541: Failure, Success, and the Current Economy with Russell Gray
Release Date: 01/12/2026
553: How To Think about Taxes
Wealth Formula Podcast
If you’re paying a ton in taxes right now… it’s because you’re playing the wrong game. Most people think taxes are about income. They’re not. They’re about behavior—more specifically, incentivizing behavior. The government is constantly telling you what it wants through the tax code, and once you stop looking at it emotionally, it’s actually pretty obvious. It wants businesses. It wants jobs. It wants housing. It wants capital deployed in specific areas like energy and infrastructure. And when you do those things, it rewards you with lower taxes. Now contrast that with the...
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552: The Inflation Spike Everyone Will Misread
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week, you’re going to start hearing a familiar narrative again… “Inflation is back.” And on the surface, it’s going to look true. The next CPI print is very likely to come in hotter than expected. We’re already seeing it in real-time data like Truflation. Energy prices have surged, and because energy feeds directly into headline CPI, it’s going to push that number up—fast. But here’s the problem… That’s not the whole story. Energy is notoriously volatile, which is why the Fed focuses more on core inflation—stripping out food and energy. But even core isn’t immune...
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551: Entrepreneurship Built for A Students?
Wealth Formula Podcast
Most people assume a high income leads to wealth. Sometimes it does. But more often, it leads to a very comfortable lifestyle that depends on getting paid dollars for hours. There’s nothing wrong with that. For many people, the best path is to keep doing what they do well and invest their income into real estate and other real assets. That alone can create significant wealth over time. But if you look at the people who build outsized wealth, there’s usually another element involved—they own something that scales. The key difference isn’t how hard they work. It’s what they own that...
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550: The Only Economists Worth Listening to Right Now
Wealth Formula Podcast
If you spend enough time listening to economists, you’ll notice something interesting. They rarely agree. Over the years on the Wealth Formula Podcast, I’ve interviewed economists from across the spectrum—Keynesians, Austrians, monetarists, market practitioners, academics. Some are bullish about the next decade. Others are extremely pessimistic. But there’s one thing that almost all of them have agreed on in private conversations. The entire economic outlook changes if artificial intelligence dramatically boosts productivity. And that possibility is no longer theoretical. The Latest...
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549: You’re Successful… Until You’re Not — with Rod Khleif
Wealth Formula Podcast
I recently had a long conversation with a very successful professional. He’s 58 years old. Highly educated. Respected in his field. Financially sophisticated — in fact, his job depends on understanding money. If you looked at his résumé, you would assume he was completely set for life. He wasn’t. A couple of bad investments. Some concentration risk. A few decisions that looked reasonable at the time. And suddenly he’s essentially back at ground zero — trying to start a new business at 58. This story is far more common than people realize. The Dangerous Assumption is that many...
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548: AI Is About to Trigger an Energy Crisis Most People Don’t See Coming
Wealth Formula Podcast
There is one truth that has followed every major technological revolution in human history. Energy demand always rises to meet technological capability. When we industrialized, coal consumption exploded. When we built the modern transportation system, oil demand reshaped global geopolitics. When we entered the digital age, electricity quietly became the backbone of the global economy. And now we are entering the AI era. What most people don’t appreciate is that AI is not just a software revolution. It is an electricity revolution. Training a single advanced AI model can consume as much...
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547: Home Ownership: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Wealth Formula Podcast
There’s a moment most high-income professionals remember clearly. It’s when the first real money finally starts coming in. If you’re a doctor, it’s when you finish residency training. And almost immediately, the world starts whispering in your ear: “It’s time to buy a house.” Not just any house. The nicest house the bank says you can afford. And that’s where people unknowingly sabotage one of the most powerful wealth-building windows of their entire lives…by becoming house poor. You see, the bank is not qualifying you based on what will make you wealthy. They’re qualifying...
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546: A Review of Retirement Account Strategies
Wealth Formula Podcast
At some point in a successful career, taxes quietly become your largest expense. Not housing. Not lifestyle. Not investing losses. Taxes. And unlike most expenses, they grow automatically as your income rises — unless you deliberately structure around them. You know that my favorite means of tax mitigation is through investing in real assets like real estate and operating businesses. That approach has been the backbone of my own strategy for years — taking active income and redirecting it into assets that generate cash flow while providing meaningful tax advantages. I’ve also...
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545: Should You Invest in Hotels?
Wealth Formula Podcast
For most of my career, I’ve been focused on two things: Operating businesses and Multifamily real estate. The strategy has been pretty simple. Take money generated from higher-risk, active businesses… and move it into more stable, long-term assets like apartment buildings. That shift—from risk to stability—is how I’ve tried to build durability over time. Now, to be fair, the sharp rise in interest rates a few years ago put a dent in that model. But zooming out, it’s still worked well for me overall. So I’m sticking with it. That said, there are other ways to think about real...
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544: Why the Sahm Rule Matters — and Why the Big Picture Matters More
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week’s episode of Wealth Formula features an interview with Claudia Sahm, and I want to share a quick takeaway before you listen — because she’s often misunderstood in the headlines. First, a quick explanation of the Sahm Rule, in plain English. The rule looks at unemployment and asks a very simple question: Has the unemployment rate started rising meaningfully from its recent low? Specifically, if the three-month average unemployment rate rises by 0.5% or more above its lowest level over the past year, the Sahm Rule is triggered. Historically, that has happened early in every U.S....
info_outlineWe all love winners.
We love hearing about the big wins and the perfect track records. It feels good. It feels safe. It instills us with a sense of trust.
But I’ve been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are long-term winners have had profound moments of failure from which they learned invaluable lessons.
Those are the people I really want to hear from. They have the kind of knowledge we all need as we navigate through life. It’s called wisdom.
Surgeons have a saying: “If you’ve never had a complication, you haven’t done enough surgery.”
In my surgeon days, I had a handful of complications. Let me tell you—they are no fun. You stay up at night replaying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently—how you could have had a better outcome.
Even when unavoidable, those complications teach you something you’ll never get from textbooks.
It’s been no different for me when it comes to business and investing. But I take comfort in knowing that even the greatest investors of all time had their moments of failure and rose from the ashes stronger and wiser. Warren Buffett. Ray Dalio. Every big winner has a story of failure.
And while it may be cliché to say that we learn best from mistakes, I truly believe it. The good news is that those mistakes don’t have to be our own. Learning from other people’s mistakes can be just as effective.
This week’s episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is with Russell Gray—a guy many of you already know from his podcasting and radio career.
Russ lived through 2008 up close. He took a beating, and he talks openly about what went wrong.
But that period also changed the way he sees the world—in a good way. It changed how he thinks about risk, leverage, and what actually matters when things stop going up.
That mindset is a big reason he’s been successful since then. It’s a conversation worth your time.