Transcription
The rich build wealth on a framework that comes straight out of the Bible. Now, whether you've ever opened one or not, it's in there. And the richest king in the Bible, he wrote most of it down about 3,000 years ago. Jesus told a story about money where the only man that was condemned was doing exactly what you've been taught to do with your own money. And that's not your fault. Nobody preaches on these verses. And your adviser, they've never [music] read them.
If you get these right, you'll probably hit your number years early. But if you miss them, you maybe never will. There's seven verses. I'm going to run through one question that tells you which side of it that you're on. So, let's go.
Okay, so let's jump right into it. We're going to start with a story and it's verse number one. It comes from Matthew chapter 25. It's the story of the parable of the talents. It's a story of business about investing and stewardship. And it's a central story that we hear all the way from the Bible repeating over and over starting in Genesis in the very beginning and it's told in in full right here in Matthew 25. Okay? And it's a it's told by by Jesus right here. And in this story, the man condemned did exactly what you've probably been told to do with your money, taught to do with your money, maybe you're doing with your money.
And in this story, there's a wealthy master and he's leaving for a long trip on a long journey. And before he goes, he calls in three different servants as he has. And he hands each of them his wealth. Now, the Bible might say bags of gold. Um, older trans translations say talents. Okay? Now, a talent wasn't a single coin back then. A talent was roughly about 20 years worth of wages. There's a lot of money for one bag. So, one servant gets five of these. Uh, another servant gets two of these. And then one servant gets one. Okay? And it says in the Bible that each according to their ability. So, the master kind of knew who was smarter or more capable and and gave them out according to their ability.
Now, the master leaves, but it doesn't give them any instructions, at least not that we're told about. There's no rule books, nothing like that. They just get the capital and then they get the time. Now, the first two servants, they go to work. They get busy. They put the money to work and a key piece of the story is they put the money at risk. Okay, we'll come back to that. They put the money at risk and they double it.
Now, the third servant, he does what most responsible adults would do, right? Uh we might call this prudent and they protect the money. They don't want to lose it. They protect the money. They keep it safe. They don't take the risk. Uh they don't pay fees. They don't earn fees, but they keep it fully protected. Make sure we don't lose it. Okay.
Now the master comes back and he start he's time to settle the accounts. He calls the servants back in to see what they did with the money. He finds out that two of them had double the money and he tells them, "Well done, my good and faithful servant." But the third one, the was the the careful one, the one that played it safe and he handed it back. They hand back all the money without a single dollar of loss. And the explanation sounds, you know, completely reasonable. He said, "I knew the stakes were high. Um, I was afraid so I kept it safe. here's exactly what belongs to you back."
But this time the master, he wasn't happy about this. In fact, he says, quote, "You wicked and lazy servant." Wicked and lazy, right? Those are the words used. Not um careless, not lazy, not unlucky, but but wicked and lazy for protecting the principle. Now, hold that verdict next to the plan that you were handed. Work for 40 years, save what you can, right? save it somewhere safe, retire at 65, and then spend it down slowly and and pray that it outlasts you. The cornerstone of that entire plan, the safest possible custody of your money is the exact behavior that this story condemns.
Now, many times in the church, um, we hear even being pushed in politics sometimes today is that wanting more is being greedy, right? And that's bad. You hear that debt makes you a slave, that you hear that safe is being faithful. And you didn't just learn a money plan here. You learned a money theology and its cornerstone just got condemned right here in that in that Bible verse.
Now going back to the parable, the master doesn't just say that uh you know you should have taken more risk or you should have swung for the fences. He doesn't say that. He says you should have at least put my money on deposit with the bankers. Okay? That way he said so that when I returned I would have received it back at least with some interest. That's the floor. Interest is the floor. The minimum acceptable move in this story was at least making some yield. At least make some yield. Even the laziest passing grave had at least had the money working.
And now looking at the faithful servants, let's see what they actually got. They didn't get like a retirement party. The reward is I will put you in charge of many things. Meaning they got more capital. They got a bigger mandate. And Jesus said it in verse 29. For to everyone that has more will be given with abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is uh the law of compounding. It's what Einstein called the eth one of the world. Those who know it earn it. Those who don't will pay it. There's no sitting still here. You're either going to get more or you're going to get get it taken away. So the reward for running money well is more money. More money to run. There's no exit in this story. There's no point where you exit out of it, which matches the very first page of the Bible. Back in Genesis 2:15, God put Adam in the garden to work and take care of it. Now, that was before anything went wrong in the story. Work isn't the curse. Work is our original assignment. The escape at, you know, 65 premise, that's not in the Bible. That's a modern invention.
So, back to the story, the master's accounting judges one thing. It's not your effort, not your intent, and it's not how safe you kept it. It's what did the capital entrusted to you produce? Now, before I translate that question into your money, we have to deal with two objections that you probably hear quite often.
All right, the first one is objection one, that money itself is evil. Right? You've heard this uh verse quoted over and over and over again. They say that money is the root of all evil. Okay? But that's that's a misquote. The Bible verse is actually 1 Timothy 6:10 and it reads, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." All right, that means for the love of it, right? The love of money and a root, not the root, a root. All right, so that's two corrections in one verse. Now, in the story, we just read that money is the tool the master hands out and they expect that money to come back multiplied. What gets condemned is the worship of the money, right? So the stewardship taking care of the money gets rewarded but worshiping money is wrong.
Now objection number two comes from the opposite side of this that anyone connecting the Bible to building wealth is running some sort of like prosperity gospel hustle something like that. And while that certainly does happen, right? That that grift is real. Let's kill the confusion about that right here because I'm definitely not saying that God wants you rich. All right? That's not what Matthew 25 is saying at all. What it's saying is that capital gets entrusted and your production gets judged. That's what it's saying. Pro P prosperity gospel is saying something different. It says that if you believe you'll receive. This parable is the opposite of that. This parable says stewardship an account that gets rewarded.
And before I give you the rest of the verses, like who am I to read these verses to you? Well, I grew up in the Bible. I've uh built and sold multiple companies. I've invested through four major market crashes. Today I'm a partner at a Bitcoin venture capital fund. and I advised multiple techfocused uh publicly traded companies. But in 2008, I got wiped out doing the exact opposite of what these verses say. I'll tell you more about that story in a minute. But so the system that I run today on my own balance sheet, right? It didn't come out of some finance book. Most of it came out of this Bible right here.
Now, the only reason I focus on money at all, let me just say this, is for two reasons. Number one, it gives my family more options. And two, it let me help more people than I could if I was broke. Of course, right? And that's also inside the Bible. Paul writes that you're enriched so you can be generous. The purpose was never just to accumulate a pile.
Now, by the end of this, I want to show you a number. We'll put a number to all this. The dollar number over 10 years, what could happen. And I'm going to also hand you the one question that tells you which side or I should say which servant you are.
Now, let's translate the master's accounting. He judged again one thing. What did the capital entrusted to you produce? Okay, so that's the one question that you should ask yourself. What did the capital that was entrusted to me produce? All of it.
All right, but that kind of takes us to the next problem. So, what exactly do the wise store up? Well, Solomon answers this for us directly in a verse that you were taught means the opposite of what it actually says. So, let's move on to verse number two. It's Proverbs 21:20, and it says, quote, "The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down." Now, you were taught this verse means to save your money, right? Park it somewhere safe, right? Don't touch it. Just let it sit there. But that's not what Solomon actually wrote. The fool's defining move is consumption. Everything that comes in gets gulped down. Everything that they get gets consumed. It all flows like straight through them, right? But the wise men, what do they do? They store up. But look at it deeper. Look at what he stores. He stores choice food and olive oil. These are things with use, right? These are things that have value. These are things that have value and the provision to serve him later. All right? So Solomon isn't splitting the world into savers and spenders. He's splitting it into consumers and stewards of a storehouse. Again, usable things, good stewards in a storehouse that could be used later, right? Not a hole in the ground. We just read what the master thinks of holes in the ground. It's not good. A storehouse is where provision waits for its assignment. And you can judge the save it safe reading by its fruit. Federal Reserve data tells us the 2022 survey of consumer finances shows that the median retirement account for American families aged 55 to 64, which is about 10 years from the finish line, is about $185,000. Now, that's not a nation of fools gulping it down. They saved, right? Those are people who followed the plan, but it left them short, right? So, the plan needs to get the blame here, not you. which means that the wise store up and what's stored has to produce.
And right about now, somebody's probably drawn the wrong conclusion from this. They're saying if safe is condemned, the answer then must be that uh I have to swing bigger. I have to take bigger chances. But Solomon saw that coming too. Okay. So now verse three, Proverbs 21:5, the plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty. Okay, so if safe was condemned, then the move must be swinging big, right? We got to leverage up on meme coins or yolo into options or whatever, something like that. But that's not that's not what the verse says. If we go back to the parable of the talents, the two faithful servants, they weren't rewarded for gambling. They are rewarded for putting capital to work and over a long period of time, over a long journey. And the word that the master used here was faithful. So faithful is a process word. Solomon puts this together in one sentence. He said haste leads to poverty. As surely as so he said not not sometimes. He said as surely as as surely as what? As surely as diligent plans will lead to profit. Now the fearful man they buried it, right? They were afraid of it. The hasty man, they burn it. They they torch it. So there's two different traps, but they both lead to the same the same poverty. The wise, they build plans. Production that compounds year after year, season after season. In this here, slow was never the enemy in the Bible. Idol is the enemy. Hasty is the enemy. And that planning, that that thread of planning runs through the entire Bible. It says, "Count the cost before you build. Plan succeed with many advisers." And that matters, right? But we're going to come we're going to come back to those verses at the end.
But that brings us to the tool because every diligent plan eventually hits the same wall. Growth takes capital. And the biggest source of capital is the one your money theology taught you to fear the most. And that's a verse, too. The most quoted money verse in the entire Bible is probably this. And I bet you were taught maybe half of it, which is verse number four, Proverbs 22:7. And in that, it says, "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender." Now, you know the second half, right? You've heard it over and over and over. Debt is slavery, right? End of the lesson. That's it. But Solomon actually wrote about it differently. He wrote two different clauses. Now, the first one names who's sitting across the table. The rich rule over the poor. He said that's what he said in sentence one. He shows you both chairs. But this verse wasn't a warning label. It's it's a map. It kind of explains how money flows. And and the half you were taught is true. If you borrow against your future self, if you borrow against your future paychecks to consume today, so you get the car payment, the credit cards, the student loans, right? then and you you then all you can do is sell your future labor, right? You have to work now to service that debt. That's the servant seat. And the text is right to condemn that part. But the rich, they don't avoid this part, right? They don't avoid the table at all. They're on the other side of it. Their obligations sit attached to assets that produce for them. So credit issued against things that pay for that, right? So not against their paycheck, the assets pay for it. Solomon ran this himself. He built the temple through a structured arrangement with the king of Ty. He received lumber. He received craftsmen. And they he received that upfront. And then he paid for those services over time with provisions that came in year after year after year. So we might today describe that as a structured obligation sort of like debt. Now that was aimed at the production itself. The man who wrote this verse, he didn't avoid the obligation. He just used it properly.
Now, I had to learn the difference with my own balance sheet. Unfortunately, a lot of you have heard my story back in 2008. I was sitting in the servant seat, right? I didn't know it at the time, but I had way too much debt that I couldn't service when the market crashed. And so, I got caught off sides off that and it cost me cost me dearly. Now, that verse wasn't wrong. I was on the wrong side of it. So, the question was never debt or no debt. The question is which seat?
And if you think I'm stretching the text here, the blessing chapter in the Old Testament names the seat directly, which takes us to verse number five. This is Deuteronomy 28. Now, in this verse, Moses is listing the blessings of the covenant. And verse 12 lands on this. You will lend to many nations, but will borrow from none. Okay? Now, if we if we read that again, what we're going to see here is that the blessing chapter of the Old Testament does not say you will owe no one. It says, "You will end." The blessed position isn't debt-free. It's the other chair at Solomon's table, the side where obligation flows toward you. Solomon drew the map in verse 4 that Moses names the destination of.
But one thing that we have to take into consideration is things have changed. One big thing that's changed since these words were written, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, from back then and and from that time, thousands of years ago all the way until 1971 was that we were in an equity-based monetary system. What this means is that money was an actual thing. It was gold. Back then it was silver. And [clears throat] we would take the physical silver, we'd weigh it out. And when somebody borrowed, existing money moved from one hand to the other, a physical thing transferred. But in 1971, Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. When he did that, we went from an equity-based monetary system to now what we're in today is a debt-based monetary system. What that means is for the past 53 years and and still true today is that money is created as debt. What that means is that when the banks lend, brand new money comes into existence through the debt issuance. So, we all live inside of a system today where the money itself is somebody's obligation. Debtree was an option in Solomon's economy, but in this one, the one that we're in today, there's no neutral chair. There's only the direction that the obligation flows. So, what this means, uh, the question isn't, uh, is there debt or no debt. Does that mean the rich never borrow? Of course not. They borrow all the time. You watch Solomon, he did it in two verses. I told you, right? So, now we need to look at our entire balance sheet. So, what we're really looking at is our net position. So, let's say that you have $5 million in productive assets with, say, $1 million of credit issued against those assets, right? That's way different than having like depreciating assets like cars and credit card debt, but with no assets, just the labor to back them up. So, in this verse, it's not scoring individual loans. It's naming a direction, right? Which way does obligation flow across your entire state? Does it flow toward you or does it flow away from you? Right? The rich borrow gross. They stay lenders net. But the poor, they borrow gross. And that's the whole position. That's the entire difference.
And the same system raised the price of the hole in the ground. The the Federal Reserve stated goal is 2% inflation per year. So this means that the dollar shrinks and it's not a malfunction. It's the actual design. But in the biblical time, bearing the bag of gold, it cost you the return. But at least the gold it kept its weight in the ground, right? But today the buried bag of gold it starts to leak every year and that's on purpose. So that means that the capital must produce. Obligation belongs on the asset side. The estate has to net toward you and the ground now eats whatever you bury.
Now if we put those together and you get the machine the rich actually run, watch what it does to the same $100,000 over 10 years. So, let's say that we have two different people, two different estates, but they both have, let's call it, $1 million in 10 years. All right? Now, watch watch the verses that you just read stacked into this machine. Estate one, they run the the safe the safe method, the safe and save method. So, they put a million dollars and they put it into like US treasuries and it's making 3% return. After 10 years, that turns that 1 million turns into about 1.34 million, which sounds like progress. Sounds pretty good. But we have to subtract the leak, right? The Fed's stated target is 2% inflation per year. But that promise hasn't been true. If we take the last six years and we average it out, official CPI has been about 4%. And after tax, if we park that for a decade, you actually went backwards in real weight against the grocery store. But it gets even worse. Against the things that wealth is actually made of, I'm talking about properties. I'm talking about businesses, scarce assets. you fell even further behind. The price of admission to the asset side has been compounding way faster than CPI. So the saver loses twice. Purchasing power against the cost of living and position against the estate he was supposed to be building. Right? That's the hole in the ground with a bank logo on top of it.
Okay, but now the other side, estate number two, they run the book. Same million split across let's call it three positions. 400,000 goes into, let's say, a whole life insurance policy. The rich do use these as private storehouses, provision stored in those, it compounds. They can issue credit against those without ever having to sell them. Right back from verse two, let's say they take another 400,000 and that goes into equity on a rental property. So then there's credit obviously attached to that as an asset. And the asset pays the obligation. So that's the ruler seat. That's that shows the flow of the of the assets. That's verse number four. And let's say the last 200,000 goes into a bitcoin, the one asset on the list with no design spec, which means, you know, nobody can print more of it. That's the answer to verse number five's leak. Now, if we run that that portfolio, let's say for 10 years at, I don't know, conservative rates. The storehouse grows to 592,000. The rental position just over 1 million. The Bitcoin measured on its long-term trend, the 200E moving average, is compounding around 30% a year. That's 2.76 million. That totals uh the portfolio about 4.4 million against 1.34 million in the first scenario. The same money, the same decade, but three times the growth in the estate because the capital was assigned instead of being buried. Now, if you think that's uh, you know, just just because of Bitcoin or whatever, cut cut their growth rate from 30% to 20%, the estate is still, you know, more than 2x the amount of just the safe strategy because the machine here, it's not a bet. The machine is the direction that it's going. Now, again, that's a simple version. That's like the training wheels version. I didn't show you the ratios, the sequencing, or how the rich run credit through all these positions. So, $1 does multiple jobs at once. And I did that on purpose. And uh the Bible will tell you why before we're done. Because a machine with credit inside of it can also kill you. And Solomon wrote the entire safety gate on this.
But let's move on first to verse number six, Ecclesiastes 11:2, which says, "Invest in seven ventures." Yes, in 8. You do not know what disaster may come upon the land. Now, the word invest is sitting right there, right there for you to read, right? But the common misconception here is that you were taught that this verse means that you're supposed to diversify. you're supposed to spread it all out. But if we read the second half again, that's not what a it's not a returns argument. It's a survival argument, right? You do not know what disaster may come. So they're not optimizing a portfolio. What they're doing is engineering for the storm that that you can't see you can't see coming. You want to plan for it. And that's the gate on the machine. The moment that credit enters an estate, right? Then disaster gets closer, right? It can force you to sell at the worst possible time at a bottom. The first rule of investing is never be a forceeller because forceelling is how leverage estates die. So the rich they hold margin. They build structure so that no single storm can make them a forceeller. Now in 2008 I ran the machine without the gate. And then I already told you how that went right. The rich don't build three times estates by taking more risk than you do. They take less risk than you but it's just structured better. And a machine built to survive every storm eventually outlives its builder, which was always the point.
Which takes us to verse number seven, Proverbs 13:22. A good person leaves an inheritance for their children's children, but a sinner's wealth is stored up for the righteous. Now, you were taught the soft version of this, right? Like, leave something behind for your kids. Today's day and age, we are a lot of people saying they don't want to leave anything, but that's not what the Bible says, right? It says, "Leave something for your children's children." That's two generations out. That's for your grandchildren, including the ones who maybe aren't even born yet. And that changes the the assignment completely because reaching generation three, it takes something that money can't do on its own. It takes a system that keeps running even after you're gone. Now, assets alone don't survive the trip, right? Assets without a system, they get consumed. They get they get gulped down. Like we talked about in verse number two, the inheritance that reaches generation three is the assets plus the machine that built the assets plus the machine that compounds the assets. It's the storehouse. It's the seats. It's the direction. It's the gate. Now, everything you've watched for the last, I don't know, 18 minutes or so, that's the inheritance. The money is just the proof that the inheritance works. And this is the season that I'm in right now, right? Our assets sit inside family trusts. I wrote out what we call a family constitution. What the Moss family stands for, the values, the rules, who can tap into the trust, what they can tap into the trust for. Because what ruins kids, it's not the money. It's handing them assets without the operating system. The constitution is the system, but it's all written down. So, it runs when I'm not around anymore. Remember the reward in the parable, not a retirement party. It said quote in charge of many things. Right? Stewardship, it doesn't exit. It compounds. It continues to compound across multiple generations. And the second half of this verse, a sinner's wealth is stored up for the righteous. What that means is that wealth doesn't disappear. Wealth transfers. It goes away from consumers and it goes towards stewards. Now, everything in this video is the mechanism of that migration. Right? So, that's seven verses. production, storehouse, patience, the right seat, the right direction, the survival gate, and the system built to outlive you.
Now, one thing left because the Bible has one more instruction before you build anything, and it's the reason I didn't hand you the ratios. So, I guess we'll call this uh verse number eight. This one comes directly from Jesus. He said it in Luke 14:28. He said, "Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? So what this means is that we have to plan. He said count first and then we build second. Right? Solomon adds the second gate on. He said plans fail for lack of counsel but many advisers they succeed. All right? So that's why I didn't hand you the ratios. Running this machine off of you know whatever a YouTube video without counting your numbers first without counsel. That's how people blow up somebody else's blueprint. The book says that you sit down first. So, start with the Bible says, right? Plan, sit down, plan, measure the cost.
So, if you want to start where this uh sort of leaves off, I'm going to put a free assessment link down below. No email required, nothing. It runs off the master's question uh for your whole estate. What do we have? Where are we going? What's our run rate? When will we get there? What what can we do to speed it up? And things like that. All right. If you want that, we'll put a link to it down below. Now, if this video changed how you think about the Bible, then uh subscribe to the channel right there and maybe share the video with somebody else who could use it. And that's what I got. All right, to your success. I'm out.