New York Takes a Bite of the Big Apple – with Eric Michael Anton – [Ep. 275]

Linda J. Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course. The book, the course, and the entire podcast library can be found on prosperity101.com. 

I seek to connect boardroom to breakroom and policy to paycheck. By empowering and encouraging employers to educate employees about the public policy issues that affect their jobs. My goal is to help people understand the foundations of prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect their prosperity by becoming informed, involved, and impactful®.

I believe this will lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. Listen each week to hear from exciting guests and be sure to visit prosperity101.com.

Thank you so much for joining with us today. It is always a pleasure to have you joining in the audience, whether by video or audio. So thank you for taking time out of your life to join in the audience today.

As you know, we always say a special thank you to our prosperity partners, the prosperity partners who give financially to help us keep the podcast on the air. So if you'd like to become a prosperity partner, please go to the website, prosperity101.com and hit the prosperity partner link and you can support this effort with any amount and we'd really appreciate your support. We'd also like to encourage you to support our strategic partners, the businesses who are engaged in the freedom economy.

They are listed on our website and in the show notes, and please do support our strategic partners, explore their goods and services, and help us all to promote a freedom economy that helps us all to flourish. And now with that in mind, speaking of flourishing, I'd like to introduce you to my guest. Eric Michael Anton is a returning guest and a dear friend.

Eric is someone I met many, many years ago, and he is a commercial real estate professional in New York city. He is the senior managing director at Marcus and Millichap, and he also has a very diverse portfolio of things he knows about. And I am excited to interview him for this.

He's been involved in politics in several ways and is a true patriot and someone who loves our country, loves his state of New York and loves the city of New York City. So Eric, I am confident that especially with the recent election, the mayoral election in New York City, I am confident that your insights are going to be very valuable for our listeners. So welcome.

Thank you.

Eric Michael Anton: Thank you, Linda. Great to be with you.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, you are amazing. And I just really appreciate your insights. Whenever we talk, I just get such an education from you because there's just insights.

No one can get unless they're living what you're living in New York city. So can you tell us first a little bit about yourself? I'm sure there's listeners who maybe didn't hear you the other times you've been on the podcast.

They may know nothing about you. So first tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at Marcus and Millichap. And then we'll get into more of the interview regarding New York city and some other things you're involved in.

Eric Michael Anton: Sounds great. So I was born in New York City. I grew up in New York and New Jersey.

And basically my entire adult life, I've lived here in Midtown Manhattan. I've been married for 27 and a half years. And my wife and I raised our two kids right here in Midtown.

We live two and a half blocks from the Empire State Building and a couple of blocks from the Chrysler building. I could see both from my apartment. We're dead center Manhattanites.

And my kids went to school in Manhattan and we love the city. We've invested in the city and we've lived through a couple ups and downs. And unfortunately now it looks like it's going to be another challenging time for New York.

Linda J. Hansen: Absolutely.

Eric Michael Anton: I went to college in Providence, Rhode Island. I went to Brown University.

I studied European history and political science. I was a very good swimmer and I played water polo and I really didn't have an idea of what I was going to do after college. I knew I would be in business.

And the one thing I did know was that I wanted to live in New York City at this time in the late eighties, early nineties, if you were going to sort of make it in business, the idea was to come to New York. So whether it was banking law, pretty much anything except maybe high-tech out in Silicon Valley, the business world was really focused here in New York City. So that's what I did after graduation.

I worked in a couple of different positions. I started out in construction management. I moved to real estate development, went back to get my finance degree at Columbia University in real estate finance, and then moved into brokerage and investments.

And I've been doing that now for give or take 25 years. For the last eight years, I've been at Marcus and Millichap, which is a publicly traded, very large real estate capital markets firm. And I like to say, I run the big deal team here.

So we are 12 people and we're focused on capitalizing, basically selling buildings, financing buildings, creating joint ventures for real estate developments. And most of what we do is New York City.

Linda J. Hansen: It's amazing to me when I think of how I've spent most of my life in the Midwest… and when I've seen you in New York City, I haven't been to your home, but we've been right nearby in restaurants right nearby that are close to where you live. I think of living there my whole life.

It's just a different life. You know, I love New York City. It's been a great place to visit.

Eric Michael Anton: Most people say, I can't take it. It's too crowded, too much noise. It's funny.

I went to Oklahoma city last week and I was walking around downtown with one of my business partners. And we looked at each other like, where are the people? Because everybody drives everywhere.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. Well, there's positives and negatives to both things. And I think it's great that people can experience it all because I love going to New York.

I love New York city. I've loved running the city on foot. So people know I'm a runner, but I love New York city.

And you've helped me love it extra because you and some of our mutual friends have been always so hospitable and helping me really get to know the city more. And it's just great. I love New York city and I really hope and pray, literally pray that New York city survives these next few years and can actually thrive as we get through.

But it doesn't look to me like it's going to be in a season of thriving. We now have this new mayoral candidate that won. He is a socialist and it's going to be really tough on New York city.

So tell me what you're thinking. I know you were actively engaged in trying to educate people against his candidacy and understanding, helping people understand why it would be negative for New York city and really our nation. I mean, New York is a major city and really the economic place, wall street is there, everything.

And if New York goes, it's really bad for the entire country. So tell me what you've seen in New York and what your feel is for how it's going to transpire over the next several years.

Eric Michael Anton: Sure. So I agree with you. New York city really is the world city. It's the most dynamic city. It's the biggest economy. It's got the most active real estate market.

It's got the most foreign investment. And so, yeah, I would say the last five or six months since Mamdani arrived, I mean, nobody knew his name maybe seven or eight months ago. And the mayoral election is incredible in that it's reached across the world.

I mean, people all over the world are talking about this. I talked to investors in Japan and Korea and Germany and France and Europe all over and they all were following this race and it's never happened before. Nobody's ever cared.

You know, the mayor of New York said, yeah, it's kind of interesting, but nothing like this. So it's really been front and center. And every day is kind of like drinking 12 milkshakes, following the machinations, the campaign, the election, and then the battle with Trump.

And it's just going on and on. He's not mayor yet. People think he's mayor. He's not even mayor until January 1st. So the interesting thing about New York City right now is after COVID, we started to recover. And at the moment, I would say during the last six months, maybe 12 months, the recovery is strong.

And so I have an interesting group. We sell and finance all types of real estate, all asset classes. So we're very familiar with the office building market, the apartment building market, hotel market, retail market, and land sales for development.

So those are the major food groups in New York City. And really every single asset class has strengthened and is now doing extremely well. So the fundamentals in New York are very good.

For instance, office space has never been more in demand. Rents have never been higher for class A office space throughout the city. A good friend of mine is a very senior attorney representing one of the biggest landlords. He's been doing it for 35 years. He said, in 35 years, I've never seen it so strong, so much demand, so much competition for space in New York. So that's good.

You know, that builds business, that creates jobs, that builds the tax base. Moving on to residential, the free market residential, because in New York City, we have rent regulated apartments and we have free market apartments. The free market apartments have never been higher.

Rents have never been higher. Demand has never been stronger. Really, in all neighborhoods and pretty much in almost every borough.

Unfortunately, in 2019, the city and the state enacted terrible regulations that make it near impossible to survive owning rent regulated apartments, rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments. And so that's probably the only negative asset class in the city. 

Moving on to retail, city is packed. People are back. People are going to restaurants. Retail demand and rents are, I'm not sure they're the highest they've ever been, but they're close.

And there's really strong demand. It's hard to get a reservation for dinner in New York. And hotel rates as well have never been higher.

So if you look at all the fundamentals, all the generators of business activity, and the biggest generator of business activity is white collar job growth here in Manhattan. We're looking great. Everything is coming together.

The general consensus is that interest rates will drift down, which is very good for real estate and generally good for business. However, the problems that we face are all self inflected. And it's been this way since I've been in New York.

And it's probably been this way since Peter Stuyvesant jumped off the boat and founded the city a couple hundred years ago. When I moved to New York, everybody complained about the rents. Everybody complained how expensive it was.

People had to double up and sleep on a couch or whatever it was until they got a good job. And so this affordability issue has always been strong, has always been part of New York. And really, it is part of New York.

If you want to make it here, you can make it anywhere. That's kind of funny. I heard a corollary of that. If you can't make it anywhere else, come to New York because everyone's crazy here and you can't fit in anywhere else. So here, maybe you can make it. That's like an old joke.

But the affordability issue was the reason Mamdani got elected. And it's now being absorbed and internalized by Republicans. So much so that when Trump met with Mamdani in the White House last week, that's what they were talking about.

And Trump, you know, Trump thinks ahead a couple layers ahead. And he said, I don't want to be the guy that is painted out to be mean to this 34-year-old newbie. Right.

So he's going to give him enough room to probably hang himself. We'll see. But it's pretty clear that socialism and communism are not good for real estate.

Linda J. Hansen: Exactly.

Eric Michael Anton: Not good for business and pretty much not good for anything. And we've only got 5,000 years of history to prove that. So it's clear to me that the more regulation, the more social benefits that we offer, the higher taxes that we try and force the wealth to pay and corporations to pay, the worst things are going to get.

We see it every cycle. It feels like every 20 years we have to go through Economics 101, Social Stability 101. If you allow criminals to get away with petty crimes, then they're going to commit more serious crimes.

I mean, that's just been the experience. And I've lived through, I first got involved with politics in 1993, raising money for Giuliani, his first run. I'm sorry, his second run when he won, when he won his first win.

It was incredible how fast he was able to clean up the city. Just by enforcing the laws, just by giving the police the ability to lock up career criminals, etc. He cracked down on fraud.

I remember there was something like four or five hundred thousand citizens, people in New York City that were illegally getting payments, different social welfare payments. And when he cracked down, what happened? People weren't dying in the streets.

Many of them had jobs. They were just cheating the system.So if you crack down on corruption, if you crack down on crime, good things happen. And we saw it under Giuliani and Bloomberg so clearly that when crime goes down in a neighborhood, people move in, people invest, people build, private industry comes and creates what the government can't. And we really had 20 years of good governance.

We had two Giuliani terms. We had three Bloomberg terms. That's 20 years of strong government, less and less regulation, crime going down and down and down.

And then we had eight years of de Blasio. And the first four years, he couldn't really do as much damage as maybe he wanted to. And then the last four, he sure did.

He really did a terrible job in New York. You know, all the covid regulations and crime wave that came with that really hurt New York so badly. And it pained me because I've spent my whole life here investing and building a business and doing charity and raising the kids and all the events and family events and things.

And to see the city go south after going north after going well, so for so long, it was terrible to watch.

Linda J. Hansen: I have a question for you. My question for you is, you mentioned that it has really turned around this year, too. And of course, we've had this really first year of the Trump second term.

And so I'm curious if you could explain for the listeners, the difference you're talking about where New York was before and how it had this downfall and things. But could you say a little bit about from the Biden administration to now, especially even the cost of the illegal immigration and what that brought to the city and how that influx there really impacted everything in the city. But then what's been happening with the Trump administration there, but also just the economics of this new administration.

And then how do you think that will be impacted with the new mayor?

Eric Michael Anton: So you asked about six hours of response time there. So many things, so many things are going through my head. So I can tell you in 2019, that's when everything really changed, because the state, principally the state, changed the rent stabilization laws and they changed the bail reform laws.

So the criminals could basically walk. If you assaulted somebody, if you stole something, shoplifting, et cetera, et cetera. And I believe it was either 2019 or 2020. I think it was 2019 when they changed the marijuana laws. And so, OK, people wanted to change marijuana and make it legal.

Fine. But I don't think the majority of people voted that anybody can go up to a school and smoke marijuana in front of the front door of the school or blow weed smoke in front of a cop's face. It went from rational to berserk immediately.

And as that was happening, Mayor Adams had a brawl with the governor of Texas, Abbott, and most of the illegal immigration was coming through Texas. And they started fighting and it became a racial matter and this and that. And Abbott said, OK, well, if you want to be friendly to all these immigrants, we'll bus them up.

And he started bussing up thousands of immigrants to New York City. And in the beginning, Adams said, oh, this is wonderful. Well, he welcomed them. You know, there was a big party. And then that changed quickly.

Because we found out that Guatemala and Honduras and especially Venezuela and some other countries were letting out all their prisoners and sending them up and the drug dealers and human traffickers and the sex offenders. So very quickly things changed. And so I would say from 2019, which was the last full year, I guess, of Trump 19 and 20 was Trump and then beginning of 21 was Biden.

So by the time Biden was put into office, things were starting to go very badly here in New York. And fast forward another year and a half, very badly. Nobody knows how many millions of illegal immigrants have come through the borders. We think it's 12 or 13 or 14 million. Maybe it's a lot more. We definitely know that a lot of them were criminals, as I said.

So the quality of life in New York went immediately down. Crime went zooming up. And I personally know that when you look at crime statistics, they're not real. I was assaulted. My wife was assaulted. My mother-in-law was assaulted.

We never reported to the police because, thank God, nobody was hurt. It was just a terrible incident. And we didn't know who did it. We know it's just so many thousands of crimes go unreported. You know, someone breaks into your car and steals something. You know, you're going to catch him. No, you're never going to catch him. So statistically, we don't really know how bad it's been. It is getting better.

Adams did bring on a good police commissioner, Tish, who's doing a very good job. Supposedly, she's going to stay on for Mandemi's administration. We'll see. I personally think the first time she calls him and says, we got to clamp down on these protesters or we got to focus on quality of life issues or whatever it is. And he says, no, she'll quit. I mean, it'll be quick, I think. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but my gut tells me no.

Linda J. Hansen: That brings up my next question. When you talked about his plans for New York and the things that he has proposed, you mentioned before that this has never worked in history.

And I'd like you to just share with the listeners what you envision in your mind the next few years will play out in New York.

Eric Michael Anton: So under Biden, the first couple of years, interest rates were pushed down extremely low. That kept business going for a while. And they flooded the country with money, billions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.

And so things look good for a little while right after COVID because people had money in their pocket, free money until inflation hit. So inflation destroys value. And that's what we're dealing with now.

So I think today Trump is trying to dig us out of that inflation hole and it seems to be working. Inflation is below three percent, could be lower. Hopefully it'll go lower.

The tariffs are seemingly working. I just read a very detailed article about how the vast majority of the tariff cost, the money is borne by the exporting country government or the exporting country company because they don't want to lose the business. For about 20 or 30 years now, we've really been taken advantage of.

So like German cars and Korean electronics, they were making massive profits because they really had no competition here. And so now that there is this excess cost, let's say the German government doesn't want Americans to stop buying Mercedes and BMWs, so they will help defer the cost through cheap loans to companies, whatever it is. They're helping subsidize those tariffs.

And also the companies themselves will not raise costs as high. They don't want to lose market share. They don't want to get hurt economically.

So the good news is that the American people are not paying the full cost of those tariffs, which is what in April of this year, all the smart guys told us, oh my God, prices are going to go berserk. Inflation is going to go up. It didn't happen.

Are prices higher, a little bit higher because of certain industries? Yes, of course. But I think we're up to something like $300 billion of tariff profits in the bank.

So I think all in all, Trump's economy, my guess is the national economy will be very strong next year. As all these plants start to get built, as all the AI infrastructures, all that money is spent and jobs are created, I think next year, the economy will be strong. I don't think we're going to hit a recession.

Now in New York City, because of these crazy policies of giving away free stuff, of course, we all know there's nothing free. Somebody has to pay for it. It could be a rough go here in New York City.

And also if they're going to raise taxes on the wealthy, guess what the wealthy can do? They can move. They can go. They can move. They can go to Florida. They can go to Texas.

By the way, they're still allowed to come back. They can live in Florida six months of the year, and they can come back and see all their friends in New York. They just can't live here six months and pay all those new taxes.

By the way, we already pay something like half of our income to the government, to the federal, state, and city government. So if you live in Illinois, California, New York, or New Jersey, the four biggest blue states, you're crushed. Now they want to crush us more.

And so people are going to say, you know what? It's just at a certain point, right? If Mamdani were able to raise taxes on me to 75%, there's no way I'd stay. I mean you can't survive.

Linda J. Hansen: Right.

Eric Michael Anton: It's just not worth it. I'm a little worried about that. Everybody is worried about that.

I think, as I said, the fundamentals are strong. It's just all these self-inflicted wounds that could disrupt and kind of ruin the glide path away from COVID and away from that awful time. I mean, when you think back, what we've all lived through during the last six years, five years… you couldn't… somebody wrote a screenplay or a book with all of these crazy… Trump getting shot and being indicted 91 times and running again.

Like you can't… you couldn't make it up.

Linda J. Hansen: I feel like the people in New York, so many people, especially young people that voted for him, they really have no idea. They just have no idea. They're voting themselves out of their own freedom and prosperity, which is of course why I do what I do.

So people don't go to the voting booth and vote themselves out of a job. Right. That's why I have Prosperity 10®.

Yeah. But they're going there and believing that the government can provide all this. And when he talks about taxing white neighborhoods more and things, it's crazy.

Eric Michael Anton: Yeah.

Linda J. Hansen: There's so much that's just insane, but hopefully New Yorkers will be able to keep the city strong, but it's going to be a rough road for you all. It's going to be a very rough road.

Eric Michael Anton: Yeah. I think the more Ivy league degrees you have, the dumber of voter you seem to be. Cops, construction workers, firemen, and people that work at fast food joints, they're brilliant. They know how to vote.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. They got it figured out. Yeah.

Eric Michael Anton: Figured it out. And all the intellectuals and all the professionals don't seem to understand any of this.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. Well, it's true. And, really so many of us pay the paychecks of those in power and they really have no idea what everybody does and how so many people struggle across the nation to pay the taxes and pay it all.

And, it's just… hopefully New York will survive. So as I said, they have taken basically the bite of the big apple and that tempting apple that leads to destruction and they have just taken a big bite out of that. So I'm concerned for the big apple.

Eric Michael Anton: Didn't work out in the garden of Eden.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah. It didn't work out in the garden of Eden.

Eric Michael Anton: I don't think it's going to work out in Brooklyn or Queens.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, exactly. So before we go though, I know that your time is short and I want to make sure we let the audience know a couple of the other things that you're involved in. So for people that may have never seen your testimonial on my website, one of the things you say in the testimonial that you give about Prosperity 101® is that you try to help your team members know that dates matter.

So I'd like you to talk about why you feel it's so important for people to know dates matter and let them know what you're doing regarding that.

Eric Michael Anton: Yeah. So I'm doing a couple of things. For 30 years, teachers have told their students, don't worry, don't memorize dates. Dates don't matter. Ideas matter. And I speak to a lot of these young people and guess what?

They don't know the ideas at all. Because if you don't memorize when things happen, if you don't have a chronological order of life and history of your country, you really know nothing. You can't vote properly.

You can't understand taxation. You can't understand business. You know, in my personal real estate business, if somebody tells me the year that they bought a building or the year that they placed a mortgage, I immediately know if it's a good deal or a bad deal.

Because you just have to know, you have to remember the history of things, the cost of money, the industry, what's happening in the city during that time. And so really, my view is it's terribly important to know dates and to train yourself to understand and know history. I like to say I do real estate to support my history buff habit.

And so two things I'm doing is I'm going to The radio here in New York City, just a couple of minutes each week on dates matter. So history, history of our country and a little bit of real estate trivia, interesting facts about the Empire State Building or Grand Central or how the city was designed that sort of thing and and I think it's incredibly important that young people especially know the history of their country and July 4th, 2026 coming up is a big date.

So that is the 250th anniversary/ birthday of our country. It's called the semi-quincentennial 250 years. So in honor of that, I was trying to think of something interesting to do. And I came up with the idea of creating a challenge coin. If anybody knows what a challenge coin is, it started in the military. It's become a big thing.

So every military unit, every commanding officer has their own challenge coin. I have mine. And so I thought I'll make a coin for the 250th. As I was thinking about it, I was thinking, Donald Trump is all in on the 250. He's going to go crazy with parties and events and fireworks and monuments, et cetera, et cetera. And the other thing he's all in on is cryptocurrencies, the blockchain.

And so I thought of linking those two things. So what we're doing and I'll show you, I'll show you the actual coin. We just got it back. This was designed by the former headmaster engraver of the U.S. Mint.

Linda J. Hansen: Okay, that's beautiful.

Eric Michael Anton: Yeah, it came out really beautiful.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, that's beautiful.

Eric Michael Anton: So the front is very patriotic with the eagle and the flag back called the reverse.

Linda J. Hansen: I love it.

Eric Michael Anton: Tech high tech. So if you can see the top, it says Futura Moneta Digitalis, which means the future of money is digital. And the bottom is binary code.

It says 1776 2026. And in the center is the image of a blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are all in blockchain. And the three symbols are valor, friendship and charity. We're going to be giving back part of sales, 5% of sales to Wounded Warriors. And why are we doing all this?

We're going to educate people that are not in the crypto world in the digital economy world about that, about that economy, because we believe it is the future and it's happening so fast. So when people see this on Instagram or Facebook, they go on our website, they swipe their credit card, they'll get the coin, they'll get the physical coin, and they'll get a certificate of authenticity. And on the back of the card is going to be a scratch off number.

And you'll be able to go to our website, create a wallet, put in your code, and we will airdrop you tokens. Whether or not they're going to be valuable, we don't know. But it's, it's kind of how all these things start.

They start by just people talking about it and using it. And what we're going to do is make it a mission based website. So again, this is targeting people that are not experts in cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin or blockchain or anything, but they're interested, they want to know about it.

So it'll be missions that you accomplish. So the first mission will be creating a digital wallet. Most people don't have them. The vast majority of Americans aren't involved at all. So that'll be the first. The next one might be to put a coin in there, you know, buy $10 a Bitcoin or whatever it is.

So we're going to make it fun, interesting, easy. That's the whole key, making it easy. And it's getting easier as the technology becomes more advanced. It's kind of like the internet. Remember, we're old enough to remember dial up internet. So it was like, hey, I'm going to go on the internet, right?

You had to wait, you had to wait, wait, wait. Now you've got the internet in your pocket, on your phone, in your house, on the TV. I mean, it's everywhere. So digital, I think digital currencies and digital, the digital economy and the blockchain is only going to get easier and more prevalent in the future. There aren't going to be crypto bros. They're just going to be people using digital assets, just like you don't have to be an expert to use the internet.

Now, you know, my 93 old dad can use it. So that's what we're up to. It's kind of a fun side hustle project.

Linda J. Hansen: That's really exciting. And it's a great way to honor our nation, our nation's heroes, and to really take a positive step towards the future by really celebrating the 250th birthday of America.

Eric Michael Anton: I think we're old enough to remember the 200th and it was a great event. And it actually happened after Vietnam kind of brought the country together. So I'm hoping that the same thing happens this July, boy, it's going to be a crazy summer.

We've got the 250th. We've got the biggest sports event in the world ever happening in the US, which is the World Cup, the soccer World Cup. And then unfortunately, September 11, 2026 is the 25th anniversary of 9-11.

So within a span of six weeks or so, it's going to be something else. It's going to be exhausting.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, pretty busy. So well, I just so appreciate your insight and opinions here. It's just great.

I do want to have you back after a while after you've really launched this coin, and you've talked more about it and gotten people involved. I want to bring you back and make sure people know more about it. And we'll do a kind of a pulse check on New York City as well.

And what's what you see as someone who's grown up there, lived there. And just, you know, you really have insights that people on the outside just don't. So I appreciate that so much.

So yeah, I'd love to have you back.

Eric Michael Anton: There's a bunch of us that are not leaving New York, we're going to grind it out. And we're going to keep pushing. And whatever happens, we'll adapt and hopefully, overcome, adapt and overcome, adapt and overcome.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, and I guess there's always the one question I ask, if you were going to tell employers how to explain all this to their employees, what would you say?

Eric Michael Anton: You know, we talked about so many different things just now, but there really is no free lunch. You know, you can't. Unfortunately, right now, our country is taking in $5 trillion a year in taxes and fees and etc.

And we're spending 7 trillion. So that can't go on forever. It just doesn't make sense.

And if you bring it down to the city, you can't give away free buses and free childcare and free, free, free, free food, whatever. Someone's got to pay for it. And so I think we're going to run into a brick wall of reality here very quickly.

That's what I would say. I would try to educate employees to understand that. Think about that 7 trillion versus 5 trillion. It's like, if I make $80,000 a year, and I spend 112,000 a year, every year, forever, like it can't go on.

Linda J. Hansen: Right. It's not sustainable. Like Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money.

Eric Michael Anton: Best quote ever.

Linda J. Hansen: Yeah, it's great. So okay, how can people contact you if they'd like to learn more about the challenge coin or about what you do with real estate? Anything? How can they contact you?

Eric Michael Anton: They can call me or email me, just Google me on the internet, and you'll get me Eric Michael Anton, A-N-T-O-N. My work email is eric.anton at marcusmillachap.com. M-A-R-C-U-S-M-I-L-L-I-C-H-A-P.com.

Linda J. Hansen: Okay. And would you like to mention the website for the challenge coin?

Eric Michael Anton: Challenge coin website is challengecoin.us, www.challengecoin.us. 

Linda J. Hansen: Wonderful. I look forward to getting updates on all of it. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Eric Michael Anton: Keep up the good work, Linda.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you.

Eric Michael Anton: Okay.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity101® podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a great review. Don't forget to visit prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck®, or to enroll you or your employees in the Breakroom Economics® online course.

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