In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the government launched the Paycheck Protection Program, a trillion-dollar effort to incentivize employers to retain their employees during the quarantine and maintain most of their compensation. The program was administered by the Small Business Association (SBA) and provided forgivable loans to eligible employers who keep their people on payroll. The idea was a good one, but the execution was terrible. There are millions of employees, self-employed people, independent contractors and small businesses who were excluded. Most of the money did not get to where it was intended.
A lot of companies are not open for business, and if the goal was for the money to get to workers, then the government should have avoided all the middlemen and funded the money directly to the employees. The entire economic relief package related to COVID-19 will end up costing about $6 Trillion. The government could have paid every worker in America $4000/mo for six months for only $2.4 Trillion. Think about it. PPP was not a total failure, but it has been too bureaucratic and way too many people who are important to our economy were left out.
A recent exchange about astronaut Victor Glover raised a bigger question that a lot of people are still wrestling with: if the goal is equality, why are we still talking about race at all? In this episode, I break down why that question still matters, why representation is still relevant in spaces where access has historically been limited, and why the real goal is not to ignore race too soon but to build a country where race truly no longer determines who gets seen, supported, or given the chance to rise. This is a conversation about merit, opportunity, and what it will actually take to get there.
I was watching a podcast recently, and something about it rubbed me the wrong way — but it also got my wheels turning. In this episode, I talk about what I love most about being American, why the system that built this country deserves more appreciation than it gets, and why some of the loudest “love it or leave it” voices go strangely quiet when powerful billionaires openly criticize the very system that made their success possible. This is a conversation about America, double standards, and what real patriotism should actually look like.
This April, the Hispanic Wealth Project is launching its High Net Worth Boot Camp, a 10-week intensive built around some of the most valuable wealth-building education I’ve seen. In this episode, I talk about why so many of us need to shift from a worker’s mentality to an owner’s mentality, why economic success has to move from consumption to wealth building, and why building wealth takes knowledge, work, and discipline. The High Net Worth Boot Camp is designed to help close that knowledge gap with modules on securities investing, real estate investments, buying and selling businesses, asset protection, and tax strategies. If building real wealth has ever felt out of reach or unclear, this is the kind of education that can change how we think and what we build.