The Trading Post

Drones and Trade: A Journey Through Skies and Barter Systems

• Trader Stu • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Imagine navigating the skies with drones and trading goods without a single coin exchanging hands. That’s the adventure we take you on with trader Stu as he shares his fascinating journey from the bustling world of commercial drone flying to the intricate webs of barter systems. With his extensive background in aviation, Stu uncovers the challenges of flying drones in regulated US airspace, especially near sensitive spots like Selfridge Air Force Base. Discover how he captured stunning aerial shots and even put drones to work in surprising ways like gutter inspections, all while dealing with the evolving landscape of regulations during the pandemic. 

But the journey doesn’t stop there. Stu takes us back in time, unraveling the history of trade from the days when salt and spices ruled the barter system, to the birth of money, and eventually the shift to fiat currency. Ever wondered about those conspiracy theories surrounding Fort Knox's gold reserves? We’ve got you covered. With insights into modern barter exchanges and the role of technology, Stu sheds light on the importance of meticulous record-keeping and tax compliance in barter transactions. Whether you're in Southeast Michigan or beyond, Stu offers guidance on exploring this intriguing world of trade. Tune in for a blend of historical wisdom and modern-day insights, guaranteed to expand your understanding of trade and innovation.

“Whistles In The West” was written, recorded, and produced by Durracell, exclusively for use with Trader Stu’s platform, always rocking the cowboy hat. The track is protected under U.S. Copyright rights to use have been granted specifically to Trader Stu for content and promotional use related to his brand and media presence.

contact:
 📧 durracellmusic@gmail.com
🌐 www.durracell.com

The thoughts and views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the host and do not reflect the official policy or position of Metro Trading Association. Although the host is an employee of Metro Trading, this podcast is intended to educate entrepreneurs on the benefits of professional trading, regardless of their location. Additionally, the host reviews various pieces of camping gear due to the association of trade, barter, and prepping.

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Trading Post podcast. I'm your host, trader Stu. Before we get started, I kind of wanted to touch a little bit on this whole drone thing only because I happen to have a lot of experience in aviation, flying and being a drone pilot, and to anybody who's looking for answers out there, I don't have answers on what they are, of course, or where they're coming from, but I will tell you this as a flight engineer for the Air Force I flew KC-10s I know how difficult it is to enter airspace, especially US airspace, right. Then, on top of it all, I was an FAA 107 commercial drone pilot and I literally sold my drone because my renewal for my FAA 107 was up and I just didn't feel like dealing with it. It's a lot of work, it's studying and even if you've never done flying before, it's a lot to, I guess, take in. And I happen to breeze through it pretty well because I've had a lot of flying experience in the Air Force. So I can say that I mean those drones, they know where they are, they know what they're doing and that they're probably ours. I mean, I know they're ours, they got to be ours because nobody can just get in here and fly around above air bases.

Speaker 1:

If you know why I one of the reasons I got rid of my drone is because I was using the drone. It was supposed to be aerial photography and then 2020 hit and of course, nobody was doing groups of anything anymore. So weddings and, you know, graduations or whatever. The whole idea behind the drone was gone. So no more groups and gatherings, and I spent a bunch of money on this drone. This was a DJI Mavic Enterprise Edition, so I had the microphone or the speakerphone, I guess you could say. Then I had the lights, the search lights that you put on top. You can bolt it on top. It was really cool. And then the other one was a three mile beacon that was super bright for flying in, I guess, heavy air traffic areas.

Speaker 1:

So then, once that all fell apart, I started doing using the drone for gutter cleaning. I would do an inspection of the gutters, I would show them the before, and then I had a SkyVac vacuum sweeper system that was carbon fiber. On a pole right, it was a carbon fiber piping, and then that way it was super light. I got really bad shoulders. Now, even with the piping of being carbon fiber, I still can't do it, it still gets heavy carbon fiber. I still couldn't. I still can't do it, it still gets heavy. So anyway, I digress. I would then show them, after the gutters were done, that you know they were clean with the drone. I had a camera on it and yeah, and I would show them, I would email it to them.

Speaker 1:

So the problem is is that I am right next to Selfridge Air Force Base or Air National Guard Base in Michigan, in eastern Michigan, by Detroit, and if you are within I forgot you know because I haven't studied this I think it was 25 nautical miles, I think it's Class D airspace. I've dumped all this information. But anyway, if you fly within that certain range and you attain a certain altitude, you've got to call for clearance at Selfridge. So I would call tower and I would say, hey, you know, this is my, I think it was. I had to give him the FAA number, my license number, and I plan on flying my drone at 2 PM and I'll maintain a flight level of whatever 250 feet, whatever it was, and they would give me clearance and say, yeah, you're good, we don't have any activity in the area, or no, you got to maintain a flight level of tree height no more than 80 feet or 100 feet or whatever it is, and it just was a big pain in the butt because most of my flights were, you know, in this area. I'm in metro Detroit area and then you got the other one. I never had a deal with Detroit airport, but if I wanted to go out that way, there's that issue too. I mean you can't just fly these things all willy nilly, right. I mean it takes a lot and on top of it all, if they're saying that there's this mothership out in the ocean and that's launching these drones to and from Jersey.

Speaker 1:

Being a boater not that I owned a boat, but I've been on a lot of boats between Michigan and Canada, so Lake St Clair is where I would boat all the time, and the canals around the area, lake Huron, and this is all between Michigan and, you know, canada, of course well, you can't, you know you can't just like take your boat and go to a different shore. It doesn't work like that. It's you gotta, you know there's there's customs, but there's there's very strict on where you can boat and where you can cross. You gotta stay within, know the half part of the river or over, and you got to watch where you're going. So it's not that easy to just get in and out of US airspace waterways. It's very highly protected, very highly radared.

Speaker 1:

If I would have screwed up at any time with the drone, they would have just followed the drone to my house and saw where it was coming from. I watched his Prepper channel because I think it's interesting, anyway, and they were like you should get a drone for OPSEC or not? Opsec, yeah, operation Security S, I don't know. Anyway, basically, if you know things, go down, you can launch your drone and get a bird's eye view of the surrounding area. Now, don't get me wrong. I did do that during COVID and I had a lot of fun with it, because we were in our apartment and I launched the drone from the balcony or whatever and flew around and I got to see all the lack thereof of traffic on what was normally busy roads and it was like a zombie apocalypse and I thought it was pretty cool. I was like wow, apocalypse, and I thought it was pretty cool. Like I was like wow, this is awesome.

Speaker 1:

But if you think for one minute, we're gonna be in a time to where, if there's civil unrest and we're laying low and bunkering it or whatever you know. Uh, what's the other other thing? They're doing a martial law and you want it fly around. No way, dude, there's no way, because if you launch the drone, all you got to do is have people going to follow up back to where it has to land, and then you're screwed like you're done. So either they're going to, you know, follow you home, or wherever you're headed to, a bunker, or I don't know. Uh, I would never do that, there's no way. I would do that if we were on that level of issue in a bad time.

Speaker 1:

So all I'm saying is that I just feel like I had to say something. I know I'm probably on a hit list or a watch list, I guess, or any of the cool three, you know three, letter agencies FBI, cia, nsa, all that. Truth be told, I'm on their list anyways. I mean, I have a top secret clearance or had one, so they already know everything. There is no about me and they're probably watching me anyways, so it doesn't matter. But at any rate, I just feel like I had to say that One to be completely transparent and honest. Hopefully that this gets out there in the algorithm database and I get some traffic to the podcast, which wouldn't be a bad thing. I would love that. And also I'll put in the description and maybe I'll get lucky and get more than a few listeners on this podcast, because I mentioned drones and it'll go out into the ether and you guys will be listening.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, let's get to the main point of the podcast, which is, of course, about trade and barter, which is the same thing, depending on how you want to phrase it. I use it interchangeably. This podcast is about the tax implications of bartering. I feel like I had to hit this again because I don't know if it even did, but a lot of people are thinking that there's a loophole here and I just want to go thoroughly over barter, or professional trade. I don't like using trade because it brings up stock market trading. I don't like that. Or gold trade, or fur trade. Fur trade is kind of like trading post, but that's why I did this. But barter is kind of the same thing. But then it gets in the thing of like one-for-one trading, which you know. These organizations take that one-for-one trading and put it in a credit system, of course, and then it puts it in an even playing field. At any rate, let's get into it. So of course, the overview of today, history of trading, barter and barter versus money, legal tax implications of bartering.

Speaker 1:

So early human societies would trade goods and services. Examples are ancient civilizations, mesopotamia, egypt is an example. So they would trade, say, salt for spices. Of course you get the spice trade. You know they get the salt trade. Salt is still very precious today because you can do so much with it. Of course it flavors food but preserves food. I want to get more into that. I want to really try making my own preserved salted pork or fish or whatever like that. It's really cool and I'll get more into that, but anyway.

Speaker 1:

So barter systems evolved with the complexity of societies and the role of it was the surplus of goods in the development of trade. So if you were somebody who had a bunch of extra fur, of course, then you could trade that out. If you couldn't sell it, some people would take that as a trade because they had a surplus of something. Then you could just trade, even Steven, whatever the value is. The problem is that you can't really store that wealth. You can't store too much spice because obviously it'll go rancid, bad or bugs will get into it, or something like that. So the difficulty in that bartering was you can't store wealth.

Speaker 1:

Plus, there's the double coincidence of wants. So what if too many people want your product and then you don't want enough of everybody else's product? That's an imbalance. Or what if you don't want anything? What if you're just straight? You're good, I don't know, I got all this extra food or whatever and I don't need anything. My kids got clothes, we got food, we got spices, we got enough salt, whatever it is. So there's that problem too.

Speaker 1:

And then the other issue is determining the value of equivalence. That's one thing. That's the issue with trading in school, I guess, or where kids can kind of when they start trading their lunches. School, I guess, or where kids can kind of when they start trading their lunches. You know, I'll trade you my Butterfinger for a PB&J or something like that, right? Well, the Butterfinger is not filling. So the kid giving up the PB&J is going to get a Butterfinger, cool, but now he'll be hungry in half an hour for the rest of the day. And you know, the value of that peanut butter jelly sandwich is much more highly of value for sustainability, of keeping you full, than it is for the quick hit of the Butterfinger.

Speaker 1:

Then, of course, the emergence of money. Right, so you got commodity money, metal coins, paper currency, and then I don't know if you knew this or not, but a cool, fun fact the reason why there's ridges on the outside of metal coins is because back in the day, when coins were actually made of the metal that they say they were from like pennies were copper people would shave off the outside of the pennies and then accumulate, you know, over the course of time, hundreds or thousands of coins. You would eventually have a pile of scrap copper and then they could melt that down and use that money. So the whole thing with the ridges is that it's hard to re. You can't really duplicate the ridges. And then if you saw a coin come in that was smooth, you know that it wasn't of true value because someone shaved off part of the copper, so it's not really worth the penny, no more, or whatever silver.

Speaker 1:

The advantages of money over barter is solving double coincidences at once. It's easier to store and transport that wealth, as we know, than banks came about. Then there's the simplification of trade and economic transactions. So value for value Right now, of course, since the Nixon administration. We live in a fiat currency time, which means that we only say that a dollar is worth a dollar because we all agree it's worth a dollar. It's not really worth a dollar. It's not backed by anything. There's the conspiracy theory that Fort Knox is the guards are guarding air. There's nothing in there. That's the whole thing behind it. There's no more gold in there is what they're saying. So our money isn't backed up by anything, except for what we say it is. And our military, I guess military, I guess. So we say that it's worth this much money for the oil because if you don't take it, I guess we'll blow you up, we'll bomb you, I guess I don't know. All the wars are always over oil and now it's precious resources. Apparently there's a big vein of was it lithium in Afghanistan, in the mountains, which is probably why we were over there. We got cobalt and we got all the stuff that makes batteries, at any rate. I digress again.

Speaker 1:

Examples of the modern barter system and barter exchanges are like ours or like MTA. I'm a sales guy, sales and marketing manager for Metro Trading Association and we're an example of one of the exchanges. We've been around since 1978, I'm a sales guy, sales and marketing manager for Metro Trading Association, and we're an example of one of the exchanges. So we've been around since 1978. And it's one of the largest in the area. So we have everyone from. We get sports tickets because the Pistons were members for a long, long time and then, uh, everything to a local mom, pa, or a guy working on his garage as a plumber.

Speaker 1:

You know, the technology that we have these days is awesome. I I was going through some of the archives with one of the owners here and she was saying you know, um, this is how we used to do it. Everything was printed out on those old, the old paper with the holes on each side that you had to like, um, it was perforated and you had to rip it off and then they had the green and the white alternating lines and all the values were printed there. I think they've had to print them every day or something like that. It was crazy. So everything was done by hand and tracked by hand, and now it's all digital, it's all in the app, it's all on the computer. You can run exchanges or transactions now 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You never got to call in anymore to the broker to run a trade. You know you don't got to call into the automated hotline anymore to run a trade, you can just do it on your phone and now it's become more like running a regular credit card, essentially. And uh, it's, it's great. I I use trade all the time and I had my companies uh in in trade. Um, I ran that company. I told you about oversight so I did gutter cleaning on trade uh. Then we started the um other thing with the uh microgreens and took trade on that in the trade show. So I've been involved with trade for a decade now.

Speaker 1:

All right, so let's get to the taxes. 1099-bs are what's sent out, I guess, at the end of the year for everyone who does trade transactions. Bartered goods and services are taxed at the same rate. They're taxed dollar for dollar, for an American dollar or anywhere. Wherever you're at a Euro, whatever country you're in, there's trade organizations everywhere and they all deal with it in their own different ways, but it's all the same. It's all taxed the same as their local currency.

Speaker 1:

So we keep accurate records of barter transactions. There is no count receivable. It's all done, like I said, through the app. Always, of course, consult your tax professional to ensure you're compliant, all right. So if you're curious more about trade and barter, definitely shoot me an email and I'll reply, Even if you're not in my area. I serve as Southeast Michigan and the Toledo Ohio area, so we range from Bay City, michigan, down to Toledo, but I'll help you out if you got any questions, or try and give you a good referral for a trade organization in your area. All right, that's it. Thanks for tuning in. This has been the Trading Post with Trader Stu, thank you.