Ron Suber - Board Member at Yieldstreet

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Ron, a board member at Yieldstreet, and we discuss how Yieldstreet is democratizing investments by making them more accessible, the concept of the uncertainty quotient, and what the future will look like with more decentralized currencies. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Hello, hello.

(Ron at 00:00:37) Hey, Joel. Good morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) It's Ron. How you doing, buddy?

(Ron at 00:00:41) Good. I'm in Denver, Colorado. Where are you today?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) I am in Florida.

(Ron at 00:00:46) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Yeah, so you're bright and early over there.

(Ron at 00:00:50) Yeah, I get up early and have coffee and do my reading and meditation in the morning and get my day started. So it's great to be here today. Congrats on everything on your end.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:59) Oh, thank you so much. I'm just super excited because I've been sitting here reading about you and your insightful posts, and I was just like, this guy's going to be a fantastic person to get to know. But I was curious, with all this that I've read about you, I want to hear your origin story.

(Ron at 00:01:18) So I was born in Flint, Michigan, which is a great place to be from. My family moved to California when I was a teenager, but they all moved back and I stayed in California. And so I worked my way through the California public schools and colleges and met my wife in San Francisco. And so we're married 30 years and have two kids, both probably older than you, candidly. One's 26 and one's 28.

(Ron at 00:01:50) And we've really had a great time in California, and we just made the big move, actually in October, to Colorado. We are a full-time Colorado resident, so excited to be here by the mountains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) How did that come about?

(Ron at 00:02:09) Well, I love California and love the Bay Area and have so many good friends and family there. But over the last couple years, Karen and I have been talking about why. Why are we doing what we're doing? Why are we spending the time in the places we are? Why are we living in San Francisco where we had a beautiful home and great neighbors and friends?

(Ron at 00:02:27) And we've been traveling for two years trying to figure out where. And so we literally went to Wyoming and Oregon and Texas and, you know, Florida, all over the place. And we come to Colorado every summer. Our daughter's here actually, and we have lots of friends here and some family. Make a long story short, we were leaving San Francisco on a trip to Colorado in September.

(Ron at 00:02:53) And I said to Karen, why don't we just put the house up for sale for fun to see what happens? And lo and behold, a venture capitalist came in and said, full price, no inspection, no contingency, all cash, but you've got to be out in two weeks. So I opened a bottle of champagne, got Karen a little tipsy one night, and I said, guess what? We're moving. And she said, no, I need a month. I'm like, no, no, we're packing tomorrow. So we literally gave away a third of our stuff, put two-thirds of it in storage, packed up our little SUV.

(Ron at 00:03:23) I bought a Thule roof rack. We threw the dog in the back, and we traveled through Utah and Montana and Colorado and all over this part of the country for ten weeks trying to figure out where are we going to live because we were homeless. And we ended up moving into this house just seven weeks ago here in Denver. It's so exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) That's amazing. You know, I'm on my journey too. So just a couple weeks ago, well, actually, I guess we started in October. We were like, we just need a change. Something's got to happen. Adjustments need to occur. So we went out and started exploring Texas. And what we learned, because we've got two small kids under four, and we learned from that plane ride and the Airbnb experience that it is a lot of work to travel with kids. So the result of that was us getting a—and we didn't particularly fall in love with the city that we were in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) What we realized was that we need to go visit a lot of places. So we went back to Florida, bought a camper, and then now we're going and visiting different places. And next week we're going to Georgia because we've got some family there and there's some towns there. But yeah, definitely. And then I've heard this story—seems like I've heard it like 20 times in my private network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) Not even on the show, but just in my own life. And people are looking to get more space.

(Ron at 00:04:47) For sure. And so I believe we're in the great migration—geographic migration—but we're also in a financial migration, which is why the Yieldstreet conversation's so timely today. And one of the things people are struggling with is, can they move? But really they're struggling with where will they go. And so people are trying to find a house on the other side.

(Ron at 00:05:10) But what I try to teach them from my own experience is you shouldn't be shopping for a house, you should be shopping for a zip code. And then once you find the zip code, you find the home within that city or town or state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) Yeah, because that's what got us the first time. We found this house. We fell in love with it. We found two or three within a few months. We're going to Texas, we're going to put an offer on one of these houses. We get out there and we're like, this is not the feel that we thought it would be based off of the photos. We need to go find the right feel. And so that's the adventure we're on. But yeah, I'm so glad we got connected through Rishi and Yieldstreet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:46) Are you—why did you get involved with that company?

(Ron at 00:05:51) So I have been involved in the online lending space since 2012. And I found Yieldstreet and became a customer online and started seeing some of the diversified, non-correlated, higher-yielding investment opportunities. It could have been in consumer loans or business loans or marine loans or art loans and all real estate loans, all kinds of different things. I worked at Prosper, which was in the online lending space and is in the online lending space. And I got to meet Michael at one of the conferences in Florida.

(Ron at 00:06:28) And I really got to understand him and the mission and vision and values and the goals of Yieldstreet. I then got to meet Melinda, his partner, and really started to understand that they were onto something big, maybe even bigger than they thought, that the wind was at their back with the whole move to mobile and the move to people taking control of their finances. And so I became an advisor to Michael and Melinda. I actually had my wife, Karen, come to New York and meet them and their wives over dinner to understand what a unique opportunity, unique company, but what unique people these were. And after becoming an advisor to them for a year, I got to know the board and got to know the company more and decided to invest in the equity of the company and join the board of directors.

(Ron at 00:07:19) And so I am very excited to be part of this journey of Yieldstreet, but really helping people get the education and awareness and understanding—we call that EA and U—about their finances and this alternative investment class to generate passive income for people who can't find it today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) Yeah, you were talking a lot in the notes about yield and also making these investments more accessible. So when I talked and did the interview a few months ago, the minimum investment was $5,000 at Yieldstreet, and today it's $1,000. So that's some progress.

(Ron at 00:07:58) It is. And so what's happening is normal people, American people, the majority of our country are locked out of these opportunities because these big brokerage firms have big minimums and big lockups and all kinds of fees and things attached that most people can't get to. And so most people are stuck in muni bonds, which are great and a part of every portfolio, but only yield like 2%. And while it's tax-free, that's great, but that's not enough. Or high-yield bonds that yield now 6%, which used to yield, you know, 12 or 15. Or they're leaving cash in their bank and getting literally zero interest or maybe 10 basis points, or if you're lucky and you're at some online bank, you may be getting 50 basis points, which is one-half of 1%, which isn't enough passive income for most people.

(Ron at 00:08:52) And that's why Yieldstreet is so important today for people to understand it, the investment opportunities at all levels, whether it's the Prism Fund, smaller investments, or bigger investments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:06) What's the biggest barrier that Yieldstreet's currently facing?

(Ron at 00:09:11) So what's interesting, it's awareness. Most people don't know what it is, that it exists. And so Yieldstreet's really working on the education of alternatives and the education of yield. And so you'll see Yieldstreet on LinkedIn and on Instagram and on ads, but it's not mainstream. You don't see it on CNN or on CNBC or some of the other mainstream news.

(Ron at 00:09:38) And I think we're really in the second or third inning of people understanding there are direct alternatives and ways to get yield today and use the Yieldstreet wallet to hold your money and get interest on your money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) So Yieldstreet, if you had to explain it to a three-year-old, right? How do you do that? How do you explain why I should use Yieldstreet to a three-year-old?

(Ron at 00:10:01) So I would start off with Uber or Airbnb. And I would say for Uber, right, on one side's a passenger, on one side's a driver. And Uber connects those two in a great experience in a timely way, in a mobile way to help both sides. And Airbnb are places to stay on one side and people who want to stay somewhere where Airbnb creates that interface for people to find each other who want to stay or have a place to stay. And Yieldstreet is the same.

(Ron at 00:10:32) On one side are opportunities where there's yield in different asset classes, and on the other side are people like us, individuals looking for yield. So diversified means there are loan opportunities, investment opportunities with yield in consumer loans, in residential real estate loans, in commercial real estate loans, in litigation finance, in art finance, and shipping finance, and all kinds of other things. So it's not just one product, one offering, and they don't all move the same. So they're not all correlated. And so you can get into different aspects of this lending, yielding opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:17) So, and help me understand because I'm new to this. So there's, let's say there's a deal. Let's break it all the way down to a commercial lending one, right? And I'm going to essentially buy into that pot, right? So I can get a piece of that yield. Who's holding it prior to me saying, hey, I want to participate, and why are they incentivized to give me some of their yield?

(Ron at 00:11:42) That's a great question. So there was a deal that was on the platform last week. It was an accounts receivable supply chain finance opportunity. So there was a company that's doing really well, and it needed some more debt capital to help fund its business. It could have been in the real estate business or in some other industry.

(Ron at 00:12:03) And so what happened was that company came to Yieldstreet saying, could you put this opportunity that we have on the platform and see if some people want to invest in or lend money into this accounts receivable supply chain finance opportunity? So the company worked out a deal with Yieldstreet. Yieldstreet lent them the money and then went to the Yieldstreet community, to us, the individuals, and said, we have an opportunity to lend money as a group to this accounts receivable supply chain company. You never would have gotten access to this before, but Yieldstreet is now this marketplace, this platform that's made it available. Here's all the information about it.

(Ron at 00:12:42) Here's the term, how long. Here's the collateral we have. Here's the interest rate. Here's all the details. You can learn about it, and we're going to put it up on the platform in two or three days.

(Ron at 00:12:55) Let us know if you have indications of interest, if you want to invest some money. And then over the next two days, all these retail people, these individuals, saw it and learned about it and decided to make investments. So there was a match of this group that wanted to borrow money. Yieldstreet put the deal together, educated us, and the people invested in it, and the deal is now going. It's kind of like that Uber driver and that Uber passenger making a match.

(Ron at 00:13:24) It was the same match in this example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:27) That's so interesting. When I raised money, what happened was Florida Funders, the venture capital company, they basically guaranteed that. And then they had a whole bank of retail investors, individuals, high-net-worth people. And then they put me on their platform, and then they bought a certain amount of it, and then it all ended up. But that sounds like a really similar model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:50) But it is different because there's no yield or anything over there. But when you were describing it, I was like, I went through this. I don't know if other VC firms do it like that. But Yieldstreet's a really, really cool company.

(Ron at 00:14:03) It's different. It definitely has some unique features that help people. So some platforms have big minimums or have ten-year deals or have real estate only deals or have equity deals with no yield that you hope that the equity investment works out. And so what Yieldstreet's doing is providing yield, literally weekly payments, monthly payments, quarterly payments, annual payments, helping people put their money somewhere where they get a return of their money and a return on their money during the year in a very transparent way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:41) That is really cool. I'm going to sign up and try it out, experience it for myself. I want yield, man.

(Ron at 00:14:49) We all do. And that's why Yieldstreet is doing so well, because so many companies are looking for ways to get capital that don't go through the banking system, and so many people are looking for yield. And what I suggest to people is go online and open an account and don't put any money in for a month, and just read. Read about past deals. It's all there.

(Ron at 00:15:11) Read about current deals and watch the new deals. Read about Prism and take your time and start small. And maybe just start off with investing in the Prism Fund and watch how Prism is now communicating with you every month, every quarter, and then see if you want to do separate deals too. But you can go slow and you can learn a ton. You don't have to invest day one.

(Ron at 00:15:33) It's a great place to get EA and U—education, awareness, and understanding.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) I like it. And then how is this emerging decentralized finance crypto staking coins type thing? How do you see that? Are you participating in it?

(Ron at 00:15:53) So I am a big believer that the way things were and the way things are isn't going to be for much longer. That this next generation isn't going to do things the way my generation did in so many ways and for sure with their finances. So I watched my father walk into a bank with a suit, shake a person's hand, and try to ask for a mortgage. This next generation, not going to happen. And it's going to be more bespoke, more in people's control.

(Ron at 00:16:28) And you see it, right, with the Reddit community and what's happening on Wall Street today and what's happening in so many different parts of our community and the world, that this new generation wants things different. They want ESG, right—environmental and social and governance—to be more important, and they want things to be more transparent. And I believe Yieldstreet's really helping this next generation, right, my generation and yours, find ways to do investments, to do savings, to hold your money in the Yieldstreet wallet, and find things to do, and then move your money somewhere else from the Yieldstreet wallet. If you find other opportunities, it's a very open platform, an open banking platform where you can save and invest and understand more about what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) Now do I have to be a—do I have to qualify, or can anybody do Yieldstreet?

(Ron at 00:17:25) So anybody can. There are accredited investors who are very sophisticated and have millions of dollars, and there's room for them too. And there are non-accredited investors who can come in for smaller amounts, and each deal has different information about both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) Oh, great. So, man, that's it. You guys are doing it.

(Ron at 00:17:44) We are doing it, and we're really listening to our customers. What is it that they're looking for? Some of them didn't want four-year deals. They didn't want their money to be committed for four years or two years. And so there are now one-month, three-month, six-month, and one-year and four-year opportunities.

(Ron at 00:18:03) So Yieldstreet's really spending the time to listen to current investors and future investors about what are you looking for. And that's how Prism came about. Some investors said, "I don't really want to have to look at each deal. Don't you have a fund, a commingled vehicle where I can invest and you all kind of allocate the money?" And so that absolutely came from our community, the Yieldstreet customers and potential customers, to create something that fit better for their financial needs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:33) All right. I've got a question for you because I saw you like some philosophical stuff, and I'm curious. So I was watching a National Geo miniseries on, I think it was called Origins. And one of the episodes was on money in the history of money. And as we're all more connected now than ever before, as a world, we're really starting to understand how banking works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) And we all just experienced a pandemic, and they just created and printed money out of nowhere. And we're really kind of understanding more and more about how money operates and works. Do you think that governments and, we can, by the way, we can edit anything we want. This is me and you hanging out completely, just you and I. Anything that you don't want on the podcast, we edit it for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:16) But I'm curious, between you and me, do you think governments are going to try to shut crypto down further or make it, some countries made it illegal for their people to own crypto? What do you think is going to happen there? Just speculation.

(Ron at 00:19:33) So I think banks are really important and they're not going away. They serve a very critical function in the world. So I'm not an anti-bank person. But they have to change. They're going to have to do things different as Square and PayPal and other groups like Yieldstreet are showing them.

(Ron at 00:19:52) And many of the banks have admitted they were slow to adjust, and they didn't have the agility that some of these other financial fintech providers like Yieldstreet and PayPal and Square and others have done. On the concept of decentralized ledgers and coins, there is definitely a need for it, but it's not going to be the way it is today because there is a criminal element that is doing things in the distributed ledgers and Bitcoin and the different coins that has to stop. So I do believe that we're going to have coins, and we're going to have distributed ledgers, and we're going to have exchanges like BlockFi, like Coinbase, and others like the New York Stock Exchange. They'll be the exchanges for these cryptocurrencies and decentralized ledgers. So I'm a believer in it, but it's not going to quite be the way it is today.

(Ron at 00:20:47) It's going to mature, right? These are the early days. And so the early innovators are out there doing lots of things. I think as it grows up, as the coins grow up, as the ledgers grow up, it will become mainstream and global and somewhat regulated, but I'm a big believer. I don't know what the price of the coin should be, but I believe it will be part of our everyday life in a way that we save money, store a value, and pay for things, which isn't quite there yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19) Yeah. It's interesting. We're watching all of these things come from, it's like watching your kids learn to walk. It's like nothing. And I really liked your perspective because that's usually how things pan out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) Usually what happens is the public freaks in one way or another, goes to one end of the spectrum or the other. And then in reality is a slow methodical, things play out in court or they make small adjustments and move. Because the one problem that I see as a large problem is the concept of, as they're finite currencies and as you print more cash, what happens there? I'm assuming they're going to take case studies from what happens with gold. But gold is artificially controlled and Bitcoin is finite, mathematically controlled. So I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) I'm just, I'm very amateur in the space. I'm not super, super into it. I don't hold very strong beliefs about it. I'm just, I'm like a curious monkey. I own some. I own four or five different coins.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) I watch it because I feel like it's the future. I feel like it's how things should be. I like the idea of the transparency and the ledgers and the concepts, the principles of decentralization versus, yeah, I love my bank, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:38) But I don't love the fact that they have the only database and control it, that says how much money I have, right?

(Ron at 00:22:44) Right. So I'll give you one quick analogy, maybe just a visual. When the Internet first came out, right, in the seventies or eighties, everybody thought the Internet was about AOL and pictures and weather and email, but we now know the Internet is really about Amazon and all this other stuff we're all doing on the Internet. And so think about not the Internet, but now move to distributed ledgers. People think the distributed ledgers are about all these coins, but they're really not.

(Ron at 00:23:12) It's about something much, much bigger, and that's the story that's being developed now. And so it's bigger than people can imagine, just like the Internet was more than email. The distributed ledger is more than these coins. It's about a whole new payment system and ways we're going to operate financially in the future. Early days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:35) Yeah. My background, a large chunk of my past was in real estate technology. And so I keep up with it just because it's interesting to me. And I saw that they were putting mortgages on block, or titles, right?

(Ron at 00:23:47) I think it—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47) was titles on blockchains, and so that you could clear it quickly when you do a mortgage. And I was like, that is amazing. That is so fascinating because you don't have to do the whole chain of custody and all of this. You just have, it's like, here it is. I own it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) I've got my key. Here is my title.

(Ron at 00:24:04) So let's take that for one second and expand on it. I just, Karen and I just moved to Colorado. I should have had on my watch or my phone a key and a blockchain of all my health records, dental, medical, and open that up to the doctor so I had control of every single medicine, procedure, health history. That's the kind of stuff that we're going to have going forward is we're going to have in a distributed ledger all of our information that we control and we can give access to, that's been authenticated and safe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) And people are working on it too. I saw one of the early creators of the Internet is working on this new technology where basically all the data resides with you and then the applications get access to it.

(Ron at 00:24:47) Totally true. Yeah. I'm excited about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) What else did you want to talk about? Right before you joined, my team said you had some, you got some personal news going on?

(Ron at 00:24:57) So I am in this period called rewirement. This is my fourth year in rewirement, and that's the period between working full time and retiring, which I hope to never retire. And so what I do today is I serve on a couple boards, including Yieldstreet. I'm advising seven or eight different companies. I'm teaching courses about entrepreneurship and what's happening in fintech.

(Ron at 00:25:21) And I'm advising a couple of SPACs, Special Purpose Acquisition Corporations. And the SPACs are fascinating. Most people are starting to hear about them and learn about them. And one of the SPACs called FTAC raised money six months ago and just announced this morning a major acquisition of Payoneer for $3 billion plus. And so it's fascinating to see exactly these awesome fintech companies who've raised a fair amount of venture capital and private equity money decide not to sell to an incumbent, not to sell to an IPO on their own, but to merge or sell into an already public company like FTAC and use that capital to take them public immediately.

(Ron at 00:26:12) And so that news literally came out two hours before we started this call. And I think that's another emerging trend that you will see, smart growing profitable fintech companies be purchased by SPACs and be public so people can now own the equity of these companies and not just the debt. Very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:33) Is that called a reverse listing or is that something else?

(Ron at 00:26:36) It's something different. This would be called just call it a private company going public via a SPAC, S-P-A-C.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44) All right. Cool. No, that's awesome. That is so cool, man. Well, congratulations for being a part of that.

(Ron at 00:26:50) Thank you. These things are hard, right? There's lots of people running up and down the field and celebrating before, but to actually get in the end zone and reward the entrepreneurs and get the SPAC deal done, it's really hard and really complicated, but it's a great story about success and hard work and entrepreneurs really working hard for a long time and finding a great outcome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) When you were talk, I was reading about, first of all, I asked my team. I was like, does he have a book? Because you write very well. You also speak very well. I'm taking mental notes as you're speaking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25) The way you pause them, it's, you're very good. We all know IQ and EQ, but can you tell me what AQ and UQ is?

(Ron at 00:27:34) I can. I'm going to digress for half a second. I teach a class about presentation and public speaking and persuasion, and there's five no-no words that I teach young and old people. The no-no words are: um, yeah, you know, like, I mean, and you could throw in a sixth one, so. And I work with people to limit those words and just breathe and pause instead.

(Ron at 00:28:07) And so you may hear some of that in the way we're talking today. And I've been watching how your presentation is also, it's very good. We could polish up a few things, but you're doing great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) Thank you. I record myself when I do public speaking. And then when I hear people saying "like" or "um" on team calls, I want to record, I hit the record button and play. Because for me, the solution is nothing more complicated than recording myself and then forcing myself to listen back.

(Ron at 00:28:38) And it's painful. I hate listening to myself, candidly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42) Oh, man. This is good. You are great, Ron.

(Ron at 00:28:46) Thank you. Let's go to your other question, which I think is really important for you and the listeners and for people. We all know about IQ, right? It's our intelligence quotient. It's our brain, right? It's how fast the brain goes, how quick it learns, ram, the speed, its ability to learn. And then there's something here in your heart, in your stomach, it's your EQ, it's your emotional quotient. It's your ability to feel and see and observe nonverbal things.

(Ron at 00:29:18) It's your Spidey sense, right, from Spider-Man. You can just feel it in the room. It could be eyes. It could be arms. It could be shoulders. It could be all kind of different nonverbal communication. And I believe that people with a highly tuned effective EQ often outsmart those with a bigger brain or a bigger IQ. And then the next two actually are AQ, which is adversity quotient. And so when you get punched in the face or you get faced with a pandemic or financial or health issues, can you get up, right?

(Ron at 00:29:52) And my favorite movie is Rocky. And Rocky just wanted to stand in the tenth round and be there. Didn't have to win, but he wanted to finish and be standing. And that's this concept that's so important today is how are we all dealing with all of this adversity in the world, which leads me to the fourth one, which my daughter taught me, UQ, which is uncertainty quotient. How do we deal with all of this uncertainty, financial uncertainty, political uncertainty, COVID uncertainty, right, pandemic issues?

(Ron at 00:30:29) And so if we can each work on all of the Qs and improve each of them and polish them and fine-tune them, I think it makes us better, more resilient, kind of more mindful people to each other, ourselves, and the planet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:44) So you learned about UQ, Uncertainty Quotient, from your daughter?

(Ron at 00:30:48) I did. In fact, when Karen and I were here, we went to the mountains with our daughter in October, and we were sitting. And I actually wrote about it and got 50,000 views overnight about UQ and how she explained to me at 26 the need to have a better ability to deal with all of this uncertainty. And Karen and I were moving and homeless at the same time, so we really had to fine-tune our own UQ as a couple to get through where we were going to live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) What else are you learning from the younger generation?

(Ron at 00:31:22) So I am learning a ton. I am really working with young people about their own intention and kind of how do they want to live their life with a spouse, with work, with health, with travel, or are they doing it on somebody else's script, maybe their parents or some other relative or their girlfriend or boyfriend? And so everybody waking up every morning and understanding what's your intention as a person, as a father, as a husband, as a brother, as a son, as a professional, and do that today. Because the world's trying to push and pull you in all these other directions. But each day, if you can stay clear what was your intention this morning, and you get all the way to the end of the day, and you say, "Hey, did okay. Didn't do perfect. Didn't do perfectly." And tomorrow you start over. Doesn't matter what happened yesterday.

(Ron at 00:32:20) You set your intention for tomorrow, tomorrow morning before you get up, before you go have your coffee, before you walk the dog, to try to understand what is it that you really intend to do today, and try to not get too distracted by news or Facebook or whatever's presented to you that day, and just start over the next day. And that's part of what I'm trying to learn from people, but also teach people is to set their own intention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) For me, it was getting up early that really changed everything for me a few years ago. I get up around five, 5:30, enough before, by the time the kids get up, I've already eaten breakfast, done cardio, lifted weights, and I am, my mind is clear. And before that, if I look back before that, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to figure out what works, high anxiety, stress. And then when I figured out the business and what the repeatable steps were, and then I could wake up and I could know here's the number one moment that matters today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) And I'm going to let everything sort of orbit around this moment. And for today, it's this conversation right now. So everything is around this and then a lot of little things happen around it, right? But with the focus, it's a lot of little things, but the focus is on one item.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:41) And that really, I guess, grounds me.

(Ron at 00:33:44) Yeah. And speaking of one item, I have one word which is my mantra personally and I actually had it tattooed on my ankle. And that word is "enough." I am enough. You are enough. My parents did enough of a good job. And you think about all day long, what is enough? Power, control, fame, sex, booze, drugs, adulation, right? All that stuff. And trying to have a lifelong lesson to remember what is enough for each of us. If you have more or less, great, but I'm working on my own enough. And so for me, it's something I just touch my ankle every morning to remember what it, whatever it is, it's enough and find out what's enough for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) I like that. Are you teaching, you said you taught a class. Do you teach at a university?

(Ron at 00:34:32) I do. So I have lots of friends who are professors at different universities in Canada and Europe and Southeast Asia, UCLA and different schools who invite me to come teach a day a quarter or other classes, some online, some in person. I was actually, my last class was in February at UCLA where I work with young people and entrepreneurs about their journey, their enough, their intention, their business, their whole academic to real-world transition, which is very difficult. And I love it. It's my favorite thing I do is sharing and listening and being a sounding board.

(Ron at 00:35:13) And I've just made some great relationships and hear from students all the time about how things worked out or where they got tripped up. And just, it's a great way to give back and to learn from this young, inspiring next generation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) Yes. We talk a lot about what we want out of life, but what we don't talk a lot about is the fact that who we are is changing while we're in pursuit of figuring it out. And that's something that isn't so obvious at first on the journey because your desires and wants and needs and things are changing. And then you kind of figure out who you are and what direction you're headed in, and then you can choose to alter that direction, but you can only do it, like, one degree at a time.

(Ron at 00:36:01) 100%. 100%, Joel. And, you know, we can continue this now or later. I just want to tell you, you're onto something big here, and you're going to have some big decisions to make. Go left, go right, go high, go low.

(Ron at 00:36:15) And I would just encourage you to keep being inquisitive and keep learning and keep asking these questions. And fail fast. And if something's not working, you've got to cut it out and go a different way, which I think some young entrepreneurs stick with something that's not working too long. I'm not saying you are, but you definitely should keep doing what you're doing and pull on the string and read and learn and talk to old guys like me. But you are enough, and you should remember that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:42) Thank you. One of the anchors for me when I—I'm human. So as nice as this all sounds, I'm telling you, like, oh, yeah, I wake up early, and I've got—it's a work every single day. And some days I crush it and some days I don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:00) But one thing that I found that's really useful is, like, the way life is—the way life is because the big moment for me was when my mom passed away. I got to be in the room and hold her hand. And my brother and sister were both around me, and they were crying. And I was like, this is surreal for me. I was almost—I was not crying at that point in time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:28) I was like, what is this? This is just somebody just died right in front of me. And then from that, I took that and I let that fuel me. Right? I let that change the course and the direction of my life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:42) I had tried prior to, you know, have a reason to get up or have a reason to get up early or a reason to do something or work really hard and try. Basically, try. And it was that moment where I was like, this is it. This is—life is short, and we die. And so until we figure that part out, you know, we've got generations probably before we completely figure it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Right, which I'm optimistic will extend life to some point and then hopefully consciousness will go into the computers through things like Neuralink and future technology. But for right now, we're in a generation where we just have to crush it and work hard.

(Ron at 00:38:26) Yeah. And look, I just read a book and it's about being human. And if you're human and you're alive, you have shame. You have guilt. We all fail.

(Ron at 00:38:37) Right? And you're really onto something about understanding that this is no dress rehearsal, that there is finality to all this. And so I'm sorry for your loss. One of the things I love sharing about loss is the ball in the box. And the ball in the box, you can Google it, is when we lose somebody, and I too lost a parent recently.

(Ron at 00:39:00) So again, I'm sorry for your loss. The box is this big, and the ball's big, and the ball hits the sides of the walls of the box a lot, often, and it hurts. But over time, as we grieve and as we process life, the ball gets smaller, and it hits the corners and edges of the box less, and it hits less hard and hurts less. And so you still always have the ball in the box, but understanding life and grief and living and being human, the ball in the box, it's tough in the beginning, but the ball does get smaller over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:38) I know I'm young because when I hear that, I'm like, I want to strap a rocket ship to that ball as it gets smaller.

(Ron at 00:39:44) Right. Of course you do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:47) Of course I do. Yeah. I'm 33 tomorrow, by the way. So you were really close on age. You were within a couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) I grew the beard to help. Before that, they thought I was 13. Now I'm getting late twenties. So—

(Ron at 00:39:58) That beard's impressive, by the way. I could never do that. So we have a couple more minutes here. I have a hard stop, you know, at some point after noon here. Well, tell me what else we can talk about on any topic, Yieldstreet or other.

(Ron at 00:40:09) This has been fabulous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:11) Yeah. Well, we want to make sure we got lots of love for Yieldstreet. So if people want to experience Yieldstreet, if they want to sign up, start reading the news before they make an investment, how would they do that?

(Ron at 00:40:24) So people can go to yieldstreet.com on a desktop or laptop or mobile device, and they can sign up an account. You don't have to put any money in. You don't have to link your bank account. You can just read and learn and watch. You can learn about the commingled Prism Fund.

(Ron at 00:40:44) You can see deals that were done before. You can see current deals open on the platform, and you can see future deals coming later this week or next week or the week after, and just start to get the flow. And the mobile app's fabulous, and it really does tell a great story, easy to read, about how people can get yield, how they can get passive income, and how they can now as individuals take control of their finances and build portfolios to help them get a return of their money and a return on their money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) And then what's the most important or impactful leadership lesson that you've learned recently?

(Ron at 00:41:29) So for me, I think leadership is really about being transparent, and it's really about being honest. And I think a lot of people are afraid to show that part of themselves. And so I literally just finished the Brené Brown podcast last night where she and Simon Sinek talked about what it is to be honest with people and transparent and share with them not just all the good news. Right? Not just all the pretty pictures, not just all the successes, but the rest, the failure, because we all fail, and we all have shame.

(Ron at 00:42:03) And for me, leadership is about showing all sides of the equation, not just the success stories.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:12) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.