• Brennan Schlagbaum has zero interest in managing properties but wants exposure to real estate.
• His solution is to invest in real estate syndications, which are completely hands-off.
• This is when a group of investors pool capital to purchase a single investment.

Brennan Schlagbaum recognizes the advantages of real estate — from the tax benefits to portfolio diversification — but he's not willing to buy and manage an investment property.

He says he has his hands full with simply maintaining a primary residence: "I hate real estate with a passion. If something breaks in my house, I call somebody."

To benefit from real estate without having to actually own and operate properties, he invests in real estate syndications.

"I think it's one of the best ways for somebody that hates real estate but understands the tax benefits of real estate to get in because you don't have to do anything," the self-made millionaire and founder of Budgetdog, who built his wealth primarily investing in low-cost index funds, told Business Insider.

How real-estate syndications work

In real-estate syndication deals, a group of investors pools together their capital to purchase a single property managed by the syndicator.

Once the investor contributes capital, their role in the deal becomes completely passive. The real-estate syndicator is responsible for finding the deal, executing the transaction, and, ultimately, delivering returns to the investors.

"You lose control from that aspect. You don't really have control over how that performs," said Schlagbaum, who said he invests in five multi-family syndications. But if you work with a syndicator with a good track record that you trust, "it's essentially an index fund."

He invests with a syndicator that specializes in multi-family properties.

"They go in, upgrade the units, increase rent prices in a really high-demand area that's underpriced, own and operate that building for a couple of years, and then typically sell it after a three- to five-year period, sometimes up to seven," he explained. "And you don't do anything as an investor; you're just an equity partner. So you literally send some capital their way and hope they do their job."

A good option for established investors looking for hands-off strategies

BI has spoken to a variety of established investors who, after building wealth by acquiring rental properties, are turning to syndication deals for a more passive experience.

"You hear that real-estate investing is passive, and that's certainly not been my experience," said self-made millionaire Tess Waresmith, who owns five units across three properties. "I still think it's a wonderful way to invest, but it's not passive like investing in the stock market is."

She invested in her first syndication in 2023 and likes that it opens the door to bigger investment opportunities.

"I check out the deal and make sure it's something that feels good to me, and then when I invest the money, I'm hands-off. I'm not involved in the day-to-day decision-making of the property," she said. "But as an investor, I get to benefit from investing in the larger unit properties."

Carl and Mindy Jensen, a financially independent couple who have started shifting toward passive-investing strategies, including real estate syndication, also appreciate the hands-off nature of these deals. But it's hard to know what your returns will look like, Carl told BI: "The people running these syndications will tell you they're expecting numbers, and it's infrequently accurate."

It's important to remember that the syndicator is "probably using their best, sunny-day scenarios." That said, "every syndication we've had has actually outperformed the original numbers."

To participate in this type of partnership, you typically have to be an accredited investor, meaning you either must have a net worth of over $1 million or an income of over $200,000 (individually) over the past two years. There's also typically a minimum investment requirement, depending on the syndicator.

But there are workarounds, said Schlagbaum, especially if you're part of a real-estate community or network.

Investors who are part of the community he's built, for example, don't necessarily have to be accredited to participate, since "the SEC deems pre-existing relationships allowable," he said. "They just get access to the deal because they know me."

Sometimes, "Getting around those hurdles is just knowing the right people."

When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid.

But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable energy generation fell to less than 30 percent of the nation’s total, and gas-, oil- and coal-powered plants revved up to pick up the slack.

Germans call these periods Dunkelflauten, meaning “dark doldrums,” and they can last for a week or longer. They’re a major concern for doldrum-afflicted places like Germany and parts of the United States as nations increasingly push renewable-energy development. Solar and wind combined contribute 40 percent of overall energy generation in Germany and 15 percent in the US and, as of December 2024, both countries have goals of becoming 100 percent clean-energy-powered by 2035.

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For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Snowflakes, snowfall, and snowmen symbolize cocaine. Love hearts, lightning bolts, and pill capsules mean MDMA, or molly. Brown hearts and dragons represent heroin. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean. The humble maple leaf, meanwhile, is the universal symbol for all drugs.

The proliferation of open drug dealing on Instagram, Snapchat, and X—as well as on encrypted messaging platforms Telegram and WhatsApp—has transformed the fabric of illegal substance procurement, gradually making it more convenient, and arguably safer, for consumers, who can receive packages in the mail without meeting people on street corners or going through the rigmarole of the dark web. There is no reliable way to gauge drug trafficking on social media, but the European Union Drugs Agency acknowledged in its latest report on the drivers of European drug sales that purchases brokered through such platforms “appear to be gaining in prominence.”

Initial studies into drug sales on social media began to be published in 2012. Over the next decade, piecemeal studies began to reveal a notable portion of drug sales were being mediated by social platforms. In 2021, it was estimated some 20 percent of drug purchases in Ireland were being arranged through social media. In the US in 2018 and Spain in 2019, a tenth of young people who used drugs appear to have connected with dealers through the internet, with the large majority doing so through social media, according to one small study.

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Medical accounts of red wine headaches go back to Roman times, but the experience is likely as old as winemaking—something like 10,000 years. As chemists specializing in winemaking, we wanted to try to figure out the source of these headaches.

Many components of red wine have been accused of causing this misery—sulfites, biogenic amines, and tannins are the most popular. Our research suggests the most likely culprit is one you may not have considered.

The common suspects

Sulfites have been a popular scapegoat for all sorts of ailments since it became mandatory in the 1990s to label them on wines in the US. However, not much evidence links sulfites directly to headaches, and other foods contain comparable levels to wine without the same effects. White wines also contain the same amount of sulfites as red wines.

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One of Dr. Mo Sarhan’s patients was experiencing intense cravings for opioids and alcohol when the Florida-based doctor offered him a striking solution: the Eli Lilly weight-loss drug Mounjaro.

“Within days, all of his cravings were gone and he was much more effective in his engagement and treatment. He’s done great since,” Sarhan says.

Sarhan and his colleague Steven Klein at the Caron Treatment Centers in Florida and Pennsylvania have prescribed a range of so-called glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s) to treat addictions, using them alongside traditional therapies, to around 75 patients.

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Matt Berkey was becoming suspicious.

Berkey, a 42-year-old poker pro known for his presence in some of the highest-stakes cash games in Las Vegas, was playing in a well-known casino poker room over the summer. One player in the game who wasn’t particularly familiar to Berkey and other regulars at the table, but who was believed to be an amateur based on his play style, was displaying some strange behavior.

For one, the player was wearing earbuds—typically a no-no in these kinds of semi-private games where many players have existing friendships.

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A handful of dairy farms sprawl across the valley floor, ringed by the spikey, copper-colored San Jacinto mountains. This is the very edge of California’s dairy country—and so far, the cows here are safe.

But everyone worries that the potentially lethal bird flu is on the way. “I hope not,” says Clemente Jimenez, as he fixes a hose at Pastime Lakes, a 1,500-head dairy farm. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

Further north and west, in the San Joaquin Valley—the heart of the state’s dairy industry—the H5N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, has rippled through the massive herds that provide most of the country’s milk. Farmworkers have piled carcasses into black and white heaps. This week the state reported 19 new confirmed cases in cows and more than 240,000 in chickens. Another 50,000 cases were confirmed at a chicken breeding facility in Oklahoma.

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Earlier this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported data showing that adult obesity rates—long trending upwards—had fallen modestly over the past few years, from 41.9 to 40.3 percent. The decline sparked discussion on social media and in major news outlets about whether the US has passed so-called “peak obesity”—and whether the growing use of certain weight-loss drugs might account for the shift.

An opinion piece in the Financial Times suggested that the public health world might look back on the current moment in much the same way that it now reflects on 1963, when cigarette sales hit their high point and then dropped dramatically over the following decades. The article’s author, John Burn-Murdoch, speculated that the dip is “highly likely” to be caused by the use of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1s, for weight loss.

It's easy to see why one might make that connection. Although GLP-1s have been used for nearly two decades in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, their use for obesity only took off more recently. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration approved a GLP-1 agonist named Saxenda specifically for this purpose. Then in the late 2010s, a GLP-1 drug named Ozempic, made from the active ingredient semaglutide, began to be used off-label. The FDA also authorized Wegovy, another semaglutide-based GLP-1 medication, explicitly for weight loss in 2021.

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On the evening of November 19, art adviser Adam Biesk was finishing work at his California home when he overheard a conversation between his wife and son, who had just come downstairs. The son, a kid in his early teens, was saying he had made a ton of money on a cryptocurrency that he himself had created.

Initially, Biesk ignored it. He knew that his son played around with crypto, but to have turned a small fortune before bedtime was too far-fetched. “We didn’t really believe it,” says Biesk. But when the phone started to ring off the hook and his wife was flooded with angry messages on Instagram, Biesk realized that his son was telling the truth—if not quite the full story.

Earlier that evening, at 7:48 pm PT, Biesk’s son had released into the wild 1 billion units of a new crypto coin, which he named Gen Z Quant. Simultaneously, he spent about $350 to purchase 51 million tokens, about 5 percent of the total supply, for himself.

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Sodium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage are moving toward the mainstream. Wider use of these batteries could lead to lower costs, less fire risk, and less need for lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

On November 18, CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, announced its second-generation sodium-ion battery, mass production of which would begin in 2027. The China-based company said the new battery has an energy density of 200 watt-hours per kilogram, which is an increase from 160 watt-hours per kilogram for the previous generation that launched in 2021. Higher energy density in an EV battery translates into more driving range.

On Nov. 21, a consortium of seven US national laboratories announced a new initiative in which they would spend $50 million to foster collaboration to accelerate the development of sodium-ion batteries. The partnership is led by Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago area.

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In recent years, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company's customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.

The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool regularly checks devices for potential compromise. But the company also offers a free version of the feature for anyone who downloads the iVerify Basics app for $1. These users can walk through steps to generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive analysis within hours. Free users can use the tool once a month. iVerify's infrastructure is built to be privacy-preserving, but to run the Mobile Threat Hunting feature, users must enter an email address so the company has a way to contact them if a scan turns up spyware—as it did in the seven recent Pegasus discoveries.

“The really fascinating thing is that the people who were targeted were not just journalists and activists, but business leaders, people running commercial enterprises, people in government positions,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst. “It looks a lot more like the targeting profile of your average piece of malware or your average APT group than it does the narrative that’s been out there that mercenary spyware is being abused to target activists. It is doing that, absolutely, but this cross section of society was surprising to find.”

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In late September, seagrass ecologist Alyssa Novak pulled on her neoprene wetsuit, pressed her snorkel mask against her face, and jumped off an oyster farming boat into the shallow waters of Pleasant Bay, an estuary in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Through her mask she gazed toward the sandy seabed, about 3 feet below the surface at low tide, where she was about to plant an experimental underwater garden of eelgrass.

Naturally occurring meadows of eelgrass—the most common type of seagrass found along the East Coast of the United States—are vanishing. Like seagrasses around the world, they have been plagued for decades by dredging, disease, and nutrient pollution from wastewater and agricultural runoff. The nutrient overloads have fueled algal blooms and clouded coastal waters with sediments, blocking out sunlight the marine plants need to make food through photosynthesis and suffocating them.

The United Nations Environment Program reports more than 20 of the world’s 72 seagrass species are on the decline. As a result, an estimated 7 percent of these habitats are lost each year.

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Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos. He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don't control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn't I be more responsible?”

Mohandas, who taught himself programming and is based in Bengaluru, India, decided he wanted to develop an alternative service for storing and sharing photos that is open source and end-to-end encrypted. Something “more private, wholesome, and trustworthy,” he says. The paid service he designed, Ente, is profitable and says it has more than 100,000 users, many of whom are already part of the privacy-obsessed crowd. But Mohandas struggled to articulate to wider audiences why they should reconsider relying on Google Photos, despite all the conveniences it offers.

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Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

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Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras. It’s not surprising that, perhaps as a reaction to the ubiquity of the phone, some young creative photographers are leaving their handsets in their pockets in favor of compact point-and-shoot digital cameras—the very type that camera manufacturers are actively discontinuing.

Much of the buzz among this creative class has centered around premium, chic models like the Fujifilm X100 and Ricoh GR, or for the self-anointed “digicam girlies” on TikTok, zoom point-and-shoots like the Canon PowerShot G7 and Sony RX100 models, which can be great for selfies.

But other shutterbugs are reaching back into the past 20 years or more to add a vintage “Y2K aesthetic” to their work. The MySpace look is strong with a lot of photographers shooting with authentic early-2000s “digicams,” aiming their cameras—flashes a-blazing—at their friends and capturing washed-out, low-resolution, grainy photos that look a whole lot like 2003.

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Donald Trump has said he will impose tariffs of 25 percent on all imports from Canada and Mexico, and an extra 10 percent on Chinese goods, accusing the countries of permitting illegal migration and drug trafficking.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, Trump said he would impose the tariffs on Canada and Mexico on his first day in office “on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous open borders,” which would remain in place “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country.”

Trump said the tariffs on China would apply to all imports and would come on top of existing levies, as he criticized Beijing for failing to follow through on promises to impose the death penalty for people dealing fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid.

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The world’s most important climate talks were pulled back from the brink of collapse after poorer countries reluctantly accepted a finance package of “at least” $300 billion a year from wealthy nations after bitter negotiations.

Fears about stretched budgets around the world and the election of Donald Trump as US president, who has described climate change as a “hoax,” drove the developing countries into acceptance of the slightly improved package after Sunday 2:30 am local time in Baku.

The UN COP29 climate summit almost collapsed twice throughout Saturday evening and into the early hours of Sunday morning, as vulnerable nations walked out of negotiations and India objected stridently.

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Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity but are not well understood.

Delusions, on the other hand, are fixed, usually false, beliefs that are strongly held but not widely shared. In previous work, we proposed that studying delusions provides unique insights into the cognitive nature of belief and its dysfunction.

Based on evidence from delusions and other psychological disciplines, we offered a tentative five-stage cognitive model of belief formation.

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

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Microsoft’s president has called on Donald Trump to “push harder” against cyber attacks from Russia, China, and Iran amid a wave of state-sponsored hacks targeting US government officials and election campaigns.

Brad Smith, who is also the Big Tech company’s vice chair and top legal officer, told the Financial Times that cyber security “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations” and appealed to the US president-elect to send a “strong message.”

“I hope that the Trump administration will push harder against nation-state cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China and Iran,” Smith said. “We should not tolerate the level of attacks that we are seeing today.”

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