Drones and Trade: A Journey Through Skies and Barter Systems

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.

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“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.

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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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Trading Post podcast.
I'm your host, trader Stu.
Before we get started, I kindof wanted to touch a little bit
on this whole drone thing onlybecause I happen to have a lot
of experience in aviation,flying and being a drone pilot,
and to anybody who's looking foranswers out there, I don't have

(00:22):
answers on what they are, ofcourse, or where they're coming
from, but I will tell you thisas a flight engineer for the Air
Force I flew KC-10s I know howdifficult it is to enter
airspace, especially US airspace, right.
Then, on top of it all, I wasan FAA 107 commercial drone

(00:44):
pilot and I literally sold mydrone because my renewal for my
FAA 107 was up and I just didn'tfeel like dealing with it.
It's a lot of work, it'sstudying and even if you've
never done flying before, it's alot to, I guess, take in.

(01:05):
And I happen to breeze throughit pretty well because I've had
a lot of flying experience inthe Air Force.
So I can say that I mean thosedrones, they know where they are
, they know what they're doingand that they're probably ours.
I mean, I know they're ours,they got to be ours because
nobody can just get in here andfly around above air bases.

(01:27):
If you know why I one of thereasons I got rid of my drone is
because I was using the drone.
It was supposed to be aerialphotography and then 2020 hit
and of course, nobody was doinggroups of anything anymore.
So weddings and, you know,graduations or whatever.
The whole idea behind the dronewas gone.
So no more groups andgatherings, and I spent a bunch

(01:49):
of money on this drone.
This was a DJI Mavic EnterpriseEdition, so I had the
microphone or the speakerphone,I guess you could say.
Then I had the lights, thesearch lights that you put on
top.
You can bolt it on top.
It was really cool.
And then the other one was athree mile beacon that was super

(02:10):
bright for flying in, I guess,heavy air traffic areas.
So then, once that all fellapart, I started doing using the
drone for gutter cleaning.
I would do an inspection of thegutters, I would show them the
before, and then I had a SkyVacvacuum sweeper system that was

(02:30):
carbon fiber.
On a pole right, it was acarbon fiber piping, and then
that way it was super light.
I got really bad shoulders.
Now, even with the piping ofbeing carbon fiber, I still
can't do it, it still gets heavycarbon fiber.
I still couldn't.
I still can't do it, it stillgets heavy.
So anyway, I digress.
I would then show them, afterthe gutters were done, that you

(02:52):
know they were clean with thedrone.
I had a camera on it and yeah,and I would show them, I would
email it to them.
So the problem is is that I amright next to Selfridge Air
Force Base or Air National GuardBase in Michigan, in eastern
Michigan, by Detroit, and if youare within I forgot you know
because I haven't studied this Ithink it was 25 nautical miles,

(03:14):
I think it's Class D airspace.
I've dumped all thisinformation.
But anyway, if you fly withinthat certain range and you
attain a certain altitude,you've got to call for clearance
at Selfridge.
So I would call tower and Iwould say, hey, you know, this
is my, I think it was.
I had to give him the FAAnumber, my license number, and I
plan on flying my drone at 2 PMand I'll maintain a flight

(03:38):
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, yougot to maintain a flight level
of tree height no more than 80feet or 100 feet or whatever it
is, and it just was a big painin the butt because most of my
flights were, you know, in thisarea.

(04:01):
I'm in metro Detroit area andthen you got the other one.
I never had a deal with Detroitairport, but if I wanted to go
out that way, there's that issuetoo.
I mean you can't just fly thesethings all willy nilly, right.
I mean it takes a lot and ontop of it all, if they're saying
that there's this mothershipout in the ocean and that's

(04:21):
launching these drones to andfrom Jersey.
Being a boater not that I owneda boat, but I've been on a lot
of boats between Michigan andCanada, so Lake St Clair is
where I would boat all the time,and the canals around the area,
lake Huron, and this is allbetween Michigan and, you know,

(04:44):
canada, of course well, youcan't, you know you can't just
like take your boat and go to adifferent shore.
It doesn't work like that.
It's you gotta, you knowthere's there's customs, but
there's there's very strict onwhere you can boat and where you
can cross.
You gotta stay within, know thehalf part of the river or over,

(05:06):
and you got to watch whereyou're going.
So it's not that easy to justget in and out of US airspace
waterways.
It's very highly protected,very highly radared.
If I would have screwed up atany time with the drone, they

(05:27):
would have just followed thedrone to my house and saw where
it was coming from.
I watched his Prepper channelbecause I think it's interesting
, anyway, and they were like youshould get a drone for OPSEC or
not?
Opsec, yeah, operation SecurityS, I don't know.

(05:47):
Anyway, basically, if you knowthings, go down, you can launch
your drone and get a bird's eyeview of the surrounding area.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I did do that during COVID andI had a lot of fun with it,
because we were in our apartmentand I launched the drone from
the balcony or whatever and flewaround and I got to see all the

(06:07):
lack thereof of traffic on whatwas normally busy roads and it
was like a zombie apocalypse andI thought it was pretty cool.
I was like wow, apocalypse, andI thought it was pretty cool.
Like I was like wow, this isawesome.
But if you think for one minute,we're gonna be in a time to
where, if there's civil unrestand we're laying low and

(06:27):
bunkering it or whatever youknow.
Uh, what's the other otherthing?
They're doing a martial law andyou want it fly around.
No way, dude, there's no way,because if you launch the drone,
all you got to do is havepeople going to follow up back
to where it has to land, andthen you're screwed like you're
done.
So either they're going to, youknow, follow you home, or

(06:49):
wherever you're headed to, abunker, or I don't know.
Uh, I would never do that,there's no way.
I would do that if we were onthat level of issue in a bad
time.
So all I'm saying is that I justfeel like I had to say
something.
I know I'm probably on a hitlist or a watch list, I guess,

(07:16):
or any of the cool three, youknow three, letter agencies FBI,
cia, nsa, all that.
Truth be told, I'm on theirlist anyways.
I mean, I have a top secretclearance or had one, so they
already know everything.
There is no about me andthey're probably watching me

(07:36):
anyways, so it doesn't matter.
But at any rate, I just feellike I had to say that One to be
completely transparent andhonest.
Hopefully that this gets outthere in the algorithm database
and I get some traffic to thepodcast, which wouldn't be a bad
thing.
I would love that.
And also I'll put in thedescription and maybe I'll get

(07:56):
lucky and get more than a fewlisteners on this podcast,
because I mentioned drones andit'll go out into the ether and
you guys will be listening.

(08:23):
But anyway, let's get to themain point of the podcast, which
is, of course, about trade andbarter, which is the same thing,
depending on how you want tophrase it.
I use it interchangeably.
This podcast is about the taximplications of bartering.
I feel like I had to hit thisagain because I don't know if it
even did, but a lot of peopleare thinking that there's a
loophole here and I just want togo thoroughly over barter, or
professional trade.
I don't like using tradebecause it brings up stock

(08:46):
market trading.
I don't like that.
Or gold trade, or fur trade.
Fur trade is kind of liketrading post, but that's why I
did this.
But barter is kind of the samething.
But then it gets in the thingof like one-for-one trading,
which you know.
These organizations take thatone-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.

(09:08):
So of course, the overview oftoday, history of trading,
barter and barter versus money,legal tax implications of
bartering.
So early human societies wouldtrade goods and services.
Examples are ancientcivilizations, mesopotamia,

(09:31):
egypt is an example.
So they would trade, say, saltfor spices.
Of course you get the spicetrade.
You know they get the salttrade.
Salt is still very precioustoday because you can do so much
with it.
Of course it flavors food butpreserves food.
I want to get more into that.
I want to really try making myown preserved salted pork or

(09:55):
fish or whatever like that.
It's really cool and I'll getmore into that, but anyway.
So barter systems evolved withthe complexity of societies and
the role of it was the surplusof goods in the development of
trade.
So if you were somebody who hada bunch of extra fur, of course

(10:19):
, then you could trade that out.
If you couldn't sell it, somepeople would take that as a
trade because they had a surplusof something.
Then you could just trade, evenSteven, whatever the value is.
The problem is that you can'treally store that wealth.
You can't store too much spicebecause obviously it'll go

(10:40):
rancid, bad or bugs will getinto it, or something like that.
So the difficulty in thatbartering was you can't store
wealth.
Plus, there's the doublecoincidence of wants.
So what if too many people wantyour product and then you don't
want enough of everybody else'sproduct?
That's an imbalance.
Or what if you don't wantanything?

(11:02):
What if you're just straight?
You're good, I don't know, Igot all this extra food or
whatever and I don't needanything.
My kids got clothes, we gotfood, we got spices, we got
enough salt, whatever it is.
So there's that problem too.
And then the other issue isdetermining the value of

(11:24):
equivalence.
That's one thing.
That's the issue with tradingin school, I guess, or where
kids can kind of when they starttrading their lunches.
School, I guess, or where kidscan kind of when they start
trading their lunches.
You know, I'll trade you myButterfinger for a PB&J or
something like that, right?
Well, the Butterfinger is notfilling.
So the kid giving up the PB&Jis going to get a Butterfinger,

(11:48):
cool, but now he'll be hungry inhalf an hour for the rest of
the day.
And you know, the value of thatpeanut butter jelly sandwich is
much more highly of value forsustainability, of keeping you
full, than it is for the quickhit of the Butterfinger.
Then, of course, the emergenceof money.
Right, so you got commoditymoney, metal coins, paper

(12:10):
currency, and then I don't knowif you knew this or not, but a
cool, fun fact the reason whythere's ridges on the outside of
metal coins is because back inthe day, when coins were
actually made of the metal thatthey say they were from like
pennies were copper people wouldshave off the outside of the
pennies and then accumulate, youknow, over the course of time,

(12:31):
hundreds or thousands of coins.
You would eventually have apile of scrap copper and then
they could melt that down anduse that money.
So the whole thing with theridges is that it's hard to re.
You can't really duplicate theridges.
And then if you saw a coin comein that was smooth, you know

(12:51):
that it wasn't of true valuebecause someone shaved off part
of the copper, so it's notreally worth the penny, no more,
or whatever silver.
The advantages of money overbarter is solving double
coincidences at once.
It's easier to store andtransport that wealth, as we
know, than banks came about.

(13:12):
Then there's the simplificationof 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 dollarbecause 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 theorythat Fort Knox is the guards are

(13:36):
guarding air.
There's nothing in there.
That's the whole thing behindit.
There's no more gold in thereis what they're saying.
So our money isn't backed up byanything, except for what we
say it is.
And our military, I guessmilitary, I guess.
So we say that it's worth thismuch money for the oil because

(13:58):
if you don't take it, I guesswe'll blow you up, we'll bomb
you, I guess I don't know.
All the wars are always overoil and now it's precious
resources.
Apparently there's a big veinof was it lithium in Afghanistan
, in the mountains, which isprobably why we were over there.
We got cobalt and we got allthe stuff that makes batteries,

(14:20):
at any rate.
I digress again.
Examples of the modern bartersystem and barter exchanges are
like ours or like MTA.
I'm a sales guy, sales andmarketing manager for Metro
Trading Association and we're anexample of one of the exchanges
.
We've been around since 1978,I'm a sales guy, sales and

(14:40):
marketing manager for MetroTrading Association, and we're
an example of one of theexchanges.
So we've been around since 1978.
And it's one of the largest inthe area.
So we have everyone from.
We get sports tickets becausethe Pistons were members for a
long, long time and then, uh,everything to a local mom, pa,
or a guy working on his garageas a plumber.
You know, the technology that wehave these days is awesome.

(15:05):
I I was going through some ofthe archives with one of the
owners here and she was sayingyou know, um, this is how we
used to do it.
Everything was printed out onthose old, the old paper with
the holes on each side that youhad to like, um, it was
perforated and you had to rip itoff and then they had the green
and the white alternating linesand all the values were printed

(15:27):
there.
I think they've had to printthem every day or something like
that.
It was crazy.
So everything was done by handand tracked by hand, and now
it's all digital, it's all inthe app, it's all on the
computer.
You can run exchanges ortransactions now 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
You never got to call inanymore to the broker to run a
trade.
You know you don't got to callinto the automated hotline

(15:47):
anymore to run a trade, you canjust do it on your phone and now
it's become more like running aregular credit card,
essentially.
And uh, it's, it's great.
I I use trade all the time andI had my companies uh in in
trade.
Um, I ran that company.
I told you about oversight so Idid gutter cleaning on trade uh

(16:09):
.
Then we started the um otherthing with the uh microgreens
and took trade on that in thetrade show.
So I've been involved withtrade for a decade now.
All right, so let's get to thetaxes.
1099-bs are what's sent out, Iguess, at the end of the year
for everyone who does tradetransactions.

(16:30):
Bartered goods and services aretaxed 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 organizationseverywhere and they all deal
with it in their own differentways, but it's all the same.
It's all taxed the same astheir local currency.

(16:51):
So we keep accurate records ofbarter transactions.
There is no count receivable.
It's all done, like I said,through the app.
Always, of course, consult yourtax professional to ensure
you're compliant, all right.
So if you're curious more abouttrade and barter, definitely
shoot me an email and I'll reply, Even if you're not in my area.

(17:13):
I serve as Southeast Michiganand 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 tradeorganization in your area.
All right, that's it.
Thanks for tuning in.
This has been the Trading Postwith Trader Stu, thank you.