This week Wheeler and Colin open with a conversation about inflation — what it actually costs to travel in Vegas and California right now, why broad inflation numbers don't tell the full story, and how the experience varies dramatically depending on income. It's a grounded setup for everything that follows.

From there they get into the week's biggest stories. Big tech collectively spent $630 billion on AI infrastructure in Q1 alone, and the build-out shows no signs of slowing — even as data centers face growing pushback from communities that don't want them nearby. New Hampshire is already seeing that tension play out politically. SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history and surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in market cap within days of trading, but with only 5% of the company available in the market, Wheeler and Colin break down what that number actually reflects and what it doesn't.

They turn to the Fed next — what Kevin Warsh is likely to do on rates, why the market has shifted from pricing in cuts to pricing in a potential hike, and how the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is complicating every macro forecast on the table. The episode wraps with two personal finance stories worth paying attention to: the American savings rate just fell to its lowest point since 2022, and private assets are being quietly added to 401(k) plan menus. Wheeler and Colin dig into what that shift in private credit means for the average investor and why they're skeptical of it.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

In this episode of Compound Growth, Colin and Wheeler sit down with their colleague and the third leg of the stool — Shae Murray — for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about non-traditional career paths, what it really takes to build confidence in a new field, and why growth often looks nothing like you planned.

Shae shares her journey from early childhood education — working across Montessori schools, Head Start programs, and a childcare center for MGH doctors — to landing in the world of financial services completely by accident. What followed was a crash course in everything from the stock market to the Series 7 exam, navigating corporate culture, getting licensed, and ultimately finding her place at CoFi Advisors as the team's very first employee.

Along the way, Colin and Wheeler get personal. They talk about identity (yes, the name thing), the mentor who shaped how Shae approaches her work, what it means to be a client's first point of contact, and a surprisingly spirited 53-minute conversation about AI that nobody planned to have.

Shae also shares her perspective on women in financial services — where the industry falls short, what the RIA space gets right, and why she thinks the tide is starting to turn.

It's honest, warm, funny in places, and — yes — it does start with a very sad stuffed horse named Fuego.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Did you know that in the United States, anyone can sign your tax return — no license required? Katrina Kowalski found that out the hard way when her husband got hit with a $50,000-plus IRS audit, courtesy of an unlicensed preparer who was a family friend. That moment set her on a path from mortgage industry burnout, to quitting a Big 5 accounting firm on the day after Christmas, to eventually building On Point Wealth and On Point Tax Services in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In this conversation, Katrina joins Wheeler and Colin to talk about what business owners get wrong about taxes, why the goal shouldn't just be paying as little as possible, and how the right CPA relationship looks less like damage control and more like a long-term financial partnership. She walks through the hidden complexity of RSUs and IPO stock — including the client who watched their stock fall 65% and still got the tax bill — and why your CPA and your financial advisor need to be in the same conversation, not separate silos.

The episode goes deeper than tactics: Katrina talks about launching her firm in August 2019, six months before COVID, building a partnership with her now-co-owner Emily Roster, and why she believes the CPA talent shortage is a direct result of an industry that still rewards volume over relationship. And with $34 trillion of wealth transferring across generations, she makes the case that women need to be at the financial table — not just inheriting a box of paperwork they've never seen before.

Katrina's guiding philosophy: do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Ferrari announced a $640,000 electric car with worse performance than a Tesla Model S — and screened the journalists who came to see it based on how they felt about EVs. It's a strange move for a brand built on confidence. It's also a pretty good lens for what's happening across a lot of big institutions right now.

The bigger conversation this month is the SpaceX IPO. One theory floating around is that it's a head fake entirely — that Tesla absorbs SpaceX instead, because the demand simply isn't there to support a deal that size. If the IPO does happen, it would be the largest the market has ever seen. Either outcome changes things. The Cerebras IPO already showed what happens when the demand doesn't show up.

Underneath all of it: strong tech earnings, real AI adoption, and the honest question of whether this ends like the internet revolution or the dot-com crash. The gladiators are in the arena. It's too early to call.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Buy now, pay later has gone from a niche checkout option to a fixture of how Americans spend — on everything from concert tickets to groceries to medical bills. The industry processed over $114 billion in transactions in 2024 alone, and the numbers are still growing. But the conversation around it rarely goes deeper than whether a specific purchase is worth it.

This episode does.

Wheeler and Colin break down how BNPL actually works, why it's grown so fast, and what separates a useful financial tool from a mechanism that quietly accelerates debt. They dig into the credit score question — why most BNPL products don't build credit, and what that means for borrowers who are trying to. They cover the real cost of convenience when deferred payments stack up, and where 0% financing is genuinely worth taking.

The bigger thread running through the episode: debt isn't inherently good or bad. A 0% BNPL plan on a Peloton is a different decision than spreading out Coachella across six payments. Context, opportunity cost, and self-awareness about your own spending patterns are the variables that actually determine whether any of these tools help or hurt you. That's true for an $8 burrito and a $3 million home purchase in equal measure.

The episode also covers the history of consumer credit — including the fact that women in the U.S. couldn't open their own credit cards until 1974 — and what the rise of BNPL reflects about how the financial system is evolving for people who have historically been locked out of it.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

There's a gap between what the data says and how people feel — and right now, that gap is enormous. Wheeler and Colin sit down with Seth Buks, a market strategist and thought leader who has spent nearly two decades translating complex financial ideas into clear, actionable guidance for advisors and their clients. The conversation covers a lot of ground: where the economy actually stands on growth, inflation, and interest rates; why real wage growth over the past five years tells a very different story than the one most people believe; and what behavioral finance reveals about the decisions investors make when fear and greed start running the show.

Seth breaks down the "vibesession" — the phenomenon where people feel economically terrible despite data pointing in the opposite direction — and explains the behavioral biases behind it, including recency bias, herding, and representativeness. The conversation shifts to AI and what the productivity data actually shows, why the bakery analogy matters for understanding GDP, and how to separate what's real from what's noise when every headline feels urgent.

They also get into the mechanics of why markets compress: the investor psychology cycle, the buy-the-dip conditioning of the past decade, and what's been missing from recent market downturns that makes this moment harder to read. And in a candid conversation about private credit, the three explore how an investment product can start well-intentioned and quietly become something clients don't fully understand they've bought into — and what advisors owe clients when complexity steps in.

The episode closes with one of the better pieces of career advice the show has heard: the asset that compounds most reliably isn't a portfolio. It's the relationships you keep.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

One year ago, Wheeler and Colin hit record on a podcast with no script, no audience, and no certainty it would go anywhere. This episode marks that anniversary — and uses it as a lens for the thing the show has always been about: what does it actually take to build something that compounds over time?

The conversation opens with a riff on jargon — why professionals in every field lose the ability to explain themselves to the people they care about most, and what that says about the gap between expertise and genuine communication. From there, it moves into reflection. What consistency really looks like when no one is watching. Why early decisions that look small — staying independent, saying no to the wrong opportunities, betting on your own voice — tend to be the ones that matter most in hindsight.

Wheeler and Colin discuss the moment they turned down a well-resourced firm that had everything except room for this, a podcast. They talk about the first year of advisors and what separates the ones who last. They revisit why growth, in any domain, is less about the headline moments and more about the accumulated weight of small, repeated choices.

This anniversary episode is a honest conversation about where the show started, direct about where it's going, and grounded in the same belief that has run through every episode: that money, work, and the way people build things are all worth talking about clearly, without the jargon getting in the way.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

April was one of the more eventful market months in recent memory, and Wheeler and Colin are breaking it all down. The S&P finished the month up 12%, the Nasdaq up 18%, and semiconductors — led by an almost impossible 116% single-month run in Intel — stole the show. But the real story underneath the numbers is earnings: more than 85% of companies that reported beat expectations, with average earnings growth hovering around 15%. That's not a sentiment rally. Companies are actually making more money.

Wheeler and Colin dig into what's driving the semiconductor surge, why Intel's chart looks like nothing either of them has seen before, and how to think about the AI infrastructure build-out without getting swept up in the hype. The conversation also covers tariff uncertainty, the resilience of the consumer despite the noise, and why the US economy continues to confound the skeptics.

Then things get a little philosophical. A discussion about fractional ownership of luxury assets — partial stakes in Ferraris, art, and collectibles — turns into a broader conversation about what anything is actually worth, and whether the financialization of everything is slowly draining the fun out of life. Plus: the Survivor betting market that spoiled the office bracket and confirmed that yes, there is a prediction market for literally everything now.

Follow Us:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/compoundgrowthpod
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CompoundGrowthPodcast
• TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@compoundgrowthpod
• Wheeler’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wheeler-crowley-0a63933b/
• Colin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-walker-mba-6099a038/

Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell