The Money Expert: How The US Dollar Is Being Quietly Replaced - What’s Coming Next!

And every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap. Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has also become the world's first trillionaire. At what point, though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden something has to bring? It is profitable to keep you financially stupid. It is profitable to keep you poor. Most Americans today would rather look rich than be rich. Over 40% of us are unfamiliar with Roth IRAs, money market accounts and high yield savings. It is so rigged, it is unfair, it is rigged towards investors. So what do you think is the biggest risk for the economy that no one is going to see coming? Right now, we have about 40 trillion dollars of national debt. We are spending about two trillion dollars a year that we don't have right now. Do you think it's a negative debt right now, stocks or near their all-time highs? Yeah, I mean, markets are high, but if you hold on, historically, it has been proven that you're going to become wealthy. And what can the average person do to protect themselves? You're one paycheck away from your family being broke because if you want to be rich. Yes, Pete, thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. Well, thank you for coming to Detroit. So you host the minority mindset YouTube channel with over two and a half million subscribers and you've previously said that nobody understands how money works. How does it work? The average person thinks money is something you have to go to work to earn. No wealthy person thinks that way. The average person goes to school to get a good degree, to get a good job, to get a paycheck, to hopefully get a good race, to hopefully get a promotion to climb the corporate ladder. No wealthy person thinks that way, but wealthy people want to do is the opposite. They want to own the corporate ladder. They don't want to have to go to work to make money. They want to figure out how they can make money through their money. And the reason why I talk about this so much is because this is something that I wish somebody would have taught me. I did everything right. My parents came to this country, America, with very little, and they wanted me to become successful because they worked very hard. And in their eyes, the way you become successful is very obvious. You do what everybody says. You look at that career pamphlet, which says the highest income people are doctors. So my dad was very plain about it. He said, "Just breathe. You can either be a doctor or you can be a failure. You get to pick." And so I thought nothing against that makes sense. So I was on this path, getting a grade studying hard, thinking that I'm going to become a doctor, and then along the way I started learning about money. And I learned that wealthy people don't want to work to get a big paycheck. They want to work to own the assets that are going to pay them. And when I learned that, I started changing what I did, which changed how I earned money. And that was that light bulb moment when I realized our economic system is not designed to reward workers. Our economic system is not designed to reward consumers. It is designed to make one person rich investors. And it made me so angry when I learned this because when you look at it, banks profit when you're in debt. The longer you stay in debt, the richer they get. Corporations profit when you spend money. The more money you spend, the richer they get. You spend money. Don't have they get even richer. Wall street profits when you don't know how to invest because now you're going to pay the highest expense ratio. The government profits when you don't understand how money works, because you're going to pay the highest taxes. You profit when you're financially educated, but we're never taught that financial education. That's why I teach that. So it sounds like to join the investor class is not just a decision that you need to make it life to be wealthy. It sounds like it's the decision. What is the main difference between someone who has money and someone who's wealthy? When you have money, you can buy nice stuff. You can buy a car. You can buy some nice clothes. You can buy a fancy vacation. You can maybe even buy a house. But when you have money and you start spending that money, the amount of money you have starts to go down. If you have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and you start spending, it's going to start to shrink. You could have a million dollars, even ten million dollars. But if you just spend that money, the money is going to continually shrink and shrink and shrink. And that's why you hear the stories of athletes, celebrities, famous people who make millions of dollars but end up broke or bankrupt. In fact, today, about half of Americans were making over a quarter million dollars a year with paycheck to paycheck with zero dollars to show for zero wealth. They have the nice car. They have the nice clothes. They have the nice stuff. But they have no actual wealth. Wealth is a matter of time. If you were to stop working today, how long will the money keep coming in? How long can you continue to afford your lifestyle? Because the average person will say, well, if I stop working today, I'm going to be struggling like in two weeks, a month, two years, like when, when is that time? And that's what wealth is. When you can say, oh, I mean, I could stop working today and it's not going to change my life. Now you're wealthy. But the only way that can happen is when you are not reliant on your work to get paid. Can you stop working today? Yes. At what age could you stop working? My late 20s. Late 20s? How were you able to do that? I had enough cash low on assets with a low enough expenses that I could just live off of my investments. Here's what I'm curious about because if you were able to do it, why didn't everyone else? I wanted to become wealthy because I saw how hard my dad worked. I wanted to be able to buy his time back. He did not have the opportunity to have a Saturday and a Sunday off. I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him when I was a kid. So as a kid, I realized that I wanted to make money because if I had money, I could say, Dad, don't work anymore. But we couldn't because my dad needed money to pay the mortgage. He needed money to put food on the table. He needed money to send money back to India. And so I knew that there was this importance of money. But at the same time, everybody around me keeps saying, don't worry about money. Don't stress about money. Money is bad. Money is evil. So it never made sense to me, which is why I started to really kind of dial in and understand, okay, money is important, but it's not your life. And that was what really kind of drove me to want to start earning money, start investing my money, get extremely aggressive with my investments. And do that again and again and again, even as I was making big money, like I started growing my business more and I was making money not to have a nice car, not to have a big house, not to go on fancy vacations. I was making money so I could buy more rental properties or buy more stocks or buy more assets. And so that was my core models. I'm making money not for myself. I'm making money to buy investments so I can live off of my investments. When was the exact moment that you first felt rich? When I was like 21-22, I really wanted a BMW i8. I really, really are. It is exactly. It was those butterfly doors. I really wanted a BMW i8. And I started to make some better money when I was like 22 because I left the party business and I entered real estate. That was my rental properties, but I started wholesaling real estate and I was real estate salesperson. I got my license. It took me a long time to get my first commission check, but sometimes those commission checks are pretty big. Like my first commission check, I think it was $10,000, which is a lot of money in one check. And I was like, oh my god, I'm making so much money. The problem is those checks are not consistent. Sometimes you get a big check. Sometimes you don't get any checks. But I was like, I'm going to get a BMW. And so my dream was to get the i8, but I was like, you know what? That's probably way too out of my reach right now. So let me get the three series and I kept going back and forth because I was like, well, I could buy the three series or I could buy a rental property that will buy my three series. And so I never bought that car. I just bought more investments. It was hard when you're young 20s because you want the nice stuff. But I told myself, no, I'm going to just keep buying the rental properties. I'm going to keep buying the rental properties. Then I bought more investments and stuff. And then eventually I was like, I can go buy the i8 today. I wouldn't even notice it. Like it wouldn't really affect me at all if I bought the i8. But I don't really want it. And I guess that was, if you say the moment I felt rich, it didn't feel like a aha moment. But when I knew that I could buy the i8, my desire for it also went down. Like my desire for the car was way up here when I couldn't afford it. As soon as I could afford it, the desire is a way down here. Does that take some of the joy out of it though? Because I thought the same thing, I had always wanted a Lamborghini. Ever since I was like 15, 16 years old, like that for me was like the rail car. And I remember there was a point there where I decided between buying a duplex and getting a Lamborghini Gallardo Superluchera. And I picked the duplex. And years later, I got to a point where you could go and buy the Lamborghini. You wouldn't notice it, but I don't want it anymore. And now the idea of buying the car, it sounds like a hassle. But part of me thinks that like, my gosh, you would probably still want to buy a car now that's like five times more expensive. And so maybe it is like, you don't have, I don't think so. That desire did not translate into a new desire of like a even nicer car, like a Ferrari or even nicer Lambo or the 4GT. No, no, it didn't. Now the SLS AMG Mercedes is the only car I want, but because I think it's also a good investment. So now you just don't care for cars. Oh, that's why I still drive the 2019 Tesla Model 3. I just don't care. For a while, I was driving a $1,000 Volvo. So do you think that that suggests then that the desire to buy that Lamborghini came from some sort of like validation or filling out the car? Yeah, it was more of like a trophy. Like you get the car when you achieve a certain level of success and that car for me was like the trophy. Like, if I could get that car, then that meant that all the work I did was worth it because I had this thing to show for it. You know, it's funny though. And then you own a couple of cars and you're like, I got to get an oil change. I got to go do this. I got to get a detail that's like insurance. And you end up not owning your things, but the classic cliche is real. They own you. Same thing with watches. I used to want all these, the desire for watches now is the lowest it's ever been. There's not a watch I want. And I started selling off like a few little things here and that can I still don't want them anymore. Yeah. I mean, you go from wanting material things to then wanting just freedom and wanting security. And I think that starts to change. But maybe also comes with age. But when I was in my 20s, I was a lot stupider. And by stupider, I mean, a lot of ways I was just stupider and I look back. I'm like, wow, I can't believe I did that. But, you know, you're young, right? Yes. I'm not like beating myself over it. What do you do? I mean, what I used to call fun in college is not what I would call fun now. Me and my friends would get together. I didn't drink, right? So we'd have my friends come over and we'd put all the sofas to the side and we said, we're going to have a wrestling match with all and I end up with pull out milk and chocolate milk because that was my thing because I was like, I don't drink. Someone encouraged people to be healthy. And we put out bottles of chocolate milk and milk and we drink milk and wrestle each other. That sounds awesome. It was a lot of fun, man. Don't you do that, Jack? That sounds incredible. We could do it right now, man. Drake, can you get some chocolate milk? Yeah, we could definitely make that happen. Dude, I just imagine a inflatable pool where you just dump. I actually thought that you were talking about like you were pouring the milk on you and you were wrestling. That's literally what I thought you were going. We never went that far. But you know, it's just like being kids, being dumb, just things like that. We would just reckless. So if investing is one of the ways to get to a point to being wealthy, does it concern you at all? Or do you think it's a negative that right now stalks or near their all-time eyes? I think it's a negative in the sense that it's more expensive to buy, but I don't think it's a negative that markets are high. Markets are always going to be breaking your record highs. Historically, the stock market always goes up. It doesn't mean it always goes up, but over time, it always goes up. And I like to tell the story of my broke cousin, Bunty, here, and isn't a hypothetical person, but he's the worst investor of all time. He made his first investment in 1987, right before Black Monday, the biggest one-day stock market crash in history, and he put $10,000 in. And then immediately the markets fell. But he did one thing right. He didn't sell. So we held on, but he felt so bad that he didn't invest again. But then he finally built his confidence years later, and he made his second investment in 2000 at the peak of the market right before the dot-com bubble burst. And he invested $20,000 because he finally built up some more confidence. He invested $20,000 in the next day, the dot-com bubble burst. And we saw the NASDAQ ball by 75-78%. Now he was heartbroken. He said, "I'm not investing again." But he held on. Some years go by. He started to build his confidence again. And he said, "You know what? Okay, I'm going to invest again for the third time. This time it was 2008. Invest $30,000 at the market peak in 2008. The next day, the housing market implodes, the stock market crashes. He's heartbroken again. I invested $10,000 before the black Monday crash, $20,000 before the dot-com crash, $30,000 before the housing market crash. This is horrible." But then he starts to build his confidence again. And he decides to make one last investment. The year 2020, he invests $40,000 right at the market peak. He's so excited. The next day, the pandemic hits, the markets cut in half. And now he's heartbroken again. He invested $100,000 between 1987 to 2020. And he only invested those four points at the market peak. He didn't sell. That $100,000 today is worth $500,000. If you reinvest it as dividends, it's worth $1,000,000. So yeah, I mean, markets are high. You're going to pay a premium to buy stocks when they're high. It's cheaper to buy them when they're low. But if you hold on, historically, it has been proven that you're going to become wealthy. In fact, they did a study and they found that the best investors are dead people because dead people don't sell. And so if you go on with the mentality of what I call ABB always be buying, you can build wealth in any market. Hey, by the way, speaking of this, I know we have all heard the saying time in the market, beats timing the market. But it's funny. The same logic also applies to starting a business. I think a lot of people spend months waiting for the perfect time to start when realistically, the most important thing is just getting the basics in place and then building from there. Personally, one of the first things I would do is lock down your business name online because a professional website and domain immediately gives you a place for people to actually find you understand what you do and take you seriously. And that's why we love working with our sponsor Northwest Registered Agents. No joke, they give you a dedicated business phone line, domain, website, and email all for free. You can literally have a real business setup without purchasing anything or even forming an LLC. And the reason they do it is simple, they want to help you get started, support you as you grow and keep you independent. You can own your own domain and website and if you ever want to move it elsewhere, you can. That is why if you've been using your personal phone number for business, don't have a website or you want an LLC, it's time to fix that. Just go to NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/ICH to get started. That is NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com /ICH or just click the link down below in the description to get started with Northwest Free Identity Services. Thank you NorthwestRegisteredAgent for sponsoring this episode. So why do you think then there's such a disconnect between what's happening throughout our economy, people struggling, and the stock market that's just ripping higher. Our economic system has talked about this is designed to make investors rich. We don't learn that. And it is happening at such an exponential level. During the pandemic, trillions of dollars of money was created. It was printed out at the near. It went out in the form of stimulus checks, unemployment checks, PPP loans, grants, money for businesses, and at first everybody felt rich. But I say the most expensive kind of money is free money because everybody felt rich, they loved this idea of free money. But do you know who pays the price for free money? The person who doesn't know where free money came from. Because if you don't know where the free money is coming from, you're the one that's paying the price. Because if we could just print money out of the near, why do we have to pay taxes? I mean, the government collects about five trillion dollars a year in taxes, but they printed about five trillion dollars. So why do I have to pay taxes in the first place? The reason is there's a cost to printing that money. And that cost is what I call a hidden tax. The hidden tax is the price of your coffee going up. The price of your eggs going up. The price of your house and your car and everything going up is inflation. And so the average person doesn't get that financial education because chances are if you're like most people you didn't learn about inflation and investing in cash flow and school. So you did what everybody else did. You studied hard, you had a good job, you're working really hard trying to get that raised trying to get the paycheck thinking that's what you're supposed to do. But the wealth you're paying a completely different game. And now when you start printing money, you start to see a bigger divide, the wealthy get wealthier, they get wealthier even faster. And it's happening so fast right now. In fact, you have a lot of financial guests on your channel. You've talked about the Federal Reserve Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank has what's called an inflation target of 2%. But have you ever wondered why they say that? What does that mean? It means they want on average the price of things to go up by 2% a year. But have you wondered why 2% why not 1%? Why not 0%? The reason why they want 2% inflation is because 2% inflation is low enough that the average person doesn't notice the prices of things rising. But it doesn't mean that the prices of things aren't rising. It means that the rising low enough that the average person is not noticing a big difference day over day when it's happening whether you notice it or not. This was actually the concept that made my YouTube channel first goal viral back in 2016 when I was talking about 2% to 3% inflation. And now a lot more people know what inflation is, but it's not a temporary thing. It's been happening for decades and it's going to continue happening. Should we even be experiencing inflation? A lot of capitalists say that in a capitalistic economy, the natural state should actually be deflation. Things get cheaper because it becomes more efficient to produce goods. I don't think any capitalist says that there should be deflation. I think every capitalist is actually in favor of slight inflation. I'm saying that capitalism, if running as it should, then it would be deflationary. A lot of things are naturally deflationary. Some things are, but some things wouldn't be. A lot of investors want inflation because inflation makes investors richer. Remember the three rules of money. Money flows to the investor. Inflation benefits the investor. Our economic system is designed to benefit the investor. So when inflation happens, it makes the investor richer. So a lot of investors, capitalists want inflation. But there's a consequence to that as well because that means the average person loses their buying power. Because when inflation happens, my paycheck doesn't stretch as far. I can't as buy as Thank you. nations. I can't buy as many nice things because more money is going just to my rent. So I have less discretionary spending power. So there's that Yin and the Yang there. But when you talk about deflation, I think what you're talking about is the prices of things falling. Deflation has kind of a different meaning because the reason why people hate deflation is because deflation also means asset prices are falling. Japan is an example of that. For decades, Japan faced deflation, not inflation. They faced an economy where asset prices are falling and things are falling. And now you're going to say, wow, that sounds great, just breathe. What's the problem with that? Incomes are also falling. So imagine not getting a raise. You got to pay cut. And so that's why for decades, the Japanese government was printing money. They also kept interest rates very low. And when I say very low, I don't mean 1% or 0% I mean negative interest rates. So they had negative interest rates, which meant I borrow $100 and I pay back 90 kind of a weird concept. But it was the government that was borrowing the money. And it was their central bank that was lending the money. So the central bank did a mind losing money in every investment. And so the government was able to borrow a lot of money. They were printing a lot of money and they were stimulating the heck out of their economy. They did that for decades to try to get out of deflation. Today, they're paying the price because now they're facing inflation and now they're trying to control the inflation, which is also impacting the United States economy. Now you can say, oh, how the heck is Japan on the other end of the world impacting the United States through a concept called the yen carry trade, which means investors Wall Street, we're going to see Japan and saying, oh, we could borrow a lot of yen for essentially free. Sign me up. And they were borrowing huge sums of money, immediately converting it to dollars, buying stocks, buying treasuries, buying real estate because now you're essentially borrowing millions of dollars for free. And you just throw it into the treasury market, throw into the stock market, throw into the real estate market and you're getting an infinite return because your cost of money is free. And so now as Japan's interest rates have gone up to fight inflation, the yen carry trade has also been hurt because I'll Wall Street saying, oh, we can't borrow this money for free anymore. I don't know if we want to do this, which means less dollars are flowing into the stock market. What do you think the actual rate of inflation is in the United States? Take whatever rate the government says, multiply it by two. So you think it's really more like six to seven percent right now. 100%. How are they able to manipulate the numbers to make it look so much lower? So inflation is measured through a number called CPI. That definition of CPI, the consumer price index, has been changed. I'll give you one example. And while we're on the topic of taking care of yourself, it's also really important to think about the people who depend on you. I think a lot about how much goes into building financial security and making sure the people I care about are taken care of is a big part of that. Yeah, it's something nobody really wants to think about, but getting a plan in place is actually way easier than you would think with our partner ethos. They make getting life insurance incredibly simple, so you can make sure the people who depend on you are taken care of in case something happens. Look, I understand. Life insurance is one of those things that's really easy to keep putting off indefinitely, especially when you're young and healthy, but that's actually when you could lock in the best rates. 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And so they would take a look at how much housing prices went up. And then they would take that number and put it into inflation. Makes sense. The housing prices shown in the inflation market and flow shown in the inflation numbers. They don't do that today. They call it owner's equivalent rent. What the heck is that? So now what they're doing is they're surveying homeowners to see if you were to rent your home or sell your home. How much would it be worth? And they're taking people's perspectives of what they think the house is worth and taking that as the inflation number. So if we start to change the definitions, we can start to kind of manipulate the inflation numbers. Don't forget inflation is also an average. So the average person's expenses are like my housing costs, my car costs, my grocery costs and my insurance. Well, those four things are make up maybe 80%, 60%, 50%, a huge chunk of your income. But it might not be that perspective or that percentage of the inflation number because now they're also going to factor in the cost of toys. Toys inflation. And so when we see toy deflation, the price of toys fall or the price of furniture fall, that brings the average inflation number down. So the average inflation number is the average across of all goods. When most of your money is going to your house, your car, your groceries, and your insurance. So you would argue even if you're getting a 5% raise year over year, you're still more broke with the raise than you were the year before. Yes. Does that mean the system is broken? No, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. The system is rigged. It is so rigged, it is unfair. It is rigged towards investors. That's why I got so angry when I learned this. Because I thought I did everything right. I was checking on the boxes. I was working so hard trying to become successful the way that everybody tells you to become successful. But the way that people actually become financially successful is not by following the same path. It's by becoming an investor. I'm not saying don't get a job. Don't work to become a doctor. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying you have to have to have to have financial education on top of your formal education. Your formal education by itself is not going to make you rich. Your financial education is going to make you rich. So if you were to distill the problem down for the average person, you would not say it's an income problem. You would not say it's a spending problem. You would simply say that it is a choice of investing. Well, it starts with your spending. Then it becomes income. And then it becomes your investments. Because even if you make whatever, say you make $50,000 a year, the first step is to learn how to live below your means. If you can't do that, it is going to be impossible for you to build wealth. You have to learn how to organize your money and spend less than what you're bringing in. And when you bring less spend than what's less than what you're bringing in, you save some money. You put some money aside for your investments. Now you start investing your money. And now you can do the math. If I'm investing, let's call it $5,000 a year. How long until I'm wealthy? Well, if you're getting a 10% return on your money, just put that into a calculator and you'll see how long it'll take. Is there an income that it is physically impossible to build wealth at? It depends where you live. In California, if you're, I think, under $110,000 a year with the family of four, you're considered poverty. In Metro Detroit, you consider rich. So sometimes you have to get out of where you are in order to become really successful. And sometimes you have to make some more sacrifices, which means maybe live smaller, live uncomfortable. So for someone watching right now, and they're not investing, like what at what level should they start considering as a first objective to increase their income? At what income should they be like, okay, I have to increase that. Well, the first thing you should do before you do anything else is you got to make sure you have a financial cushion. Start with $2,000. Save $2,000 as fast as humanly possible. Once you do that, and this is an emergency fund, that this is not $2,000 to go out and buy a TV. The second thing you need to do is you need to pay off your high interest debt, your credit cards, your payday loans, and all the things like that. Because if I told you Jack, give me $8,000 today. I'm going to invest it and get a 20% return on your money. In 40 years, you don't have to invest another penny again. In 40 years, that $8,000 is going to grow not to $100,000, not a million dollars, not $3,000,000, not $5,000, not $10,000, but over $11,000,000. All right, you can say, all right, sign me up to a spree. I got $8,000. Well, the problem is you're probably not going to get 20% returns, but you know who is? MX, Mastercard, Visa, Discover, and you're paying that every time you keep credit card debt, which is why you need to pay that off before you think about investing. When you don't have $2,000, and when you have this high interest debt, you were in what I call the financial danger zone. Now, I'm going to tell you something that probably will hurt people's feelings, but I don't say what I say to make people happy. I don't say what I say to make friends. I say what I say to help people be better with money. If you were in the financial danger zone, you have to make extreme sacrifice. That means no eating at restaurants, no name brand clothes, no vacations, and no more Netflix until you get out of the financial danger zone. I can say, just but it would be no Netflix like $15 a month. It's not about the $15 a month. The average American watches over two hours of television. a vision a day. If you're paying 15 to 25% a year in interest, you should not feel comfortable enough to sit there and spend two hours rotting your mind watching Netflix. Are you going to say, well, just breathe at a hard day. I need to relax. Cool. Read a book about money. Watch YouTube videos about her earn more money. Go drive Uber, go do something to earn some more money, or to learn how you can earn some more money, or you can do something that way you can get out of the financial danger zone. Because, and I say this with as much love as possible, it is skinning you alive. It is screwing you over and you're making everybody else switch except yourself. So start there. Step number three is you got to start systemizing your money. The simplest rule that I teach is 75, 15, 10, which says for every dollar that you earn from here on out, 75 cents is the maximum that you can spend. 15 cents is the minimum you invest 10 cents is the minimum you save. That way now, whether you're making 20,000 dollars a year, 200,000 dollars a year, two million dollars a year, you're always saving and investing before you spend all your money. And now you continue doing this until you hit a good savings goal for you. So, you know, if you're 25 years old, you don't need a year's of savings. You can be more aggressive. Maybe you only need three months of savings. But if you're 45 with kids and a spouse, more financial responsibilities, you might need a year's worth of savings, which you don't need more than a year, save that year's worth of savings. And now 75, 25, you're spending 75 cents of every dollar that you earn, you're investing 25 cents of every dollar that you earn, and you do this in perpetuity. How much of this falls on the average person to take personal responsibility versus economic conditions? This year, we really started looking at the entire business through one lens. How do you get more efficient? We hired a full-time editor, got a new studio, upgraded the Wi-Fi, and honestly, we've made amazing progress. But the biggest change by far came from using today's sponsor, Claude. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. So whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And cohort goes way beyond a chatbot. It's not answering questions. It's actually doing the work. Real spreadsheets, formatted reports, organized files directly on your computer, no uploads, no cleanup. 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So AG1 sent us over a care package and I've been trying it out, and it genuinely tastes really good. It's also super nice to increase simplicity in my life, because I'll admit I'm not very good at eating my vegetables or making sure I'm getting all of these micronutrients. I don't know. It's complicated, but I have AG1. I can drink it every day, and it's great to fill in all of those nutritional gaps, and it's super easy. So for a limited time, you could save 20% off your first subscription order of the AG1 next gen or AG1 Pro when you go to drink AG1.com/ICH that is drink AG1.com/ICH. One more time, that is drink AG1.com/ICH now that things are picking back up. You can't control economic conditions, but you can control what you do. You can blame your boss, you can blame the Fed, you can blame the government, you can blame everything all day and night long, it's not going to change your outcome. You can blame everybody, you can blame me, you blame you, you can blame YouTube. It doesn't change where you are, and so if you want to change where you are, you have to take 100% of that. And you're right, I mean yet, our economic system is screwing the average person. The Fed, when the print money is screwing the average person, certain policies are going to screw the average person. Okay. Now what are you going to do about it? And so if you want to change a position, the best thing you can do is change what you do. A big of a problem is the wealth gap that some people are doing extremely well while others are really beginning to struggle. Well, it depends from what perspective. I mean, it's a huge problem, but you can change which side of the coin you are on. At what point though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden something has to change or something has to break? Well, if you look at history, any and every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap that was one of the key factors that has caused a civilization to collapse. When you have such a big divide between the rich and the poor, that is a sign, a signal that a civilization is nearing its end. So it is 100% a problem when it comes from a civilization standpoint because you can't live in a society where you have some people that are incredibly rich and everybody else can't afford to buy basic necessities. Are we there yet? Well, it feels like it, but that is a huge problem. And now how do you fix it? You know, you can talk about politics and whatever they want to do all day night long. I can't change that, but what I can do is teach people how to start feeding themselves out of that position. Is your ever a point where having too much money is actually bad for society? I'm sure there is, but I think limiting somebody's wealth is just as bad if not worse. Do you think that that exact thing that you just had limiting someone's wealth was the differentiating factor between the other empires that have fallen because of a wealth gap and current status of the United States, which is like class mobility is still an achievable thing in America today. It's not easy, but it is there. Whereas back in the day with these fallen empires, it wasn't necessarily a thing. It definitely has to do with it. The thing that you want to pay attention to really is the currency because the currency is what led to so many civilizations falling because what we've seen happen time and time again is that a civilization starts to grow, they become powerful, and then they want to keep growing. And so how can you keep growing as you start spending more money? But if you don't have more money to spend as a government, what do you do? You can raise taxes, but people don't like raising taxes. The other is you can print money. And so what you start to see is civilization start to print more money to boost the economy and it works in the beginning because people feel rich. More money is created. More spending is happening. More jobs are created. People feel like the growing asset values are growing up, but they can only happen for so long. And eventually people start to question that same currency. It's called devaluation of currency. And it's happened time and time again. And when that devaluation of currency starts to happen, people are working for money that doesn't really have much value. And now what are you actually working for? And that's when you start to see the big problems. And that's the exact same thing that causes the divide between the rich and the poor because when you have money printing happen. That's what causes inflation. That inflation is what's making investors richer. Remember money rule number two? Inflation makes the investor richer. And so inflation happens and makes the investor richer. They feel great at first, but at what cost? Somebody's got to pay that money back. So if there is more opportunity now than there ever was in the past, well, first of all, let me assess, do you agree with that statement or do you just 100% so it's easier to become wealthy now than it ever has been in the past? Yes. So why does wealth inequality actually happen then? Goes back to the financial education. What are people doing? I mean, how else does anybody do anything? We go through formal education because I think if I become a doctor, I'm going to become rich. I think if I'm an attorney, I'm going to become successful. Well, a lot of doctors are broke. A lot of attorneys are broke and I'm telling you this has an attorney. Do you think it's mostly education or do you think that it's mostly discipline? Because if you go to someone, I mean, I can be totally wrong here, but like, if you go to someone who's like morbidly obese and you ask them, you know, what's going on here, they're not going to say, oh, like I, I didn't know that if I ate less or like I ate more healthy food, like I'd be able to shed some of these pounds, they'd probably say something like, well, you know, I just don't necessarily want to or it's like more of a condition or something. I don't say a horrible analogy, but you get the point. On top of what Jack said, I think education is pretty out there, like in terms of investing or saving money or making more of a bad spot. Literally just say, I'm in a bad spot financially on anything. YouTube, but Chad GBT, yeah, there's going to be people giving bad advice, but Graham's probably going to rank at the top, and so you'll probably be okay or minority, or a minority mindset. Discipline is a part of education, but here's the problem. I want you to go outside and ask somebody, what's inflation? How much inflation are we seeing? What's our national debt? What is an asset? Tell me what the answer is you see, and you're going to say, okay, I don't have time to do that for this podcast, I've already done it, and I've gone to the streets and I've asked people the same questions that posted videos of me talking to regular people asking, what is inflation? How much national debt do we have? I've become wealthy. What is an asset? How do you invest your money? What is a bond? What is a stock? This person has no idea, and the spawning, I get comments saying, well, how many people did you have to interview to find these? We didn't cut people out. We didn't have to. It's just, the education is available. Unfortunately, many people don't know. But how much of that is actually valuable to know, because there is like, kind of like that IQ curves of like people on the very far left, you're like, I don't know anything, so I'm just going to put my, you know, all my money in index funds, and then you get into the middle of like, oh, I need to assess inflation. I need to assess this. I need to understand this. Cell options. All these things. Yeah. CPI, this and that, all of this data analytics, and yet they get stuck in the middle trying to time things, trying to do this, trying to do that, and then you go all the way over on the right side like the high IQ individuals that are just like, yeah, all of that stuff still does exist, but it's not going to necessarily dictate my investing decisions. And so the people on the high and low IQ side of the spectrum are essentially doing the exact same thing. I think you're wrong about where the low IQ spectrum is, because a lot of people don't know what an index fund is. And that's a huge chunk. And that's what I'm talking about. I don't care which way you invest, just invest. Invex rooms for fine, but you have to start investing. The average American today is investing more money into the Netflix subscription than they are their actual wealth. Is that true? 100%. There was a study that came out years ago. I made a whole video on this that Americans were spending more money on coffee than they were on their retirement. Half of Americans have no money saved for retirement. Half of Americans have no investments at all. I'm talking about 401k, IRAs, stock market, crypto, whatever, they don't have anything. But many Americans have a Netflix subscription. And so when we're in that level of society where most people have little to no investments statistically, but investments are high and become wealthy. Women is the first step to even understand that this is possible. Because if you were like me, 15, 20 years ago and didn't know what a dividend was, I don't know what an asset was, didn't know what a stock brokerage was, then yeah, I'm going to be a little angry because if I continue doing what I was doing, I would have had no idea how some people continue to become rich while I work a job, make a good income, I have nice stuff, but I have no wealth. That's the problem and it starts with education, discipline is a part of it, action is a part of it. I mean, there's so many things that are part of it, but you have to start somewhere. An education, if you can start learning how savings work, now it's up to you to decide if you want to do it. America's a free country. You have the freedom to become successful, you have the freedom to be a cat if you want. You can choose. But if you don't know what the options are, what are you going to choose? You're going to choose whatever you know. And if all you ever heard was we can't afford nice things, that's for rich people. Rich people are bad. Rich people are evil. Well, you grow up through this generational poverty. What is generational poverty? It's not a DNA that you have. There's no sign in your cells that you're going to be broke. It's you grow up with this what I call money trauma, which is you crop learning that money is bad, money is evil. You can't have money. Money is, you know, this foreign thing that you can't ever understand. And that's all you think is reality. And until you get out of that bubble and realize, oh my god, there's a whole world of financial education out here. Now you can start to see something different because everybody knows formal education, everybody knows school, everybody will tell you, yeah, if you want to become successful, just get a good job, get another degree, get another whatever. But if you really want to become successful, formal education is not bad, but you have to take financial education and put it on top of that. Right now we have about $40 trillion of national debt, which means that our government today has spent $40 trillion that it did not generate. We are spending about $2 trillion a year that we don't have right now. So here's how our government works. The government has one source of revenue, taxes from taxpayers. Now what are the taxes that you pay? Well, you're going to go to work and you're going to pay an income tax and you've got to pay Medicare and social security taxes, then you've got to pay your capital gains taxes when you buy a stock and sell it for a profit, then you've got to pay your sales tax when you go to the store and you want to buy something, then maybe buy a house and you buy a property tax. You have to pay property taxes. Now we have to think about tariff taxes when you buy something from a foreign country, then you have to pay corporate taxes if you're a corporation and you make a profit. Then you have your local taxes, your California taxes or your New York taxes or maybe your city taxes, and you also have to think about your other taxes, which are things like cigarette tax, toll tax, alcohol taxes, and then you also have your death tax, estate tax. If you die with a lot of money and it goes to your ears, that's another tax. So there's a lot of different types of taxes. The government's going to collect about $5 trillion in taxes this year. Then they're going to go and spend that money. Now if the government was financially sound, you would think that they would maybe spend $4 trillion and save and invest $1 trillion. That's not what they do. They spend all $5 trillion and then some, they're going to spend an additional $2 trillion. Well, where do they borrow that money? Because that money has to come from somewhere. They could borrow the money from people like you and me. I know you like to lend money to the government through your treasure, your municipal bonds. They can borrow money from corporations, they can borrow money from countries like Japan. Because Japan is the largest foreign lender to the United States. Or they can borrow money from the central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank. But the Federal Reserve Bank is not a bank because you and I can't go to the deposit money. It's not a reserve because it's not sitting on any cash reserves. It's not even Federal. It says someone has a website. But they have the ability to print money and they lend that money to the government. So when the government spends money they don't have, that money gets printed at some point. Some of it does. So spending money is inflation. So now the government is going to spend $2 trillion that don't have. Okay, cool. Well, now what has happened is we have $40 trillion of national debt. And then something really bad happened during the pandemic time. A lot of bad things happened. But I'm going to talk about this particular instance. The Wall Street fell to the lowest levels in the history of time in 2020 and 2021. Do you know what everybody did? Well, they refinanced their house or the bought a house that refinanced their loans at a low interest rate. The government did the same thing. They refinanced all their national debt. Now historically, we're going to talk pre-2020. When the government would refinance their debt, one of the things I'd like to do was get what's called long term debt, usually like a 10 year or a 30 year loan, they would lock it in. Just like a 30 year mortgage. They did something different during the pandemic. The government got a little greedy. They said, well, why would we want to lock in a, I don't know, a 2.1% loan for 30 years when we could get a 18 1.8% loan for five years. And so they started locking in these short term loans at slightly lower interest rates. That was great for 2020 through 2025. Here we are in 2026. And about a third of our national debt is going to readjust in 2026. Okay, well, why does that matter? Interest rates today in 2026 are a whole lot higher than they were back during the pandemic era, which means our national debt cost is about to go up. Not because we're borrowing more money than we are, but because the cost of that debt is going up. Well, why does that matter? Today we are paying more money in national debt than we are our military, which means for every dollar you pay in taxes, 20 cents is going just in interest payments, not to make your life better, but just to pay back, back interest. Well, now we're borrowing more money, racking up our national debt, and you know what else is happening is about to get more expensive, which means more of your taxes are going to have to go to paying back that interest, which means either we're going to have to raise our taxes to keep funding things or we're going to have to print more money. And if we print more money, our national debt becomes more expensive. And not just that. Now we're hearing more proposals about why don't we just print money to pay back the debt. And now you can start to see the problem. Why don't we just pay off the MX with the discover card? And that's what we are getting closer and closer to. And if people start to lose faith in the dollar, interest rates go up more, hurts the value of the dollar, hurts the value of our country, and you can start to see how that becomes a big problem. national debt. is a problem. And people will realize that's a problem after it really becomes a problem. What do you think to the counter of that, though, that some people say that AI is going to boost productivity to the point where all of a sudden we're going to be making so much money, that the national debt is not going to matter as much as it does today. That's what the new Fed Chairman Kevin Worsh is saying. The Federal Reserve Bank says, "Go back to what we're talking about with deflation. AI is going to make life so much cheaper. It's going to make things so much better. Great. Let's see it happen." So how do you think this is all going to play out and what can the average person do to protect themselves? How is it going to play out is you can take a look at history and anytime you have a the United States is the world's economic superpower. We are the world's reserve currency. We weren't always the world's reserve currency. We only became the world's reserve currency after World War II, around 1944. And so generally, historically, the world's super power stays in power for around 100 or so years. You can plus or minus some decades, but around that time. We can't be the world's superpower forever, especially if we keep these types of spending habits. Now, we can extend our lifespan by learning to control our spending by working to balance our budget a little bit better by working to reduce our debt to GDP ratio. But if we just keep spending money free and freely, you know, eventually we're going to have more problems and we might not be the world's reserve currency forever. Now, when is that? Is it our lifetimes? I don't know. Is it this decade? Probably not. But eventually that change will come. Every empire comes to an end. Sears was the biggest retailer in the world. If you talk to somebody 30 years ago and said, "Well, what are your thoughts about sears?" Everybody would say, "Oh my God, it's the best. It's the biggest. It's the most profitable. It's the most amazing." Nobody would have thought that it was going to go bankrupt, but here we are today in this bankrupt. Amazon is not always going to be in business. It's going to rise. It's going to fall. Just like that every empire is going to have its up and is down. So how can people protect themselves? It goes back to exactly what we've been talking about. Owning investments is the way that you become wealthy. It's the way that you protect yourself. It's the way that you can hedge yourself against any financial downturn. Now, different investments have different values, but if you can have a truly a diversified portfolio, that's how you can protect yourself. Does a diversified portfolio need to be spread across multiple different brokerages? Or are you good just to pick one of them and then it's part for the course? By diversified portfolio, I mean diversified across different asset classes. So a lot of people think diversified means I'm going to own some blue chip funds, some international funds, some growth funds and dividend funds, but you're all invested in stocks. Diversified portfolio is I own stocks, I own some real estate. Maybe I own some crypto. Maybe I own some gold. That's a diversified portfolio when you own the different asset classes. What's wrong with owning 100% stocks? You're fully invested in paper assets, but let's just say that you own a world stock market index fund, the entire world, even though it's in stocks, couldn't you say that's still pretty well diversified? The total stock market fund, the Vanguard fund also goes down. So if you want to own assets that don't all go down at the same time, you have to own different asset classes. Take a look at the last 10 years. 2022, Bitcoin fell by around 60 ish percent. The stock market fell by around 20%. Housing market was booming. Gold prices were booming. 2020. The stock market fell by 30 some percent. Bitcoin prices fell. Housing prices went up. Gold prices went up. So when you start to understand that not all assets move in the same cycle, but all assets move in cycles, that's where having different asset classes can benefit. How is your personal portfolio broken down across different assets? I have five different assets. Number one is my own business, briefs finance. Number two is real estate. Number three is stocks. Number four is what I call speculative. This is me investing in startups and investing crypto. Number five is investing in gold. Gold's about 2% of a portfolio. And what are the percentages of the others? We take out the business, real estate's about 50% stocks, 30%, the speculative about 18% gold, 2%. What's in the speculative in the 18%? That's the crypto, and that is these startups that I invest in. Startups have not been a good investment for me. I haven't seen a return on my startups yet. Hopefully one day I will. Same with me. Yeah. It's tough for me. You know what's so funny is I got pitched grunts and didn't invest in that one. Everyone else I knew in the same funds, it's the same group of people who were just like said it not to do that one. That's the one that had a hundred X exit, a hundred X, a hundred. That's huge. And that's the one I didn't buy. Yeah. Just come on, man. Come on. Give me a break. So what's going to give me a break here, Jack? That's not the one that you didn't invest in. I'm sure there is. It is. I have passed up on text messages that say, hey, me too. And who needs a hundred X more? This guy. So we both missed out. That's fine. You guys are both doing good. You guys are both doing okay. We're doing okay. Anyway, your channel is doing amazing. The podcast is doing great. Sponsorships are booming. I think you guys just just flew out here in class. Staying at a nice hotel. You put us in the hotel. You put us in the class. Thank you. By the way, guys, this was by the way, I mean, taking a step outside of the podcast for a second. You put us in a phenomenal hotel, the Shinola hotel here in Detroit. I did not think it was going to be like I was amazed. There's literally an outside balcony. I have never in my entire life had a hotel with a balcony like an outside whatever you call that. Our hotel has a living room and two bathrooms. Yes. Two bathrooms in a hotel room. Did you use both of them? No. You should. And also you wrote or someone from your team wrote like inspirational quotes on our on our mirrors. We didn't even have to check in. This was like my wife's level service. So even at the airport, we show off. And it says Graham, Stefan, Jack, Selby. Well, I can't take the credit. I'll say that. Drey, thank you. Thank you to my entire team. Thank you. Yeah. Well, our team does an amazing job taking care of our guests because you know what? When I'll tell you why, when people come out to or when we invite people to Detroit, the first thing I say Detroit eight mile. What does that mean? And so we want people to say Detroit. I loved Detroit. And so I appreciate that and it's part of my culture too. We like to take care of our guests. And I really I can't take that credit. My team does an amazing job. They're out late taking care of everything. So I don't even know all that happened until you have told me. So thank you. But I am I'm trying to save you a little bit of money because in the text message, they said that we could put any like charges on the room or there's like a restaurant downstairs. I'm like, that's what I looked at the cost of a coffee $10. So I didn't do it. Well, thank you, Ram. I appreciate it. So if I could save money in any little one there, because you got enough here. When our employee Michael first came to us, he offered to run our ex account completely for free. And so we just kind of figured why not? Well, he ended up absolutely crushing it. And so we slowly started giving him more and more tasks. And now he's a full-time employee when you're hiring. It's always helpful to know who really wants the job. But you don't need unusual stunts. You just need your sponsor, Zippercruder. On Zippercruder, qualified candidates can add a personal note to tell you why they're interested in your job. So you can see the most motivated people right away. And right now you could try it for free at zippercruder.com/ich. And Zippercruder has a new feature that shows you the most interested, qualified candidates first so you meet the right people faster. It is no wonder Zippercruder is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Zippercruder makes it easy for amazing candidates to get your attention. Four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. So try it for free at zippercruder.com/ich. Again, that is zippercruder.com/ich. Meet your match on Zippercruder. I could save money in any little one there, because you got enough here. I appreciate it. Well, you know, you guys are doing an amazing job. Again, you know, for us it's we want to educate the world about finances because isn't it crazy that we all go to work every single day to earn money? But we're never taught about money. In fact, most people are actively avoiding the topic of money. I don't know if I told you guys this, but you know, my grand parents were refugees because my family is from a state in India called Punjab. In 1947, this state of Punjab was severed. And if you were a sick, which is the religion that I am, and you were on the west side, you had to migrate east. You were going to be so when that happened, my grandparents had to migrate east. And it wasn't like, you know, the luxurious migration like my grandfather had to sword in his hand and the shoes on his feet and the clothes on his back and that was it. During the process, he saw his, they got attacked by a mob. He saw his uncle get his hand in half. He put him on a horse. That was the last time he saw him. He made it to the new east side of Punjab. He lost his shoes along the way. It was barefoot. Didn't have a place to stay. Didn't have money to eat. And he talks about during that time, he said this in Punjabi, but the biggest disease is poorness, poverty. The reason why is in the sick religion, service, Sava is a core fundamental tenant. And he says during the time I saw so many hungry kids, kids that died from hunger in front of my eyes. I couldn't feed them. I couldn't even feed myself. And so when you have that level of poverty, You know, you want security. You want safety. My dad went through his own. There was other attacks that happened He went through his own stuff. You come to America and you go through this level of like insecurity All you want a security and so when you want security, what do you do? You want a safe secure job and this is what gets me so riled up as we were told that the safe secure job is You know getting a good degree. Yes, it can give you a good income But they didn't come by itself is not enough. If you want to actually become financially secure Just having a salary is not going to do it because what happens if you stop working? What happens if you want to stop working? What happens if you can't work? What happens if you lose your job? What happens if you get hit by a bus and your family needs an income? I mean, I don't want to be dire, but you know You have to start to think about these things and if your soul income relies on you working your one paycheck away from your family being broke Yet there are some people in this world that become incredibly wealthy and We don't understand how or why so we start to put these smoke screens at money is bad money is evil Don't talk about money, but the reality is we're insecure about money and when you're insecure about money You don't want to talk about your insecurities. They just put a smoke screen up above it. So we just don't talk about it But my goal is try to you know, I talk about sometimes things in a way that are income uncomfortable I do that deliberately because until you understand how this works You can't make a change and when you start to wake up now You can start learning and take that first step then you can start getting disciplined, right? And then you get to make that choice do you want the watch do you want the car do you want the freedom and most Americans today would rather look rich than be rich We have more Americans paying a thousand dollars a month on their car payment that ever before That was in dollars a month on your car. That's just the car payment. We're not talking about the insurance the oil changes the gas and How much investments do you have for many people it's nothing and so would you rather look rich with the escalate or whatever the BMW or do you want to be rich because if you want to be rich You got to sacrifice the BMW and the escalate for a little while and it goes back to that that confidence because guess what when I started to make a little bit of money I wanted the BMW. I wanted to look like I was rich when I started to make some serious money. I Don't care. So how do you feel that some people are confusing investing right now with gambling? Oh Your thoughts on prediction markets. Oh my god There's a few things I I don't like using the world word I hate but there's a few things I really really really dislike One is buy now pay later. The other is prediction markets. You know, I we talked about startup investments, right? I had a couple opportunities to invest in prediction market companies and Buy now pay later companies. Oh man I would have been made so much money on those investments, but I refused because I morely could not agree to invest in those things. Oh my god It's absurd. I'm trying to just Calm down so I can talk about this because it has got to the point you can go into call sheet or whatever You know there's out there and you can start to predict is the stock market going to open up tomorrow or down tomorrow You're telling me you're gonna bet on it instead of actually buying really bad thing. It's hedging. No, it's gambling It is setting you could hedge because if your portfolio is down, you could hedge that it's gonna open down and which is one hundred percent a gamble The way the way that it works One of the most popular bets on call sheet has been Bitcoin is Bitcoin gonna hit a hundred thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars a million dollars Whatever and I started to do the math. Why would anybody want to bet if Bitcoin is gonna hit us? This is called a million dollars instead of buying the Bitcoin because if you bought one Bitcoin, let's just say for a hundred thousand dollars and it went up to a million dollars The most you're gonna make is a nine hundred thousand dollar difference, but if you bet on it and you got it right You're not gonna make nine hundred thousand dollars. You can make ten twenty or even a hundred X that Which is more than even if I and I don't recommend this Going into debt to buy Bitcoin You're still not even gonna get the same returns than if you just went and gambled that money So you know what people are doing now? They're saying wow not only could I make these huge spreads on Bedding how about I go into debt to start betting and this is what I call phase three of the investment cycle phase one of the investment cycle is I want to buy an investment because I want to own the underlying asset. I want to buy Bitcoin because I like the Bitcoin I want to buy a stock because I like the underlying asset. I want to buy real estate because I like the underlying asset Phase two is I want more of that asset so I'm gonna leverage it up with debt I want to buy more stocks. I'm gonna use more margin. I want to buy more real estate I'm gonna do zero money down programs I'm gonna buy a lot of just as much debt as possible to buy that real estate same with cryptocurrency Then phase three. This is what we've seen happen with every bubble in history Is now it's the derivatives. It's not the debt. I am gambling on the derivative of the original asset if it stocks Phase one is I'm buying the stock because I like the underlying company. Phase two is I am using margin to buy the stock Phase three is forget the stock. I'm gonna gamble on the stock. I'm gonna buy these 4x futures on the stock which is now a derivative of a derivative so I can amplify my returns if I'm right You can take a look at every market crash in history We started to see these derivatives rise which was a key indicator that there was a burst coming Take a look at real estate when the 2008 housing market happened It wasn't because people were buying houses with no money down. I'm yeah, that contributed to it But the real downfall that led to the fall of Lehman Brothers and all the big firms on Wall Street Was now the derivatives was the I'm going in and I'm buying the derivative of the derivatives the CDOs the mortgage-back securities all that stuff That was happening there and then all the other derivatives on top of that is what caused the house of cards to fall even more And so now when we have these prediction markets which are booming people are now not buying the underlying asset They're not going into debt to buy the underlying asset They're going into debt to buy the derivative of the underlying asset because I can 100x my returns Is there ever a scenario where it makes sense to take on margin? I don't recommend it. I'm sure there is people have gotten rich with it So absolutely there are I don't recommend it. We've spoken with two people on the past who say that mathematically It's best to buy a two x leveraged S&P 500 index fund And if you're young and can write out the volatility and keep buying over enough time You'll see outsized returns the math Doesn't always math for people we could say hey look Just buy and hold an investment But how many people sell when markets go down? Why is you talked about the S&P 500 The S&P 500 is averaged about 10 ish per cent a year for the last 100 years the NASDAQ 100 has averaged 14 15 per cent a year maybe a little bit more since inception Well, why don't people buy QQQ instead of the S&P 500? I know people do but talk about the average person because QQQ the NASDAQ 100 goes down way more when markets go down And that volatility is hard for the average person and so yeah We can always talk about math the numbers math the numbers don't always add up to success a love Dave Ramsey One of the things that Dave Ramsey always talks about the money is just as much psychology as it is math Which is why he preaches was called the debt snowball which is a payoff the lowest debts first as opposed to the debt avalanche Which is paying off the highest interest rate debts first the math says you're gonna save money to pay off the highest interest rate debts first But according to him you're gonna get out of debt faster if you actually just stay consistent with paying off your debt And if you stay consistent the way you do that is just by getting the small wins for money How much of it is psychological versus mathematical if you were to give a ranking or a percentage based on this so friend of mine Is a very successful is a trader also an investor, but he made his money through trading and I There's very few people that I can actually say that for because I don't really know anybody who made money from trading except one guy And what he tells me is it's 50% psychological 50% mathematical and What's interesting is he tries to teach the psychology of investing? Yes, I yeah, you know what sucks about it nobody pays attention Nobody cares about the psychology investing We just look at the numbers because we want to buy it for a hundred and sell it for a thousand But we don't understand the psychology associate it with it, which is why the best investors are often dead people Because dead people don't sell what I try to do is teach like I wrote a whole ebook on this called always be buying a BB and the idea is with This idea always be buying you get a buy when markets are up buy when markets are down you buy when markets are sideways You buy when there's a Republican in the White House, you buy when there's a Democrat you buy when there's raining you buy when there's sunny you buy no matter what and that Has been proven to win historically you talked about a spectrum right you got less like bell curve Some people just got to get their money in order and start investing in the S&P 500 Then there's a person that says okay, you know what the S&P 500 is cool But I want to do a little bit more because if I can get slightly better gains I can have significantly more wealth This is what we focus in on a briefs finance the whole idea of For the person that wants to be a little bit more involved to get slightly better gains How can you lead to more wealth because if you invest $500 a month for 30 years get a 10% return? You're gonna retire with just under a million dollars not bad Do you only problem this because of the rising cost? of living that million dollars might not be enough. So what can you do? Well, if you got not 20% returns or 15% returns, but let's just say 13% average returns, which is 100% possible. You do the same $500 a month. At just 13% a year, you don't invest another dollar. You don't have to save another penny. You don't have to work another job. You're just investing the same amount of money getting slightly better returns. Now you're not going to have a million dollars or 1.5 million. You're going to have over $1.7 million. You're going to have over $750,000 more just because you got slightly better returns. Not for everybody, but for somebody who wants a little bit more risk, that is an option. So would you then argue that markets are not perfectly efficient? And if you are an astute and disciplined investor, you can beat the markets. Many people do. Not everybody. Most people don't, but many people do. What do you think, Graham? I think such a small percentage of people out there could do it consistently, but I think there's also a lot of just bias that if you have, let's say a million people all throwing darts and you tell those people that they could predict where they throw the dart and all this sort of stuff out of enough people, there's going to be like 20 people who are just like consistently correct. Same thing if you say like, can you predict red or black 30 times in a row? Like statistically, it's so impossible. But with a billion people, all this guessing, you're going to have someone who just like gets it right. And I'll be like, Oh, no, I just knew I felt it. You know what I always thought is if you split up the world into two single file lines, and then you made each of them do rock paper scissors and you and everyone competed against everyone. There would be one person who's going to win rock paper scissors. Like, you know, however many times in a row, 10,000 times in a row. But the different statistically paper scissors and investing is you can have a system for investing. You could have a system for rock paper scissors would be that I looked in his eyes. Well here's the picture. They're a little shifty. And or if they do rock, then they're more likely to do paper afterwards and like do enough calculations basic because there is blue, you know, a strategy for playing rock paper. I'm sure there is. And so the people that understand that strategy are going to win, right? So beat me. So you just wow. Yeah. I was showing. See, you had not to do. You have and mastered the strategy yet. Yeah. But if you understand the strategy or a strategy, you have a better shot. You can't guarantee anything, but you have a better shot. And when you look look for slightly better returns, it becomes a lot more accessible than trying to shoot for 20% returns. Because what we do here is we are actively looking for what we call a shift in market shift. Where is money moving? And we like to do what's called boots on the ground, which is trying to get information from the people that are actually doing the thing. So we're ahead of investing research. When we heard the news that President Trump signed a new executive order on drones. And what we did, we went to drone facilities, talking to drone executives to understand where is a drone market moving to find investment opportunities. And we're very well for us. Everybody's talking about SpaceX in 2026. You know what's funny, but SpaceX everybody's talking about it after hits the news because that's unfortunately, how most people invest. They are reactionary. They invest after it's on the news, but by the time it's on the news, a lot of the real money has been made. Well, here's what's interesting, but we noticed is in 2025, President Trump signed two executive orders. Well, one executive order and a new tax bill. One of the executive orders was allocating more money towards space exploration. That was interesting. Then the tax bill, the one big beautiful bill act, we know it cut taxes for a lot of people. You know what I also did. It allocated more money towards space. So we looked into that, my investment research head, and then we published a report on why we are starting to buy space investments. Those space investments went up in 2025, but they boomed going up to 2026 with the whole SpaceX thing. And then we saw what happened to SpaceX, but it was understanding where the money is moving before hits the news. That's research. That's the system when everybody else is doing is they invest based off of news. When the tariffs hit, I mean, I got endless stories when tariffs hit, you know what everybody did. They panicked. Do you want to know what Wall Street did? They started moving the money. They were buying the global supply chain. Things in the Panama Canal, they were buying different types of things where where money is going to move because they knew the global shipping was going to change. We saw that we saw Wall Street firms were moving billions of dollars into these new supply chain and shipping companies. We found that we published that as a report to say, hey, this is what's happening. They ended up being a great investment. We're not right on everything. Sometimes we're wrong. Sometimes we're early. Sometimes we're right. But the idea is when you have a system, when you have research, when you have something, it can help you get a better chance of being right. Can't guarantee it. You can have the best rock, paper, scissors system and still be wrong because I want to percent guess something. But the idea is if you're just trying to do a little bit better and you have a true system and you know what you're following. If you're trying to find the money, you try to take the emotions out. Now you have a better chance to get slightly better returns. And if you can get slightly better returns, it can lead to significantly more wealth. So what are the best opportunities that you're seeing today that the market's not pricing yet? Here's what we do. Or at least my head of investing research. I'm going to take his quote here. So the gold rush happened, right? Gold rush was everybody wants to go and dig up the next gold. The people that got rich was the people that were selling the picks and shovels. Because everybody needed a pick and shovel, right? To dig up the gold. But what we try to do is we do the iron ore and lumber investing, which is the picks and shovels actually need lumber and they need the iron in order to produce the picks and shovels. So it's taken one layer deeper. So that's how we try to do is we try to look a couple layers deeper to find those types of opportunities. And so he was just in Brazil going into certain mines over there looking at how certain metals are pulled out of the ground because critical minerals are a big shift in our economy. There's a couple of reasons why. Number one is we have a trade war going on with China. President Trump put on huge tariffs on China. China has been the world's producer of certain metals. The idea is we need these metals in order to run our economy. And China is the only producer of them. But we did not know in the United States was how reliant we are. We were on China. How do I know that? Because United States Congress had a congressional summit. We were invited there. My head of investor researchers sitting there, as they said, we did not realize how much our defense systems, meaning our missiles, needed minerals from China. So now we're trying to rebuild our supply chain. So now the United States government is investing billions of dollars to rebuild this supply chain of metals and minerals, which means more money, right? Because as an investor, you want to invest where the money is moving. The biggest spender in our economy is that you or me, it's not in video or SpaceX is the United States government. So now the government is investing huge sums of money to build this new supply chain of metals and minerals. And we're trying to identify where they're going to do it. The other problem is certain metals and minerals are seeing a decreasing supply, or at least decreasing easily accessible supply, which means we could be seeing shortages of certain minerals. Because we need these in order to produce missiles and our defense stuff, but we also need it for iPhones. We also need it for AI and data centers. So we know how big of, you know, a thing AI is. It's not just in the United States. China wants to beat the United States and AI. The UAE, Dubai wants to beat the United States and AI. I mean, the whole world is trying to invest in AI. It's not just the United States. These data centers need more metals and minerals. For example, helium. What do we think of helium? That's what goes in balloons, right? Yeah. We know what else helium is used for is used to cool down semiconductors because data centers get really hot. Okay, that's cool. Well, you know, producing helium, there's not like a, we can't just get more, I mean, there's a limited supply of it. And you know what else happened? Because of this war in the Middle East, a big producer of helium and Qatar was bombed. That means the production of helium is going to get hurt. Now, when are we going to see that in the economy at some point? Which means while producing those semiconductor chips could become a little bit more expensive. And so when you start to understand these types of things, now you can start to do that again, research, have a system to understand where the money is moving. But again, we have full-time people that this is all they do. That's what gives us an edge. The average person is just trying to buy stocks to hear about on CNBC or Reddit or now chat GPT. Again, I love AI. But AI is only as powerful as the information AI has. And AI only has the information that's publicly available on the internet. But we're trying to go and get boots on the ground to get more information out to guarantee returns. But to improve our odds of getting returns because that's what we publish to our investors. It's like, where do we see these opportunities? So Jack wants to know what stock to buy. I don't know. I can't tell you what stock to buy. I mean, I don't want to know. Jack, what I want you to do is I'm going to set you up with Jack's nowhere there and he's going to walk you through because it depends. And here's what I'm saying. I don't know. Because if I give you a stock pick, there's a lot more to it than just me telling you what stock you should buy. Because what's a good stock for me may not be a good stock for you. because number one, we have three types of investors, there's. Growth investors, income investors, wealth preservation investors. - And then there's jack. - And then there's jackers. And there's gamblers, right? - There's zero day out of the money call options. - Growth investors are gonna have different types of opportunities. Income investors are gonna have different types of opportunities because they want cash flow. Well, the preservation investors, the people that have a couple million dollars or more, and we just don't wanna lose our money, they have different opportunities. So when people say, what's not shit up by, oh my God, it's like, you can't answer that question because there's so much that goes into it, what's the risk tolerance? How do you wanna make money? How long do you wanna hold? And so this is where I can't tell you what to buy, but I can give you the research depending on where it is you are as an investor to start looking and researching. That's what we do. We're not here to tell you what to buy. We're here to show you where the opportunities are, depending on what type of investor you are, and then you can go out and make that decision for yourself because I like income. I like cash flow. It sounds like you don't. So we're gonna, you know, because here's the thing, right? You might think Nvidia's a great stock. I don't wanna buy Nvidia. They're cash flow sucks. And so that's why what your goal is as an investor is gonna help dictate your investing decisions. But now we gotta, let's go back to the spectrum we were talking about, right? Not everybody needs to do this, but everybody just got to get started. And you can just start with the S&P 500, it's great. But then maybe you wanna graduate to the next thing and the next thing, maybe you want some real estate, maybe you want some other stuff, but you gotta understand where you are because ultimately there's three things I will determine how well do you become. TMR, time, money, returns. Time is how long your money has to grow. The longer you invest your money, the wealthier you're going to become. So you can either start investing last year, which unfortunately I don't think you can do, or you can invest for an extra five years, meaning you hold off on retirement. That's one option. You can work until 70 or 75 instead of 65. Option number two is you can invest for money. So Jack on the side, you can start driving Uber, in addition to doing the podcast. That's an option you can have more money to invest more, or you can grow your business, or whatever it is you want to make more money, but you have to put more money into your investments. You can also live smaller. Option number three, if those two are not enough, is you can improve your returns. And if you want to improve your returns, you have to take on some additional risk. And you have to see now where on this spectrum of TMR you are, to see how much wealthy you need to be able to be free, wealthy, rich, secure, whatever your definition of, or goal you want is, but you're going to need some amount of money. Go to our website, briefs.co, and you can find calculators there, just plug in the numbers and see, do you have enough time to become wealthy? Are you investing enough money, or are you getting enough returns? When does someone have enough money? And is there an amount that you say that they should shift from growth to preservation? I don't give recommendations, but here's how you could think about it. Wealth as a growth investor is relatively simple. It's the 4% rule. But this is what many people have followed. You might want to adjust it for whatever you are. The idea of being, if you have a million dollars of assets, you can live off of 4% of that $40,000. Is that enough for you? Because what many financial advisors say is, if you can live off of 4% of your investments, you can just sell that and live off of that and you are wealthy. That's not my goal. I don't like that. I like cash flow. What's the definition of wealth as a cash flow investor? Your income exceeds your expenses. If your expenses are $5,000 a month, and you're making $5,100 a month, passively from your investments, you are wealthy, because they don't have to sell your investments, and your income is paying for your expenses, and now you are free. As the wealth preservation investor, there's a little bit different. The idea here is you just don't want to lose your money when the next market crash happens. - What do you think, Graham? - I think probably $10 million is an amount that most people, I think, could be insulated from a lot of things. I'm talking like medical issues, family emergencies, expenses, while still living practically anywhere they want in the United States within a reason. Like not driving rules, Royces and Bentley's and Lambos, but like having a pretty decent house. - But I want a Bentley and a Lambo. So how is that enough for me? - Then I would say you probably need a little more. $10 million plus, you know, that's true. - But what if I just want to live in Guatemala and live in a small shack with a Bentley? - This is me with a, with a, with a, - Well, defensive, it's a GTC. It depends if it's supercharged, if you got the Moliner package. I mean, there's a lot of-- - That's a really good point. - Personal finance is personal. That's why, you know, you can say 10 million, it's cool, makes a good sound clip. The end of the day, it really depends. Personal finance is personal. For some people, 10 million is like, oh my God, I'm gonna live free for the rest of my life, for other people, 10 million dollars. I can't afford my private jet for one year with 10 million dollars. So figure out where you want to be and TMR, calculate what is real wealth for you. - But do you think some people get into some would of like a money trap, a psychological money trap where they're in pursuit of money, they reach an amount that any reasonable person like would be satisfied with with their goals. And yet they continue to push. - 100% sub the conscious sort of thing. - Why did Warren Buffett continue working when he had more money than almost everybody in the world? - One could argue he wasn't working for money. - He wasn't. 100% he wasn't working for money. He was working because he loved what he did. He was fulfilling for him. Some people play the game. It's a business, business is a game. Some people enjoy it. And so at some point you become really delusional and it's not about the money. Really there is a point and maybe it is 10 million dollars. If you're working beyond 10 million dollars, it's probably because you're a little bit delusional and you're not doing it for the money, you're doing it because you love the game. You like business, business is a sport. You play sports when you're young, would you play? - Play baseball, basketball, soccer, ping pong. - Ping pong? - Well, I mean. - Frisbee, Frisbee. I roller-bladed, I like ping pong. - We got a ping pong team, we might have to set that up. - Yeah, it's fucking nice one. - Did you like the competition? - I honestly love the competition. I love losing. - Okay, why'd you like losing? - Because I feel like I can try as hard as I can, like I feel challenged. - You feel challenged? - Yeah. - So now imagine this, you never lost. You're so good. - Yeah, that's not very fun at all. - It's not very fun. - I go to Lifetime Fitness in Vegas, maybe I shouldn't, but I go to Lifetime Fitness in Vegas, and there's a few of them, so. - And I, well, there's two. And I absolutely obliterate every single person there, and this is not like, probably myself out. - It's like working out. - What? - Working out? - No, no, pick them all. They have a pick them all over there. - Oh, I thought you meant like lifting weights. - Why are you so shocked to justify what I said I would? - Because I see some like bodybuilders. - Yeah, well, you know, I'm, you know, it's a bit of a-- - Well, put you on the deadlift in our office. We got a little jender. - Yeah, my back's hurt a little bit right now. Save it for later. But I go there, and I play pickleball with these people, but these are like very casual players. I'm not a very casual player, like I want to win. And it's not fun. Because I'll go, I'll want to play for a while. I'll end up playing one game and leave. - I learned this the hard way, but when I was first, like under the hunt for money, I was chasing money. And, you know, I went through some hard things in my life where I realized money isn't what it's about. Money is one part of life. If you really wanted to be happy and fulfilled, and that means you have to be physically fit, mentally fit, spiritually fit, and financially fit. I called this my quadrifit theory. Physically fit because, you know, you want to look good in the gym, but also you just don't want to be sick, you don't want to be unhealthy, you want to feel good. Mentally fit because you don't want to be surrounded by toxic people and, you know, to people that are constantly bringing you down and very negative and just draining your happiness. Then you're spiritually fit. This is not about being religious. This is about your purpose. And I want you to remember what I just said here, about your purpose. Because if your purpose is making money, if you wake up with $10 million, you're gonna feel so miserable. Because now why do you need to get out of bed? More money? What is more money going to do? You need a purpose. You need a reason to get out of bed every single day. Then there's financially fit, which is you want to be financially free. You want to have money so you can do more of the things that you love and take care of the people around you. When I started briefs finance, I didn't do it because I needed the money. And this is like one of the things that you can grant. You were asking me, what was my goal? Do I want to get acquired or whatever? The reason I'm not after an acquisition, and I don't want to say never, say never. But the reason why we haven't sold, we're not after an acquisition, is because I started this because of a mission. I want to help me 15 years ago, 20 years ago. When I started the company, this is the first year I took a salary out of the company. This is the first year I took a dollar out of the company. Not a profit. I'm talking about anything as a salary. Now I'm just paying myself. $5,000 a month. I am the lowest paid employee on payroll. Why? Because I'm not doing it because I need the money. I'm sure it's worth a lot of money, okay? But I don't, that's not my motivator. If I didn't have briefs finest, I would be just fine. I do it because I want to. I do it because I need to. If I just wanted to make money, I would probably just go out and sell a 15 to $25,000 coaching program on how you can build your investments and just sell that on YouTube. Because I could probably sell a good amount of them and live on a beach and just do that. But guess what? Spiritually, I'd probably feel really empty because I'm not fulfilled. And so you talk about money and the motivator it dude when you're when you're struggling with money, money can be a motivator 100%. And I hate when people say, "Oh, don't work for money. Money is out of motivator." You become so out of touch because when you're struggling with money, money is a motivator. When your parents are sick, money is a motivator. When your kids are sick, there's wife wants a vacation. Money is a motivator to get out of the hole. But after you become free, a second or third Lamborghini is out of motivator. But that spiritual fitness is a motivator. And often times money follows. It's like a, it's like the score. You want to win. You do it for the competitiveness. You do it because there's a purpose behind it. You do it because of something deeper. And that's what gets you excited. I am excited to work. Why do I drive to come here? Why do I work every single day so hard? I love it. It's fun for me. I enjoy it. We're making a difference in people's lives. That's what I want to do. And I think about like, what would I do if I were to retire, quote unquote, "retire"? I want to be bored. So when you actually hit that point, how do you make sure you protect your money? I know you're talking before about maybe setting up trusts or LLCs or maybe having really good insurance. Yeah. So this is what I call the big rate phase. There's two parts to this. The first is you want to be great for yourself and your family, but protecting your assets. The other is big rate for your community by also giving back because I believe the more you have, the more you can give. Giving can be money. It can be time. Knowledge, which you should give. Now how do you protect your assets? The first thing is understanding now how our economic system works. I don't own anything in my name. I don't own a house. I don't own a business. I don't own a rental properties. Just pretty thing is not the owner of them. It is the entities that are the owner of them. Why? I told you by my first rental property. Well, I told you kind of the sunshine and rabos part of it. There's a stormy part of that story as well, which is I brought in a nightmare tenant because I didn't work in my property manager. I just put out an ad on what was it called? The Craigslist. Craigslist. And I just found the first tenant without qualifying them. Which is what I wanted. Yeah, well, hopefully it worked well for you. No. No, I had to evict them. They trashed my house. Yeah. You got off easy. So they were a nightmare tenant. I was 19. I was getting calls every day about, oh, I was cutting cucumbers on the countertop. And I without a cutting board and I scratched the countertop. I need a new countertop right now. The place is a dump, it's a mess. I renovated everything. I'll put a new countertop. I don't know what I was supposed to do. Oh my God, I think something's wrong with the electrical. I think the house is about to go up and flames. You need to get here right now. Bring the fire department, bring an electrician. I'm freaking out. I get my electrician or I get a electrician. We drive up to that property. The condo right away, find out that a light bulb had fused. All this stuff goes on and on and on. Eventually they decide to leave. We get a new tenant, everything is good. I'm like 22 years old now or something. And I get a packet delivered to me, saying you're being sued. What? The tenant slipped and fell in your bathtub because the tub was too slippery when the water was on. So they want damages. What? I didn't understand. They used one of those, you know, free attorneys that you can go through whatever. Well we found out through all the stuff that they actually sipped and fell out of friends barbecue. But we're trying to come after the quote unquote rich landlord. I'm like a young 20-some kid. I don't have any extra money. How did you find out they slipped at the barbecue? By the way, really quick. I just want to pop in and say that we were talking to Jispreet after filming this episode and he was telling us about his upcoming live stream that he's doing. And we just liked it so much that we decided to actually partner up with him on this. So on September 29th, he is running a free live workshop about how to profit from the falling dollar and also some of the most common investing mistakes that people are making and just a market like this, which is crazy. Again, it's totally free September 29th and there are two time slots. You could join either at 10.30 in the morning or 8 p.m. Eastern. So if you've enjoyed the podcast so far and you want to hear more, just click the link down below in the description to reserve your spots. What's going on in the market right now is just absolutely insane. So this should provide a little more context. Again, it is totally free. We just genuinely like what he is doing and we think it could be a value. So again, the link is down below in the description to sign up, reserve your spot, totally free, enjoy. Now let's get back to the episode. I had hired a better property manager after I hired the first one. There was a chip in the bathtub about a size of a quarter and they made a complaint about it so they sent a contractor to go fix it. The contractor goes or they said, "Oh, the husband slipped and fell at a barbecue. We can't come right now." So my property manager documented it. They go back. Always still recovering from the slip at the barbecue documented. Third time, you know, we don't want it anymore documented. So we had this documentation. We then aligned that with their health records, turns out, "Oh, it was the slip at the barbecue that caused the slip, not a slip in the bathtub." In any case, it was an insurance thing, but do you know what else? I didn't own the property. The property was owned by an entity and when a property is owned by an entity, the most that somebody could take is whatever is inside the entity. They can't come after my personal assets because I don't own it. The entity does. You're creating a new human. So you want to get a good attorney who can help you build these types of entities. The second thing is you want to get a good tax accountant, maybe a good tax attorney. Your biggest expense, as you start to become wealthier, is probably not going to be what you think it is. It'll probably be taxes because you're paying taxes as soon as you earn the money. But the tax code, and I can show you, it's in the office, about 2,000 pages long of the tax code. The tax code is not what your tax brackets are. That's like one paragraph in the 2,000-some pages. It's the deductions, the write-offs, the loopholes, that the people who can get the good accountants get a good attorney's can actually use. So learn how to use the tax code to your advantage because it is a rule book that allows some people to pay less money in taxes 100% legally. We're talking about real estate before. The reason why so many wealthy people love investing in real estate, isn't just because of the cash flow, it's because of the tax breaks. You can make a lot of money in real estate and pay little to $0.00 in taxes 100% legally through the tax write-offs that are allowed there. A lot of people think about, oh, the only way to get tax-free wealth is a 401k or IRA. I don't have a 401k, I don't have an IRA. To me, I don't like the control that I get from it because I can't access my money, but I can use real estate to grow my wealth tax-free because there's something called the 1031 exchange, which says I have a buy-a-property for let's say $100,000. It goes up in value to $200,000. I can sell it, take that $100,000 of profit, pay $0.00 in taxes by a new property for $200,000. More cash flow, more write-offs, and I can do that again and again and again as long as I hold a property for at least a year. Now, it's not so simple, but you want to have a good accountant who can help you with that. This is where now having a good accountant to understand the tax law can help you. Understand I can pay less money in taxes, then you need to think about a state planning. Get yourself a good estate planning attorney, a will, a trust, you know, for some people a will is better, for some people a trust is better, for some people you need both. Personal finance is personal, get an attorney who's going to help you because the last person you want to decide where your money is going to go is the government, is housing still a good investment? 100%. It's just like the stock market. The stock market is at an all-time high, is it still a good investment? Absolutely. We could see the housing market go down, we could see it go up more. But my game in real estate is not to see prices go up. That's icing on the cake. If it happens great, my goal is cash flow. Please read, Jack, you're going to love it. You can do the math. You can see how much am I going to pay for the property? What is my cost? What are my expenses? What is my income going to look like? And you can predict this much better than you can predict the price of a Pokemon card or predict the price of Bitcoin or a call sheet prediction because now you can do the math to understand what is the rental market in the area? And you can put in a little factor for you being wrong. You can even add a little kind of line item and now you can see, well, I am anticipated to make, you know, 100 dollars a month of cash flow. Now you can start to predict that much better. What's your yield do you go after when you buy a property? Is it 10% to 12% like what's your cash on cash return or what's the net return you look for at a property? I don't look for net return. I look for cash on cash return. Let me explain the difference and I'll explain how much. When people think net return, they think, okay, I bought this property for $100,000. I'm generating, let's just say $100 a month in profit and then it goes in the value to $200,000. So net return is, you know, the $100 a month plus the growth in the property value. I don't care about that growth in property value. Yeah, it's nice, but that's not how I'm basing my investments because that's gambling to me. That's speculation. There's a chance that it goes up in value. There's a chance it stays the same. There's a chance it goes down, I can't predict that increase in appreciation, but I can calculate how much cash will I'm going to get. So when I think of my investment philosophy, I look for cash on cash return, which is If I'm gonna invest $100,000 today, how much cash flow is gonna come out and come into my pocket? I look for 7%. So if I invest $100,000 today, $7,000 a year of profit after it expenses, hits my bank account. - Now, you could argue that let's just say it's 7%. Couldn't you focus that exact same time on your business and make way more than what you would earn from a property? And I understand it's maybe not apples to apples here and that the property's a bit passive. But I look at my own portfolio and I think, oh man, if I borrow it this and I buy this, I could make this. Or if I just spend a little more time doing better at the business, I could just make triple that. - You're 100% right. My business is gonna grow a lot faster than 7% a year. But diversification of assets. So you just build a system. The business makes some money. Some of the money is gonna go back in growth, back into the business. Some of the money is gonna go for savings. Some of the money's gonna be invested. We talked to about 75, 15, 10. So the business is gonna have its own system. The money's gonna come in from my investments. I'm gonna invest some in real estate. I'm gonna invest some in stocks. I'm gonna invest some smaller places. So you just build systems for how you're gonna to use your money. - How do you make sure you're not distracted when you buy a property from taking your eye off the business? - You don't wanna chase the shiny object, but for me real estate is passive. I have a great management team. It took me more than a decade to build it. And when I'm in the business, I'm spending my time in the business. I mean, you have to figure out that time for you. I spend a lot of time in my business and a lot less time on my real estate. - What are you buying in real estate? Are you buying apartment buildings? Houses? - Yep. - Residential. - You get that comment on YouTube. I was like, what should I start with? Real estate, stocks, crypto. Look for the opportunity. And be an opportunist. If you see an opportunity with a stock market where it'd fall by 50% tomorrow, I'm not gonna say, oh, most investment money at real estate, I can't detest in the stock market. There's the opportunity. If I see an opportunity to invest in something else, I will invest in that. And you know, it's wherever your knowledge is. Like I damn it invest in self-storage. If I found the time and I saw an opportunity, yeah, maybe it would because it was fun to learn new things. But I've never done that before. I've never done hotels. I've never done commercial. Minus one mixed use building. But that's, you know, it's just wherever you see your knowledge and then where you have the time to learn. Do you have an investing belief that people would disagree with? - I'm sure I have many. Number one, I invest in stocks. Robert Kiyosaki hates that. Number two, I invest in real estate. A lot of people hate that. Number three, I have some crypto. Warren Buffett would hate that. But invest in what you understand. Now the speculative is what I don't fully understand. I haven't really made any money with my startups. But I want to, so I'm gonna keep doing it because I see the opportunity there. Just, you gotta do what you believe in. I have a friend. He is a great investor in cars. I don't believe investing in cars. I think cars are stupid liability to blow your money on when you don't have it. You've obviously never owned a Ferrari Scooteria. - I haven't. - No, and it shows. - Yeah, you're right. But I believe it's a stupid investment. It's a liability that loses value. I'm not against buying a nice car. If you can afford it. I'm not against buying a new car. If you can afford it, it's like buying first class. Go ahead, do it. But I am not a huge fan of the idea of investing in cars. I got a friend. He's got a like a car shop. He buys broken up cars, fixes them, sells them for a profit. I would never do that. I don't know how to do that. I don't want to do that. But he makes a great living doing it. - What's the best investment you've ever made? - Myself. What was the specific thing that you did to invest in yourself? - I spent a lot of time learning. I didn't grow up learning about investing. I didn't grow up learning about entrepreneurship. So I started by reading books. I actually started by listening to audio CDs, then I read books, then I bought classes, coaching, hiring smart people. This is what I call financial tuition. So we talked about formal education. You know, your formal tuition. Financial tuition is the cost you pay to learn, the money side of things. But do you want to know the best lessons? It wasn't my books or the courses of the coaching. It was the mistakes I made. I have made so many expensive mistakes. I made more mistakes than more people have even started. I made so many expensive mistakes. I made so many mistakes in real estate. I made so many mistakes in business. I made so many mistakes on YouTube. I made so many mistakes and some of them are extremely costly. Financially costly, mentally costly. They cost me sleep sometimes. But you learn way more from your mistakes than you do your successes. And people will definitely judge you and hate on you for your mistakes. And Sarah Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx. I heard her say this one time and it really resonated with me that when she was a kid, her dad used to ask her, where did you screw up at today? Not what did you do good at? What did you win at? What did you make a mistake in? To encourage you to make mistakes. Because if you can make mistakes, you are going to be willing to become more successful. So you got to be willing to make those mistakes. You got to be willing to screw up and you got to be willing to do it again and again and again because you don't know the right path. But you can get there by trying all the wrong paths. And you don't know how many wrong paths you're going to have to take to get there. I take 10 and I take 15 and I take 100. But you got to keep screwing up in order to get there. What do you do outside of making money? Because I've never really heard you talk about family hobbies, vacations, what you do like spare time. I'm a huge family guy. So I have a pretty big family. And I like spending time with my family and friends. I like working out me too. Now we heard that you work out wearing that. Like you just take your jacket off and you know, like, lift what is it through? We have a little gym in the office, right? We took one of our conference rooms and turned that into a gym because one complaint that I had was we worked so much. I don't have time to work out. So we brought the gym into the office. And yeah, I mean, sometimes you're just walking between one meeting to the other and you just do a bench press set. I enjoy it. It's fun for me. It's the competition and I enjoy just, I enjoy lifting. But you wear that shirt if you're lifting. Well, I mean, we'll see. I'll turn it. I'm going to take 10 minutes to change my clothes at 10 minutes. It's maybe you have an undershirt on. And you just take this off and yeah. Yeah, sometimes if I have like enough time, like if I have a 30 minute break, then sure I'll take 30 minutes to do that. But if I got like a minute and a half, I'm just going to go drop a set and go into my next meeting. So yeah, I like working out. I like, I do enjoy traveling now. I didn't grow up traveling that much. Traveling for me was going to India to visit family. Now I've been able to travel a lot more. And thankfully my business and work in YouTube has allowed me to travel a lot more. I've traveled to you guys's house too. And Vegas, Vegas is so beautiful. I like eating. I'm a big food guy. Food is like like what's your favorite dish? I love Indian food. Okay. Indian food is like my favorite. But I like Jamaican food. Well, I like, I can't even think of one food that I don't like. I love sushi. Like sushi. This is not, there's really nothing. I loved, I grow tomatoes, man. I love gardening. I have a pretty big garden in my backyard. I got tomatoes, I got eggplants. I got okra. I love melon. I'd love to see a garden tour. Yeah. I start a second channel. I do a garden. I love gardening, dude. Like, you know, I love being in the sun. I hate running. I like sprinting though. But I do run just for the pushing of it. I like being out in the sun and running in the sun when it's hot outside and the sun's beating on you. To me, that just feels so good. So yeah, I mean, I like, there's very few things that I don't like olives. I used to not like olives. I love olives. But now I'm becoming okay with olives. Okay, good. I've kind of, at the moment. The green ones are the black ones. Both. They're okay now. I used to hate them both. But, you know, it's a very few things that don't. It's a strong word. That's what I'm saying. But there's very few things I don't like. If you say, you know what? Let's go grab some chocolate milk and walk around the city. I'm gonna say, let's do it. Okay. I'll show you the best chocolate milk and Detroit. And we're going to go have some fun. And in terms of not drinking, have you ever had a sip of it? I don't drink. Is it more of a religious or is it personal? Start it off religious. Okay. 100%. And then it became personal because somebody made a bet with me in college. He said, "I bet you $5 that you're gonna start drinking before you graduate, refreshment here." Yeah. I said, "You're on." So, he never paid me that $5. I never drank. And then it became a business thing because I was in the party business. And one of the guys I was working with said, you know, just a piece of advice, don't drink. What happens to party promoters who drink is they use a very vulgar word, but you essentially pee away all your profits. I was like, okay, that makes sense. So I just, I never got into it. And then I saw like, it changes the way you think and how you act. Like, why would I want to ever be in that state of like not being me? Because you know, why do people drink? They're not confident a lot of times. It's like, I need to drink. People would say, I need to drink so I can feel more open and loose. Oh my God. I mean, I feel open and loose, right, all day and all. Right. See, I don't need to drink to do that. I can have fun. Like, we have Nerf guns. Everybody's got a Nerf gun in the office. I don't like having boring stuff. I'm a, you know, I'm pretty serious on YouTube myself, but, you know, I'm a pretty goofy guy in that sense. Like, you're not going to hurt my feelings if you make a joke about me. On the topic of a religion, you said you're a Sikh. - Yeah, it's pronounced sick. - Sick, S-I-K-H. - S-I-K-H. So I'm curious with the head. - Turban, yeah. - So when are you supposed to wear it and when are you allowed to take it off? - You're supposed to wear it all the time, especially when you go out. So turban is what many people call it. In our religion, there's a lot of ways you can call it. A buggerty, short per bug, or the star, it's a head covering. They come in many different shapes and sizes. You've got smaller ones, you'll see kids wearing smaller ones. When I'm home, I'll have a smaller one on from traveling, sometimes they wear a smaller one. There's a lot of variation shape sizes. A lot of common questions is number one, does the color matter? No, you wear whatever color you want. A question I would get asked as a kid a lot was, is that your brain inside of there? No, it's your hair because we're not supposed to cut our hair. And so it's there to cover our hair. And the reason why we wear it is actually, it's like a identification. So the sick religion was born out of essentially conflict. And there was a lot of conflict that used to happen between different religions, different castes. And the idea was six are supposed to be protectors for people that cannot protect and defend themselves. So how can you identify a sick? One easy way is through the turban, or another one is right here. This is called a cara, it's a bracelet. So wait to identify a sick. So if you needed help, you can reach out to a sick and they're supposed to help you. By nature, we're supposed to be defenders. Are you born into that? Or is it something that you run with age? Like is it something where it's like your parents were sick? And that makes you sick. I can't speak for other people, but I was born into the religion. And my grandparents were very religious and they taught me a lot about it. I lived with my grandparents growing up. So they lived in our house. And so they taught me about it. Then as I got older, I kind of, for a little period of time, I drifted away. And then I started learning myself more about it. And I said, you know, this is something that I really like and respect, because it's as much of like, you know, defending as it is about a philosophy, a way of life. What's the main philosophical point that speaks to you? That attracted you back to being a sick? There's three core elements. Namjapo, vandshako, girthkaro. Namjapo means remember God. Vandshako means serve others before you serve yourself. Girthkaro means earn an honest living. And those, that's the core pillars, philosophy of the sick religion. Service is a big element of it to be able to want to make the world a better place. I'll give you an example. So I talked about, I'll make a business example. It briefs finance. We want to help people start investing, come investors, get better investments. Obviously, we can't guarantee anything, but we are on a mission to help 1.3 billion people be better with money. Why 1.3? In the American culture, 13 is often considered bad luck. Unlucky 13. In our culture, 13 is actually good luck, because 13, the way you say it in our language, vandshako is theta. Theta is 13, but also means yours. So there's a story where one of our founders, the first founder was counting vegetables to give. And he got lost in the number 13. You kept saying theta, theta, theta, the idea being, this is what I'm doing is service to you and service to God. And my whole presence is to serve. So the number 13 is a good luck measure. So we are on a mission to serve 1.3 billion people. When we publish our investment reports, we publish them on the 13th of the month. We don't advertise this. It's just something that I did as the founder of the company that I wanted to help kind of live with that service. Now I get, I'm not perfect. I'm not a saint. I'm not advocating that I'm anything like that. But for me, service doing things to help others is an important part of what we do. It's an important part of what I do. Why am I in the city of Detroit? Because I want to help build this city. There's a lot that we can serve here in the city and in the world. So that's why we do what we do. I have to ask, do you have like a really strong hairline? Does that never seem like your hair? I'm very fortunate that I have a good hairline. A lot of people that I know, they have a receding hairline. But no, actually, I'm very fortunate. Very blessed. I got good genes for a good hairline. But when are you allowed to like have your. You know, when I'm home, I'm going to sleep. I'll take off my turban and I'll put on a small one. You know, there's no like, oh, when you're inside the doors, you must take it off. We're not a like superstitious religion. It's more of like, you wear it as an identity. You said you're not allowed to get your hair cut, but wouldn't, like, how does that work out? Because it wouldn't just grow forever. Yeah. But your hair stops growing after a certain time. Oh, it does. Yeah, like my hair has been around my hips. Yeah, my hips for as long as I can remember. Has it really grown past that? Can you wear a helmet? Like if you were to ride a bicycle or a motorcycle? Yeah. So, I mean, there's different opinions on this, but if you want to go ask a good question, I am curious. Yeah. I never wear a helmet when I ride a bicycle. Oh wow. Some people will. But if I tell you kind of like the core philosophy, core philosophy is your turban is your helmet. And that's what people will fight for. And so people will ride a motorcycle without a helmet on. My family in India, they drive motorcycles without a helmet on. So it's a risk, absolutely. But people understand also the turban carries a lot of value, a lot of significance, a lot of cultural significance, religious significance, a lot of weight is put into the turban itself. And so covering it with something that would be considered disrespectful in that sense. Wow. I like the idea of identifying the people that serve. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I love to see a video from you on religion. I find it really interesting. I feel like it just didn't want right now. Yeah, but I know, but you're talking about like what specifically drew you to this. Just to separate from the iced coffee hour, I personally think it would be very interesting. All right. Well, make it happen. Cool. Any questions for us? Anything we could answer for you. How do you guys feel the economy is doing? For Jack, he's selling call options. So he's, you know, so it doesn't matter if it's up or down. It really doesn't matter. Yeah. Personally, I think things are quite bubbly, but I know myself well enough that I'm not going to try to time the market. Why do you do call options? You know, you're probably going to lose. Well, it depends. I sell covered calls on stocks. So like if there's a company that I like that has enough volatility where I can receive like a somewhat meaningful percentage of the cost per share back every week, I'll continue to do that. And so it, to me, I like the guaranteed income. I like the hedging on a company that I do enjoy. I don't see it as necessarily risky. Have you lost money with it? I have. Yeah. Have you made more than you lost? Yeah. Good. I've made more than I have lost for sure on call options, but he would have made more money selling calls. Just buying the underlying stock. Yeah. I would have made more money buying the underlying stock, but those are two completely different strategies. I have made more money not buying your 4GT, but by buying, no, I actually made now more money. No, I know, but by buying, let's just say like 2x levered Google positions. Oh, yeah. See, it's like it's completely different investment. A lot of people lose money with options, which is why I don't mess with options. And what I've heard is that the people that make the most money with options are the people selling the courses on how to do options. I don't sell education on options. But options is a zero sum game. And so, like, the only argument that I would accept is that the only people making money of the people benefiting off the spread, but the way I see it is like, you have a person that's trying to time the market and you have the other person that's selling the other person that ability. You have an interesting story. And I think you should share that one more time here, because you came up on this podcast, built one of the biggest podcasts in the world through a very unique way. And I think a lot of people that are probably watching this are thinking, how can I build wealth? How did you build wealth? And how do you think the average person can start building wealth now? Well, I would say I built wealth because I always lived beneath my means. So, like, obviously, it helped that I started earning a decent living at a relatively young age. By the time I was 21, I was making living like a pretty comfortable salary. That was the first year I think I remember I broke like $100,000 as my income. And so, I always saved as much as I could. And so, I would say that's how I technically built wealth. But the way that I think most people should approach it if they don't want a classic W2 job is find a way to provide undeniable value. And so, when I first started working with Graham, I gave him an offer that was so good that he would have been dumb to refuse. What was the offer? I mean, granted, this is from like an online internet strange person because I emailed him this, right? But it was persistent. It was seven emails over the course of a couple of months. But I was basically just like, I will do anything that you need me to do. Whenever you need me to do it, charge zero money. I'm just there to try to help the cause. Like, I can drive to you. I could do anything. And so, he gave me a task that he couldn't even pay people to do. And then I did that. And then I did it like this. I did it like perfectly like that was all that I did put everything else aside and then slowly started like taking on more and more responsibility until it got to the point where my value was undeniable. And then it was sort of like a team, a partnership. Like we were in this together and then I was able to come up with the idea of the Ice Coffee Hour podcast and create our business off of his pre-existing business that was kind of its own thing. And then I just, you know, we have a percent split on that. So yeah. And that is the easiest way, I think, to build wealth because I could go to you, let's just say, let's say I'm a nobody and I could say, I love mine already mindset. And I have this way that we could make you an extra $500,000 a year. No extra work on your one. I'm just gonna take your content and repurpose it in this way and I'm gonna post it on these, but I'm gonna do this XYZ. And all I want for that is, you know, a small percentage and I'll do all the work for you. And maybe you say, hey, let's just test it. And it works. Okay, perfect. Well, now you have a little percentage of that income stream. - Yeah. - There are so many ways that people could take advantage of just working with other people who are doing something that you want to get into and just put your own spin on things. If you're already making a lot of money, then it's more than likely that you're in an ecosystem where there's opportunity everywhere. Opportunity is like gravity. Like it just, it all attracts like the same mass. Like the people that are driving it are the people making a lot of money. Like it's a whole ecosystem. If you can put yourself in that ecosystem, you can latch onto an opportunity that that person would not have done otherwise. Even if they knew that it was a thing just because their time is let's say worth $1,000 an hour while yours is at the current state worth $10 an hour and this opportunity is $500 an hour. So this person who's time is worth $1,000 an hour, it would not be worth it for them to take a $500 an hour opportunity, but it's definitely worth it for you. Yeah, I also think working for free in the beginning, just offering a free service is the best way in our guide. Can I shout out Anton? - Yeah, yeah. - Anton's fantastic. So Anton came to me and says, "Gram, you're not doing custom shorts. "I'll give you custom shorts." Let's just do 10 of them and say, "It's on me. "There's no risk to you. "I'll do all the scripting. "You just review it, you film it. "I'll do all the editing. "You could change whatever you want it. "There's no risk." And I did it. Anton was fantastic. So what do I do? Now I'm working with Anton full time and I'm recommending Anton to everyone who wants to do shorts because he's just genuinely that good. Like he helped me out. Now I want to help him out. And so now he's working with like a few of the other creative. And then he's doing it for someone else. And now they go and like, "Oh, Anton's awesome. "I'm gonna refer him out." And now Anton's business is booming. I'm not saying that was because of me 'cause he was doing well to begin with. But it's certainly, it gets you foot in the door to all these other things. And you never know where it's gonna lead. And what's the worst case? It didn't work out with Anton. He spent a few days of his time working. It didn't work out. Oh well, it's like that's the worst case. - Yeah, I love it. That's it. If you guys are looking to try to increase your income, make more money, then I would say the most important thing is to get within an ecosystem of people who are making a lot of money and provide undeniable value. And in my case, I sort of didn't have any regard whatsoever for my time for anything. I was just like, yeah, let me provide you value. So I was lucky 'cause I didn't have a rent. Or anything, I was eight, what, 19, 19, 20 at the time. I was young. So I was fortunate in that capacity. But if you guys do the same, I think that that if I were to say anything is probably the highest likelihood of making good money. But you know what? We were even thinking about doing something like this. There have been a few companies out there where we look at what they're doing. Or like, oh my gosh, you could easily make it. It sounds like we're exactly. You could easily make an extra $100 million a year in revenue, easily. If you did XYZ, and we know we could implement that within the company so quickly, if they just did this, don't we know it? But they're not doing it. And they don't realize that they should be doing it, but we see it 'cause we're in that space. There are so many things that we just want to like do. Obviously our time is a bit limited. But you know what, consulting it, icedcoffeehour.com. - There we go. - I like it. - For certain companies, I think it makes sense. Like, oh, it gets me going. Jack and I were going back and forth. With all these, we could do this. - But the important part is the ecosystem. It's like you're in proximity to people that are doing well, then like gravity, they're gonna attract opportunity. - I love it. - Yeah, cool, cool. Just appreciate so much. We'll link to all of your information down below in the description. For anyone who's not already subscribed to you, all your information is gonna be down below. Or if you accept the collab request, it'll show up against the icedcoffeehour. And then we could do the same for our episode. - I love that. - Can I also give you guys the e-book to put in the description? - Yeah, for sure. - We just wrote a new book on investing. I call it ABB. Always be buying. How to find opportunity in any market. We spent a lot of time on the e-book. We were giving it away for free. So I'll give you guys something that you can put in that description. - Thank you. - Awesome. - Going down below. - Going down below. - Thank you so much. Thank you to all of our channel members as well who get the content early, uncensored. Hope you enjoy this. And our next episode is already live, by the way, for channel members. So really hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much. And until next time. - Until next time. - Hunter Biden. - Hunter Biden is now out with a new slap top crypto coin and a crash to burn. Losing almost all of its value. What was going through your mind when you sought? Go from 50 to-- - Oh. (laughing) So the FBI has had physical possession. Hunter Biden's laptop for more than three years. Now on that laptop is an individual evidence of crime. - Regardless of whether you get indicted or convicted, it can kill you. - How much is that debt for fighting those legal battles? - Like about $15 million. - The real power in Washington DC is money. - The federal government's power is beyond anything that you can remotely imagine. - How would you rate your finances one at a ten? - Right now? - Yeah. - A zero. - He spent more than $200,000 a month on things like luxury hotel rooms, cash withdrawals, dental work, and payments on a Porsche. - By the way, this is-- - We can edit this part out. It's off the record. Are aliens real or are they? - We should probably stop the cameras. - Okay. (dramatic music) (dramatic music)