a higher income matters, but this is not the actual reason that people are saving. And because of this, we are inspired by similar products that are trying to transform the habits of different people. Strava, Duolingo, Habitica, and we borrow our inspiration from these companies in a sense that we are trying to make, first of all, saving so easy to start. And every time that people are saving on our platform, they should be, you know, able to celebrate the wins that they're doing. But also, we are seeing also on our platform every time they are putting the money aside, once they finish a certain goal, they always try to get something much bigger. And also, we see how they are able to do this, and this motivates them to actually do much more. And so, it's quite simple how our platform works. You come to Tunzar, we're on boarded merchants. You pick a product, say a TV, a laptop, anything. And then you basically set up a payment plan. Currently, we are supporting up to six months. And then you start paying for this product as low as less than one euro.  How are you making money? How often are you receiving money? And then with this, we try to send reminders to keep you on track on your goal. And then we deliver the product once the payments are completed, which means our customers or our consumers do not end up with debt or high interest. And so, in a nutshell, we let African consumers serve for purchases, for more curated serving as a service marketplace with trusted merchants and our secure API. And currently, Tunzar is piloted in Tanzania. And we have our marketplace when we're on boarded several businesses. And as you can see, we have products and people can select how often they want to do it every day, every week, after three days. And then eventually, they start paying for the product. And then once they finish the payments, as I say, that's when we deliver. And also, Tunzar works offline. And that's the coolest thing about our platform. So we also piloted how it would be because we are seeing a lot of, there's a lot of mobile money agents in my country and so many other African countries. And because of this, our vision is to also use the existing mobile money network to convert more people to using Tunzar and other distribution centers in the future. And while we were building a platform for our consumers, something very interesting happened. We learned that the businesses that are currently, that want to sell on Tunzar, unfortunately, do not have digital tools. And so because of this, we also built Tunzar Plus to support the businesses that are accepting payments on Tunzar. I'm saying this is interesting because we are now able to see the credit score or like, depending on what they are selling, what businesses are selling, we can build a credit score for these businesses to eventually support them in the future. So our product is quite simple. We built an API that is easily accessible, transparent, and offers freedom on how you want to pay for products. And what we are seeing now, since we launched Tunzar to the users that access in our platform, first of all, starting to serve us become much easier for them. And also we enhance their saving habits based on the data. And also they are saying, people like our money and so many others, they are saying that they reduce their debt burden and their dependence on loans. Currently, we are making money through commissions. We are taking money from the businesses. The price that you see at the shop is exactly what you will see on Tunzar, so there's no added cost, no interest, nothing. And also we see a potential of making money through transactions. We have probably 30,000 now payment transactions, and so we see an opportunity here. And also because we're on board merchants on our marketplace, so in the future, we want to consider ads. We are addressing two markets. First of all is the e-commerce market, which is the serviceable obtained market for Tanzania. It's about what we are aiming for, it's about over $400 million. And also we are looking at digital payments, and this is where the interesting thing is, because the numbers are much more attractive, and Tanzania, like so many other African markets, is vibrant and ready for opportunities like this. So we are also going after the digital payments as another market. And there are some other players who are doing something similar. There's one in Canada and America, also in Germany, you see accrues savings in monkey. However, Tunzar stands out because of our easily plug-in play-savings and payment infrastructure that is targeting African merchants, but also we offer these tools for digital transformation for these businesses. And we currently, so this is a little bit outdated. We are now at over 47,000 users and about 1,800 paying users, and we have fulfilled over 4,000 orders. And yes, we are making money on our platform as we are still testing it. We see there's some transactions, and also we are making about 1,000 to sometimes 2,000, but the average is $1,300 a month. And this is our trend. Something interesting happened last month. We partnered with M-Pesa around October, and so now Tunzar is available within M-Pesa platform. And this allowed our growth to rapidly go high. So this happened recently. I don't understand it fully yet, but I hope this will be something amazing and a great opportunity for us. Yes, as I mentioned, we partnered with M-Pesa and also TIGO. These are two largest mobile money networks in my country. And also we are licensed by the Bank of Tanzania and Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority, which allows us to be in this market. And also we raised some funding from startup WiseGuys and MAPCON and other angel investors. Currently our plan is to grow within Tanzania and to make sure that we understand this market even much better. We have plans to go to other markets. They are not solid yet, but we have plans we are considering Uganda and Zambia and maybe in the future Kenya and Nigeria. We are not sure if we are going to be an African Neobank or we continue further to develop our platform. So if I tell you right now it will be a Neobank, I'm not sure about that, but that's what we might become in the future. So yeah, and our plan to expand Tunzar includes releasing our API to developers of a value-added services, for example, credit scoring as a service and offer new verticals for services like rental, travel, school fees. We are raising half a million dollars for growth. I already have a commitment of $200,000 for growth in Tanzania, but what we are much more interested in is people who have connections and talents and experience building products like Tunzar in Africa. This is my team. Paul is joining me as a co-founder and also our team is also based in Dalesalam and we are building everything in Dalesalam, Tanzania and these are the people who keep Tunzar alive. So, we come at Tunzanian. Thank you.