CW 1046 - Approaching Singularity, Inflation in the US & Abroad & Are AVMs an Ominous Sign

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He, he's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome and thank you so much for joining me. This is your host, Jason hartman with episode 1046. 1046 and today we have a lot to talk about, a lot to talk about. So first of all, as a follow up to a recent episode where we talked about automated valuation models, one of our clients sent me a message and I wanted you to hear what he said. He's in the mortgage business and I think this conversation was pretty interesting and these insights were interesting. Now, there are two reasons, two kind of primary reasons that we want to talk about this. One is of course, the ongoing discussion we've had about robotics and automation and artificial intelligence and how that will shape the economy of the future and may determine whether any of us have jobs or not. You know, it is incredible. Hey, it's an amazing time to be alive, right? It is incredible the things that software and algorithms can do now. They can compose music, they can write books, they can do all sorts of amazing things, not just the task that we think they can do initially. The AI is just truly mind boggling. Now. You know, we've talked about Ray Kurzweil on the show many times and he's the, the very well known inventor, a Googler, and you know, working on the Longevity project and he talks about singularity. Singularity is the idea, according to Ray, if I get his thoughts right, that the computer equivalent to the human brain, at a cost of $1,000 in today's dollars, will be the point at which he considers singularity. In other words, where the person and the machine is equivalent and can merge. Where we are one. You know, of course there have been movies on this, right? And I can't remember the name of one of these movies that I saw, but maybe you saw it too, whatever the name is, the nameless movie, whatever it is about uploading our consciousness to the machine. So instead of thinking of immortality in the typical way, we. We might think of it in the thought way, because what are we really right? When my grandmother passed away, when she was alive, she weighed the same amount after she passed. And there's a movie about that too, right? Don't they call it like 21 grams or something like that? Because you technically do get a little bit lighter after you pass. You know, I don't know the details of that or if it's true, but I know there was a movie about it. So, hey, don't believe what you see in movies or what you read online or what you read in the mainstream media for that matter. Question everything, Right? Question everything. And by the way, I'm going to share an example about that with you today, about what I've talked about many times over the years, about how we can't hear the dogs that don't bark. We never really ask the question. Compared to what do we. Well, hopefully we do listening. But generally in the human population, people don't ask that very, very important question. And they really need to ask that question very, very often. So in talking about that singularity, that's an issue when it comes to robotics and automation and artificial intelligence, that's a broader one, but in terms of real estate. So one reason we're talking about the automated valuation models is of course because it will automate a big part of an industry out of a job, potentially, right? So that's always a thing to think about and remember, since I think it was in the last, I want to say 50 years, I did quote this before on the show, but I can't remember the exact stat. Now, the Census Bureau has been keeping track of what jobs have been lost due to automation, and there is only one job that is completely gone due to automation. And you probably remember what I said, I will say it again, that one job, what is it? Elevator operator. Elevator operators are pretty much that's not a growth industry. In fact, it's not an industry at all anymore because we do it ourselves now. We walk in the elevator and without any assistance, we push the button for up, down or what floor we want to go to, right? We do not have a person who operating the elevator for us anymore. And eventually, or maybe many of you have listened already, you will not have a person managing your properties. You will be operating that yourself and truly disintermediating. So we have all these areas, right? But that's the only whole industry, according to the Census Bureau, that is completely Gone. Elevator operator. That's it. Every other job is still here, but maybe this time it's different because the technology is at this hockey stick. If you're looking at a graph, it's like a hockey stick, right? Progression in terms of the exponential growth of technology. So we shall see how it all turns out. So we're thinking of it from that perspective, of the jobs perspective and the impact on the economy in terms of automation. But we're also thinking about it from the real estate perspective. And what does it mean for valuations? Can the machine do it as well or better than the human, than the appraiser, than the real estate appraiser? Is this a sign that the market could be getting reckless again? You know, is this a reckless thing to allow automated valuation models to decide what a property is worth? Because remember, the deal everyone signs up for when they get a mortgage is they say, look, I will either pay the payments that we agreed upon or I will give you the collateral back. Well, guess what? As we saw during the Great Recession several years ago, we saw that the collateral was, was quite a bit overvalued in the cyclical markets, especially in places like the west coast and the Northeastern markets and South Florida. So we don't want the collateral to be overvalued. It's very important to the stability of the real estate market and the entire industry and Wall street. And it's a whole domino effect that the collateral be accurately valued. Very, very important. So take a listen to this from our client, Aaron. I got his permission to play it on the show. Here we go.

Hey, Jason, I just got fin. I just listened to one of your more recent podcasts where you brought on the guy and talked about AVMs, and you were mentioning how you weren't sure if there was a database that existed with all of the appraisal data. And there is one, in fact, Fannie Mae has quite a large database and it's connected to something they call collateral underwriter Cu. You can Google that to learn more if you care. But basically the way the trend is going is that appraisers, you know, their role in the whole real estate transaction is going to be limited or reduced substantially over, over time. You'll see where. I mean, we're already seeing today where we're doing deals where no appraisal is needed at all. That's on purchases and on refis, because Fannie or Freddie has good enough data to justify the deal without having an appraisal in the file. So we're already seeing it today.

Now remember a comment on that. Remember one of the things that got us into trouble and was a contributor, I'll say that, to the Great Recession is the careless, lax appraisals. The conflicting motivate, well, not conflicting motivations, the non conflicting motivations. The fact that everybody's interest was aligned on doing the deal no matter what. There was no nobody putting the brakes on anything. And in the whole mortgage industry everybody wanted to do the deal no matter what, right? And the appraiser should be the brakes in the deal always. And hey, look, there are lots of inaccurate appraisals. I'll be the first to tell you that we have on a regular basis appraisals come in low and usually what happens, and I've seen this when I was in traditional real estate and we certainly see it now being arguably the highest volume provider in our business in the country where we have, you know, people compromise, right? The seller and the buyer will compromise. If the appraisal comes in $10,000 low, the buyer might agree to pay $5,000 extra and the seller will agree to come down $5,000. And they'll meet in the middle and still do the deal because they both think it's prudent to make the deal happen. But at least it's not because the appraisals are being incredibly reckless like they were during the Great Recession. And now we have appraisal management companies which all the lenders seem to hate. But hey, it keeps the system a little more honest. At least that's what I would argue. But we used to have these drive by appraisals and that was one of the reasons we had the incorrect valuation of the collateral. But now big data has made it better.

So keep listening data and the database grows. You'll see that more and more. And again the appraiser's role is going to diminish. It's a dying breed. Anyways, if you look at sort of the trend, there's just, you know, you got a lot of old appraisers that are slowly retiring or they threw in the towel years ago because they were sick of all the bs, all the rules and hoops, had a jump through with the AMC is basically working for.

Less appraisal management companies.

Appraisers just haven't been coming in in terms of having enough of them. So anyhow, that's kind of where the trend of the hockey puck is going. There you go. Hey Aaron, thanks for the comment on that. That's very interesting, Appreciate that. Can I play that message on the podcast. I think it'd be pretty interesting to the listeners. And a couple of comments from me. Well, one's a comment, the other's a question. First of all, yet another sign that many people are going to be automated out of their job now. You know, we've talked about that many times that, you know, the robots taking over type thing and we'll see where it goes. It's never really been any long term pain in the past, or at least, you know, the modern past, but maybe.

This time it's different.

As I always say, who knows? We'll see. But the other thing is, what are your thoughts about that? Is that reckless? Do you think that the AVM will cause reckless valuations and lead to, you know, another potential foreclosure wave? Or, you know, just what are in general folks about.

I have to say I hate hearing my own voice on tape. You might have said that before. And interestingly, being in the media business and being a reporter as I am. Yeah, that's sort of weird, right? But there you go.

Hey, Jason. Yeah, as far as the whole being automated out of a job, I think absolutely. You know, we're in the day and age where, you know, exponential technologies are kind of taking over the world and between artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data blockchain, a lot of industries are going to be radically changed, some completely gutted. And yeah, I mean, the robots really will be, in some cases kind of displacing a lot of people. I don't think there's any doubt about that. There's been a lot of things written about that that I've kind of found of interest and I've kind of read up on that a little bit. But yeah, it's, it's very interesting to me as far as the whole ABMs being reckless, I would say at its present, the way it's being utilized currently, it's not an issue or I don't think it is reckless, in my opinion now that, you know, obviously they could change things and loosen up in the future perhaps, but I think in its current state it's not reckless. I went ahead and I just actually sent you a link and you can kind of read a little bit more into what the guidelines are showing. I think that'll give this a little bit more, more color and you'll have a little bit of a, more, you know, full understanding. And as far as using my audio on the, on the podcast. Yeah, that's, that's totally fine.

Okay, so before I go too much into that conversation, there were some other messages because a few of us were having the conversation and it's interesting, but maybe we'll save that for another episode. So hope you found that interesting. Our hearts have to go out to the people in Venezuela. Wow. You know, we've talked many times on the show about the obvious perils of heavy corrupt government, socialism and communism. And to add to the disaster that is Venezuela, they were just hit by the strongest earthquake since 1900. Now, no deaths were reported so far. With 7.3 on the magnitude scale, on the Richter scale, it's, you know, just what they need, more destruction. You know, as if their economy wasn't enough destruction, then you add a natural disaster to that. You know, hospitals there are very poorly stocked with supplies. Ambulances are grounded. I mean, just, there's obviously huge food shortages. Shortages of everything. And listen to this. The International Monetary Fund, the imf, says that inflation in Venezuela this year, just this year, I mean, are you ready for this? Has been 1 million percent. 1 million percent this year. Okay, what are we, eight and a half months into the year? 1 million percent inflation. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I mean, that is just a disaster. You know, we've profiled so many countries that have had inflation rates like this, like Zimbabwe, the poster child for bad central banking, certainly, and bad government. Now, now we'll, we'll see if Venezuela exceeds Zimbabwe in terms of its disastrousness. But it's just very sad for the people there. We talk about this in a pretty sterile way, but these are real people who have really been suffering for a long time. We talked many years ago how Venezuela had a toilet paper shortage and Bolivia had a toilet paper shortage. Now, you know, I've been to 81 countries. I've not been to Venezuela or Bolivia, but I've been right next to it. I've been to Peru and to, I think, all the Central American countries over the years. Well, maybe not all of them, but anyway, whatever. It's just unbelievable what's happening. Remember in Zimbabwe, what they would do is as the inflation rate was so high and merchants were literally raising their prices every hour, Every hour. You know, if you wanted to buy a coffee or a banana or anything, right, you know, you wanted to buy a sandwich, every hour the price would be higher. And of course that leads to people just wanting to unload their money because the money is becoming worth less, worth less all the time. And if you can accumulate debt during those times, you're doing great because the inflation just wipes your debt away. Inflation induced debt destruction. One of my big principles that I teach. But you know, when you look at a million percent inflation in Venezuela versus what we talk about here in terms of the consumer price index being 2%, 3%, some of the really bad years higher than that during the Carter administration, it's nothing. And we know it's understated here. We all know that. Anybody with a brain knows it's totally understated. And it's a little hard to figure out, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that inflation, even the most radical inflation believer who believes that the government is lying about everything would be hard pressed to say inflation's even 10% in the US right at least now. But when you look at the price of asset inflation, and I talk about people getting into and being able to enter the investor class, the investor class and what that means to their future, and asset price inflation is not part of the inflation index. And I think that's a very big deal. And no one's talking about it but yours truly. And it should be talked about because as I've said before, think about it. If you are a millennial, for example, or you have millennial children or Generation Z children, the next one we're going to be talking about, because I'm getting really sick of talking about millennials. So soon we'll be talking about Gen Z. Don't worry. Millennial is Gen Y. Gen Z is right on their, on their heels and they're coming right up. They'll be entering the economy soon. When we look at like the millennials, right? If they can't afford because of this radical student loan debt that they're under and the asset price inflation that has already occurred before they were able to even get in the game and buy assets that produce income like real estate or stocks and bonds even. Right? Well, I should say stocks specifically. But if they can't get in the game, how are they going to build wealth for the long term? Right? I bought my first property when I was 20 years old. It was a little condo in Huntington Beach, California. I've talked about that deal many, many times. You've heard my ups and downs with that property and other properties. But, you know, look, I got in the game early and I bought another property right after that and I bought many more over the years. These properties are what creates the long term wealth for you, right? Either your properties or your business. That's about all Right. That really is proven. Hey, you could say, well, you know, cryptocurrencies, but very unproven, as you know. I'm not much of a believer in those. But I hope to be wrong about that. I really would like to be wrong about that. But we will see how it works out. Now, on another note, let's totally switch gears here. But before we do that, a few things. Be sure you subscribe to our Alexa skill and you can listen to our content on Alexa. And by the way, we're kind of going through bit of our old content library. Here's the thing about what we do here. I really wish the real estate investment market was more dynamic in the sense that it would be almost more like Wall street. Okay? Only for one selfish reason. And that one selfish reason is I would have a lot more to talk about and my content would be always changing. But this changes so slowly that the stuff I said five years ago is still pretty much true today. You know this. Someone said that real investing should be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Okay, Real investing should be about as exciting as watching paint dry or grass grow. Right? Either one. It's a slow process. It happens largely behind the scenes. Just let some time go by, manage your investments and before you know it, you will be quite successful with them. At least that's what history says. Right? And the stock market's changing all the time, right? So it's very timely. But my stuff isn't that timely. No, real estate persons or advisors stuff is very timely because it just doesn't change that much. I remember when we had a big office. Oh, and by the way, remember I told you about my perils of commercial landlords being totally cutthroat and things like that, and how they lie about the lease and how there's no protection like there is in the residential, you know, one to four unit market where you've got all these consumer protection agencies and laws to protect you from the greed and the scumbags out there. Well, there's another thing I didn't tell you. You know, I was thinking about that story and I was thinking, you know, I didn't even mention how in three cases, in three of the offices I had, we had floods where the office suite flooded with water. Okay. And it just totally put us out of. We had to go around it. We could still use the office. But, you know, there were these giant fans in there and they made so much noise and you know, the blue papers around and the offices smelled bad. People had to move out of their cubicles and I had to move employees around. Did we get anything for that? Did the landlord do anything for us? No, not at all. What do you think would happen if your property, one of your rental properties, the homes you own flooded, do you think that the tenant would keep paying you rent? I doubt it, I doubt it. But in a commercial deal.

No such luck. You are going to pay every bit of rent even though you don't have every bit of use of the property because of the way that whole business is so cutthroat and the way the leases are designed. You know, if you want to get into commercial real estate, hey, go ahead. But I'll tell you, good old little single family, humble single family homes. I love them. They're great. They're great. The only problem with them, well we talk about there are many problems with them. But you know, the two major problems with the little humble single family home and everything else is pretty great are you really gotta keep on your property managers. If you're not self managing okay, you've really gotta keep them in check. It's a constant, constant thing you need to do. And if you want to scale it, it can be harder to scale. And if you do want to scale it, you've really got to build an infrastructure with software, maybe a helper, a virtual assistant, bookkeeper. You know, we've talked about resources for that on the show in the past. Those are some of the things. But hey, I want to switch gears here before we do that. So listen, check out Alexa. I got on a tangent there because I'm playing some of our old vintage content on Alexa right now and we'll have some new stuff too and we'll have, there's a lot of variety on our Alexa News flash. So put it, add the Alexa skill to your Alexa device and you can listen to it every single day. There's new content. Also join us in Hawaii at our Profits in Paradise event. We look forward to seeing you there in November. It's going to be fun, it's going to be beautiful, it's going to be profitable and educational and you know, I can't wait to get to Hawaii. I haven't been there for several years. I've been several times over the years. You know, one of the things I remember about Hawaii is just that this beautiful air, you know, the air is so fresh there and it smells good and they have this nice breeze all the time. You know, you can walk out on the beach at night and there's just this great breeze and you can see the stars and you know, Hawaii is just a gorgeous, gorgeous place. So it's our first event in Hawaii, so join us there. That'll be in November. Go to jasonhartman.com for details about that event and join us in Kauai for the Venture alliance event immediately following that one. Also, be sure to subscribe to our propertycast, where you can get properties on your smartphone or your computer or whatever device constantly. We upload properties there, so there may be none for a couple of days. There may be many in one day, so keep checking back. And each property is its own episode, so check that out. The Jason Hartman propertycast wherever you get your podcast. So we had John Stossel on, on the show before. You might remember that episode. And John Stossel is one of my favorites. One of my big passions in life is consumer advocacy and that ties in with investigative journalism and investigative reporting. You know, same similar passion because one leads to the other in many cases. I've been fascinated with my readings of Pulitzer, Hearst, Citizen Kane maybe, who knows, And William Randolph Hearst. And they're really leading of the field of investigative reporting and investigative journalism. I just, I just love that this small, tiny segment of the news media that is largely going away because the news media outlets just don't have the budgets to fund investigative journalism and investigative reporting anymore. And so there aren't many of them left, okay? But they do such a great service to humanity. John Stossel is one of those. I want to play you a little clip from one of his books, Give Me a Break. And I think he had just released this book when I had him on the show a few years back. He says how I expose hucksters, cheats and scam artists and became the Scrooge of the media. Give me a break. John Stossel. So here's John Stossel. And while you're listening to this, I want you to think about how I talk about how you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. How what gets rewarded gets repeated. Okay. Because that is very applicable to this. How nobody asks compared to what three principles I'm always teaching the compared to what? Principle that you can't hear, the dogs that don't bark principle and the what gets rewarded gets repeated principle. Here we go with John Stossel Chemicals.

However, wait for approval in the FDA's 12 to 15 year pipeline because there's a tiny chance that something in them might hurt you. But what about the thousands of lives that could be saved now by the fat substitute? Don't those lives count? No. When the FDA debates what should be approved, it focuses only on who might be hurt. It's easy to understand why the Victims of a bad drug are very visible. The lawsuits over the fen phen deaths were on the front pages of most every newspaper. The media put pictures of armless and legless thalidomide babies on the covers of magazines. But whom would we photograph for the story on the fat substitute? We don't know which thousand fat people might be saved some years.

You can't hear the dogs that don't bark. See the vacuum, the profound impact of things unseen. Incredible. Yet almost nobody thinks about that in life. Keep listening.

The FDA held a news conference and proudly announced this new heart drug we're approving will save 14,000American lives a year. No one stood up at the press conference to ask, excuse me, didn't that mean you killed 14,000 people last year by delaying its approval? No one asked that because reporters don't think that way. But that is what the FDA's announcement meant. If the drug saves 14,000 lives a year, then 14,000 people died each year while the drug awaited approval. Thousands will die this year while cancer therapies and fat substitutes wait for approval. Some of us may want to wait. Many of us want to be absolutely certain a drug is safe before we take it. But I'm confused. Why isn't the choice left to us? In a free country, why do we meekly allow the FDA to act as a police agency? That can tell us? You may not. Why does it get to use force? I interviewed Janet Cheadle, a young girl suffering from neuroblastoma, a form of cancer that, if left untreated, would kill her. Before she became an adult, her parents wanted to take her to a clinic in Texas run by a doctor who said he had a treatment that might help. But the FDA decides who may be treated. And the agency turned Janet down, saying it's not safe for her to pursue medical treatments the government hasn't sanctioned. Later, when the FDA tried to shut the clinic down and put the doctor in jail, desperate parents and their kids went to Congress to protest. Then the FDA agreed to let Janet have the treatment. But in a free country, why did her parents have to beg? Now what am I saying? What's the alternative? Have no oversight, let any company peddle every dubious medicine to an unsuspecting public? Well, that's not going to happen. And it sounds terrifying. Snake oil sellers might sell all kinds of harmful stuff. That's why we created the FDA in the first place. But wait a second. Snake oil sellers sell it anyway. I'd been reporting on the snake oil sellers for years. I did it While the FDA was supposedly in charge, crooks and deluded optimists sold useless baldness remedies, breast enlargers and diet products. Regardless of what the law said, the FDA didn't matter to the crooks. Government was too incompetent to stop them. What it mostly stopped or delayed were the serious drug companies attempts at genuine innovation. Of course, without an fda, how would doctors and patients know which drugs are safe and effective? The same way we know which computers and restaurants are good through newspapers, magazines and word of mouth. I was coming to see that in a free, open society, competition gets the information out. And letting that process flow protects consumers better than government command and control. I don't claim to have all the answers, but let's imagine as a thought experiment that FDA scrutiny was voluntary. Companies that want government blessing would pay the $500 million, wait 10 or 15 years and get the FDA's seal of approval. Those of us who were cautious would only take those FDA approved drugs. But if you had a terminal illness, you could try something that might save your life without having to wait 15 years without having to break your country's laws by importing it illegally from Europe or sneaking into Mexico to some dubious clinic. If I'm dying, shouldn't my government allow me the right to try what I want? If FDA scrutiny were voluntary, the government testing agency would soon have competition. Private groups like Consumer Reports or Underwriters Laboratories would step in to compete with the fda.

See, this is so true. You can't hear the dogs that don't bark. Right? We don't know what might crop up in the free market if the government got out of the way. Nobody knows that because it never. It hasn't happened. So you don't know you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. Just another moment on this and then we'll wrap it up.

The UL symbols already on more than 17,000 electrical appliances, automotive products and other equipment. No government force was required. Yet even though UL certifications voluntary, its safety standards are highly respected. It many stores won't carry products without the UL label. In fact, knowing what we know about the incompetence of government monopolies, there's little doubt that competing private groups would do the testing better, cheaper and quicker. Not having a big and mandatory FDA to protect us from bad things sounded scary, but only until I considered the alternatives and the good things we lose by being protected.

You can't hear the dogs that don't bark. Compared to what? Compared to what? Right. So really interesting stuff. Get John Stossel's book, follow him. He's got great stuff. He's got great videos on YouTube in all sorts of arenas of life. So John Stossel, big fan. I was glad to have him on the show a few years back, although I didn't think it was a great interview. But one of the things us media people have talked about over the years, and I was just talking to a fellow podcaster friend of mine the other day about this, is that rarely are super big name guests really good on your show. It's a funny thing, but his content is certainly great. I love this book, highly recommend it. It's called Give Me a Break by John Stossel. So check that out and I think you'll enjoy it too. And you know, he talks a lot about how really the marketplace is regulated by competitors. You know, if you look online, if you look on Amazon, for example, and you read the bad reviews, you know, a lot of those reviews are written by competitors. Now that's of course, extremely unethical and probably illegal. I don't know, maybe. Maybe it is. Or not, I'm not sure. Well, it's illegal to lie, you know, and defame someone like that. But that's who regulates the market. The competitors regulate each other. Right. And so they go and complain to government. I mean, government doesn't have enough people to go investigate things. Someone always brings it to their attention. For example, I may have mentioned this before, but I just recently had a long chat with the fraud investigator that warned the sec, the securities and Exchange Commission, about Bernie Madoff, years before it became a story and before we knew he was a crook. Right. You know, it's just a fascinating story. And the government didn't listen. Right. Government ignores things a lot. They ignore criminals who are out there selling snake oil and doing lots of bad things. And it's usually a competitor that gets the government's attention so that they can go regulate. That's typically the way it works. So, hey, that's it for today. We've got to wrap it up. Remember, we're here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, sometimes Extra. For example, last week instead of publishing three episodes, we had four. Some weeks we even have four, five episodes. And I know that some of you listening on one of our feeds weren't getting updates. So we apologize for that. And it should be working fine now. Just make sure, you know, to go check us out@jason hartman.com if you're ever not getting your episodes, because we will be here broadcasting at least three times a week. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, if not more often for you. Be sure to join us. Okay, thank you and happy investing. We'll talk to you on the next episode.

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