What happens when the people you manage make more money than you do?

ROI Podcast® #516 puts Eric Readinger and Law Smith into one of the stranger management problems created by the new economics of college sports.

John Calipari says some college basketball players now make more than assistant coaches. That sends Eric and Law into NCAA NIL compensation, college athlete pay, coaching economics, player leverage and the practical problem of leading talented people whose financial power may exceed that of the people technically managing them.

It is a college sports problem that looks a lot like a business problem.

Compensation does not automatically create authority. Job titles do not automatically create leverage. And managing high-value talent gets considerably more complicated when the traditional economic hierarchy gets flipped upside down.

Then, because this is ROI Podcast®, they wander directly into everything else.

Law explains how he is using Claude and other AI tools for research, administrative work and business grunt work. Eric tries to figure out what data centers actually do. They get into data overload, the physical infrastructure behind digital information, generic AI-generated advertising and why giving machines unlimited creative capacity has already produced an impressive amount of extremely mediocre creative.

The back half gets stranger.

Eric and Law react to David Grusch's appearance on Joe Rogan and discuss his UAP allegations, intelligence versus counterintelligence, government secrecy, remote viewing, consciousness, alleged non-human intelligence, underwater bases, reptilian claims, ancient civilizations and the possibility that AI could eventually help researchers process enormous amounts of information humans cannot realistically analyze themselves.

Nobody proves aliens exist.

Nobody fixes college sports.

Nobody becomes an endocrinologist.

Pretty productive 69 minutes.

Also discussed: testosterone testing, Sober October, golf, John Calipari, NCAA video games, virtual currencies, money laundering, Jameis Winston, Joe Rogan, The Abyss and Southland Tales.

ROI Podcast® #516 is a host-only episode with Eric Readinger and Law Smith.

Business, management, technology, economics and comedy without pretending every conversation needs seven actionable takeaways and a downloadable PDF.

Most people do not hate sales. They hate being sold at by somebody who has been waiting for them to inhale so the 47-slide deck can resume.

In ROI Podcast® #515, Law Smith and Eric Readinger talk with Cam Tolman, founder of PitchDown™ and the Non-Sales Sales Coach, about what happens when you stop treating sales like a performance and start treating it like guided discovery.

Cam's argument is simple: stop talking about yourself. Ask better questions. Listen closely. Help the buyer recognize the real gap between where they think they are and where they actually are. If the problem is real, the buyer can own it, understand what doing nothing costs, and decide whether movement makes sense. If the problem is not real, do not force a close just because somebody wrote a quota on a whiteboard.

The guys break down why prospects say yes and still do nothing, why agreement is not the same thing as commitment, and why traditional discovery calls too often become sellers collecting information for themselves rather than helping buyers discover something useful about their own situation.

They also get into why every employee influences revenue. Sales may be somebody's title, but support, marketing, product, operations, accounting, leadership, and every other customer-impacting function can improve or wreck the buying experience.

Then it is AI vs. human intelligence. Cam uses AI for efficiency, but argues that important sales conversations still rely on empathy, human connection, curiosity, judgment, tone, facial expressions, pauses, body language, and the willingness to tell somebody the truth instead of whatever gets the signature fastest.

Along the way: entrepreneurship, bad sales calls, buyer psychology, body-language tells, why "always be curious" beats "always be closing," and enough lightning-round nonsense to make sure nobody accidentally mistakes this for corporate sales enablement.

Listen if you are a founder, salesperson, account manager, customer success leader, marketer, operator, consultant, executive, agency owner, or anybody whose paycheck eventually requires another human to agree, decide, approve, renew, buy, or move.

Topics include how to sell without being salesy, sales psychology, buyer psychology, discovery selling, ethical sales, better sales questions, buyer self-discovery, sales without pressure, B2B sales, founder-led sales, AI in sales, human intelligence, empathy, active listening, customer experience, sales leadership, revenue growth, PitchDown™, and Cam Tolman.

You were probably told to save money, build good credit, contribute to retirement accounts, work for several decades and eventually retire somewhere with a Costco membership and surprisingly strong opinions about thermostat settings.

Mark Quann thinks that entire playbook deserves cross-examination.

In ROI Podcast® #513, Law Smith and Eric Readinger talk with Mark Quann, founder of The Perfect Portfolio and author of Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes, about the wealth strategy known as Buy, Borrow, Die.

Mark explains the basic idea: buy appreciating assets, avoid unnecessarily selling those assets, and potentially use loans secured by those investments to access liquidity instead. The conversation gets into margin loans, stocks and ETFs, real estate, life insurance, precious metals, Bitcoin, inflation, capital gains, financial education and why Mark believes wealthy investors think about debt differently.

Law naturally stress-tests the strategy by asking how somebody should finance a cocaine habit.

Somebody had to.

Mark also explains why he's bullish on Bitcoin but considerably less affectionate toward the rest of crypto, why he questions conventional retirement and banking advice, and why he's teaching investment concepts to homeschool students young enough to still require permission to operate the toaster.

His road into finance wasn't exactly Wharton-to-Goldman.

Mark talks about dropping out of school, growing up poor, becoming a private investigator in Los Angeles, conducting workers' compensation surveillance, meeting Patrick Bet-David early in his career, becoming a financial advisor, writing books and eventually building The Perfect Portfolio.

It's personal finance, investing, entrepreneurship, tax strategy, childhood LSD, private-investigator urine bottles and Eric somehow getting accused of racism.

So, basically, Bloomberg with worse adult supervision.

Guest: Mark Quann, The Perfect Portfolio
Hosts: Law Smith, @LawSmithWorks, LawSmithWorks.com | Eric Readinger, @EricReadinger
ROI Podcast®: @ROIshow, ROIshow.com
Tocobaga: SolvingHow.com

The description reflects subjects and claims actually discussed in the provided transcript and audio and not financial advice.

Instagram: @lawsmithworks. ROI's own posts consistently tag that account.

X: @LawSmithWorks.

YouTube: @LawSmithWorks.

Facebook: Law Smith Works / @LawSmithWorks.

LinkedIn: Law Smith / lawsmithworks.

Instagram: @ericreadinger.

Facebook: Eric Readinger / ericreadinger.

LinkedIn: Eric Readinger / eric-readinger.

I found third-party indexing suggesting @ericreadinger on TikTok, but I could not first-party verify that account, so I would not put it in the episode metadata yet.

Instagram: @roishow.

YouTube: @roishow.

Facebook: ROI Podcast / girthyroi. The URL still carries the old brand handle.

LinkedIn: ROI Podcast®. The public company page still uses the legacy /company/sweatequity slug.

Instagram: @solvinghow.

Facebook: Tocobaga / TocobagaWorks.

LinkedIn: Tocobaga, company page currently indexed at /company/toco-works.

His own website explicitly identifies these as official accounts:

Instagram: @markjquann.

X: @markjquann.

LinkedIn: Mark Quann / mark-quann-author.

Instagram: @theperfectportfolio.

YouTube: @P2Wealth.

X: @P2Wealth.

LinkedIn: The Perfect Portfolio.

Facebook: Mark Quann, The Perfect Portfolio.