Ron Blue: All of a sudden in five years, I had a national clientele, a rich, wealthy Christians who wanted to give, and that’s how the whole thing got started. And today, there’s ten thousand clients at that firm Serve’s that are giving away one hundred and fifty million a year. They’re managing about 12 billion in assets. And I look back and I realize how God prepared me to do what I did. I can take zero credit for it.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome to a special edition of the Faith Driven Investor podcast, From time to time, we’ll get involved in a broader definition of investing. And this is one of those times when we think about storing the wealth that guys entrust us with. Much of that is going to take place with investing in mutual funds and in stocks and bonds and venture capital, private equity, all the different topics that we have rolled out over the course of the last year and a half or so, over 75 or 80 podcasts with speakers like Frank Chen from Andreessen Horowitz, Andrew Stevens. And gosh, we’ve had just about every asset class. But lest we think that it’s just about investing that God cares about, which is different, of course, in a way, a lot of people think about it, the reverse of that as people just care about giving. But since we and you is listening to this podcast, subscribe to more of this one pocket mentality, that is we stored these assets. We have an opportunity to participate in the work that God is doing. We need to, from time to time, start focusing a bit on the giving side as well, and in some cases were called to go ahead and make that investment into the private equity fund or into the mutual fund. And in some cases, we’re called to be faithful to the giving opportunity that’s right in our midst. And so every once in a while, maybe every 10 episodes or so, we’ll get into that a little bit more deeply. And whenever we do that and do that with one of my best friends in the world, Darrell Heald, you probably know enough about my story by now to note, at age 28, I came to faith. At age 38, I had what I call my born again again moment when I met Darryl. And Darryl asked me the simple question, Henry, why do you give? And that sent me into God’s word. And it just changed my life. So whenever we have an opportunity to talk about this, I’d like to bring Darryl back on board. We’ve been partners in ministry and invested in so many things since that time 13 years ago, which I’m super grateful for today. We’ve got an incredible guest in Baila. So before I go any further, Darryl, welcome. Welcome to the program.

Darryl Heald: Thanks. And good to be on the program. And I’m super excited. You could have just skipped over any of my intro. Let’s go straight to our guests.

Henry Kaestner: Well, before we do that, we’re going to go almost straight to our guest from Blue. And Ron, by the way, welcome to the program. It’s awesome. Have with us back again

Ron Blue: a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I’d love talking to you guys.

Henry Kaestner: You’ve always been such a great encouragement to me talking about this, these formative experiences that God has put in my life in these really important relationships. Ten years ago, we started Sovereign’s Capital and it was Darryl that introduced us to you, and you went ahead and got it right away and said, I’ll do anything I can do to help you. And we asked if you’d be on our board of advisors and if we could get this guy who’s probably the biggest name in Christian investing and the generosity with which you said, yeah, absolutely. You know, if any way I can help you and you put my face on your website and just tell other people that you’ve talked to me and that blew me away. It blew me away. I’ll never forget. I’ve told you before, but I’m going to tell you and our listeners that again, as we’re getting ready, though, I was taking certain liberties with our relationship and I showed up this podcast nine minutes late. And what our listening audience may not know is that we on occasion will have several of these podcast recordings we do in sequence. And we just got off the podcast interview with Dallas Jenkins, who is the guy behind the chosen, and we’re talking about him. And he had a message. He also has known Ron, interestingly, and this is something Ron, I don’t think you knew, is that Ron hired Dallas well before he was famous to direct a video that Ron did, which I think is super cool. But one of the things that came up in the interview we had with Dallas was that somebody had come to him early on in his career and said Dallas. And I was on a Facebook post on a video he’d done, and he wasn’t sure that the film they had done had been received as well as he had hoped. And somebody from Romania four o’clock in the morning said, Dallas, your job is not to feed the 5000, it’s just to supply the five loaves and two fish. Now, they’re just beginning with what you have. And then, Ron, as I was explaining interest, apologizing for being late, you shared an anecdote that was very similar to that. And whenever I hear those repeated themes, it makes an impact in my life. It makes me feel like God is trying to tell me something and maybe as well. And you were talking about a time when you thought you showed up to an event and it wasn’t as well received. Or maybe there weren’t as many people there as you would have wanted in your bride. Told you what

Ron Blue: she said, Ron. She said God said feed the sheep, don’t count them. And it changed my whole perspective. You know, it just it took away the whole idea of how big the audience don’t make any difference. It may be an audience of one because you don’t know who God is going to put it in the audience and you don’t know what he’s going to say to them. So my job just to be faithful to deliver his message and he takes it from there however he wants to. So don’t count them. Just feed them. And appreciate. Henry, you’re feeding. Flock here of people that are really becoming serious, you know, when you get serious about your money, you’re serious about your faith, and when you put those two together, that’s a big deal. That’s why Jesus spoke so much about money, because it’s the greatest barrier to my relationship to the Lord. The God of Mammon steals that every single day. And we live in a culture that I think is the most difficult to live in because there’s so many temptations. And I don’t mean that in a condemning way, but I say, you know, I didn’t even know what I needed till I went to the mall and that and there’s billions of dollars being spent every day trying to make me discontent. And a lot of it gets through.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m still with you.

Ron Blue: It’s hard to live in this culture and have the proper perspective on money. So I’m delighted that you’re doing what you’re doing.

Henry Kaestner: Well, thank you. And to your point, we’re trying not to count our listeners in, but they know all three of them know that I love them. And Mr. Tony

Ron Blue: Abbott, your wife doesn’t count

Darryl Heald: two of them. Love I love.

Ron Blue: I’ll tell if

Henry Kaestner: you are one of those two people, though. You’ll know that we’ve had Ron on before. We featured Ron and one of our conferences, and he weren’t our first ever lifetime achievement award. And so some number of the folks listening to this are going to understand some of who you are in your background. But before we get into that, I really want Daryl to guide our conversation today because it’s something that’s so near and caught to who he is and and the ministry that guys got him on. But give us a flyover. Who is Ron Blue? What have you done? What is God done through you in your career? Bringing us up to speed real quickly and then going to go real deep on generosity?

Ron Blue: Well, can it real quickly. I turned 79 this year just a few months ago, and I was fine with that until I realized that I was living in my 80th year. Then I began to feel really bad

Henry Kaestner: right now that if we could all look as good as you do in our 80th year, then nobody would ever have to fear being 80, that’s for sure. But you’re now to be clear, you’re seventy nine.

Ron Blue: Right? And the good news is that before long I’m going to be able to shoot my age in golf. If I can live long enough,

Henry Kaestner: I’m not going to live that

Darryl Heald: long.

Ron Blue: Well, that quick story, I was raised in a Christian home, but I totally rejected the faith. And I went to college. I went to college to have a good time. I did got kicked out twice, got back and got married. That changed everything. Got my MBA from Indiana University in nineteen sixty seven and went to work on Wall Street with at that time Pete Margaret Mitchell and was with Pete Murray for three years, starting my own firm. I didn’t want to stay with the big firm, so I started a firm in Indianapolis which today is still going by the way and

Henry Kaestner: name on the door to

Ron Blue: the same name on the door. They don’t know who I am. Anyway, I spent seven years doing that and during that seven years my wife came to Christ in nineteen seventy two, asked me what I thought about that, and I threatened her with divorce because I was on the success track. Then I was an entrepreneur and I wanted to become wealthy and I was getting it. So she didn’t say anything for two years but she lived out first beta three and there was a godly woman that I there was something different. And so I prayed to receive Christ on my way to play golf. In nineteen seventy four, I had the four spiritual laws. I was by myself read through those and I said to the Lord, I don’t want to change anything, but I’m willing to be changed. And that day I shot a thirty six on the front side and I said, man, if I had known this how to become a Christian in a long time ago, if I got back on my game on the backside. But that led to joining Campus Crusade two years later and working in Africa for two years. I traveling to Africa. I made ten trips. But during that time I was also teaching leadership seminars and decision making seminars in the United States. I was gone 70 percent of the time and my wife, we were in a strange city when we moved to Atlanta. My income had gone from one hundred and fifty thousand to twenty five thousand and we had five kids below the age of 12 and she had a husband gone 70 percent of the time. And she called me at the office one day and she said, How do you get on Christian? And I said, What do you mean? She said that this is the abundant life I’ve had, all the abundance I can take. And what that led then was I was with Dr. Howard Hendricks, who was a friend and mentor, and he had been asking for financial advice from me. And I had been out of the financial world for a couple of years. But he said, would you take a look at my finances? Which I did, and I was able to sit down with him and Gene and say, you know what, Howie, you’re doing just fine. And it was like a load came off of his shoulders. This was in nineteen seventy nine. And now when I look back over those 40 some years, I realized that the question he was asking is really the question almost everybody wants the answer to, and that is how am I doing? They want to know the answer to that question, every one of us wants to know, and of course, it changes over time. So I felt like having traveled to Africa, that there was a lot of money in the United States. So I determined through a series of things that I wanted to help Christians plan to manage their money so they have more to give away. And that was not called financial planning at the time. Financial planning didn’t exist. There was no such thing as a CFP, and it was product sales or investment sales and insurance sales and so forth. But the first client that I had, he wanted to give a million dollars to Campus Crusade. I did not know him. He was a physician. And I said, well, what’s your income? He said, eighty two thousand a year. I said, What’s your net worth? He said, I don’t know, three or four hundred thousand. And so I’m thinking, there’s no way he can give a million dollars away. But God in his providence had done something. And that was the last couple of years as a CPA. I had done a lot of bank projection work and all it was was projecting cash flows over five years and working them out to a final net worth statement. So that’s what I did for this doctor. And it turned out he could give away a million dollars. He gave he had more property than he realized. He gave away his property, lowered his taxes, increase his cash flow, increases giving with Florida’s taxes were to increase his cash flow. And you worked all that out. And in five years, he could give away a million dollars and still have basically what he started with. And I thought there’s a lot more people like that. And I thought recently, what if he’d only wanted to give one hundred thousand? That would have been my bar. But it was a million, and so my bar became a million, and because he gave it to Campus Crusade, Dr. Bright asked me to speak at all of their donor events. And I would say, look, if you want to give away a million dollars or more, I can help you do that. And not only that, you can pay me to help you. And so I knew how to build a time based business, so I didn’t have to sell any product. And I knew how to do financial planning. And all of a sudden in five years, I had a national clientele, a rich, wealthy Christians who wanted to give. And that’s how the whole thing got started. And today, there’s ten thousand clients that the firm serves that are giving away one hundred and fifty million a year. They’re managing about 12 billion in assets. And I look back and I realize how God prepared me to do what I did. I can take zero credit for it. And it’s such a joy now to I can look back and say, wow, isn’t this great? And I’ll finish with this. What I found was the people that gave away those huge sums of money were the most joyful people I knew and the most contented. They were accomplishing something with the resources God had entrusted to them and they were experiencing the joy of giving. So they were good investors. They were good entrepreneurs, but they were better givers. And I don’t mean that on a comparative basis, but so I’ve had a great life. Henry, helping people give away money

Darryl Heald: your life, indeed. Thank you for sharing the history. What a legacy it’s got. I mean, it takes a while to tell a story when you start to your seventy ninth year.

Ron Blue: Yeah, but

Darryl Heald: I love you. So Henry and I know each other thirteen years, but Rodney and I’ve known each other over 30 years. Yeah. So I was the young real estate broker and the company I was working for actually owned the building where you all were Ozzfest. And so I was two floors below Rodell Balloon Company and I was going to church with a couple of the young financial planners that were working for Ron. And they started give me these books that he wrote, Money Matters and Money Matters for Your Kids. And I was very much influenced by Iran. And Judy, Kathy and I both have been. And one of the reasons why we did what we did, a lot of ways that we raised our kids around these money issues, giving and things like that were influenced by you. And I’m thankful. So we’re really grateful for that. And it’s kind of fun that our families are friends. We’ve served on a number of boards together as well. But Rodney, thanks for joining us today. One of the things that I know that I’ve heard you talk about a number of times is what are the impediments to giving? You have this triangle like why aren’t more people giving? Because you just gave this great example of this guys says, hey, I want to give a million and so on. But where is that kind of a state of giving? And in one sense, there’s a lot of resources out there. Occasionally we see a person like this doctor being generous. But what’s holding a lot of other people back?

Ron Blue: Well, I think if I were to boil it all down, Darryl, I think there’s three things that have to happen in giver’s life. No. One, there has to be transformation. You’ll never see maximum giving apart from transformation. So it begins with a heart attitude, a belief in what the Bible says about eternity and about my life here. But secondly, there needs to be intentionality. A lot of people give, but they really give out of their surplus. So they give large sums of money maybe, but they don’t necessarily maximize their giving unless they have intentionality. And I used to say there’s two questions. No one who owns it, you got to answer that question. But the second big question is, how much is enough? You know, how much is enough to accumulate, how much is enough on a lifestyle? And there’s not a right answer on that. There’s only a faith answer on it in the faith answer says, OK, God, what would you have me? And I would ask this way, how much do you want me to keep? And the rest I’ll give away. I love what Bob Buford, my friend, said to me one time, he had heard me ask that question, how much is enough? He said Ronnie said, I figured out how much is enough. I doubled it and gave the rest away.

Darryl Heald: I said,

Ron Blue: But that’s OK. He said, a finish line. And if you have a finish line, then the question becomes if you’re accumulating. Why am I accumulating more? And I believe so. There needs to be intentionality. But I think there’s a third thing that is very helpful in maximizing giving, and that is accountability. And I was in that business of providing accountability and I required all of my financial planners to have a financial planner, myself included. I have a financial planner. You know, I’ve written 20 books on finances, but actually read one book 20 times. But I have a financial planner because I can’t hold myself accountable. And Judy and I think differently a lot on the giving. She’s far more generous than I am. I mean, she’d give it all away. When we sold the business, I felt pretty good. She said, you know, God gave you all that. I said, you’re right. She said, you better give it all away so that when my retirement. But when she said that, then we told the financial planner what we were going to do. And so we’ve been held accountable to not accumulating them. And I would continue to accumulate if I didn’t have a financial planner holding me accountable to a decision that I felt like I had made at a particular point in time. Anyway, there are lots of stories about that. But I think transformation, intentionality and accountability are really three things that when they take place, you see maximized giving. And I will say this to that. I know that the only thing that breaks the power of money is giving. You ain’t got to open your hands or you’ll never experience the freedom of a relationship with Christ because you’ll always be there be two things to be going on. No one will be fair. And fear mentioned a lot in the Bible. And when you if you haven’t done that, there’s a fear of loss. And you obsessed with it, and that’s the biggest, you know, I talk and you’ve heard me say this, the paradox of prosperity and the paradox of prosperity is that the more you have, the more choices you have. Therefore, the more confusing it becomes. I mean, anybody that’s owned a boat knows what I’m talking about. When I sell the boat, they say it’s the second happiest day of their life, or if you own two homes or whatever it may be. And we’ve had two homes and I’ve had a boat and was happy with all of it was gone. But the more you had, the more choices you have and therefore the more fear of loss and the more confusing life becomes contrary to the American dream. And I’m not talking against people living well at all. That’s not the issue. God places people such as you guys, and I think probably such as the audience in positions of great influence because of the success they’ve had either invested in rebuilding their businesses. And that’s a good thing. And it’s OK to enjoy that. It says God gives me Rusty all things to enjoy. But he doesn’t say that joy should be my objective. He said also says right along with that, you’ve been given much in order to give much. So generosity, investment, entrepreneurship, they all tied together because they represent success in many ways, but then conquering the success by living generously.

Darryl Heald: That’s great. Thanks, Ron. I love those three things there. And so what is the so I mean, there is a significant financial services industry out there, right. That is looking to serve, you know, everyone listening to this podcast. So then what’s the disconnect with the current level of service and what you’re talking about? And if I’m kind of leaning in to what you’re saying right now as an investor and wanting to be more intentional, have that accountability, what does that look like?

Ron Blue: Well, the problem in the financial services world is that there’s a conflict of interest inherent in it. So, you know, when I tell people that my metric of success in the financial planning firm was how much our clients are giving away. Not how much we were accumulating, and today, if you would talk to around the blue adviser, they would talk about how much their clients give. And, you know, as a consequence of that, we almost never lost a client one. And number two, we almost never lost the client generationally. So now I’ve lived long enough to see people and I knew through it Kathee years and years ago. And he’s now in there for generations of the cafes. And they’re all working with advisors that are faith based, an advisor that is faith based and a client that is faith based, share the same language and the same value system. So if I’m an investor or an entrepreneur, I’m looking for an advisor. I want to know what that adviser believes. I want to know what motivates you. I want to know what he thinks about giving, because theoretically, if a client gives to a million dollars, I’ve lost the fees on a million dollars. What I found is when a client gave away a million dollars, got replaced with somebody who had two million. So I think there’s a scarcity mentality. And to me that is almost it just can’t be because the scarcity mentality says I serve a God who can’t create and I serve a God who’s not sovereign. I was once talking to a group of advisers and there were six Merrill Lynch advisors sitting next to one another. And I said, Are you guys in competition? And they kind of squirmed and I said, if you are you do not believe in a sovereign God, God can raise up those clients and he will. But, you know, faith, I see the evidence of faith in retrospect. I never see it in prospect. So I’ve got to make that decision, do that thing. That’s right. And then God honors that and blesses it.

Henry Kaestner: By that you mean you can see patterns in your life where God was faithful and blessed you in times when you didn’t see that happening. But it’s so much more difficult for us to anticipate how that pattern will continue in our lives. We’ve seen it time and time again about how God is provided right when we needed. And yet it’s so hard to just kind of project that forward as if God was sovereign and love me up until May. Twenty six, twenty twenty one. And then after that I was on my own.

Ron Blue: Yeah, well that’s true. And the life of faith never stops. You know, I struggle like everybody day to day. Now I do say this. I had good mentors and I do have a quiet time almost every day. And today I was meditating on abiding in Christ. What does that mean? You know, and it means total surrender. But I knew that, but I needed to know it again today. Yeah, and now it’s near the end of the day and I need to know it again. So the life of faith doesn’t end, but it is a life of fruitfulness and joy. Also, when you look back and, you know, I got the privilege now of looking back and not seeing what I did, but seeing what how God used even me. He used Balan’s as he could use me. And my wife taught me that

Darryl Heald: we love dearly. We love to feel. But what are the things that we actually just had a discussion on today? So we’ve seen this out of covid, this incredible rising market, so many asset prices going up so often. So one of the conundrums, it seems like with when we think about what we’re stupid in asset is like, if I think it’s going to continue to go higher, why give now? What would be your advice on that?

Ron Blue: That’s a great question. Yeah, I love that question. I used to get that a lot when I used to get it. When I was speaking to donor groups, they said, you know, if I’d give me a million dollars, I could make two million and I have more to give. So I said, well, let me let me give you an illustration. Most people know the magic of compounding. If I took ten thousand dollars and compounded it at twenty five percent over 40 years, it would grow to seventy three million dollars without adding another penny to it. If, on the other hand, it only compounded out at twenty four percent, same time period, it would be 52 million. So it’s the twenty one million dollar difference on one percentage point. Now the reason I say that is because what is God’s interest rate. Thirty fold. Sixty fold. One hundred and thirty fold is thirty thousand percent and sixty four to six thousand percent. Nine hundred dollars. Ten thousand percent. So how much is ten thousand dollars given to the kingdom. At ten thousand percent for all eternity. That’s the difference, so I want to do my given while I’m living, so I’m knowing where it’s going and I want it I want it invested in the kingdom because the return in the kingdom is far more than what the stock market’s going to return. So I use that illustration because people can grasp that and to say, well, I’m going to give when now you need to give right now and say something else. I think you need to give some cash to nondeductible cash. And I got this from a pastor who he did this and I picked up the example. So it was not mine, but I carry cash in my pocket and I look for people that are unnoticed. The most unnoticed are those who clean the bathrooms in airports, and so when I go out and I do a lot of flying, so when I go in the bathroom, I look for that cleaner and they’re always standing in the corner head down, sometimes not saying anything. And you walk over and you give them 20 dollars or forty dollars or one hundred dollars, whatever it may be. And the joy that you see on their face, that’s far more fun, if you will, than writing a big check to a ministry that had a guy followed me out one time and he said, I saw what you did. Why did you do that? And I said, listen, I am so blessed. I want to share that blessing with somebody else I love.

Darryl Heald: Rod, one of my favorite stories you have, why don’t you tell our audience is the Chick fil A’s story, the lady that.

Ron Blue: Yeah, I’ll make it short. I used to take my son many years ago to breakfast every Friday, one of my sons to and there was this lady named Rex and she worked at Chick fil A. We’d always meet at the Chick fil A and she was always the most pleasant, smiling and so forth. If she got saucy when I opened the door, she would have our meal ready for us because we’re always ordered the same thing. So I was walking out one day and I thought, I wonder if you can keep a fast food waitress. And I’ve never done that. So the Lord convinced me to tip her, give her something. So I reached in my pocket and I pulled out of twenty and the Lord said, You cheapskate, you got a lot of toys. And I said, Oh, no. So I took five hundred dollars and I followed him up. I went back in and I said, Can you take a tip? Is it OK? She said, yes. So I gave her one hundred dollars. She didn’t know how much it was and walked out. And the next week I was back in the chick Ticketfly and I was before my son had come and she came over to the table and she said, I was so happy. When you gave me the money last week, I needed a new set of tires, she said. But when I got home, my daughter, who was in high school, came home and there was a girl in her class who had had a fire in their apartment and they lost everything. She said they needed the money worse than I did. And so I had the ability to give that hundred dollars to that family. And I thought, man, I gave out of my abundance and she gave out of her property at that impacted me, I mean, and convicted me for sure. So I encourage people who you can give a lot of money away, but I encourage people to give some cash away to give it away. We’ve got a family that has ten kids that, you know, here in Atlanta. They had two of their own and they adopted three from Africa and then a family. The parents died and they adopted all five of them. So they have ten. So at the end of the year, Judy said we need to give them some money. We go to Costco every now and then fill up some cards and take it over there to them. But she wanted us to write them a check. And I thought, well, if I write that the helping hands, it’ll be deductible, but they’ll also take their percent. So I wrote the check and we drove over there and we gave it. And that type of giving is is just blessed giving. I really enjoy that. And I don’t want I don’t want to talk about me in the sense of I’m so good because I am not naturally generous by any means. I’m naturally pretty selfish. And, you know, I like nice things. I like to fly first class. I like to drive a Lexus, but I God won’t let me drive a brand new Lexus anymore. I have to buy. I used to run ride.

Darryl Heald: I mean, we could love to hear more stories than all, but why don’t we do this? I mean, because you have helped people do all this planning. So you talk about this blessed giving. What is your allocation look like? Kind of know we think about asset allocation all the time. And and so I’ll go from a giving standpoint, what is your advice on what are the dimensions and all in a giving allocation?

Ron Blue: Well, no one there’s nobody including Bill Gates or Warren Buffett that has enough money to solve all the needs. So you can’t solve every need with money. And so I generally counsel people. Where’s your heart? You know, what’s your passion? One of the things that you think are important, you can give broadly, but have again, I’ll come back to this intentionality. What is it that you really want to give to that you’re committed to? And I think husbands and wives need to be talking about this together because they probably have different interest. And that’s OK, that’s the way we grow. So I think giving it’s not an allocation. Well, I do believe in tithing to the church, but that’s the beginning point. I don’t really consider that the giving. I mean, it is. Yes, but the real giving takes place after that. I’m giving out of obedience. I want to give out of obedience, but I also want to give out of desire. So what is it that motivates me and that can change over time? So I can for people, it’s not necessarily an allocation. The Bible talks about giving to widows, giving the orphans, giving to the poor for sure, and giving to the church. But there’s a lot of ministries and I want to attach my money to my heart when it comes to giving. So I have things that I like and things that Judy likes. You know, it is funny because every time we get a letter from John Erickson, I know it’s going to cost me money because Judy loves Johnny. She loves the minister. We’ve known John for 40 some years and that’s a passion. So any time Johnny goes, she gets money because it’s a passion. So I said, give her your passion is tell your heart to your money in terms of your giving. So, yeah, I’m sorry, Daryn, when you’re asking me questions, you’re asking me questions in my sweet spot.

Darryl Heald: Why does the government. So what is that? Let’s say your blessed peace is like how much percentage of your giving and what do you all look like it? What about global? What about, you know, nationally? How do you kind of break that down and think about some of the different buckets that you’re giving to?

Ron Blue: We made a decision early that we like to give to people, so we give a lot to missionaries. We made a decision along that line that people that are working in Third World countries have more difficulty in raising money than they do in America. So we have a tendency to get more internationally when we’re giving to missionaries and missions than we do in this country. We like to give it comes down to people. What’s the impact on people? So the sex trafficking, the poor, that’s where we like to put our money and that’s our passion. I heard today we have high school curriculum on personal finance and we charge the school twenty five dollars a student to give them the curriculum. The guy that heads up our high school ministry and our institute read a testimony today of a high school junior who how, having gone through the class, it had changed the direction of his life to wanting to be in ministry. And that’s where he was going. And he said, twenty five dollars bought a changed life. That type of thing means a lot when you’re giving and I think we’d like to give to where we see the results. Also, it’s hard to give some place that you’re not tied to, literally tied to. So we pray about it a lot. We don’t give to everything that comes to our door by any means. And I don’t feel guilty and not giving because God has given us the ability to give. He’s given us the places to give and I can’t give every place. And in some cases it may be if I give, somebody else doesn’t have to give. So I don’t feel guilty at all about turning down requests for money.

Darryl Heald: Thanks, Ron. Another thing to where I’m just curious with I’m sure a lot of the listeners probably have children, grandchildren and all how you, Judy, have written on this before, but could you give us some ideas on how we can help our kids or grandkids understand that it’s more blessed to give our safe?

Ron Blue: Well, there’s two things about training children that can really sum it up. And I had a father asked me one time, how do you train your kids to manage money? And I said two things. No one more is caught than taught. So they’re going to do what you do. That’s the biggest factor in how kids handle money and think about money, and I said, the second thing is you learn to manage money by managing money. And that’s the really hard thing today. And a credit card society of having your kids manage money. But there needs to be a way and there are ways that they can do that. And that same father said to me later, he said, I realized when you said that, that because I do online giving my kids had never seen me tithe. And we didn’t talk about it because we had made that decision. We did our online giving so they’d never seen me tithe. So just think about it. What am I doing to communicate the values of giving one? And number two, how can I train my children to manage money? And here’s the mistake that parents make. They don’t let their kids make mistakes, especially the wealthy. I see they can afford to bail them out. And I don’t mean out of jail, but they can afford to do a lot of things. So what would that look like?

Darryl Heald: What how would you set that? What would be a couple of suggestions that you would say, hey, you know, you should try these couple of things?

Ron Blue: Well, no one intends on the age. OK, so we started training our kids. By the time the youngest was eight, we kind of had the system figure it out. And so we gave them a budget to buy their clothes and we knew that they would have spending money needs, that they would have needs to make gifts to Christmas and so forth. And we wanted them to say, but we wanted them to tithe. So we gave them money and we did it on a monthly basis so that they had to manage the money. So when you give them one twelfth of their clothes, money. In February, they don’t have to buy their school clothes until August, so they had to learn to say, but they also had to learn that when the envelope was empty, they were done and we allowed them in some cases to trade from one envelope to another, with the exception of tith in savings. But there had to be their ability to make the financial decisions. So somehow you probably need to help him set a budget and then figure out the management side of it, especially with the credit cards today, because cash, you just don’t deal with cash much anymore.

Richard Cunningham: You’re listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ, following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2: Hey everyone. All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosted guests may maintain positions in the companies of securities discussed, and this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.

Richard Cunningham: Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is the end of November 2024. We are talking marks on the markets and given that it’s the end of November, we want to wish you and your loved ones a very happy Thanksgiving.

If you happened to catch this podcast on the other side of the Thanksgiving holiday, then wishing you a blessed start to your advent season. I’ve got John Colman in the podcast studio with me. John, we’re talking markets. We’re talking economy. Not sure if you heard there was an election earlier this month. And so we’re going to kind of look at how things are responded to that. But as overjoyed and thrilled I am is to have you in the studio. We’ve got a very special guest with us today, don’t we?

John Coleman: Yeah. We’ve got a frequent FDI contributor, maybe frequent Ross Roggensack who runs Oak City Consulting, a long time leader in the faith driven investing movement. Brilliant on markets. Just a great friend of mine, great friend of a lot of folks in the movement. And we’re so privileged to have you on today. Ross. Thanks for coming.

Ross Roggensack: Well, thanks for letting me. I’m always glad to be here.

John Coleman: Always glad we knew you would be able to handle a very laid back topic. Like US elections, you know, where there are no emotions at play. So congrats on taking on such an easy podcast with.

Richard Cunningham: The wise sage. Well, guys, great to have you with us. So let’s start there. Let’s hit on that November 5th election. So we’re coming up, we’re recording this on Friday, the 22nd. This podcast will release during the week of Thanksgiving, so it’ll be kind of roughly right around three weeks out.

Post-election, Trump won 76.1 million votes to 74.2 was Kamala Harris to Donald Trump in the popular vote. So he got that one. He won all seven key battleground states, winning the Electoral College. 312 to 226. The Senate race took out to 5347 in favor of the GOP. And while there’s still three uncalled races in the House race, it looks like Republicans have 219 right now to the Democrats to 13.

So, guys, I want to start here is what happened in this election. How did this all kind of transpire and was this the outcome you saw coming? Were you surprised and maybe John will start with you on that.

John Coleman: Yeah. So I’d maybe put the election just in a little bit of historical context, at least on the Republican side. This is probably the biggest electoral victory for a president since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

So if you’ll remember, you know, in 2000, President George W Bush, there was a disputed election for some period of time between he and Al Gore. It was incredibly close, one of the closest in history to that time in 2004, President Bush won in a bit more convincing fashion. He even had a slightly wider popular vote margin than President Trump did, although with 16 million fewer voters. But he had a smaller Electoral College margin.

And then, of course, President Trump’s first victory back in 2016 was quite narrow and he lost the popular vote, won the Electoral College. And so for Republicans, at least, this is a mandate in the way that they interpret it, because this is the biggest electoral victory that a Republican presidential candidate has had since 1988.

What was behind that was a very broad based movement in the electorate. Some of these stats may be a bit outdated. Some of our friends in places like California have not been able to calculate votes entirely yet. And so I’ll be talking from some stats I heard probably a week ago as some of the count on the West Coast was still ongoing, but effectively Trump gained ground versus 2020 in all but two states.

So 48 states moved in favor of President Trump among almost every demographic category. And of course, you can cut those in a variety of ways. Kamala Harris seemed to pick up ground among unmarried women. For example, the President Trump seemed to pick up ground amongst most other categories, including what was surprising to many people amongst minority communities in the US.

So Trump won one of the largest shares of the black male vote of any Republican in quite some time. He got a little more than 20% of the black male vote. He got nearly half of the Hispanic vote in the US, which has been not typical for Republican presidential candidates. And again, he won more margin in 48 states. They kind of moved his direction.

And so this really was an across the board pickup in electoral support for President Trump in almost every category and where he didn’t pick up ground. There were issues at play, I think, like with unmarried women, where abortion was quite a big topic, you know, where there was just momentum for Democrats in that area.

And so I think you could say this was a very wide ranging victory for President Trump. That victory had tails. You know, famously, President Trump, the last few elections, Republicans have not gained ground in the way that they thought they would. The last election, there was supposed to be a red wave. A. Quote that didn’t materialize.

And yet, in this election, President Trump now has a 53 vote majority in the Senate. As you noted, they’ll have control of the House of Representatives by a pretty decent margin. And so this did look like a mandate to bring in a new mode of administration, I think, across the board in the federal government.

And I think there were a number of things that moved that. I think, one, just the economy is not where people want it to be. I think there’s broad based dissatisfaction with inflation, for example, and just the cost of living. I think there were a series of cultural issues that were at play in the Trump campaign hit on those quite a lot with relation to a variety of hot button cultural topics.

Immigration was obviously a huge issue in this election because of the perceived mismanagement of that under the Biden administration and Kamala Harris’s participation in that. And then a series of just desires about the economy generally.

I mean, the Biden administration and later the Harris campaign had endorsed things like an unrealized capital gains tax increase, taxation, etc., that I think a lot of people reacted negatively to. And so I think there were a number of issues working in his favor. And the truth is, when a sitting president is as unpopular as President Biden is, and when an economy is as weak as it is right now under this sitting administration, there’s often a vote for change. And I think that materialized.

Richard Cunningham: Ross, what would you add to that from your vantage point?

Ross Roggensack: A couple of things. Just as a person who believes in God and the Bible. I think that we know that God’s in control and that regardless of who won, even if Kamala had won, he would still be in control. He’d still be on the throne. So everything’s going to be okay whichever side you run for.

I think I wasn’t that surprised. I remember when the assassination attempt happened and he jumped up and did the fight, fight, fight thing. I looked at my wife and said, this election’s over. You can’t beat that. And just kind of thinking about I don’t know if that’s providential. I don’t know if the hand of God was on him. I won’t try to intercede on that.

But I do think that something was happening, and I think that it was. After that you kind of saw neutral, seemingly neutral people. Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and others kind of jumped in just because they saw, I think, what was happening and what needed to happen. And so I’m just really glad that he won the popular vote. That was a good. Wearing the last time when he won the electoral but didn’t win the popular vote. And we you know, I think that’s part of the reason the markets have been so giddy is that they’re able to kind of put that tension behind it and just move on. So it’s a new day. It’s a fun day. And I’m glad.

John Coleman: One, the fact that the election, as you said, Ross, it was over that night. Right. Basically, I mean, if you stayed up late enough, you kind of knew what the presidential outcome was going to be. The House is still a bit up. And I do think that’s been a good thing for the country. And I think it’s been a good thing for markets that there hasn’t been a disputed election at all in this case. And there’s a clarity of the outcome.

And you could feel that. I mean, we’ll look back on this. I can’t wait for the books that are written about it. It’s hard to almost process all that happened in the last three months. I mean, we had a sitting president replaced on the ticket of his own party mid campaign after the first presidential debate and then a new candidate put in place with no. Kind of subsequent primary system, etc.. I mean, there were just a lot of moving pieces at play here and it is nice to have a definitive outcome. I think if nothing else, no matter where you land at it outcome, I think it’s good for the country right now and lets people kind of move forward with clarity.

Richard Cunningham: Yeah. So Trump’s putting together his team and thank you guys for those insights and maybe it might be helpful to have one of you talk about maybe just the Senate confirmation process of Cabinet picks as we get into this.

But there’s some kind of highlight names, like you’ve got this Department of Government Efficiency coming out with advisors like Ellen and Vivek Ramaswamy. Matt Gates was picked to be the attorney general, and now he has stepped aside, as it sounds like it was a distraction to the whole kind of Trump administration. And now it’s Pam Bondi out of Florida, Matt Whitaker for Naito, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Marco Rubio is Secretary of State, RFK Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

So you’re starting to see a lot of these names come up and there’s massive responses kind of in both directions as you see on them. But ultimately, what is the a strategy or mandate, John, is the word you used earlier, as you see with who Trump is putting around him to be a part of this administration?

John Coleman: Yeah, you know, it’s not every pick is in place right now. And certainly there are some important picks, I think, remaining to be had. I know there have been some rumors today about the Department of Agriculture, for example, and what that might look like. I think there have been a few signals in the picks that he’s made so far.

One is it does seem like he’s picking folks who will shake up the existing system, which is what he promised during the campaign. I mean, to have Robert F Kennedy at Health and Human Services, Tulsi Gabbard at that DNI. Seth at the Department of Defense. And, you know, a variety of other picks, You can tell this is not an establishment cabinet in many ways and that they are looking to make dramatic changes.

And like you said, the DOJ’s the Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek and Ellen is explicitly intended, I think, to be a signal that they’re shaking things up. And that’s very consistent with President Trump’s campaign. Right. I mean, I think they ran on this and they said we are going to make dramatic and big changes. And I think what you’re seeing is them coming through on that campaign promise to really make dramatically different picks and to do something different.

I think in the foreign policy realm, there have actually been a couple of signals you can pick up. One is my impression is that this is a very pro-Israel cabinet so far. You know, one of the big two conflicts in the world right now is Israel and Lebanon or Iran, however you want to position that conflict. And I think Elise Stefanik at the U.N. is a big defender of Israel. I think Mike Huckabee being ambassador to Israel is a signal. I think Marco Rubio has been a strong supporter of Israel at the State Department, the Ukraine war.

You know, Trump has promised to try and drive that to conclusion. And it strikes me that even apart from his VP pick, J.D. Vance, that the signals are there, that he’ll do that. And yet, if you’re a person who’s worried about disruptions in the international order, I do think, for example, that Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz are extremely mature politicians, thoughtful people who you could expect to navigate those conflicts quite well.

And so I think there is a balance there on the international order front between folks who kind of know how these things are done and those who are intended to shake things up that hopefully portend a really thoughtful approach to the end of those conflicts, which is, you know, Trump has said he’s going to end Ukraine on day one, which I think within the first 30 to 60 days is what he’ll shoot for. I think he’ll look to end the conflict in Israel. And it seems like he’s going to try and make good on those promises.

You know, the other pick that’s outstanding right now is the Treasury Department. At the time of this recording, there’s been some back and forth on that because of Trump’s trade policies. He put Howard Lutnick, who’s a big supporter of his tariff policies in at Commerce. And then there’s still a bit of an ongoing debate around Treasury, at least the last I looked in the news right now. And I think that will be an important signal. But overall, this is a cabinet that is looking to shake things up, I think. And it seems like he’s really going to try and make good on that campaign promise. But Ross, what are you saying?

Ross Roggensack: He’s shaking things up. All right. And I think that here Treasury movies between Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. There you go. You know, I think that who he’s talking about for Treasury sounds really good. And I imagine for markets that will be important as well as whoever he puts at OMB, those are kind of the big things we’re sort of watching. And certainly the names he’s floating for Treasury probably are all good.

Richard Cunningham: Unpack that correlation a little bit, Ross. Why are those two positions in particular so key for kind of economic and market outlooks? Well.

Ross Roggensack: Treasury is just so important as it relates to especially a lot of what Trump talks about in terms of tariffs, etc.. And then just the way the Fed interacts with Treasury, it needs stability. He can’t sort of take a flier on that when he’s got to. I was joking in case anybody wasn’t sure about ten. Nugent It would be fun, though, but I think that somebody like Kevin Warsh would calm markets. Understand that there’s an adult in that seat and nothing crazy is going to happen. So I think that the market’s really at this point probably could well be assured that at least somebody is. And that’s probably maybe a reason for some of the rally the last couple of days as his name came out or the other studies mentioned. So it’s. So far, so good.

Richard Cunningham: So let’s go there, because all of this ties back to kind of underlying outcomes and markets and economy is this is the FDA I pod and Ross the point you’ve kind of made in the month response to the election.

It seems like markets generally are viewing Trump’s policies as stimulatory less regulatory oversight. Prospect of lower taxes. You even saw things or particular kind of segments of the market really jumped. If you know, if the prospect of lower interest rates continues to take place, something like the Russell 2000, which is more of your small cap universe, continues to jump.

So a couple of quick numbers is S&P 500 is up roughly 25% on the year, 2% on the month. If we’re looking at kind of November and just the response, the election, Russell, 2000 is up 18% on the year, 8% on the month. So significant jump. Nasdaq, which is, you know, maybe you’re more tech oriented kind of concentration of 29% of the year. We know a lot of that has to do with the Magnificent Seven and just the way they’ve ripped

So markets and we’re now here in public equities most particularly have seemed to be just positive in response to the election. Is that what you guys are kind of diagnosing as well?

Ross Roggensack: Yeah. I think certainly if you think about the 2016 election when he won and the market at least overnight was straight down and then straight up, and then we had a pretty wildly bullish environment until he was inaugurated. It feels similar. Some differences here and there, but certainly feels a lot like the last time he was elected.

And so I think there’s some confidence in small cap U.S. based companies and probably in private equity and M&A in less regulation and more growth, less taxes. I mean, all those things are positive and especially with the House and the Senate, I think that there’s some confidence that, you know, by the spring we’ll have a tax bill done. I mean, things are going to happen fast, as I think certainly he learned and they all learned they got to get it done now or it won’t get done.

So I think we’ll see a lot of stuff happen and the markets about tomorrow, not today. And the markets are thinking about the summer or the fall when we’re past those tax cuts and we’re maybe thinking about what is the event going to do to cut government and maybe will the war in Russia be over and maybe, you know, all the kind of things that I think are forcing the market up right now?

John Coleman: Yeah, I would say it’s not even a very partizan thing to say that the last administration, it proposed some things that were extremely negative for markets on capital gains taxation, unrealized capital gains tax there. FTC under the Biden administration has been extraordinarily restrictive. The DOJ had been aggressive, the SEC had been aggressive. There were a lot of very negative things for markets embedded in that.

I think I agree with Ross. I mean, a couple of the factors at play right now that markets love deregulation. I think we’ll see a lot of cutting of regulation. I think markets like that, there’s a decent chance the M&A markets open up under a new FTC commissioner, which would be really good for markets.

I think the chances that taxes go up dramatically, corporate taxes or personal income taxes or capital gains taxes have diminished quite a lot, you know, and that would have caused a sell off at the end of the year. I think if people thought that cap gains taxes were going up next year, people would have liquidated this year, which would have caused a sell off. And I think there’s not the urgency around that right now.

And so I think in general, there is a much more business friendly environment at play right now and probably more pro-growth environment deregulation, you know, with hopefully a healthy attitude towards M&A markets, etc..

I think the one thing that might warrant some watching is the continued inflationary pressures in the economy, some of which is obviously outside of President Trump and his administration’s control. The Fed has lowered rates, but that hasn’t impacted a lot of our fixed income markets, mortgage rates, etc., because there is still a fear about inflation, I think in markets right now.

And if rates were to come down more significantly, we’d see more of a bump in small caps and mid-caps, we’d see more economic activity. People are looking for that. If Trump can end the foreign wars that are going on right now in Ukraine with Ukraine and Russia with Israel, I think that’ll be good for markets.

And then the tariff policies, the big question mark probably, I think, you know, he’s proposed a fairly aggressive approach towards tariffs in the United States towards other countries. And we just have to see how that materializes. It’s been quite some time since that was a platform in a presidential election in the United States. And there are potentially some good things that are out there, potentially some challenging things that economically. And I think that’s one area people will potentially be watching in the first few months.

Richard Cunningham: You mentioned a lot to unpack there, John, and want to be sure we kind of go line by line and under almost like the lens of let’s play out the other side of this and kind of what are some of the negatives.

Although there’s been a lot of optimism and positive response like. IPO and M&A markets are just low and have been very slow. And the hunger and the starvation of and the need for distributions is out there. I mean, the last three years have been some of the lowest since the kind of great financial crisis in eight and No. Nine in IPO and M&A markets thinking about like an asset class like VC and 2022 to 2024 combined.

There have been less distributions in the VC asset class than there were in 2019 alone. And you know, you think of these companies like a databricks or a stripe or, you know, plaid camp. All these folks have been waiting on the sidelines for that IPO. They just continue not to kind of come to fruition. So does a Trump administration help activate these markets as or even correlation there? What do you guys see there? Because there’s just a necessity for these markets to pick up.

John Coleman: Yeah, I mean, Richard, just to emphasize one thing, you’ve said, you know, liquidity in private markets has been really challenging. I think, Ross, you’ve probably seen that venture’s probably the most extreme example of that. That’s true in private equity. It’s true in some other categories. We just have not seen distributions coming out of funds. We have not seen companies selling the IPO. Markets have been slow and the M&A markets have been slow.

And again, part of that is just the position of the current FTC commissioner, Lina Khan, who’s been very restrictive, I think, on M&A markets, particularly by larger companies. And so we haven’t had the exits that would typically allow for distributions out of venture and private equity portfolios.

And because we’ve seen a bit of a downturn, at least up until about a year ago in the economy and a rise in interest rates, people have been trying to hold positions in funds for longer to squeeze the return out of them that they could they didn’t want to sell when valuations were compressed or when they were down.

I think we’re starting to see those come back independent even of the Trump election. I think we started to see valuations rise. Venture valuations have certainly started to creep up. And I think at some point you just have to start selling these things. You have to have an opening in M&A and IPOs. You can only sit on these positions for so long.

And so I think in particular, if the FTC’s position towards M&A is a little bit looser next year and if people have a favorable view of the forward looking economy, which would push up valuations which are often predicated on a forward look at earnings in companies, which seems to be happening because of public equity markets, I think we could see much more activity in the new year, liquidating private equity and venture portfolios.

And I think it almost has to pick up at some point. Right. It’s been a pretty anemic three years for liquidity and there’s just so much pent up demand to create liquidity that it’s difficult for me to imagine that continuing through the next year. Ross And what are you seeing?

Ross Roggensack: Yeah, I mean, some of it is just pent up demand, so I don’t want to give Trump too much credit. I do think he might be in a position where it will get better. Some of it will be because of that. But, you know, in terms of negatives, you know, J.D. Vance has been a bit on Lina Khan’s side and the FTC, and maybe there’ll be a little bit of hesitancy, I’m not sure, in terms of wanting to break companies up or slow down that momentum.

But it does feel like the pent up demand and just where we are in the cycle, we should be entering a better season for Venture especially and probably for private just because of the way money flows are starting to go. So it’s probably good timing for Trump, which is a lot of what a good presidency is, is just being in the seat at the right time sometimes or not at the wrong time, you know?

Richard Cunningham: Yeah, Ross, that’s a great point. I think that’s something we need to keep in mind is that markets are exchanging hundreds of billions of dollars of hands a day, and they’re going to do that regardless of who’s in the White House.

So we definitely don’t want to give credit or take away credit to any to full an extent. While this helps kind of set the competitive landscape or the rules of play in a lot of ways, who’s in the administration? Definitely appreciate it.

Ross Roggensack: Don’t worry, we will take credit. Well, that’s so true.

Richard Cunningham: Going on, let’s get into, John, another one of the points that you unpacked and that was fed and rate cuts. You know, one of the things that I think kind of flew under the radar is on November 6th and seventh, there was a second rate cut in this kind of cutting cycle.

There was the massive one back in September. We’ve come down now to a range of 4 or 5 to 4.75. But you mentioned, John, there’s still some inflationary pressures that is taking actions now. They’ve cut rates all the way up to 75 bips and kind of this period, we’re still seeing a really high ten year treasury, though the spread on yields between risk free rates, you know, the US treasuries and what corporations are having to pay to borrow money is at a 17 year low, 26 year low on kind of credit grade bonds.

So where are you at as you look at kind of the Fed’s policy, the inflation picture that we’re looking at and maybe with the optimism that we’re seeing overall, what could possibly break the system? Is there something in play here that we haven’t hit on yet that could be a big sensitivity to all of this kind of forward looking optimism we are feeling?

John Coleman: Yeah, I’ll be brief because I think Ross is more of a fixed income expert than I am. I would say yes. My impression is there is still fear of inflation in the system. There’s a lack of certainty around what government spending is doing, for example, to that environment.

I know several people who believe, for example, that we have been in a mild recession apart from government spending, which is obviously deficit spending consistently right now, and that that’s been kind of artificially inflating our view of how the economy is performing. And we’ve certainly seen that even within some of the businesses that we advise. You know that the last year has been a bit bumpier than it might look at a surface level in markets.

And so there’s a little bit of uncertainty around that. I think people are also worried about the long term financial health of the US federal government, given the debts that we’ve accumulated in the reset of interest rates coming in the new year on those debts, which is going to take our payments, I think above $1 trillion annually in the new year.

And there’s just no signs in the underlying economy that all the areas of inflation haven’t totally come back to normalized rates. You know, I think the Fed, Ross, is still said they’re targeting 2%, although they’ve been a little soft on that number to try and achieve the soft landing. And it doesn’t seem that we are achieving that level right now.

And look, inflation is just notoriously hard to tame, right? Periods of inflation often lasts a little bit longer than you think. You can’t clearly read when they’re over all the time. And so I think markets have a tough time achieving a degree of certainty that those periods are over. And until that happens, and until people are comfortable with the direction of the economy, I think it’s going to be very difficult to get rates in a in a series of places around the economy much lower. But Ross, I’ll defer to your expertise in this area.

Ross Roggensack: Yeah, I’m not an expert. I’m just old. I’m not an expert. But I do think when the Fed cut in September by 50 and then 25 again in November, you know, we’ve seen rates much higher than even when they cut. And so it feels like there’s a tension of maybe a chance that we’re growing faster than what the Fed thinks. And so they’re moving too quickly. So the bond market is trying to tell them to stop it because they’re going to juice the economy too much to where we get inflation back.

Lately, there’s been the bond vigilante kind of threat out there that if the Fed and the government just spends any more money, that we’re just not going to buy bonds anymore. And so there’s always that threat. I’m a little surprised since the election that we haven’t seen the ten year come down in yield. I would have thought it might have just because that sort of bond vigilantes and would be shaken off a bit for a while because there would be some expectation that we would shrink government. Government is just so large. It’s twice the size it was 15 years ago.

And I know John spends way too much time in Washington, and it gets bigger and richer every time you go, I’m sure. And we know where that money comes from. It comes from us. So it’ll be interesting. I would expect the biggest risk in the market is that that if we see the ten year go to five or somewhere near there, that that would not be handled very well by the stock market, I don’t think.

So that’s sort of the the boogeyman out there is rates of rates can come down some more. That would help. But the longer they stay up here at 440 or so, they started to creep to five. That should be a warning sign to all of us that you should sit up and pay attention that maybe some bad things could happen, at least for a while.

John Coleman: I think almost certainly, Ros, you need to launch a podcast called Bond Vigilante at this point, or at least get a T-shirt.

Richard Cunningham: I’m in agreement.

John Coleman: Only appropriate.

Ross Roggensack: Now we’ll get Ed Yardeni to teach, and he’s the one right now is the one that came up.

Richard Cunningham: With some kid rock hair for Ross and a Bond vigilante t shirt would be would.

Ross Roggensack: Be the look that said that they threw.

Richard Cunningham: Up the shocker sign for all those at home. Man Let’s go back to John. You mentioned one last thing, kind of like the caveat to all of what you’re saying, and that is foreign conflict and just kind of the geopolitical scene, the two major wars.

Let’s double click into that a little bit because I think that’s another one of those hey, all of the optimism, kind of uniformity around House, Senate president kind of all in one direction. But here we have with these foreign conflicts that are pretty unpredictable and feel very fragile at the state. What thoughts do you guys have there? Russ, we’ll start with you.

Ross Roggensack: Well, not to be too much of a Republican here, but what’s happening right now in Russia with us approving the missiles that are being flown into Russia, that are missiles that are training is really dangerous. And I do think in this lame duck period, they need to calm this down or else we could have a very serious issue in Russia and in Ukraine if that doesn’t reverse itself or at least if somebody doesn’t calm the message because there’s a lot of threatening language by Putin about nuclear weapons, that.

Is really scary. And we will forget about the stock market in a hurry if a nuclear bomb gets dropped in Ukraine. No doubt. So I don’t really know what they’re trying to achieve. It’s scary and I don’t know what they’re trying to do. It’s confusing to me. And a little bit frightening, actually.

John Coleman: Yeah. You know, this is an area where everything is pretty unpredictable. I mean, I can offer some of my thoughts on where I suspect we’re headed. But the truth is with these I mean, international conflicts are very difficult to predict.

And, you know, first, as Christians, we just got to be. Any time there are wars at this scale, like what’s happening in the Middle East, what’s happening in Russia, in Ukraine, it’s just a human tragedy. Right. I mean, the number of civilians who have died in both of those conflicts, the number of civilians who are still threatened, even the military personnel who are dying and are threatened. I mean, it’s a human tragedy that that’s happening. And I think, you know, all of our prayers, regardless of where we stand on the political resolution of those, are that that human cost can end, that people will stop dying, that we can find a resolution to these. And, you know, certainly we want to be sensitive to that as we’re predicting things.

I’m actually reasonably bullish on a conclusion to those conflicts over the next year, and I’m reasonably bullish that we won’t see other conflicts developed with nations like China which might pose a threat. And I’ll voice why. The first is I do think that in both of the conflicts, Ukraine and Russia and Israel and again its neighbors, so Lebanon, Iran, you know, the Palestinian territories, the clear signal is that the new administration would like to actively in those conflicts.

I think with regards to the Israel conflict, there is a clear signal, the pro-Israeli stance among the administration, at least in the appointees we have so far. And I think the Trump administration’s strong ties with places like Saudi Arabia, you know, Saudi Arabia has already signaled that they’re willing to lower some of their standards for normalization of relations with Israel since President Trump won the election.

Are all signs that we could see that come to conclusion and Iran contained in the region a bit more, because if you had the Saudis and Israelis working together hand in hand with the American government, there are probably solutions that could be had to the ongoing conflict there. So I’m somewhat bullish that that will happen.

And then in Ukraine and Russia, I think both sides are legitimately exhausted with the conflict at the moment. Ross is right. Putin said some scary things. He revised his nuclear policy. Ukraine is now launching long range missiles into Russia. Russia recently launched a nuclear capable missile into Ukraine, even though it didn’t have a nuclear warhead attached to it. Those are super threatening signals.

My hope is that those threatening signals are jockeying in advance of what they understand will be a strong push for a negotiated settlement in the first days of the Trump administration. And the question there is exactly what they’ll agree to, the two big levers being how long won’t Ukraine have to promise not to go in to Naito? And how long will Naito have to promise not to allow Ukraine in? Is it ten years? Is it 20 years? Is it longer? And then the second is obviously where the territorial lines set. Putin would love to freeze them where they are I think on the front, Ukraine would like to push those back and only give up something like Crimea, for example. And so that will become the process for debate. I do think there will be a settlement to that. I think Putin may not acknowledge this, but he would like to see an end to that conflict. It hasn’t gone well for Russia, hasn’t gone well for Ukraine. Both sides are probably in a place now where they’re willing to talk with the right people at the table.

And then finally, I’m bullish. You know, some people still have a fear that conflict could escalate with China. And once again, I’m somewhat bullish that it won’t. I think China’s in a weaker domestic position than most outsiders recognize right now. I think their economy is a bit weaker. I think they just announced stimulus, I believe, over the course of the last week or two. They’ve got a debt problem. They’ve got a real estate problem. They’ve got a shrinking population.

And they’ve just witnessed what happened to Russia when it went into Ukraine, a conflict they thought would be easy, which has turned out not to be easy and quite embarrassing for the Russian state. It’s hard for me to imagine without some sort of massive provocation, China, for example, invading Taiwan or something of that nature at this time.

So I’m somewhat bullish. We can get those conflicts under control next year and I’m hopeful we can obviously because of the human cost. But, you know, the caveat is these things are hard to predict, right? You don’t know what these international actors are thinking. And so you can only hope for the best and develop policies you think you know, can drive those to conclusion.

Richard Cunningham: You know, we got a bond vigilante and a foreign policy writer on the podcast today. It’s good to be wrong.

John Coleman: All of this stuff will be proven wrong by the end of next week. Richard.

Richard Cunningham: It’s for the best part as you’re on the record, so we’ll be able to call you out right away and we’ll. Yeah, Thank you guys for sharing that. It’s been a thousand days plus now. And Ukraine, Russia and 400 plus Israel, Hamas. So as you’ve talked about, John, just the cost of life.

Ross Roggensack: 600,000 Ukrainians have died in this war, 600,000. Think about that number. Just amazing. That we know of.

Richard Cunningham: Well, maybe that’s a good place to just kind of stop. Put a pin in the conversation and just say, Hey, for anyone listening that maybe is disheartened by the election outcome. Here’s something like I was talking about the foreign conflict or on the other side of the coin is just overjoyed by the election outcome.

Let’s get back to that kind of like eternal mindset, biblical perspective. We asked the question at the close of every podcast of What’s the Lord been teaching you in and through His word lately? And so maybe in light of the subjects we’ve covered in just your time with the Lord, how would you process and kind of think about this? What encouragement would you guys offer? Ross, we’ll start with you. John will close with you.

Ross Roggensack: Well, my church has been walking through Joshua. And a few weeks ago we ventured out to the Battle of Jericho, which wouldn’t be encouraging to many. So I’m not going to go there. But just before the battle. Joshua is I guess he’s meditating or praying and he looks up and there’s a soldier in front of him with a strong sword.

And Joshua looks at him and says, Are you are you for us or against us? And this is the Lord now speaking to Trinity right in front of him. And the answer was no, which is not an answer. It’s basically that’s the wrong question.

And our pastor kind of asked us to think about in light of that, in the light of what we do in our work, oftentimes I want to go in a direction. I ask if the Lord is with me or against me. Am I going in the right direction? And our pastor kind of rephrased it and said, maybe we should be asking the Lord which direction should we go and not? Am I going in the right way? So maybe that’s a good thing to think about as we welcome to the next season, is us just being quiet and asking, Lord, where are you going? You know, where are you going? Can I go with you? So that’s sort of what I’ve been thinking about.

Richard Cunningham: And that’s good, Ross. We’ve been processing through God’s will and just call on my wife and I his life. Honestly, just lately just been processing the big questions I just got Where would you have us? And we keep coming back to the word will.

And what you just said remind me of first Thessalonians 516, which is rejoice, always pray, continually give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. We want to ask those questions about right and wrong. Got you on this side, that side, and you just stops and says, Rejoice, pray, give thanks. That’s my will for you. Kind of like you’re saying, God, what direction would you take me in? John Coleman, Take us home.

John Coleman: Well, first, just let me know. I’m almost shocked. We got through an entire podcast right now without having to talk about cryptocurrencies. Given that Bitcoin is almost at 100,000. I know that’s Ross’s favorite topic because it’s probably his heaviest asset allocation is is Bitcoin.

Ross Roggensack: So you’re a wealthy man right now?

Richard Cunningham: Ross That’s my fault for not bringing up crypto, but it has been rippin.

John Coleman: It has been good time in the crypto markets. You know, I have been thinking a lot over the last few days about humility. I heard the founder of Hello on a podcast recently talking about humility. They have some prayers for humility on the app. I’ve been using the Halo app actually to do daily devotionals and things like that, and they have some great prayers on humility.

And then I was actually watching a sneak peek of a TV show on Monday that I won’t reveal that forthcoming from some friends of all of us here on the podcast. And there was a scene with the Prophet Samuel where he was talking to Saul and he talks about how when Saul was small in his own eyes, God made him great. But then when Saul started to believe his own story, him to fail to attribute God, obviously he was humbled and it’s just helped to remind me constantly.

Like any time we start to feel on top of the world for anybody feeling on top of the world right now, you know, we need to remember God is in control and that we are subject to him and we should always seek humility. We should have humility. We should remember to give glory and credit to God. We shouldn’t let the valleys be too deep or the peaks be too high.

Right? We should know that we’re on a journey and that journey will have both suffering and triumphs. And we should just always be cautious in our dealings with ourselves and with others that we constantly give credit to God, that we treat others as better than ourselves, and that we as Christians are setting an example for how we treat others so that we communicate that message of humility and love that Jesus consistently gave us.

And it’s only by doing so that we can ever truly achieve great things not for ourselves, but for others and for God. Right? And that’s just really hit home for me over the course of the last week with a couple of messages I’ve seen.

It’s an area I fall short all the time, and so it’s something I have to keep in front of my eyes. You know, Ross is smiling way too big when I made that last comment about falling short on humility. But but it really is. I mean, you got to pray about it. You got to think about it. And I’m too tempted to give myself credit for stuff sometimes. And I think we all are. And, you know, as folks are feeling either great or bad right now, it’s important that we all remember to put that in context of eternity and the role that we play here. For the God that we serve to fear.

Richard Cunningham: The Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I think humility is one of those great byproducts of wisdom. Ross Robinson of City Consulting, John Coleman of Sovereign’s Capital Friends. This has been another episode of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Wonderful to have you with us. Have a great Thanksgiving. Start your Advent season. We’ll catch you next time.

Speaker 2: We are grateful for the opportunity to serve this community and see your listeners come in for more than 100 countries. Faith Driven Investor It can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a groups study with other investors looking to get the same answers to questions you have and find great community as they do so. There’s no cost, no catch. In person or online, you can meet an hour a week with other peers from your backyard or the other side of the world.

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Richard Cunningham You’re listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ, following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 Hey everyone. All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosted guests may maintain positions in the companies of securities discussed, and this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.

Richard Cunningham Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Man we are nearing the end of 2020 for Luke Roush and really it’s been since May, since we’ve had the opportunity really in earnest to hit on the real estate markets. And we’ve got an incredible leader in the space. Nick Bonner with us here today that will introduce your momentarily, but excited to have you back in the podcast. Luke, I know it’s been a couple of weeks and excited to be talking. Real estate feels like it’s after an election. A lot of Fed activity, everything that’s been going on, we just kind of need to pay tribute to that asset class and large. But Luke, how are you doing? How is Team Roush this Thanksgiving?

Luke Roush We are doing great. We had a great Thanksgiving. Grateful for unique times that we live in. And certainly the last handful of months has been unique in the real estate realm and dynamic, which makes for a fun podcast session. So this is a great guest and a great conversation we’re going to have today.

Richard Cunningham It sure does. So coming from sunny San Diego, California, where he can probably dunk on as in terms of weather as our friend Nick Bonner. Nick has been a leader in the FDI real estate space for quite some time, thinking about just redemption inside of real estate. Longtime CBRE, Caldwell Broker, great expertise. Nick, awesome to have you on the phone with us. Man.

Nick Bonner I was a joy to serve and I’m grateful for you guys and your entire team. What you’re doing to spur the movement of faith driven investing. We’ve heard Luke say it before. Aslan is on the move. You guys are helping investors to be found faithful and they can return. So thank you guys for what you doing.

Richard Cunningham Absolutely. Well, Nick, you’ve got a wild story. And I think that’s just kind of where we want to start with this podcast is your time at the Pine Tops Foundation what you’ve had your hand in over kind of your career, I think will help frame up where we’re going and kind of what happens now and present day with your work. But I just want to hand over the mic to you to kind of contextualize this episode a little bit and who you are.

Nick Bonner Awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah. So I’ll start off just like a quick background on me because I think it helps sort of frame this up. Pastor’s kid born and raised, actively involved in the church my whole life, spent about a decade on the board of a church board, 13 years on the board of a Christian foundation called the Pine Tops Foundation. In about the last 20 years in commercial real estate, in the capacities of lender, broker, property, manager of my own assets, investments and the like. And all that has sort of helped frame up a lot of my thinking around some of what we’re going to dive into today. Since I started volunteering with the foundation, we’ve deployed over 500 grants and over 40 different private placements, the majority of which were for impact investments. And I mentioned that because my roles in commercial real estate in the foundation have opened my eyes to a very broad spectrum of the deployment of capital and the impact that it can have, which has really stirred up a lot of good questions and opportunities around this space for me. Give me a what I think is a pretty unique perspective. So I’ll start real quick with Pinetop, just to give you a brief overview of that. So Private Christian Foundation, we set out about nine years ago. We sort of said, Hey, we need to come up with a theory of change because in spite of being one of the wealthiest Christian nations in history, the church in America has declined. And so we don’t have a money problem. We don’t have a critical mass problem. We have an efficacy problem. So what are we going to do to steward God’s money in a way that actually results in real change? And so the answer to that was what we call the Great Opportunity Report or the GAO report for sure. And how we came about with that was initially was intended to be a confidential internal domestic strategy for us. But we quickly realized it was something that was just much bigger than anything we could ever tackle on our own. And so what we did with that is we basically asked two questions. One, what is the state of the church look like in 2050 and how do we change that? So we built demographic models around it, and then we went back through history and said, okay, how do we change that based off historical record? Like, where have we seen big growth in the church and are there common denominators there? And the answer was, Yeah, there’s five. And so we built a chapter on each one of those five intro to kind of frame it up and then a closing chapter of just ideas, just tons of ideas to like, all right, how do we get after this? So if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, okay, this is an investor podcast, but a lot of people on here are faith driven. And so if you’re tired of people talking about the church and how it’s dying and how it’s, you know, not efficacious, read this report and get inspired and get to work, there’s some really exciting ideas that come out of that and so you can find it. It’s free. Great opportunity, dawg. We probably had 40, 45,000 downloads on it. We’re not marketing. And it’s just it’s kind of tough to tell like how much exposure it’s had because it’s a PDF document that just gets forwarded around. But our best guess is, you know, probably 45,000 different church leaders of major denominations and ministries that have been using that as their game plan. That’s required reading in a number of seminaries and denominations. And so, you know, we’re excited about what it’s. And I’m more excited about what other people will do with it when they get a hold of it and start to ideate on like, Wow, what’s my part in this? So one example of that is a real estate model called Open Doors. And what’s fun about this is this wasn’t even my idea. Like we hired a bunch of McKinsey consultants and KKR people. There’s 150 different people that helped us put this dock together. Their names are in the back of it. And they came up with this idea that like, hey, as we look at the overall church, like your two biggest costs, like most companies are people in real estate and arguably maybe there’s a vocational angle in there for pastors. But clearly the low hanging fruit is in the real estate because as I started digging into it, I realized the average church in an American city spends half of their finances on a building that the only fully utilize about 5% of the week.

Richard Cunningham Absolutely. I’ve always thought about that.

Nick Bonner It’s a colossal waste of stewardship. I mean, it’s just like it makes me angry when I think about it. And so their idea was we’ve got to have a better model for that. What if we had for profit sustainable solutions with third parties that owned this property? What if we had sort of like a we work for churches like 20 years ago, if I would have told you that you’d be interested in sharing your music collection, your home in your car, you’d be like, You’re crazy in your office space, for that matter, right? But like, here we are. So why is the church so far behind this? Why couldn’t we do that, too? So a couple other big stats for you, as I sort of do some of an original research on this is there’s about $1 trillion of equity just buried in the dirt in church buildings, just church buildings alone, not even the rest of the real estate the church owns. And so if we deployed that capital alone, we could triple the current rate of church planting. And why that’s important because I didn’t know really anything about church planting before this report is church planning is one of the five most catalytic things that could be done that would be positively disruptive for the church. It is a common denominator behind all big revivals in American history. One other stat on that, which is roughly 12% of companies own their own properties, but roughly 84% of churches own theirs. And it’s such a big difference. It’s like, wow, why are we settling for, you know, a property tax exemption and maybe 3% appreciation when the scripture tells us that we’re given returns of 30, 60 and 100 fold? Like what if we were putting our capital into our mission in the same way that businesses put their capital into their mission? And so that was sort of the big idea behind like, okay, we’ve got to do something different about about real estate. So what does that look like?

Luke Roush Yeah, well, I’d just dovetail on that, Nick. One of the things that we talk a lot with business leaders that we partner with about is stay focused and stay clear on the business that you’re in. If you’re in the business of distributing heavy industrial equipment, focus on distributing heavy industrial equipment. Don’t focus on somehow trying to become like a real estate mogul through the the dirt that’s underneath your dealerships. And so we try to always remind business leaders of what is the business that you’re in. If you’re in the real estate business and you’re trading multifamily properties, you probably want to own the real estate. But if you’re in almost any other kind of business, you’re looking to control that costs and make it a variable expense rather than a sunk asset. So what you’re bringing up is very apropos. And, you know, it’d be curious to go back and figure out how did we get here? Maybe it’s just a spirit around kind of own in the building that started, but more importantly, I think more constructively, where do we go from here in terms of trying to return to the core mission, which is reaching people with the Gospel? So please continue.

Nick Bonner Yeah, I know with you and I’ve got a whole white paper I wrote on how we got here that you guys have been nice enough to post on FDI on, you know, basically takes you into the etymology. It’s about words, like language matters. Like we can’t even look at a building and call it the right thing. We look at buildings and we call them churches. They’re not churches, the churches, the exits, the gathering of people. So, so long as we look at buildings and say, that’s a church, then we actually even create a mindset where a pastor is like, Wait, you want me to share my church? No, this is my church. Like, I’m not sharing this building. And so we just need to think differently about this. And to your point, there’s an example I give of you guys get pitched by businesses all the time. So let me pitch you on a business idea for a moment. All right. So I’m going to start a business. It’s a predominantly retail business. We are only going to be actually visible to the community a half a day a week. We’re going to go to our main parishioners and we’re going to ask them to take their day off for 2 to 4 hours and spend that moving, picking up stuff and moving in and out the rest of the week. There’s going to be zero sign that we actually are even in existence. And as the CEO of this company, I’m going to spend a decent amount of time on things that are. Pletely outside of my scope or set of abilities. Do you want to invest in me? You’d be like, Are you.

Luke Roush Crazy? That sounds like a long cut, Nick.

Nick Bonner Right. So this is the model. This is plan A for church planting. Like we’re sending these guys out to battle the go get slaughtered. Like these poor pastors have these really crummy models that they’re given. And so you probably hear my voice. We just we need better solutions for this. And so I don’t want to camp on this for too long. But the quick idea with this whole open doors model was let’s go out and buy buildings or create a fund for profit sustainable, fund them, go buy buildings, be a church industrial office, whatever, it just have to work for the users, renovate it so that multiple churches can share the space when they need it, when they don’t need it, which we just learned is the majority of the time, at least the entirety of the building. We rent that out to other uses, like Christian preschool or coffee shop or coworking or let’s just let’s take wedding space back. I mean, an event space is a huge income generator and all of those uses can both subsidize the church’s cost to be in the space and bring in new sources of people. So that might not normally set foot inside of a church. So now you put the well inside of the building. You have these divine collisions that can occur within the church and you’re creating a sense of space of a third place that people want to be in. And you just tell the pastors, Hey, you’ve got access seven days a week, why don’t you sit in the lobby and just hand out coffee to people as they come in like they’re showing up at your front door? Just love people and basically take all the distractions away from them. So that was the model set out to do it. I love Henry Kissinger’s example of like introducing somebody to the world of sushi where he says, like, you got like the apartment life model over here. And that’s like, you know, the California roll. And then you’ve got, you know, some of these other private equity funds that are like the nigiri sushi, right? You don’t take somebody straight into Gary Sushi. You start him at the California, get an appetite and you go towards that. Well, this open doors model, like there’s so many different moving pieces to it and then there’s like all this cultural overlay and spiritual things of like people, you know, hating on the church that it’s like, that’s the nigiri sushi. And I came out of the gates swinging for that, and it was hard. It was an interesting time because I was a part of a group. It was kind of like the first FDI group ever, only unofficial. You’ll recognize the names of like Beaner Skin. And I don’t know if, you know Matt Migliore is, but couple of other guys that are part of this.

Luke Roush These are some of the urges and they threw in real estate.

Nick Bonner The O.G.. So we all get together. Dan Mack it maybe not a name you guys know, but it’s just a phenomenal human being. And a buddy of mine, John Kim, we all get together. We’re like, How do we solve for this stuff? So it’s during Covid. We’re like, Well, let’s just do like a video. Like we can’t meet with people. Just do a video meeting like, you know, every week. So it was awesome. Was first FTI Group during that time super formative for me. This is when Ben starts Callus Capital was turns in the Sovereigns real estate fund. We introduced each other like narthex, which is doing like their own real estate fund co hatch. Well then Field Redemption Collective. There’s like all these groups that are spinning in our minds and we’re learning about all these great solutions that entrepreneurs are pursuing and having the realization that, like, man, access to this capital is really hard because the only thing that investors love more than their money is their time. And so if you want to invest in one of these models, it’s going to take time to go evaluate is brand new. Like these aren’t California rules. These are somewhere between that and the Gary Sushi. And so God gave me a vision during this time that was like, Man, I love these people in their models so much. I’m going to take the operator route. But my goal is to prove this so well that we could go raise up ultimately a REIT where all of my buddies, we could all collaborate and roll up all of our individual funds into this massive REIT because then we can begin to democratize the capital in this space. Right now, the barriers of entry for anything really Christian impact is really high. If you don’t invest in this stuff, you got to have typically minimum like a quarter million bucks. Be ready to have your money locked up for 5 to 7, maybe ten years. And oftentimes there isn’t a massive amount of diversification. So if grandma wants to invest your money, you’re saying, no, grandma, don’t, don’t do it. And so what if there were a highly diversified vehicle that had a $2,000, you know, minimum and a ton of flexibility that opens up the pool so much bigger. And so I sort of got off track a little bit. I wanted to share an example of one of the thought experiments also that led me to this space. So years ago, Tom Blaisdell wrote this white paper where he explains that there’s we all think that government is supposed to solve this stuff. Or guess what? Like there’s only about 15 times the amount of government money available, then donation capital. And certainly donation capital was not enough to get the job done. There’s 100 and. 50 times the amount of investment capital available in the ecosystem. Then there is donation capital. So the thought experiment on this is. So all the two pocket investors, right? Let’s just imagine for a moment that in the philanthropy space we could create a KPI that measured kingdom impact. I don’t believe you can, but let’s just imagine for a second that you could. So if we did, let’s imagine that the philanthropy space has a 100% return on their KPI. Let’s imagine that the impact space does a really poor job and they only have a 1% return on theirs. Even in that scenario, the impact investment space would still have a 50% greater return than the philanthropy space because of its sheer size. Right. And so please don’t understand me. Like philanthropic capital is absolutely necessary. I’m just trying to cast a bigger net, bigger vision beyond that as the sole apparatus for solving the world’s issues. Right. So this is not binary thinking. This is like a continuum. God made 17,000 types of butterflies. So there’s plenty of room for expression and creativity in our work. But this thought experiment gives you a sense of like, how critically important it is to actually get into this impact investment space and start doing work there.

Richard Cunningham Right? That’s really important. I want to double down on that real quick because I think that’s just worth stopping because it actually plays off really nicely. One of the most legendary FTI videos, in my opinion, for those that have been through kind of the six week FDI cohort is when Greg learned a hand unpacks this concept and he talks about, you know, Americans are given somewhere around 400 to $500 billion to philanthropy, which what you’re talking about charity each year. And that number is actually going down, which is a bummer. You know, we the church should be joyfully, hopefully like increasing that number in that share that we’re giving. And that’s such a small percentage of GDP. And what you’re talking about here is the hundred plus trillion dollars in investable assets out there. Just a small portion of that was unlocked for other than, you know, purely profit driven purposes, which making a good return is absolutely key. You’re saying what could take place here is just an even greater multiple. Am I am I understand that correctly?

Nick Bonner Yeah. And I love Greg learned a hand. And that is a man that has put his money where his mouth is. And his two by two model was instructive and edifying for me as well, where like, you know, on the vertical axis, you’ve got the spiritual impact on the horizontal, you’ve got financial. Everybody wants to be talking to the right, but what about top on the left? Like what about concessionary investments? Like where’s our space for that? And like, where’s our ability to like seek the Holy Spirit’s guiding in that space. In fact, a lot of the times he’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you the same some of my favorite investments are talking to the left. So there’s certainly needs. One of my dreams is after we sort of prove out the right thing is actually go out and do a concessionary fund. But it’s a hard issue. And I think I need FDI to help mature the hearts of a lot of the faith driven investors before I’m willing to take a flier on that one.

Luke Roush Hey, Nick, one question that I wanted to ask pertinent to the reconstruct is any time you think about creating an open ended vehicle like that where there’s more flexibility around minimums, more flexibility around individuals who can access it is from a networth perspective. And then also having the liquidity to be able to support that more open doors access pun intended. Given your background, I’d love to have you just talk a little bit about how do you tactically start that? Like once it’s big, once it’s stable and you’ve got sufficient liquidity reserves and all that to be able to facilitate churn, it’s easier to imagine. But a lot of times I’ve seen folks get hung up on this model because they can’t figure out how do you get critical mass at the beginning? Maybe talk a little bit about how you’re facing into that or thinking about facing into that in the coming years.

Nick Bonner Yeah. So I don’t want to blow the story too much, but for the vehicle, the plan would be raise enough money that you can get an initial critical mass. And so, you know, an initial rig, A-plus offering, would allow you to do 75 million a year every year until you’ve got enough capital and operational history to go to an investment banker and say, okay, let’s go big now. And what an investment banker is willing to start with as their minimum, whether that’s, you know, 300 million or 2 billion, you know, that’s the question that would need to be answered at that point in time based on that fund and its performance. But ultimately, if you go the I.B. route to the road to Wall Street, we bring.

Richard Cunningham Luke on the pod for investment expertise, and you can just see him foaming at the mouth, chomping at the bit. Want to get into that conversation?

Luke Roush I love innovation. I love people who are looking at what others have looked at and seeing new opportunities. That’s really what innovation is. Very rarely is it inventing something new, but it’s figuring out how to apply a concept from one field in the maybe a new field and just creatively playing at the margin of, you know, intersecting circles. So I really like the construct and I think that know what you’re really pointing towards, Nick, is the democratization of faith driven investing. Even if it’s true that the majority of assets are held by very few individuals globally, the reality is that, you know, the vision, mission, dream, I think that we all share this is our collective mission is to be able to allow everyone to participate, whether in big ways or small ways, in this idea of reflecting our values and how we steward capital and to try to look for market based mechanisms that can lead to an enhanced ability to plant churches and do some of the things that you’ve outlined through that Global Opportunity report, which is incredibly insightful for me. And it sat on my desk for well over a year as I just kind of processed and reprocess the contents. So really grateful for point. Absolutely, in a way with that.

Nick Bonner Yeah, well, praise God and thank you. Yeah. One of the visions that God had given us with this is like the widow’s might. Like when we came out with this, we went to a number of the operators that are doing really good work, and the people that are running the ministry side of their work came to us, were like, I can’t invest in the work we’re doing. I don’t have a quarter million dollars. But like this vision of like being able to go to Wall Street and have a lower minimum, man, like I’m in. So there’s a lot of people that want to be a part of this. And that’s what’s driving me more than anything is all my friends and family that are like, Hey, I’d love to be a part of this, but I can’t do it just yet. And even like even the investors that have a lot of the money, like so my best friend’s house, three years old, he had a liquidity event recently and he came to me. He’s like, Nick, you know, I want to do a faith driven investing real estate thing. What do I do where I go? And I’m like, Yeah, here’s like six different funds have invested into you. And he’s like, Dude, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have the time to dig through this. So is there an easy button? Like, is there like way I can invest in all of these? And I was like, Well, yeah, we could figure that out. Actually introducing the business, give us like solvency. Got a real estate fund, do that. So yes, trying to solve for that is the fun part. So let me take you back. Yeah.

Richard Cunningham I was about to say, bless my linear brain that likes to hear the conclusion of the story that gets us to the present day and go quickly through the kind of like the open doors to now.

Nick Bonner Yeah. So open doors start that, by the way. Like I still got a full time job at CBRE and joked during the time of working two and a half full time jobs and working full time at C, which is not like a residential where you can work like 20 hours a week, like you got to be full time. And it’s a very competitive industry. Plus volunteer and Pinetop plus starting this whole Open Doors syndicate, I thought it would take 18 months. And right before Covid, I was well on my way on pace for that. And then Covid hit and bunch of other things hit. And, you know, it ended up taking more like six years. And so during that time, I mean, this is a podcast for another day. But like I just had to say it was rough. I ended up having a full on panic attack. And I’m not a person that is panicky, my wife. Laughed when our therapist diagnosed me with anxiety. She was like, You don’t have anxiety, but there’s something to like going after this stuff that has real repercussions. And so I actually wrote a whole white paper on like discerning that call in, like, how do we know if like, we followed God when we’re in the middle of like, the desert? Did I do wrong or this is actually where you brought me God. And so during this time I bump into Dallas Jenkins and he’s like, Nick, you have to read me and myself and Bob by Saul Fisher The story of the collapse of Vegetables and shout out to the Holy Post. By the way, I’m Phil Fisher. So I read the story and he’s got we have time to go into it in detail. But like he talks about the Schumann Night Woman, which is not a story that I remember in the Bible, but quick upshot on this. So there’s this woman who’s barren. She’s serving a Leisha. He says, Hey, God’s going to give you a child. God gives her a child. A year later, she raises him up. When he’s in his teens, the child basically ends up dying in her arms. So she goes to her husband. Her husband asked her how she is, and she says this astounding thing. She says, all is well, which is not something you would normally say when your first and only child dies. She goes a like she asked the same questions. Use this all as well. And it’s clear that she’s messed up about this, by the way, like she’s like grieving over this. But the question that he poses in this is like, what kind of a God gives somebody a dream and then takes it away. Right. And then the second question is, what kind of a person answers all is well when their only child dies in their arms in the answer is like God had clearly taken her through a journey personally where the moral of the story that she learned was like, sometimes God gives us a desire or a dream only to take it away only because only then, after taking it away, can we really know if we love him more than the desire or the dream. And should he ever give that dream or desire back to us, only then would we ever actually be able to experience it to its fullest. So this is a super powerful lesson for me through this process because I think I sort of made this like seeing how important this vision was. I think I, in spite of my best efforts, I sort of made it a little bit of an idol. And so I’ll pause for a quick diagnostic for those listening, if you want to figure out if you’ve got an idol of your own, let me ask you two quick questions. The first question is fill in this blank. For me, living is for me, living is for me. And be like, I don’t know, going on great surf trips or, you know, hanging out with my family or having success in business. Right.

Richard Cunningham Spoken like a guy who lives in San Diego.

Nick Bonner Yeah. All good things, right? And then answer that next one for me, dying is for me, dying is, man, if I lost this or if that happened. Right. So if your answer to those two questions is anything other than Jesus, then you’re set up for failure. Because the problem is, for me, living is like all of those things can be taken away in an instant. The only possible answer that can fit in both blanks and protect you from suffering is if the answer is Jesus. So I’ll fast forward through the story and I’ve got the money raised. I’ve got 30 plus churches that are like, If you build, it will come. We’re excited. I got multiple redundancy and all the tenants. I’ve pulled the trigger on the Lego. I spent all the money, I’ve got everything ready. I’ve got a couple of buildings lined up and God presses pause in a big way. And so I’ve got to tell you, this only got story for a moment because I think people will be blessed by it. So five years prior, I’d been shopping for a new church after 17 years of the same church and during the storm camping out in the book of Colossians, I’m reading cautions every day for the entire summer. The Lord is speaking to me through caution so loudly that I actually read chapter one every day for 30 days straight. Never done this before or since then. Every time I read it, he speaks to me. So I go to 12 different churches, and if you know me, I’m a nerd. I got my spreadsheet. I’m evaluating these churches on like 15 different points and three pastors preach on Colossians chapter one. And I’m like, What are the chances? And the Holy Spirit, you know, meets me in a way as a sort of Baptist Presbyterian background that I am not used to being about. I’m like weeping in these churches, super embarrassing, but I don’t really care at the same time. And at the end of it, I’m like, God, wow, this is amazing experience. Like, what are you doing here? Like, I can’t attend three church. I got to pick one and he doesn’t give me that answer, so I have to pick one. So I pick one church back into the story. Fast forward five years. So church one, I’m attending church. Two of those three joins our church in August of last year and says, Hey, like we just love you guys are doing are going to join your church now two on the same roof. And then in September, a third church comes to us and says, Hey, we’re closing down at the end of this year. We want to sell our building to you. But this isn’t a market sale. We’re not stupid. This is a. Time passed. We see a legacy here and we want to basically hand this thing over to you. You’ve got to pay off our debt and our severance. But, you know, it’s a $50 million building. They want to sell us for 5 million bucks. And long story short, with this process, the church can’t raise the money because they’re like, look, their only catches. You got 30 days to raise 5 million bucks. So I call the people I know. I’m like, let’s get you a $45 million write off. You guys could buy this thing for 5 million. You could gift it to my church. Nobody wants to do it. Shocker to me. I can’t believe it.

Richard Cunningham I know where this is going. Back to the open doors thing. Yeah. Wow. I’m excited to hear how this ends.

Nick Bonner So bottom line is, we’re closing in and I’m like, Yeah, we’re not going to buy this thing. What are we going to do? And I feel like praying about it. I’m like, got to understand what’s going on. And guys like, Hey, who did I give that vision to? You have three churches under the same roof and I’m like, Me is like, Well, what were those three churches? And so I go back through my notes, You want to get to the third church was the preach on Colossians. There’s the church that wants to sell this building to us. And I’m like, Whoa, goosebumps, right? Like, okay. And then God’s like, Hey, how much money does the church need? 5 million bucks. And how much money do you raise for the open doors model? 5 million bucks. Like with God, like.

Richard Cunningham Isaac on the altar necklace.

Nick Bonner This is the Isaac on the altar moment, man. And so rule number one is churches don’t own real estate with open doors like they can’t like you need a third party. And so, again, just to abbreviate all this, I make the decision. I go to my lead capital provider. I’m like, Hey, here’s the idea. I don’t really know if you want to do this, but here’s the opportunity. We could do it alone. I could just back out. We could just sort of put open doors on pause and they’re like, This is great, let’s do it. And I’m like, okay, I was open. You’d say, No, but here we go. So bottom line is I put open doors on hold, give up my capital, then help them close escrow on the building. And that may end up being the first open doors building. And it may not. It’s out of my control. And so for the second time in six years, I give up my career and then found myself on the other side of it saying like, okay, God, like, what do we do now? And the following from that was really a dark night of the soul. My wife gave me John Comer’s book Lit The Dark Night of the Soul, which was cathartic during that time. So just like just felt like God had just sort of hugged me out to dry. And so this was a time of of a lot of soul searching. But now I just have to say that God is just so good and so patient. And I was rebellious in my heart during that time. But he just showed me a tremendous amount of grace through it. And I think the upshot during this time was what I came down to, in spite of all my anger about sort of like giving up my career twice now, this is like, you know, God, whatever you want to do with me, do with me. Where else can I go? It’s like Peter, like only you have the words of life. So if your endgame is for me to end up, you know, poor and naked and alone, then, like, I guess, like, okay, there’s nowhere else I can turn to. So that was a really, I guess, maturing time in my face. And I think I’ll speak to this maybe a little bit later. But there are few biblical characters that didn’t have a desert journey that God took them through or they just had to like abandon basically all things and make the decision that it’s really only God. It’s not the dream, it’s not the desire. It’s got to be only God. So you fast forward to today, which is shortly after all that happened. I got a phone call into Andrew Arroyo from Andrew Arroyo. Real Estate is a buddy of mine who calls me and says, Hey, Nick, I think there’s a generational wealth making opportunity in commercial real estate. We’ve got 40% of all commercial, say, debt roll. In the next three years. There’s going to be a lot of people that need to sell fundamentally good buildings for discounts just to, you know, meet redemption cues and to pay off their lenders. And so I said, yeah, it sounds interesting, man, but I’ve just seen too much. And for me, it’s in Pachter bust. Like, I can’t do anything that doesn’t have a legitimate impact. It’s like me too, like I’m in the same boat. He’s like, Nick. He’s like, for the last X amount of years you’ve been sharing all these Christian models, all these redemptive impact models of people for free. What if we did that? You actually got paid to do it? I was like, Whoa, that would be a dream come true. And so fast forward on this. Again, we’re in the process right now of starting, as I understand it, the world’s first Christian impact investment rate. And it’s one of those things where it’s like Mark since got this quote where there decades when nothing happens in days or decades happen. And this is one of those for me where I feel like by giving up Isaac on the altar with this whole open doors thing, like God allowed me to, instead of hitting my 20 year vision of like, Hey, we’ll go to open doors. And 20 years later I have a right. It was like, Now let’s just do the rewrite. Now you’ve been faithful, go. And so I’m super excited by this idea because we just yesterday, I mean, this all happened in real time. So what’s today’s Thursday? So Tuesday I sent my farewell notice to everybody at KB yesterday. The SEC got back to us and said, We’re officially qualifying you guys to be a read on. And is real. Like, it’s getting real really fast. I haven’t even updated my LinkedIn profile. So bottom line is we’re going to go start this REIT that can do all those things that we were talking about where we’re going to go find all these other operators and invest into them and lift up their arms and provide an easier route to capital on both sides of the equation. Want to grow both the supply and the demand side of the equation. So if you got a question of the REIT, we’ve talked about that more later. But I just want to say that the lesson here for me is it’s actually the second time in my career that God has taught me this lesson. I hope there’s not a third, but it’s a Joseph story. Like God doesn’t move in a linear fashion all the time. A lot of times we think he should go from point A to B to C to D, and God can go to A to F, over to Q and straight to Z and right back to again if he wants to. But like if you look at the stories in the Bible of people like Joseph, it’s like, man, we’re not in control of this stuff. God is in control of this stuff. And if we can just hang on to him, the places he’ll take us to, all the places will go.

Luke Roush I think that’s a good word. And you know what I would say, Nick? Is that what you’re talking through in terms of the journey that you’ve been on, is what it looks like to be actively faithful and guard against being willful. There’s certain things that God has put in our control and is allowed to be in our control and those other things that are kind of outside of our control. It’s a trying to discern, as you did in your path through the desert, what is the voice of God? What is maybe the voice of the enemy or your own voice? Kind of speaking of the voice of the world, speaking in the year, trying to discern which voice and listening for the accent that God has and how he speaks to us, which oftentimes is corroborated by Scripture and or godly counsel around us. That is what discernment looks like in the process of being faithful, but being actively faithful and moving forward with full recognition that God controls the outcomes and teaches us things along the way. And in Patterson’s quote, around decades happen in days and other times it’s, you know, days happen over decades. I think that’s a really important reminder around controlling what we can control and trusting God with some level of the timing and the outcome. So this has been super instructive and informative, I think, for Richard and I sitting here and it’s great to hear your story. I love the process that you’re going through to be able to democratize real estate and what it looks like for more people to get in the game, which in the words of Henry and Justin. So, Richard, over to you.

Richard Cunningham Yeah, I mean, if you’d allow me, honestly, the liberty just to try to summarize like Nick, because it’s powerful and it’s a really cool, as you said, only God story, kind of all of it, but it’s this catalytic vision. You receive it pine tops for how you can engage as kind of this church issue that we have the systemic church issue. And I love that. It’s so overlaps with your passion and your background and, you know, just professionally what you’re capable of, which is in the real estate space. And so then you get this vision for open doors, which is for church real estate spaces, to kind of step in as an antidote and a healer. There Open Doors is at the finish line, docs are created and signed, capital is raised, and you’re there on the goal line. And then all of a sudden the Lord comes down the pipeline with this $50 million church that is an opportunity to be acquired for 5 million. You sacrifice the capital, the Isaac on the altar moment for Open doors. This project you are so excited about for the acquisition of this church leads to what sounds like a pretty dark season or just a lot of contemplation of like, God, how would you use me? And then all of a sudden this Rick comes to fruition in a way which was the ultimate end game. You started open doors with in a way that you could never have kind of fathomed. And so I just I love that it’s God not moving in a linear fashion and so deeply edifying. And there’s 30 podcasts inside of just this one podcast that we could pull on each individual strand. But maybe Nick closes down with this of just like generally you’ve given so many just kind of incredible tidbits of wisdom in here, like what it was like kind of that last piece of advice you might leave the audience with as it relates to real estate or just engaging with the space, what have you. And we’ll close there.

Nick Bonner Yeah. So and there’s so much I want to say on this front. So I’d like to speak to two different audiences here in your podcast. So first, to those who haven’t yet done any impact investments, I’d say, you know, there’s this great Leonardo Da Vinci Code who says, I’ve been impressed by the urgency of doing knowing is not enough. We must apply. Being willing is not enough. We must do right. So if you haven’t done impact investment like start now, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, like you start now. Don’t wait until your victory lap. Our time is now. How are you stewarding the other 90% of the capital that God’s entrusted with you? And if you don’t have time to go investigate, 400 different operators go investigate and five funds make them do the due diligence and I’ll give you a freebie. Like there’s a bunch of people that are on this podcast. Chuck Weldon was just on this podcast. He’s fantastic. Invest in him. We’re going to. Launch capital. Their outstanding guys are great. Yeah, we’re talking about really solid people. And so those who are active, I’d encourage them to consider the Greg learn a hand to buy to. I mean, try some concessionary investments and see what God does and go pray about that. There’s this Viktor Frankl quote that says Success like happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue, and it only does so at the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. And so my final thought on this is if your identity isn’t being an investor, you will likely do a poor job of furthering that gospel through investment. Dump your identity as an investor or receive your inheritance as a child of God. Bring him your loaves and fish and watch him walk away.

Richard Cunningham Come on. Nick Bonner. Thank you. How awesome to hear your story, man. Thank you for what you’re doing for this broader, redemptive investing space, specifically within the asset class of real estate. I’m excited to follow your journey. Friends in the FDI ecosystem, I would say keep your eyes open on LinkedIn, social media, everywhere. You’re going to see Nick around and this is going to be something that we’re going to follow along closely. So friends, Happy Advent, we’ll catch you for one last FTI podcast after this one to close out 2024. But otherwise, we’ll catch you next time. Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 We are grateful for the opportunity to serve this community and see your listeners come in for more than 100 countries. Faith Driven Investor It can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a groups study with other investors looking to get the same answers to questions you have and find great community as they do so. There’s no cost, no catch. In person or online, you can meet an hour a week with other peers from your backyard or the other side of the world. You can also stay connected by signing up for our monthly newsletter at Faith driven investing.org. This podcast wouldn’t be possible without the help of many of our friends. Executive Producer Justin Foreman. Intro mixed and arranged by Summer Drags Audio and Editing by Richard Barley. Our theme song is Sweet Ever After by Ellie Holcomb.

Richard Cunningham [00:00:00] You’re listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ, following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 [00:00:17] Hey everyone. All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosted guests may maintain positions in the companies of securities discussed, and this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.

Richard Cunningham [00:00:46] Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor podcast. What is the final FDI pod of 2024? So with that in mind, friends, Merry Christmas. I know this podcast will release the week of Christmas, so maybe you’re catching us on a drive to see people you love. Maybe you’re taking a break in the Christmas tunes wrap in that final Christmas present, what have you, and we’re hanging out with you. But regardless of where you are, I hope you have yourself a wonderful Merry Christmas. And hey, with that in mind, a couple of quick housekeeping things. We’re going to return to the FDI podcast after a little break around Christmas and New Year’s on January 13th. So mark your calendars. That will be our likely first release date of 2025 will be coming in hot with a marks on the markets. And then one final thing to say about today’s episode is no Luke Roush or John Coleman with us. A couple of our mainstays. We’re bringing in another one of our mainstays who’s been a frequent guest of the FDI podcast recently, as we’ve been doing a couple of blended FTE and FDI pods, President and executive director of the Faith Driven Movements, Justin Foreman. And just so we’re doing something special today is we’re just going to highlight what all is going on in the FDI movement, what our guide has done in 2024. And you’ve brought someone exceptionally special with us today to do that.

Justin Forman [00:01:59] We have. I thought this was the podcast we were talking about Baylor football. Was this not the Baylor football like pre-game, but.

Richard Cunningham [00:02:04] That’s our next.

Justin Forman [00:02:04] One. That’s an.

Richard Cunningham [00:02:05] Excellent one. Yeah. After we’re going to spare, I guess you and I eight and four takes on the Baylor Bears, even though you think we think we won the national championship.

Justin Forman [00:02:12] Yeah, we might get recording before we go way too far. And that indeed it is good to be back. You know it’s fun. I feel privileged to be here to really kind of bring together friends, you know, in any good office, friendship, family rivalry, whatever word you choose to use, there are sometimes a couple of people that just are just like culture core. And when I think about that, when I think about faith driven investing, I think about Richard. But I also think about Samantha and I think about just the fun banter that you guys have had over the years about the movement, about the mission. And it’s fun just getting friends together here, just to talk about to celebrate what God’s done. You know, I know our faith during we’re often so quick to build, to think. To do that, we need those moments to reflect and we need those moments to celebrate. And I think that there’s ample amounts of scripture when we think about reflection and stones of remembrance. And I hope that in some ways, you know, the conversation today is a chance to do that, to reflect upon what God has done over this past year. And when I think about what God has done, certainly a huge part of that has been the work of Samantha leading the team Faith Driven Investor for the coaching and community and so much else. And so it’s really fun to be together here again.

Richard Cunningham [00:03:28] Yeah. So welcome to the podcast studio from the Louisville, Kentucky area. Samantha Couch Sam is a vice president and helps lead the team at Faith Driven Investor. So oftentimes with Luke, John and myself and then the guests we bring in, we’re talking markets, we’re talking asset classes, what it might be, just kind of things we’re seeing as investors and the movement ourselves. And I just don’t say and rarely do we kind of take a step back and just say, hey, let’s focus on the team. Who is building this movement? Sam is helping lead out the FDI team. And let’s just pause and acknowledge, Hey, look at all that like God did in 2020 for you. So faithful it’s celebrating. Kind of tease out some of the things to come in 2025. So Sam, great to have you on the spot.

Samantha Couch [00:04:07] Thank you so much. Like just inside, it’s really, really fun to have the group back together and to be with you. So I’m excited to be here.

Richard Cunningham [00:04:14] I’m going to be great. So let’s travel back in time a little bit to beginning of the year. And there was the first kind of standalone FDI conference is all around this theme of getting in the game, saying maybe kind of take us back to it. Was January correct, when this conference came out and just highlight some of what took place? We did a number of podcasts following the conference with guests who spoke on it. But take us back to kind of the genesis of 2020 fourth annual FDI Conference.

Samantha Couch [00:04:41] Yeah, it was a great time. And like you said, it was the first time that we’d ever done it as a standalone. You know, previously we’ve been kind of tacked on to the podcast, so we didn’t really know what to expect, but we just knew that we were excited about it and it just took off like wildfire. So we had watch parties all around the world. I think we had over 90 large parties and people stepping into this and saw just great celebrations in places like Chicago. We had over 100 people attend the launch party in Chicago. I think two of the top five launch party locations were in Europe, which was really fun to see in the Ukraine and the Netherlands and the things that we’ve seen come out of the community and the group together in the Netherlands have been incredibly inspiring, really fun to watch. And it just seemed to really be such a pivotal moment for the Faith Driven Investor movement and the growth that we’ve seen over this past year. And everybody who’s been stepping into communities, stepping in to lead a foundation group, be a part of a foundation group, all of the many, many conversations we’ve been able to have with individuals over the last year have really. Because of how fantastic that conference was in January.

Richard Cunningham [00:05:50] Absolutely. We had a big conference watch party here in Austin. Reiner Center of the National Christian Foundation, helped host it in partnership with FDI, which is great. And so, Justin, why did kind of you bifurcate what was the decision that it’s like, hey, let’s keep the conference in September, let’s move FDI out on its own? It’s hard to believe that only happened this year. This shows how much growth there’s been in the movement that was still in 2020 for calendar year. And what was kind of the heart there?

Justin Forman [00:06:14] Yeah. You know, I think one of the things to pause for a moment to say, like what’s the method of the madness? And some that’s still being figured out, right? But when you figure out just kind of what the mission of Faith Driven Entrepreneur feature and investing is, and at its core, it’s really about awakening the body of Christ to see in this moment, in this unique time the unique role that entrepreneurs and investors have to play. And the world is surrounded in full of darkness and we can see that we don’t have to look far to find it. I think the question for us is, is, as we would say, what does it look like to kind of take that beachhead of darkness and bring light to it? And when we think about that, maybe it’s kind of like if you were drawn up, battle plans coming ashore on the beach and you were saying, okay, woman What would be the tip of the spear? And when we thought about that, we know the entrepreneurship culture. There’s no doubt that we don’t have to look far down the street from your hometown to find, you know, an entrepreneur creating self-driving cars, robots and reusable rockets. And there is no doubt when we see that happening that it’s shaping culture and we see that same thing happening in faith driven investing.

We see the stories of Anthony Tan, we see Sam read some of those stories. We see stories of Susanne Daniel and so many others that are getting involved in partnering with other entrepreneurs. And so when we think about the mission of Faith driven, it really starts with that entrepreneur. Changing culture. Shifting culture. But any entrepreneur can’t get very far without having that supply line and that support. And that’s where the Faith Driven Investor and conversation has come in. And, you know, as you said, we’re smile at the fact that it kind of like in some ways it was really the first year for the Faith Driven Investor conference. But for the past few years, it paired up with the conference and there was a conference on one day and you have the conference. And the second thing, I think what we found out was there was just a lot of people that, you know, you get fatigued and the two day conference for there is a lot of content. You don’t get a fair chance to really absorb it, but also to find the unique people that should be there for it.

Justin Forman [continued] And so the decision to spread those out was to give each their own room and a chance to breathe and to be that top of funnel moment to introduce people. We really look at this as the front door. It’s the front porch of a conversation to say, you know, a couple of hours from the convenience of a zoom screen or in-person with friends that you can really get a chance to say, how do I find out about this big trend, this big thing that’s happening? And I’m hearing a lot of people talk about, but I just don’t know what it is. I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know how to get involved. And so it’s that really kind of one, two, three set up that when we really think about this event, it’s designed to do and we think that the content starts the conversation. We think then it moves into something further with these foundation groups, and I’m sure Sam will share a little bit more about. But it was an exciting time for us to really say there is a bigger thing happening and Faith Driven Investor to separate it, make it its own day.

And I think what it also was exciting for our team is it changed the dynamic of who you partner with when you partner with NEF. The conference, a lot of times that was a church and it makes sense. That’s where the entrepreneurs are. When we think about the Faith Driven Investor event, it really has opened up the door for so many great partnerships with advisors and friends like National Christian Foundation and Blue Trust and others that have been hosting these, saying, You really called to bring this content and this mission and this message to our people and we want a place to do that. And if you can help us set the table for it and what a great chance it is to partner. And so, yeah, it was fun For many years that we’ve done it. We really believe that this was kind of really the first one where the FDI flag was planted. And I think we saw that both in the response with, you know, close to 100 watch parties, 2000 people in attendance and high capacity investors, people are giving up their time then are really saying, hey, I’m stewarding large sums of capital and we want to find those ways to make a difference with it.

So, yeah, a fun moment for the movement. It’s one of those stones of remembrance when you see organizations and ministries partnering with it to really push the conversation forward.

Richard Cunningham [00:10:12]

And love it. And we’re going to talk about the 2025 conference coming up here shortly as we kind of hit on some of the things coming down the pipeline. But Sam, you lead a stellar team, a full team, and I swear no one has more jam packed calendars in the FDI team. And so naturally, the conference in January is not the only thing that’s happened. And so then kind of from there, Justin mentioned this audience that you serve the high capacity investor who wants to get in the game to use the conference team with their capital. What is then kind of the year look like in these foundation groups and what have you?

Samantha Couch [00:10:42]

Yeah, so the natural next step. For anybody who’s coming into the conference is to either host a foundation group or to be a part of one. And for those of you who are listening, if you aren’t familiar with our foundation’s group, it really is. It’s a great time of community to come together with your peers for six weeks, to watch some of our content and know walk through some great conversations and talking about really the heart posture and what Faith Driven Investor is, and to be able to have that in community with other people. Right. Because so often if we are working really hard to listen to the Word of God and to be obedient and that’s what this is, this hard posture of getting down on your knees and praying about how God wants you to steward the resources that you’ve been gifted with. Having a community to also be in that conversation with and be prayerful and intentional about that with you is so important because if you hard to discern your voice verses the voice of God. And so having your peers and some people for accountability to walk through that is critical when you’re talking about things like this. And walking through that, we have those cohorts, gosh, we do basically four different cycles of cohorts a year and we’ll do that again in 2025. So it’s just been an incredible year of growth, like I said earlier, and looking at even 2023 versus 2024, we almost doubled in size in the number of people who are intentionally stepping into this community. We even had opportunities to go deeper and more specific topics like real estate and emerging markets and public markets, direct investing, solving the world’s greatest problems, which is something else that we’ve been talking a lot about. And so it’s been really, really fun not only to see people take this first step into community, but also come out of it on the other side of like understanding where they feel like God has called them to, and then having a deeper community to step into and have those conversations around real estate or emerging markets and things like that.

Justin Forman [00:12:35] You know, I think Sam’s hitting on something huge. Wealth isolates. Let’s face it. We need to say the very clear thing out loud and that oftentimes it’s hard to find a safe place. You know, one of the things I love about what Sam has really talked about here is creating both a high bar and a safe place, but creating a place of affinity. And I think to find a safe place and to find that high bar, you have to find a place of affinity. And it’s not because that we’re trying to push people into it’s about numbers and scales, but it’s about the unique challenges that we face. Depending upon how much God is entrusted us to steward, depending upon the structure of how that is set up, family offices and donor advised funds and whatever that might look like. It just looks different.

And so what I’ve loved is, is this year we’ve been able to step into that where we can say, Hey, here’s a group for advisors, here’s a good friend Busters. They’re at the stage, here’s a group for advisors are stepping into that stage. And I think that one of the things that I’ve loved is, is that we’ve been able to drill down and kind of some of the questions, kind of the personas of people are in this journey. And Sam can allude to some of this, but I think that we find that there’s probably three personas that people step in in this conversation with. One, they’re intimidated. They’re just afraid. They just don’t know what is under the hood. And and candidly, some of us just don’t want to spend the time to. It’s not because it’s not good. It’s not because it’s a worthwhile endeavor. We just are afraid or afraid of what we might find there. Maybe our investing is canceling out our philanthropic initiatives and we’re we just don’t want to spend the time and we need some help.

Now, obviously, there’s great people in the movement, river Guides, that will help you with that process and make that accessible. But I think the unassuming, kind of easy, accessible online nature of some of these community groups really makes it easy for people to get in. I think the second person that we find that’s coming to this group is entrepreneurs that are scaling. They believe in the power of entrepreneurship, a culture. They know that for a fact. They’re convinced of it in their heart, but they just don’t know what that looks like. To do that and to invest in faith driven entrepreneurs in the way that maybe they’ve been invested in. And so I think that’s a fun dynamic that’s coming of age and you’re seeing that growing as these are scaling.

Justin Forman [continued] And then a third one and this is, you know, something we really want to make clear, it’s the teachers and it’s the leaders. It’s the pioneers of this movement. And we have to really pause here to say this movement is a your movement and it only goes as far as you roll up your sleeves to help make it go. Like oftentimes we can think that there’s somebody else that’s going to do something. But that’s not the case here. This is an active movement where everybody that’s called into it needs to be a part of it. And our call is is really to say, okay, what does it look like to get these teachers, to get these leaders to realize that you might feel like you’re only a couple of steps ahead. But in this movement, that’s new and that’s for me, it’s those couple steps that make all the difference. The person right behind you.

And we need these leaders to step in to say, what does it look like to facilitate a group? What does it look like to facilitate a watch party to make this stuff happen? We try to make it easy. We try to make it easy so that the easy button can get pushed and we can set the table for it. But nonetheless, this is one of those times where there’s needs to be that are a factor, that replication factor. That pay it forward kind of moment. Otherwise, this thing doesn’t go very far. But thankfully, we’ve seen people rolling up their sleeves and saying with humility, I don’t pretend to be the expert. I just know a couple of things that I’ve learned from somebody else in this movement, and I want to pay that forward. And so I just love that as we think about groups in the work that Sam and her team has done, the maturing that’s happened that we’ve made it, we’ve gotten better at matchmaking. We’ve gotten better at being able to match people to the stage of group where they’ll have the best experience, but also the stage to find the best leaders to lead that next group.

Richard Cunningham [00:16:21] Yeah, it’s well said from both of you. And I think, you know, in an effort to make sure that folks listening are not like, gosh, this is super promotional about groups or what all FDI is doing, like that is not the heart of this at all. Because I want to kind of talk about this real quickly is that, one, as we know, discipleship and growth spiritually is a hand to hand combat sport like it happens and intimate settings between you and the Lord or you in tight knit community. And that’s what this facilitates.

Richard Cunningham [continued] But also the groups are kind of the first line of defense of like what is taking place. These are the front lines in the movement, like the themes we’re unpacking on a podcast oftentimes bubbled back up to us because a real estate group is talking about how much equity is locked up in church real estate. And so then last week we have Nick Bonner on the FDI podcast, or folks are getting together and saying, Man, the content inside our home that we’re watching on whatever streaming platform it is, is just not redemptive. And so then all of a sudden we’re processing that on an FDI podcast with a filmmaker or someone at a studio, and that’s informing investment product that now is out in market and people can go into or hey, there’s prohibitively high investment minimums across some of these private market funds. What kind of vehicles can exist that an everyday investor who’s maybe not accredited or a QC or he could get in the game? And so it’s what’s taking place in FDI groups that are informing the themes that we’re talking about on the pod, that are also informing what’s taking place on the conference and what have you. And so it’s just I think it helps to kind of call out and point out how this ecosystem in this movement almost feeds itself. And Sam, it’s your team is kind of leading the charge there. So a couple of things I want Sam you to hit on real quickly are some of the key partnerships that have formed and you’ve been encouraged by in 2024 with just other leaders across the movement. Justin’s mentioned some of them, but then also just who’s on your team and servant and kind of building this out in the day to day?

Samantha Couch [00:18:04] Yeah, absolutely. And it was really fun what you hit on real quick. And Nick Bonner, that name just reminded me like a lot of the guests on the podcast are also leaders of these foundation groups, you know, so it’s just it really is such a full circle movement. I love to see that happen. But partnerships over the last year, a couple that have been super fun to step into one would be next. It is so fun to get to know these individual chapter presidents. I had a great time at their impact gathering in Arizona a couple months ago and then just getting to meet people in person who I’ve been talking to for the last two and a half years has been super rewarding. And these chapters are such champions of the Faith Driven Investor movement. I’m a huge fan of everything that they’re doing and so it’s just been great to step into that and like just instead to use some of that language of setting the table, you know, that’s a lot of what we’re working to do is just setting the table and asking and inviting these people to step into this and giving them an opportunity to gather together in person.

Samantha Couch [continued] And these kinds of chapters are a great opportunity to do that. Like you said, Brian de Santo in Austin is such a champion for us and always hosts an amazing watch party. We’ve got some fun things coming up with him later on this year. I have a chapter in my own backyard. I got together with them for coffee last week and so it’s just been a really, really great year of sharpening those relationships and getting to know one another and how we can serve one another better. And then on the heels of that trust, we have a great relationship with the folks over at Blue Trust. And this year they really wanted to step into having all of their advisors go through our our foundation script. So we kicked that off with our staff, leading them kind of like a train, the trainer type of group with 50 of the Blue Trust members stepping into and walking through that content with us. And it was such a great time. It was really good to get to know them better. And then they’ve gone on to lead internally with their team. Some of them have gone on to lead their customers and their clients. We’ve got an incredible course that echoes a lot of what’s in our foundation’s course, but it’s specifically targeted towards couples. And so we’ve had some of them step into that with their clients. It’s just a great tool to be having those deeper conversations together with the people that they’re serving. So that’s been a really good one to step into this year as well.

Justin Forman [00:20:13] You know, one of the things that I think is so encouraging about those partnerships as well as so many others, is that we need to recognize there’s a moment in the movement that’s happened that we’ve figured out some of the plumbing. And what I mean by that is we’ve figured out how to to set up the donor advised fund account and just what that looks like. Well, what I love is hearing the leaders from National Christian Foundation, Blue Trust and so many others there saying it’s as much about that, but it’s about the community around it. And there’s an emphasis of saying we will only go as far. We will only. Be encouraged to use those tools to use those tools more effectively, more deeply, more generously. If we have a good community surrounding us, because the world is going to tell us now, the world is going to say, slow down, stop. Wait a second. Let’s see how this plays out.

Justin Forman [continued] But it’s when you’re surrounded by peers that are seeing how there’s a compounding impact, that if you deploy this capital now, think about the impact that that’s going to have or generations. And so I think what’s fun is you’re seeing in those partnerships a push towards community. And I think that one of the things I just continue to emphasize is we are figuring out ways to partner with people every day. And so if you’re an organization out there that’s hearing this and saying, gosh, how would we do this? We would love to engage with it because we love serving behind the scenes. We love kind of being that backstop to support with the content and the tools for community. But it’s fun to see A growing number of organizations are now saying, okay, this is how we can implement it in it. Because they have that renewed emphasis and purpose on community.

Richard Cunningham [00:21:44] Awesome. And Justin, I think that kind of help sets the stage for where we’re going next on the pod and we’re going to close with some kind of FDI 2025 conference and more things in 2025. But I think there’s kind of three things that I want each of you to tug on a little bit of building out this community further. And those are FDI plus solving the world’s greatest problems. And on that one in particular, Justin, I’ve actually done a couple of recent joint SWGP FDI podcast releases, so the audience has a little bit of an understanding of what this is or solving the world’s greatest problems kind of theme is. And maybe the third one is halftime and what will happen there. And so all kind of seminal moments and seminal kind of cornerstone things inside the movement studies, FDI Plus and halftime. So maybe I’ll let you start and then Justin will go to you to kind of wrap up comments on those three kind of particular initiatives and just big things that are unfolding across the FDI space.

Samantha Couch [00:22:37] Yeah, absolutely. FDI Plus, this has really been born out of all of these conversations we’ve been having with these individuals who come through Foundations group that we were just talking about, who, when I’m having these next steps calls and helping them determine like, what’s the right next step for them? What does that look like? We get a lot of questions about how do I do this? Who do I do it with? And to just this point earlier, this is overwhelming. I don’t even know if I want to look under the hood. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m very intimidated by this. And so there’s just a lot of questions and confusion. And I think a demand really to be able to go deeper and to be able to do this with peers and to get a really deep six weeks is great. It is a great first step. But this is an opportunity to step into this and really go deeper.

And so we’re launching something in January called Faith Driven Investor Plus. And that’s really what this is. It is an opportunity to step into what’s next and to be able to go deeper. And so we’ll start that with what we’re calling our launch weekend. We’re going to do that in 4 to 5 different cities this year. But in January, we’re kicking off in Chapel Hill and we are bringing families together to talk about in that weekend specifically just to gather together and kind of find your people, but also, you know, understanding, solving the world’s greatest problems. So what does that look like for you? How does God break your heart for the kingdom? Where are you called? To give generously but also invest. And when it comes to those causes and those issues and understanding that and like, what does it look like when you start to craft out an investment thesis for your family? What does that look like when you’re having that conversation with your spouse or with your adult children? That is a blessing of this time together. Most people are coming with their significant other with their spouse. We even have some people who are bringing their adult children so they can all be a part of this and then go together for this content. So it starts with an in-person gathering and then we’ll get together monthly afterwards online for about five months as we continue these conversations and kind of this sharpening as we talk more about how do you get in the game. So if you haven’t yet really starting to make those moves forward in order to do that and if you have, how do you go deeper and how do you do that with peers and trusted friends and even an advisory board? And what does that look like?

Justin Forman [00:24:49] You know, I think you said it best, Richard, when we talked about this episode. It’s going to sound like we’re up here pitching and sharing about things. But what we’re really doing is we’re building places that people have asked for to say, okay, how do I find a chance to take the next step in? I think that as fired up as we can get about a podcast or a piece of content, in many ways it’s a stop sign that causes a U-turn to get people to say, The world might be telling me to go this direction, but how do I turn things around? And as you do that, that’s what a foundation course might be. And so over six weeks, you get a chance to really say, man, there’s a there there, there’s a destination to go to. But just because you see a podcast, just because you go through a six week course doesn’t mean you’re going to flip to the other side of the world, flip the portfolio reallocation completely on its head because the world is going to be one of those things is going to tempt you, pull you in different directions, and you need peers and you need people that. Aren’t just wondering if they should, but are convinced that there is a better thing out there and they want to go to the same destination.

And so I think that’s what’s exciting to me about FDI Plus, is this is a group of people that are raising their hand, saying there’s an intentionality that I want to have to make sure that there’s a map and there’s a frame that when we start out for this journey that we’re going to have checkpoints know for on the right track. And that’s what this road map and that’s what this family investment thesis on family investment policy that seems talking about is really all about. And so yeah, it’s been a fun journey for us to have some of these groups. But then people are saying, Hey, what does it look like to do this with fellow travelers that are coming from a similar stage? They have a similar destination in mind. And so we’ve been able to pull in some of the ingredients of kind of the half time process. But really, this one is kind of further down that stage, maybe from some other half time courses and experience and program because it’s about the allocation. It’s about starting to say, Hey, I have some clarity on some family strengths. We have some understanding that we want to dethrone the hold that money might have on our life, but we want to be intentional about our giving and investing with friends, and I love it.

Justin Forman [continued] It was fun to start the invitations all credit to Sam and her team. The way that we were able to do that was this fun boxes that we’re able to send out to people maybe with something between 007 or The Incredibles in terms of these invitations. It didn’t explode after you watched it, but it was a fun way to really say this is a big deal, this is a big deal and a big thing and something’s happening. And we want to say what could happen if we could bring people that aren’t lookers, but they’re intentional about it and saying, what more could we do together? And so in the year ahead, you know, we’ve already got for these gatherings confirmed, I think we’re working on a first. But these are intentional communities and conversations where people through a launch weekend and then through 5 or 6 other monthly gatherings are going to be intentional about discovering peers are in the same direction following that path and getting in the game. And so it was an honor and privilege to invite many friends in the movement that we knew were looking for this had expressed that they were looking for this, But many times we don’t know what God’s doing in your heart. So if you’re in that stage and you’re in that place and something’s provoked news, you’re hearing this and saying, and that might be me, check it out at Faith Driven Investor plus.org and you can be able to learn about what’s happening there and talk to somebody from our team to see if this might be a fit of something to explore because of the types of things that we’re sharing about and connecting people with.

You know, guidelines would say that this has to be a qualified purchaser, somebody stewarding 5 million or more in terms of capital to get in the game. But if you’re at that stage, if you’re at that place, that’s the season and position that God has you in and you’re committed to doing something. We want to make sure that you’re surrounded with like minded peers that can do that. So yeah, it is one of the things we’re most excited about. And you know, to bookend kind of what you said, Richard, the conference that we have coming up here and February 7th, you know, we’re not going to hold any punches back. One of the things that we often talk about Faith Driven Investor investing, you say like, hey, what’s the style? What’s the tone, What’s the way that we’re doing this? And if you’re refining a, you know, an avatar or somebody that was like from a pastoral voice to say, what’s the tone? It’s a Francis Chan David Black kind of tone that says, Hey, time is short. What’s live for the things that matter and what does that look like?

Justin Forman [continued] And so this FDI conference coming up on February 7th and will be happening online or happening also in person, over 100 different watch parties around the world. We’re already seeing just on a path of growth of how that’s growing significantly from where it was last year. And I think that’s just a testament to so many fund managers, advisors, leaders in the movement that are pushing this conversation for it. And we hope it’s a front porch and a chance to gather. We think that kind of the theme, this riskiest thing is to do nothing is really that call to say, you know, it truly is the riskiest thing. When you look at the parable of the talents, it’s pretty clear when you do nothing, when you bury it, that’s not what God’s looking for. He’s looking for us to get around people that are going to push us, encourage us to deploy it, and to do that with intentionality. And so that’s the theme of the event. Some incredible stories. The thing that I love most about this conference is I’m seeing the content come together is this is not a movement in theory anymore. This is born out in reality. This is deeply intertwined in the stories of families and individuals that have looked under the hood, found out how it was canceling out some of their philanthropic efforts, and they said, that’s not enough. We’ve got to change it. We’ve got to look differently at the way that we invest, the way that we give. And so my hope is that this year, particularly people see themselves in the story, that they see somebody that maybe it’s a Susanne Daniels or Alice or whoever it is, and the content that they would see themselves and say, I can do that too. Yeah, it might take a step, might take a first step and my take a little bit of work. But there’s a joy in the journey that I see them on. There’s a life that I want and I want that for me. I want that for my marriage. I want that for my. Family. And I think that it’s just, again, further evidence of what God’s been doing over these last couple of years. So when you see these theories turn into stories. And so really looking forward to that. And we’re so grateful for the work that Sam and her team is doing to serve and support so many of these different watch parties.

Richard Cunningham [00:31:02] Sam, what else would you add to that with the big February 7th event? Some of the themes you’re excited about seeing come to life and maybe help just distinguish like the global FDI event and then kind of the FDI plus offering, because I think we hit on a number of events, but maybe just kind of help real quickly clarify what those are each individually.

Samantha Couch [00:31:18] Yeah. So the conference again is February 7th. And to find out more, you can go to Faith Driven Investor conference.org. But that is a great first step. It is a great like Justin said, it’s a front porch to the movement so you can look to see if there’s a watch party happening in your area. If there’s not and you want to host one, we’d love to talk to you about that. And you can do that or you can stream online and just watch individually. But that is about two and a half, three hours of content that really sets the tone for the year with the Faith Driven Investor movement. But it is a really, really good time to be able, if there is one, in your area, you may not know who else has stepped into the movement in your city. And you can meet new people, you can find peers, you can have people to rustle through these conversations with. And so it’s just a really great first step. The Faith Driven Investor Plus is different than the conference, of course, right? So this is an opportunity to go deeper into those conversations to join us for a launch weekend at one of the 4 to 5 events that we’ll be having this year. And to be able to kind of walk through that journey of what God’s calling you to do and to be able to step into that deeper and have those conversations around people. I think something we’ve said a lot this year is that we can do more together than we can apart, and that is the the blessing of community and finding those people, whether it’s at a watch party for the conference or if you want to go super deep into Faith Driven Investor plus finding those people so you can do more together so you can have those conversations together, have that accountability, have those relationships and those friendships to kind of steward those conversations and that obedience and what God’s calling you into doing.

Richard Cunningham [00:32:51] Good clarification. Thank you. So February 7th, 2025, FDI conference. It is kind of the launch of the new year, if you will. I’m sure we will have speakers on the conference back on the pod and then these FDI plus gatherings. And just that’s a line Justin uses all the time. If you follow him on socials or hear him speak, as the movement goes wider, there is such a necessity to go deeper. And that really is the FDI plus audience in that kind of cup range who can really go out there and do something about what God is putting on their heart. Given the different kind of thresholds and markets they might be able to enter into. I want to kind of hit on this real quickly and we’re going to ask the question we ask at the close of every FDI part, and that is, hey, one theme about 2025 that you just think is paramount to where this movement is headed, whether it’s something that’s going to be pulled on in the conference or just something in particular for FDI, what is one theme in 2025? You’re like, Yeah, I think God’s really going to be doing something in that kind of realm. Justin, I’ll start with you.

Justin Forman [00:33:49] Action. It’s all about action. You know, I think that it’s funny, so many things in life that you can kind of be, you know, firefighter aim. I think sometimes in the Christian world, in the space, which sometimes we can. Amy may, may, may, may, may, may never fire. And what excites me is I think we’re getting to a place in a season where people have taken aim, their hearts are calibrated, something’s changing and they’re ready to take action. And so when I think about that, there’s just a virtuous cycle that just one feeds the other. And when you act, it just changes your heart in that way. And so I love that virtuous cycle. And I think that that word action really embodies where I think the stage, the Faith Driven Investor movement is right now.

Richard Cunningham [00:34:35] Spoken like a guy who started an organization called Faith Driven Entrepreneur happens to meet a number of businesses himself. Something about action and Justin Foreman saying, What would you say?

Samantha Couch [00:34:45] He stole My answer. I’ll go a little bit different, which is activation, right? That is, I think, what is happening now. And because we know wealth isolates and fear paralyzes and so faith produces action. And so being able to set the table and inviting people into this, to give them the opportunity to take action or to start thinking about that, that’s what I’m seeing right now. And my big hopes and dreams for the year ahead is activation.

Richard Cunningham [00:35:11] Come on. All right. Well, you guys get the privilege of answering this for the final time of 2020 for what is God been teaching you and and through his word lately. Sam, let’s go to you, and then Justin will finish with you.

Samantha Couch [00:35:22] Yeah. The word that keeps coming to mind when I think about this and just the prayers that have had in the quiet time of God has been obedience. You know, we know that resistance doesn’t mean that you aren’t going in the right direction. You know, we are prepared for resistance, right? Because often we don’t know. It hangs in the balance. And so it’s these steps of obedience along the way that gets you into, you know, what God has in store for you. And so many times we’re battling resistance or hard and God’s just pruning us into something really, really beautiful that’s just on the other side. It’s hard to see sometimes. So for me, it’s just kind of been meditating on this word of obedience. I’m really leaning into that relationship with God. You know, I heard something not too long ago that the rabbis, when they were teaching the 14 or 15 year olds and they called them to follow them, you know, the saying was like, go be covered in the dust of your rabbi. And so that is so beautiful to me. And I want to be walking so closely in obedience with the Lord that I’m just covered in his dust. And so that’s where I am right now. That’s what he’s telling me.

Justin Forman [00:36:29] That’s hard to follow, but it’s beautiful to see that. And I think that that speaks to a lot of the journey that we’ve been on as a ministry. But I think maybe I’ll use a cheat code here and maybe not a particular verse, but I’ll maybe just kind of a theme. I think that oftentimes the home that I grew up in, it was really about the father, the son, and then this other retired guy. And I think it has just been a journey and a joy and like a childlike wonder these last ten years to see the Holy Spirit work. And this sounds silly, but I think some people who are listening will relate to it when you’re looking for it. You see the Holy Spirit in an email. You see it in a text. You see it in conversation. You see it in a closed door. You see it in an open door. You see it in a frustrating conversation. You see it everywhere. And I think pausing to see the thing behind the thing is just that season that I’m in, but celebrating it with this, like, childlike wonder is been a fun, fun thing for me. So when I say, what is God speaking, it’s I think he’s speaking in a way that again, for many years of my life it was historical and it was factual, but now it’s real. And watching the little things and that’s just been a childlike wonder. Maybe as we think about this Christmas in the holiday season, we talk about that childlike wonder at this time of year that’s been amplified for me to see the childlike wonder how he works, things that are unexpected.

Richard Cunningham [00:37:52] Samantha Couch and Faith Driven Investor Justin Foreman, of all the faith driven movements, but very much involved and tapped in to what’s going on at Faith Driven Investor. Thank you guys for joining us today. Thank you for what you’re doing to build out a movement that myself and so many others here listening are beneficiaries of. Friends, Merry Christmas. Hope you have a wonderful closed year 2024 start to 2025. And thank you again. We’ll get you next time.

Speaker 5 [00:38:17] We are grateful for the opportunity to serve this community and see listeners come in for more than 100 countries. Faith Driven Investor. It can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a group study with other investors looking to get the same answers to questions you have and find great community as they do so. There’s no cost, no catch. In person or online, you can meet an hour a week with other peers from your backyard or the other side of the world. You can also stay connected by signing up for our monthly newsletter and faith driven investing Dawg. This podcast wouldn’t be possible without the help of many of our friends. Executive Producer Justin Foreman. Intro mixed and arranged by Summer Drags Audio and Editing by Richard Barley. Our theme song is Sweet Ever After by Ellie Holcomb.

Richard Cunningham You’re listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ, following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 Hey everyone. All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosted guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed, and this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.

Richard Cunningham Welcome back, everyone, to what is the first Faith Driven Investor podcast of 2025. Happy New Year. Hope that you and your family and loved ones had a phenomenal Christmas celebration and wishing you just a number of blessings in 2025.

We are kicking off the SDI podcast in style here today as we’ve got a very special guest, David Johnson, who we will introduce momentarily. And we’re doing a mark’s on the markets. And so joined as always remarks on the markets episodes as the one and only John Coleman. John, great to have you in the podcast studio. And before we introduce our special guest man. How are the Christmas and New Year holidays and everything like that?

John Coleman It is awesome. Richard. We get to stay local for the most part because we got family around Atlanta. Great time with the kids.

Sovereign’s adopted the practice of shutting down the whole firm between Christmas and New Year’s. A couple of years ago, which makes sure none of us are bothering each other too much during that time for a faith driven firm. Obviously that’s a very special time of year. And so I think we’re all refreshed and headed in New Year. Excited for what’s next.

Richard Cunningham Awesome, man. Well, folks, I mentioned it. We are starting off the FDA podcast right here in 2025 today As a marks on the Markets episode, we’re joined by someone who just lives and breathes the markets. It’s David Johnson, who is the founder managing partner and chief investment officer of the Johnson Group, a firm that oversees $6 billion in client assets.

He’s coming to us today from New York. He splits time between New York and sunny Newport Beach, California. In addition to the Johnson Group, he is often a guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News and Fox Business. He’s the author of several bestselling books, including his recent one from 2024. David Full Time Work in The Meaning of Life, released in February.

Just a storied career. Someone who’s been in the markets, knows the markets extremely well, is a committed, devoted believer. A family man loves USC football, a husband to Jolene and father, to Mitchell, Sadie and Graham. So, David, what a privilege to have you on, just a guest of your stature. Grateful to be talking markets with you and John Day.

David Bahnsen Well, thanks so much for all the kind words and thank you for getting those priorities right with Jolene and the kids in USC football all on an equal footing. So, yeah.

Richard Cunningham That is awesome. Well, we’re glad to have you here, David. Maybe one highlight from you all is Christmas break.

David Bahnsen You know, we went to a ski resort in Vermont with our whole family. My oldest is off in college now, and he spent the whole semester studying abroad in Europe. And so we had not been all together as a family since the summer and getting a week away, skiing and enjoying a very cold, white Christmas and just that kind of family time. It was really quite lovely. That was definitely the highlight of my Christmas break.

Richard Cunningham And good for you guys. That’s fantastic. Vermont in the snow. Well, guys, we’re talking markets today. And I think before we start looking forward to 20, 25, 2024, it’s pretty wild, to say the least.

So now you both have a number of just pieces out there and kind of commentary out there. But maybe let’s have both of you just kind of highlight what you believe are kind of the seminal moments, whether it be in the markets, economy, political landscape, and let’s spend some time there just kind of camping out in 2024 as it sets the foundation for where we are today.

David Bahnsen Well, in terms of the highlights of 24, it’s very interesting that a lot of people are going to focus on the election last year and the political moment, which I make a point in White paper I’ve just published, kind of summarizing the year behind and projecting a lot of things for the year forward. It’s our Dividend cafe.com. It’s a free paper that I’ve done every year for a long, long time.

I make the point that the election may have been one of the largest news stories of the year and obviously the largest political, but it’s hard for me to justify it even being in the top five as a market story that you had a year in which corporate profits met and exceeded expectations, which were frankly quite lofty.

You had a year in which forward guidance on corporate profits into next year, which is really what markets always trade on. Markets don’t trade on the profits that just were they trade on the profits we expect to be because markets are forward looking what we call discounting mechanisms that expectations for profit growth next year is very strong.

You did have a Federal Reserve that began to cut rates. But I want to point out people say, well, the Fed really goosed markets by cutting rates in September. We started off the year believing that there was going to be eight rate cuts beginning in March. By September, markets were up thousands of points and they hadn’t cut at all. And so the Fed was not even really driving of markets.

You more or less had the narrative and that the tightening of 2022 was going to lead to recession. It didn’t happen in 23. Markets went up a lot. The job. The environment was mostly very constructive and 20 for wage growth was mostly very constructive. That’s not to say there aren’t pockets of issues within the economy, but those who were worried about something worse in the economy, it didn’t materialize.

So markets had to reprice in a little bit more sanguine environment for the macro economy. Then you add that with the end of Fed tightening, so to speak, and a very robust corporate profit environment. So do I think markets are at a high valuation? Very much so. Do I think there’s frothiness in the market? Absolutely.

And do I think there’s some questions about whether or not a lot of what people hope will happen in 25. Myself included around Trump 2.0 deregulation, tax reform, energy policy, all of those things I think should be constructive, but they’re not going to happen easily. There’s going to be some volatility around, you know, getting all this executed. So that’s kind of our high level position on where markets are in 24 and going into 25.

John Coleman Yeah, I would tend to agree with David on a number of fronts. You know, if I move through the public markets, the story has been this just massive increase in the price of the Magnificent Seven and the concentration of the index amongst some of the largest growth oriented technology stocks in the world has been noted a lot of places.

It’s the biggest gap between the equal weight and asset weight. Russell 3000 since the.com burst although I’ll circle back I think is structurally different. And those are really solid companies even if their valuations might be a bit lofty at the moment, unlike the.com burst, that obviously creates a number of dynamics in markets.

There’s if you look at the subset of public markets, small cap mid-cap stocks are actually a bit undervalued potentially right now on a historical basis because there’s been this large cap run for 8 or 9 years now that’s been kind of a bull run in that sector driven by these growth oriented technology stocks. And so there are pockets of value opportunity within that.

But there’s such concentration in the asset weighted indexes today on a few of these massive flight to quality growth technology stocks that I think understanding the future trajectory of those and how investors will react to those even in the way they treat indexes in their portfolios in public markets is a huge part of the story.

And underlying that I think is a fundamental change in the US economy that I think is partially legitimate and that we have a series of new technologies right now that, you know, every 2 or 3 years we project there’s something as big as the Internet, right? Like blockchain was supposed to be that.

I think fundamentally, though, artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics actually are step change technologies that can reroute the fundamental economy of the US, which is why you’re seeing some of these market consolidation movements that are worth talking about. We’ll see that materialize over the course of the next 3 to 5 years.

And then in private markets, what’s been interesting is just there was this collapse for a period of time in valuations in private markets, a complete freeze up of those in kind of 21 and 22. Those markets have come back, particularly venture markets, but distributions still have not materialized.

Right. And so it’s still a little bit sluggish on the private market side because distributions from old funds and investments have not yet materialized. So institutional investors are waiting to re-up into those strategies until they get distributions, which has cause continued sluggishness.

I think that will change in this coming year, which we can talk about why, with Lina Khan leaving the FTC with distributions just coming forward as the economy has improved with people trimming their public markets positions, there are a lot of dynamics at play, but I think those are defining.

And then in terms of the fundamental economy, which David touched on when we entered last year, we were still talking harder, soft landing from inflation and whether we could navigate that. It feels to me as if we’ve navigated some form of a soft landing, although there’s still some debate about what that actually means.

And the Fed did reduce rates, but less than expected. And the bond markets haven’t reflected that. Right. If you look at the way that most people get debt right now, the rates and debt markets, whether that be mortgages or corporate debt, have remained kind of stubbornly high versus some of the decreases in rates that the Fed has enacted, which means that the underlying economy is kind of rejecting, at least in certain areas, this decline in interest rates in a high interest rate environment has persisted in certain areas of lending, which obviously impacts homeowners, people running businesses, big corporations, even more in some ways than the Fed funds rate. Right.

And so that disconnect between those two areas of the market, I think is a really interesting story headed into this year. Like, why is that the case? Will that cause some some sluggishness in the business sector, in the housing sector, or do we start to see those things more converge in a more typical way over the course of the next year or so?

Those were some of the big stories to me in 24. I mean, the Trump election obviously is a huge topic. The global ramifications of what might happen in Canada and parts of Europe have huge positive. Implications, like David said, for deregulation, for business growth, for innovation, for mergers and acquisitions. But I do feel that that’s more a 25 discussion than a 24 discussion in terms of its impact on the economy.

Richard Cunningham Well, guys, great recap. I think we covered a lot of ground there. And David, you teased out a little bit your annual kind of year behind your head white paper that you put out, the Dividend Cafe, which is just massive fan of the Dividend Cafe and your weekly writing on Fridays.

Let’s look at that. Your head kind of sentiment and outlook. You know, would you say optimism, caution or where do you kind of fall on the spectrum? You guys hit on a lot of different topics and kind of macro and economic environment, even kind of political environments. What is your general kind of take and why is that looking forward?

David Bahnsen You know, it really is a mixed bag that there are some components in which I have a very constructive view and I think John will appreciate something I want to share here in a moment about private markets. And then there are areas of caution and concern.

And the easiest part is to cover that. The caution and concern is that an S&P 500 is trading at 23 times earnings and it’s averaged about 16 to 17 times earnings for 20, 30, 40 years. So you’re a couple standard deviations ahead of your average valuation.

But it’s really not just that, because I accept that the last time we were into the mid 20s of a valuation, that the quality of the companies was much less. If you go back to 1999 and 2000 before the.com implosion. I think that’s very true. But the top ten companies in the market then were about 20% of the market. They’re now 40% of the market, 38.6%, to be precise.

So really, people need to understand that the S&P 500 is 60%, the S&P for 90 and 40%, the S&P ten, and that the yield that the S&P is paying them is 1.1%. It was 2.8% 25 years ago. The price to book ratio, which is not the best metric, a valuation price to earnings because stocks are and should be valued off of profits. But the price to book value is the highest it’s ever been in history.

And so you not only have expensive market and yet with some good companies at the top, but those good companies are valued above perfection. And so I think what that does is it skews the risk reward. Can everything go perfectly for another year? Maybe. I don’t believe that’s likely.

I think at some point in time, and I just wouldn’t dare to offer a timing around this, there are some quarters coming. We’re in Video announces Microsoft ordered a lot less from us this quarter than we thought. And both Microsoft and Nvidia have a day that people are not going to believe and bring down Nasdaq in a way people are not going to believe. I think that’s inevitable, but it’s not really the focus of my concern going into 25 long term.

My concern is always that we have a society that is dealing with excessive government indebtedness and that there’s been too much crowding out of the private sector from a very high debt to GDP ratio and no political will or public will to do anything about it from an investment standpoint within that.

I do think there are sectors that are not overvalued. I do think there are companies that are not overvalued. And this is the part I was referencing earlier that I think John might appreciate from some of his earlier comments. I have a chart in my aforementioned year behind year ahead paper the ratio of private equity exits to investments, the ratio between how many companies are being sold to how many are newly being invested in has collapsed to a level we’ve never seen.

It’s down about half from where it was ten years ago. There is a big need not for new purchases, but for new sales companies that, by the way, have performed. These are not distressed companies or traumatic exits. These would be rewarding exits. But there’s just a ton of dry powder that is built up that they cannot deploy because there’s still a lot of companies they have not been able to sell companies for and return money to the limited partners.

So private markets, corporate transactions, I think that the Trump administration would be successful in some needed financial market deregulation. The FTC will be less cumbersome about approving M&A. The interest rate environment will be somewhat more favorable than it’s been, and the fundamentals are necessary in both public and private markets for a lot of corporate activity that should drive efficiency, it should drive returns to private markets and it should ultimately move capital, which then allows for new investment and ultimately greater opportunity.

John Coleman If I could just pick up on that last point, I couldn’t agree more with David’s comments in the private markets. So I’ll start by saying I think the fundamental economy in the U.S. is actually positioned for a decent year in 25.

I have David’s mid to long term concerns about indebtedness of the country and the way that that impacts us. But I think from a 2025 perspective, the underlying economy to me is looking strong and I think some of the deregulatory impact of the Trump administration certainty around taxes from any new election, etc., is likely to lead to stronger underlying performance in the real economy in the United States. I somewhat bullish on that.

I think the way that might work out in private markets, which David was just touching on, is one of the great things about the lack of distributions and some of the disruption in private markets over the last few years is it has created a lot of pent up activity that has to happen at some point. And I think 25 might be that point and it’s washed out a lot of the poorer managers.

So there is a stat I saw recently that fund one to fund two venture firms, typically 50% survive. The last two years it’s been 15%, basically. Many funds have not reached their target fund raises. And so the higher quality managers in private equity and venture in real estate are still surviving. But many of the lower quality managers are washing out, which I think could be good for creating constructive transactions in that space, particularly if M&A from public companies opens up more under the new FTC and some of these venture backed companies can begin going public, joining larger firms and, you know, the Googles, Microsoft, Apples of the World, they’ve got a ton of cash.

They’ve got really good currency in their public market prices right now. It should be a great acquisition environment for them if they can get past the regulatory hurdles of that. It’s my perspective. The public market implication is that I do think, David, I’d be interested in your take. It could be a tale of two markets. I like your S&P ten versus S&P for 90.

You know, if you look at the small cap and mid-cap markets, they’re actually trading below or about at the long term valuations of the public markets. But there’s always a flight to quality when there’s economic uncertainty. And so we feel more settled this year. What I think could happen is some reversion to more typical valuations between that top 10 or 30 stocks and the bottom, you know, 2970 stocks where we see those mid-cap and small cap gain a bit and get more confidence.

And we do see a retraction, not in a dot.com way, but in a return to some more reasonable level that bakes in some margin for error amongst the most powerful growth stocks in the world. That will have a huge impact on the index overall. But for an investor who’s positioning their portfolio smartly, there are easy ways to mitigate that impact.

I mean, it’s simple. Sometimes it’s going equal weight rather than asset weight or as simple as, you know, increasing your exposure to value stocks or to things in the small amid timing is always super difficult. David, as you noted, if you’d made that call a year ago, you would have gotten pummeled in the markets. But it does feel with the current valuation disconnects, inevitable that at some point that gap will normalize some even if those growth equity stocks at the top right now are higher quality than they used to be. At least that’s kind of the way I see the coming market correction.

David Bahnsen Yeah. You know, John, it’s funny, you bring up two points in there that are a little bit different from one another, but overlap. And I think both of them are important. It’s the big cap versus small cap delta that has materialized and the growth versus value. And they’re not one in the same. There are two different stories.

Listen to these statistics because they’re just fascinating to me. Over ten years, the Russell 2000 is only up 7.7% per year. The S&P is up 13.5, almost doubling. But listen to this. Just over the last four years since Covid, the Russell is only up 3.9. The S&P is up 13.4, a 10% per year difference between big cap and small cap.

Now, to John’s point, it’s one I reiterate. Timing of this has been very difficult. And keep in mind when we say, well, you could have got pummeled if you did last year, you still would have been up. It’s just you would have had a big opportunity cost. You know, value is up. Last year, small cap was up, even weight was up. It just wasn’t up as much as market cap weight.

But it is a way to maybe mitigate risk. Now, look at my firm. I happen to know this about John’s firm. We’re not index investors, and so I don’t have a dog in the hunt about even weight versus cap weight. But if I did, I would very much be leaning into even weight right now versus cap weight.

I think it’s a great way to play a broadening out of the market and get more exposure to laggards, health care, consumer staples, energy, real estate that are very likely on a relative basis going to do differently. Heard the communication services, technology and even consumer discretionary that have done so well the last couple of years.

So those are very good meta narratives around where the market stands. That it makes it different. You hear this theme from both the comments I’ve made and John has made. We’re not really talking about do you want to be invested or not invested? We’re not really having one of those kinds of years or one of those kinds of conversations. It’s not risk on versus risk off. It’s what types of risks are most prudent right now.

And I think people believing that in video will go from a $3.5 trillion market cap to a $4.5 trillion market cap. You know, keep in mind, from video to be up another 20%, not another 160%, another 20%. It has to go up next year alone more than the entire value of the rest of the market, besides about five companies. Okay. That’s just what you’re dealing with when these companies are now worth 3 to $4 trillion. 20% of 3.5 trillion is $700 billion. Is Nvidia going to go up in one year after being up 1,200% in the last few years? Is it going to go up in one year? The amount of Tesla’s entire market cap. But that’s what most investors are invested to.

John Coleman And what’s important to what David said is you can still believe in very as a great company with fundamental transformational technology and also believe that that’s a difficult narrative for its future valuation. Right. Which is what’s different than.com. A lot of those were kind of empty shell companies at that time. You know, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple seem to be solid, really good companies. That doesn’t mean their valuation is reflective of an appropriate level right now.

David Bahnsen I agree 100%. But it’s funny people mention that a lot because it’s so true that the cash flow generation was so subpar in 1999 compared to where it is now. However, Amazon went from 400 to 6.

John Coleman That’s true.

David Bahnsen But before it, you know, ended up storming back. So there’s nothing that says Nvidia won’t be a huge success story in ten years with a few very difficult years along the way. But I try to reiterate that point John made all the time. I’m not saying anything bad about Apple, Google, Metta or Nvidia, I’m merely just talking about valuation.

And I believe most of us, those that are now 50 year old professional investment advisors, are byproducts of lessons we learned in our 20s and 30s and in the late 90s when I was coming of age as a professional investor, I watched Intel, Cisco, Microsoft give up 15 years of return by being so bought at such an excessive valuation. But they never had a negative year in earnings. They never had a bad operating performance. They were just so overpriced.

In 1999, Microsoft didn’t get back to its pre 2000 high till 2016. Cisco still hasn’t got back to it and they’ve grown earnings every single year since. So valuation matters.

Richard Cunningham Well, man, this is good. I’m enjoying this a lot. And one of the things you both have hit on as we think about this kind of so recording this podcast on January 8th, it’ll release around Monday the 13th, the following Monday, the 20th, we have a changing a guard and Donald Trump will be inaugurated.

And one of the things you both have hit on is just kind of the Trump administration’s mandate to take off some of the handcuffs and the guardrails around M&A activity we’ve talked about just all that is possible, what could take place. Everyone, of course, sees the headlines of what’s taking place with doge and more efficiency in the government and slashing away at that deficit, the massive government kind of just debt spiral we’re in.

And David, you’re a very transparent individual. You never shy away from calling yourself a lifetime movement conservative, a proud Reagan supporter of the 80s, a permanent leader of the National Review. But you’ve also been pretty critical of Trump in that this recent Nippon Steel situation where Japanese company Nippon Steel wants to acquire U.S. Steel. Biden has raised his hand to block the transaction. Trump has actually showed support of that same blocking the transaction.

So that doesn’t kind of showcase what you guys were alluding to with just the lack of regulation, hopefully to come in 2025. So as you think about the new guard and everything that’s going to come with kind of the new Trump administration, I mean, the mandate he received in the election. What’s kind of the overall outlook there?

David Bahnsen There’s a part of me that paradoxically, I hope people can take this the right way. I hope he has been lying to us about his opposition to the Nippon Steel deal, because I would be more favorable to him having to politic around the issue than I would the inconsistency in the policy.

He did a press conference a couple weeks ago and I was very fond of most of the things he said where he was bragging about SoftBank wanting to put in $100 billion of foreign direct investment in the primary equity deals the United States. And he joked, I’m going to try to upsell them to 200 billion. Where is SoftBank located? Japan.

Japan has over 800 billion, a direct investment in United States, including a company called Nippon Steel that currently has factories in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, Louisiana. Some of those have been there for over 25 years. We just got done selling $3.5 billion of missiles to Japan. I don’t believe anybody can take this national security argument seriously.

I understand the politics. I understand the cosmetics around union bosses. But union workers want this deal to happen. Blue collar union workers in Pennsylvania are going to lose their job if this deal doesn’t happen. They’ve offered $15 billion for U.S. steel since the Biden administration blocked it. The company’s trading in 7.4 billion. This is not a material deal to the U.S. economy. 7 billion these days as a small cap company.

And so there’s one entity that benefits from this deal not happening. China. China steelmakers are over 50% of global steel production. They flood the world with steel. There are legitimate adversary to the United States, a legitimate opponent to the values of our country. Those are actual state owned enterprises. Nippon Steel is a private company in Japan. It is not part of the Japanese government. Japan is an ally of the United States.

When I was a managing director at Morgan Stanley, we took $9 billion from Mitsubishi to save Morgan Stanley with the Treasury Department and State Department begging them to do the deal. Do we want foreign direct investment or not? We have 1 million jobs that have been created because of Japanese foreign direct investment.

So I think your greater point is, are we really looking at a deregulatory apparatus in the Trump administration? And I’m optimistic about it. I think that that was one of the great underrated things that they did in his prior term. And I think philosophically and most of the personnel he’s surrounded himself with in this transition are largely pretty Reaganite about deregulation, tax reform, energy policy. But on this Nippon Steel deal, I’m just mystified. Other than the cosmetics of not wanting to look like you’re contradicting union bosses. But that’s not good enough for me.

John Coleman Yeah. And I would say, as I look at the potential policy implications of the Trump administration this year, and I’ll just comment on the economic impacts of this, maybe I’ll say a word about the social impacts or why you might do this otherwise. But deregulation would obviously be positive for the economy, particularly if deregulation allows greater innovation that allows greater dynamism in the capital markets, that allows easier business formation, etc.. Those are always stimulatory for the economy.

If the Trump administration follows through on keeping taxes where they are, or potentially selectively reducing those in certain areas, that tends to be very stimulating for the economy. If they can really then apart from the regulation reform, the size and scope of the federal government as a component of that, I think that’s a bigger question mark That buzzsaw is difficult to encounter. Right. But if they could do that, I actually think that would receive a positive response from markets.

I think immigration is a separate issue that’s being done for other reasons. The kind of idea of closing the border, enforcing legal immigration has a broader set of social consequences. The market impacts are likely to be somewhat mixed of that. But I think that’s not really the primary reason that people are arguing for that. And it’s dominantly in national security, in a national autonomy point of view, which I think is a very valid set of reasons to have that immigration discussion.

And then the fear I would have, as David notes, I do think what Trump has is an intuition about using trade policy and the tools of national policy to assure that the United States competes on equal footing and ensures its national interests with its partners around the world. I do know that there’s a great deal of concern here in Europe and other places that if that were to go too far, that could actually be quite disruptive of the global economic system.

Like if we get back into a series of trade wars, you know, higher tariffs and countries around the world, that certainly has a set of negative consequences both in the United States and abroad. What I don’t know, David, and I think you’re hinting at this, is how much of that are him using a set of policy tools to achieve a different set of objectives that he has? And how much of that is a real ideological commitment to increasing tariffs, to restricting trade in a more dramatic way, apart from real national security stuff like pharmaceutical supply lines?

Chipmaking. There are some areas I think we’re all aware now. We have a national security interest and a national interest in assuring we have domestic capabilities on those or allied capabilities on those, rather than some of our foreign adversaries dominating those. But, you know, the nuts and bolts tariffs and trade stuff is where if it went too far, it could cause a significant disruption, I think, to our economy and the global economy, which David was was outlining.

David Bahnsen I agree so much that it makes me more upset when they use national security as a pretense for not doing a deal illegitimately because it undermines the credibility when there’s a legitimate. National security interest, supply chains on national defense, pharmaceuticals, some of the areas you bring up. I think it’s really important for markets that we have credibility here. And when there is a disingenuous argument that’s made, it undermines the credibility of a more serious and constructive argument that needs to be made.

Tariffs are a big part of my annual white paper because it’s a very tricky thing for anyone with a view of markets to understand right now, because the president has been so effective in the past using it as a negotiating tactic, and it’s difficult to separate ideology from tactics. And so sometimes I wonder if I’m giving him too much benefit of the doubt. And sometimes I wonder if I’m not giving him enough.

I got to say, most of his rhetoric since the election has not been very protectionist or trade restrictive. It’s especially with Canada and Mexico focused on domestic policy objectives crime, drugs, border security, immigration cooperation. And so if he’s going to threaten tariffs, they’re to extract better domestic policy outcomes with allies, neighboring nations. That’s not going to be market impactful. Markets might even like it to the extent that he says things at times like tariffs are going to raise a bunch of revenue.

I just have to hope he doesn’t really believe it. Obviously, tariffs are a cost. They’re paid by American importers and and there’s a cost to it. And it sometimes may fill another policy objective. But, you know, all things being equal, I always say, do we want more trade or less trade? And when people say, well, I don’t know, it depends. I say, well, not if you understand what I mean.

Because all I mean by trade is a buyer and seller voluntarily doing something. And how could the answer ever be that we want less of it? If it’s two people voluntarily doing it, they must have a reason they want to do it. They get deemed to be in their own best interest. And so much of what we import from other countries are unfinished, unprocessed goods that play a part in our own manufacturing of an eventual finished product. And it really does have a big impact on other elements of the American economy.

But again, very candidly, the Trump administration, I think, knows a lot of this. And I am reasonably optimistic that connected to energy policy objectives and tax policy objectives. I think it will be a net constructive part of 2025.

John Coleman The one other brief comment I’d make, Richard, since we haven’t touched on it and I know you want to move on to the next question is another big pillar of the Trump administration that I think could be good for global markets. A little less impactful on U.S. markets is if he actually is able to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Obviously, there’s a whole human component to that that obviously outweighs any economic component. So I’m not trying to diminish that or overlook that in any way. But I think a settled global security system where Russia is not actively at war in Ukraine, where the Middle East is more stabilized, would likely be a boon, especially for international markets in Europe. And I think we certainly have a period of time where there seems to be a better chance of those getting settled in a constructive way in the next 5 or 6 months than we’ve had over the last 12 months, so to speak. And I think that if they were settled on the right terms, that that would be a benefit to global markets in addition to the humanitarian benefits, etc., that that would bring.

Richard Cunningham Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, John. And one other thing, John, I specifically want to ask you about and then David, we’re going to hit on some of your writing from last year as well, because I think there are good things to zoom on and they dovetail into this conversation as John, over kind of the Christmas holidays. You put out a Fox News piece on Pax Americana and just great piece. And I think it’d be worth just kind of given a little 62nd flyover of the thesis and there because so much of that parlays into this conversation we’re having right now about kind of Trump’s next presidency.

John Coleman Yeah. So I’m an American and an American optimist, which is sometimes in short supply these days. And the piece so Pax Americana is a Latin phrase. It’s kind of derived. There was this period called Pax Romana a couple of thousand years ago where under the Roman Empire there was this 200 year period of relative stability. I mean, this is we’re talking about the ancient world. So relative stability under Roman rule, basically under the stability that Rome created.

People have used that phrase Pax, et cetera, to describe various areas of peace. And what we’re in now is year 80. This year, since the end of 1945 of Pax Americana, which is basically the era of peace and stability and global prosperity brought about by the American world order. Post-World War two. After the Nazis were defeated, Imperial Japan was defeated. The Cold War erupted, but the Soviet Union was kept at bay. Communist China was kept at bay.

John Coleman (continued) And there was this just historic rise in prosperity, rising global safety. Rise in free trade, in global travel that persists to this day. It’s the most prosperous, peaceful period in the history of the world right now. Right. And that’s happened under the American security umbrella, an American economic umbrella for 80 years.

People have been commenting on the end of that for some time. And my article argued that actually I personally think the Pax Americana could persist for the rest of this century, that we are underestimating the possibility that this is a continued American century. And the data is there to give you confidence that this American security umbrella and economic umbrella could extend for quite some time.

America is not quite as powerful as it was in the 50s, right after World War Two. We were 50% of world GDP, 80% of the world’s hard currency. But today we’re 4% of global population, 26% of GDP. GDP per capita in Mississippi and Arkansas is greater than almost every country in Europe except for Switzerland. Some of the Nordics, which have oil and gas reserves, Monaco, Japan, cheap per capita, I think is on the order of $30,000. That would be by far the poorest American state.

American strength is incredibly high economically on a relative basis. We’re still the most innovative country in the world by far. If you look at things like artificial intelligence, every dominant firm in artificial intelligence is American based. A lot of the robotics firms are a lot of the biotechnology firms are a lot of the autonomy firms are. We are blessed in that American companies are really dominating the innovation landscape, space travel, etc..

And we still have the strongest military in the history of the world, right? There are adversaries now who have greater equality with us than they have in the past. But I also believe that while America is strong and continuing to accelerate some of those adversaries, it’s easy to overestimate.

I mean, China is set to decline its population by more than 50% by the end of this century because of the inhumane implications of the one child policy that they implemented. There’s weakness in their economy. Their fundamental economy is slowed. And for those of us who believe in the fundamental operating system of representative government and democracy, we also know that restricting people’s political and economic freedoms in the way that communist countries do historically leads them to decline and to collapse. Right.

And so the piece was really about us having optimism in this operating system of representative government that America and its allies operate under. And the idea that America is not peaked, that we aren’t out of the Pax Americana, but that that can actually I think it’s better than likely that that persists in an unexpected way over the next couple of decades.

If we can avoid some of the big existential problems in our own economy like debt, which is certainly a concern, but I think that the chess pieces are there for us to continue to prosper. If we can be responsible with our government and lean into the dynamism that’s created this era of American peace to begin with.

Richard Cunningham Funny who you talk about, John. Just love the sense of optimism and parlays nicely into David. Going over to you to talk about your book that you released last year, full time work in the Meaning of Life. So as we drive this conversation kind of towards a close, I think this will kind of help all of us step back and have that more kind of redemptive eternal world view, if you will. So I want to give you a moment there, and then we’ll go to our final question, gents.

David Bahnsen Yeah, hopefully the underlying premise of the book and the reason that I felt the need to write it can tie into an optimistic conclusion, because there’s times in which I feel that I’ve become very pessimistic about a declining work ethic in American society, both as a man of faith who feels sometimes very discouraged by the church’s teaching and messaging around this subject, and then even the underlying kind of American ethos and DNA that is really rooted in something very pro-industry and pro labor, pro entrepreneurial activity, pro risk taking, that does seem at times to be altering in terms of its overall view of work.

The book is making an argument that God made us from the Garden of Eden to be productive, to be creative, to be innovative. And that part of our status as image bearers of God is that we are to take the raw materials of creation that He made and even that we cannot make out of nothing as he can. We are to make out of something that something being his creation.

We are to go be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and cultivate it. And this was all said before sin entered the world. So we talk so much about work being a curse instead of understanding that work was a blessing that was made by God as basically the very thing that he was making us to do. And then because of sin, it was tainted with the curse of toil. Sweat of the brow. But nevertheless, the work itself was never presented as the curse.

I look around at our society now, and I believe the most contented people, the those that have the most fulfilling lives, they generally wake up every day with a particular purpose. I believe people achieve the maximum flourishing in their life when they’re living in obedient communion with their creator. But I believe that even apart from other things that can really enhance our quality of life loving marriage, healthy children, an active social life and community with other friends, these are all vitally important for the good life.

But a purpose in waking up every day have something to do and buy something to do. I do not mean those things that are purely recreational and consumptive, but rather that are productive. I think these things are existentially important to the human person. And I very much want to see the church get back to this message.

And I want to see America not abandon this message because, you know, he was referring to China’s declining birth rates. We’ve seen what’s happened in Japan, countries that end up having a declining view of family, end up having a declining view of work. And that becomes a negative feedback loop that you can’t get out of. It is fatal for a society.

So the solution to America’s problems of despair, of hopelessness, oftentimes substance abuse. The solution is purpose in working productive activity. And this is a message I care a great deal about. And I’ve been very encouraged by the response to the book and hopeful that that message will continue to get out there.

Richard Cunningham And that’s a good one. Well, hey, guys, I know we just got a ton of wisdom right there. But I do think it’s worth just as we kind of start off the new year, 2025, just fun to hear about what God’s been teaching you in his Word lately. What you’re thinking about as we take on a new year. And we’ll be quick here. But John, go ahead.

John Coleman Yeah, I actually spent the holiday. I had one other piece come out over the holidays about Jesus because I was reflecting on that a lot over Christmas and it compared Jesus and Emperor Augustus Octavian, who lived at the same time. And it was such an interesting contrast for me to reflect that two of the greatest, you know, 5 or 10 people in history, you know, lived at that same time and were such opposite characters.

Augustus or Octavian was arguably the greatest political leader in history. And that doesn’t mean necessarily he did everything I would want to or he was. People may confuse that. But I mean, the man created the Roman Empire that lasted for hundreds of years. He consolidated power in Rome. He set off this period of time that was the most peaceful in the ancient world. And he did so through his political skill. But he was also ruthless. He was focused on power. He was focused on consolidating, that he was violent.

And then at the same time, you know, any historian of that time would have said, gosh, Augustus, his name is going to reign through history. And what was so fascinating to me is for the average person in the world right now, Augustus, his name is a footnote in a passage about the actual best known person in the world. Right. That in the midst of this incredible political power and consolidation, there was this fragile, tiny baby born in a barn who nobody would have picked out at that time and wouldn’t have picked out for hundreds of years on a global basis other than those who knew him as truly the most influential person ever born. And something more than that for those of us who are believers, right?

God made flesh this miraculous moment in the history of the universe that happened. And just totally for me, it was like a demonstration of how God sometimes totally upends what we think is important and powerful and meaningful and displays it with such contrast that he could send Jesus who was augustus’s opposite at this time, and now this man who otherwise would have been one of the most famous in history, is kind of a footnote, even though he’s so learned about. And over Christmas, you know, we had billions of people around the world singing songs to Jesus Christ, this baby born in a barn. And, you know, it’s academics on campuses who study Augustus.

And I just I mean, I love the way God works sometimes. And it’s still like every time I think about the Christmas story and the redemptive nature of God sacrificing of himself to send his son to us, it’s just overwhelmingly powerful to me. And so I know that’s pretty cliche to talk about right after Christmas, but I can’t help it. Every year I just feel overwhelmed by, you know, the glory of God, the miraculous way in which he works and just the contrast of his values to our sometimes in the way that we think short term.

Richard Cunningham That’s great. Come on. Well, David, take us home.

David Bahnsen Yeah, I love that. That’s really encouraging, John. And edifying and such a neat way to think about all that. You know, I really enjoyed the kind of New Year’s resolution process this year. And and I know a lot of people say, no, you don’t. Need New Years. You know, you can make resolutions at any time, and that’s true. But I also don’t think there’s anything terribly unconstructive about using the calendar year to reflect and so forth.

And 2024 was a wonderful year for me, for my family, for our business, for just a lot of things. And, you know, 24 was a difficult year for a lot of people. But what all of us have in common is that 2025 is a new year. And regardless of how the year prior, the month prior, when when one kind of thinks about goal setting or things about where they want to be spiritually, personally in going into a new year, it’s kind of a clean slate.

And this is a biblical concept. As I was doing my New Year’s resolutions last week, I read Isaiah 43 that talked about forgetting the former things, not dwelling on the past. God is going to do a new thing. And I think that’s the story of our lives. It’s a story of redemption. It’s a story of recreation. Sometimes it’s more profoundly reiterated in our lives than others, but it’s a constant that we’re not captive to anything from the year prior, the month prior, the decade prior, that there’s opportunity to go forward with newness. And that ought to present an excitement and a motivation for us and to be encouraged in what God can do. It’s the entire story of the gospel, God making things new.

Richard Cunningham Man David Bahnsen of the Bahnsen Group. John Coleman Sovereign’s Capital. I don’t think I could think of a better way to start off 2025. Some some dialed market commentary, some good patriotism and just great hope and optimism about a new year. So thank you both for your time today. Friends, thanks for listening. Let’s go have a wonderful year and we’ll catch you next time.

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