The Savings Expert: Are You Under 45? You Won't Get A Pension! Don't Buy A House! - Jaspreet Singh

We have to get over these money myths.

You can't build wealth if you rent where you live. You can't build wealth if you don't have access to millions of dollars. That's not true.

There's one thing that has given much better returns than any real estate, any stock, and even any cryptocurrency. So let's talk about the real way to build true wealth.

Jaspreet Singh is the non-nonsense financial guru, realtor, and entrepreneur whose methods have helped millions of people solve their crippling money problems and unlock financial freedom.

People don't like when I say this, but I don't say what I say to make friends. I say what I say to help people be better with money.

There's a lot of people that are lacking financial education. We're taught to study hard, get a good job, and if you continue working down that path, you're going to become successful.

Most people buy a house they can't afford and statistically are living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, that's 78% of Americans.

Ironically, the key thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life is they're scared to look broke. So what do they do? They're driving around in nicer cars, going on better vacations, and eating at nicer restaurants, but they no longer have money to save. They no longer have money to invest.

The problem is we need about $1.8 million to comfortably retire. So if you are in the financial danger zone, which means you don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt, you have to make drastic changes today.

So what do I do? Well, the first thing you got to understand is a 75-15-10 plan. But now let's dig this a little bit deeper and let's talk about making money.

I put my money in five places that have been proven to win.

Number one: this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show.

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Who should care about your message and why should they care?

Anybody who uses money, which is everybody. The interesting thing about money is we use money every single day. It costs money to eat, and it costs money to feed other people.

Yeah, most of us are never taught about money, so most people say money doesn't matter. I shouldn't think about money. I shouldn't have to worry about money. Money's bad. Money's evil.

When in reality, it costs money to eat, and it costs money to feed other people. When you don't understand that, now you're the one that's going to be paying the highest taxes. You're the one that's going to be struggling to pay your bills.

You're the one that's not going to be able to go to Disney World. You're the one that can't pay for that amazing gift for your wife or your husband. And you're the one that can't pay for the healthcare for your parents.

And you wonder why. In this economic system that we all live in, money talks. Unless you understand that, you're never going to be able to win in the system.

What is the difference between people who figure out how to make themselves wealthy and those that don't?

If we put all objective advantages aside—rich parents, inherited lots of money, all these kinds of things—what is the fundamental difference that you've seen from the many, many hundreds of thousands of people that you've worked with and taught and that have consumed your content?

There's one difference, one key difference. People that become wealthy understand how money works, and everybody else does not.

I'll tell you where I came to this conclusion. I checked all the boxes. I studied hard in school. I went through high school, I went to college, I spent one year in graduate school, and then I went through law school.

But I never once learned a thing about money. I never once learned to think about building wealth. I never once learned to think about investing. I never once learned to think about passive income.

But if you look at the wealthiest people in the world, they don't get there by working a job and getting a raise. They don't get there by working to climb the corporate ladder. They get there because they understand how money works and they understand how to win in the economic system.

The crazy thing about that is we're all taught to trust the system. My parents are immigrants from a state in India called Punjab, and like many other traditional Indian immigrants, they wanted me to become successful.

Now, in my house, that definition of success was very simple. They gave me two options. Option number one was, "You can be a doctor." Option two was, "You can be a failure."

And they said, "You get to pick which one." This is me when I'm like one year old. Since the day I could start talking, my parents told everybody—not just people around us—they called my family in India, my family all around the country, that "Jay is going to grow up and become a doctor because he's going to become successful."

Now, I had nothing against that because I wanted to become successful too. I saw how hard my parents worked. My dad, if he got a Saturday and a Sunday off, was considered a long weekend.

I mean, my parents bust their butt, and I wanted to become successful so I could give back to them. They told me that if I wanted to become successful, the way I do that is by becoming a doctor, which makes sense because when you're in school, you get those pamphlets—those career pamphlets—and they show you the different career options you have.

Anytime you look at that, the top of the list is always doctor. So they said, "If you want to become successful, you have to become a doctor."

Because we came to this country, you have to become successful, so you have to become a doctor. Now, I didn't think anything was wrong with it because I liked the idea of becoming successful, so I went down that path.

Now, along the way, I realized I didn't want to be a doctor. I told my parents that I'm not going to be a doctor. My mom almost had a heart attack. My dad couldn't believe it.

So my dad essentially told me that, "Jay, if you want to keep any pride in the family, you have to at least become an attorney." So I said, "Okay."

I went to law school part-time and worked on my business full-time. Now today, I am a licensed attorney, but I've never worked a day as an attorney.

The reason why I've never worked as an attorney is because it's just not worth my time, and it's not where my passion is. Along that way, that's when I learned that we're taught, "This is how you win: go to school, study hard, get good grades, get a good job, and if you continue working down that path, you're going to become successful."

But if you look at the successful people, that's not the path that they followed. If we take a look at the three things that have built more wealth than anything else over the last century, it's starting a business, investing in real estate, and investing in stocks.

Yet along my entire educational path, I was never taught that. We're focused on how do you get a good job, but what wealthy people are focused on is how do I grow my assets.

That's the key difference here. Wealthy people are working to own the corporate ladder; everybody else is working to climb the corporate ladder.

Now, assuming that you don't have rich parents—because most people assume that you have to be rich in order to do this—you need millions of dollars, you need access to all this money—but that's not true.

You can start now with $100, $10, but you have to get started. The problem is most of us are never taught how to do this. But unless you start doing this, you're never going to build wealth, and that's the way that you win in this economic system.

So I want to go through all of those three things you've just said. I want to talk about starting businesses, I want to talk about investing in stocks, and I also want to talk about real estate.

But I'm curious, in your own personal story, when did the penny drop? Because it's so interesting in my life, there's key moments where I got to see behind the curtain.

When I say see behind the curtain, I'll refer to my friends when we're speaking privately. I'll say I'll refer to it as money games. Like the day where I saw these billionaires playing money games that I didn't know existed.

I was there working my butt off, working in call centers or building whatever, and then I got to meet a billionaire, got to spend time with them, got to see behind the curtain, and was like, "Oh, they just play these money games which nobody else has been told about."

When was the penny drop moment for you? You qualified as a lawyer; why didn't you end up pursuing that? Something happened.

Yeah, so when I was in grade school, I began working at Indian weddings. I played a drum called the dhol, it's a Punjabi drum. That's where my family is from in India, and I used to play this drum at weddings.

Now, my parents didn't like that I did this because anything that was not math or science was like, "You don't do this." So I had to play this drum in secret, but I played at weddings, and I started to make a little bit of money.

By a little bit of money, I mean $50 per wedding when I was in middle school, then maybe $100, $200 in high school. One of the DJs that I was working with said, "Jay, you know a lot of kids in high school. How about we host a teen party for some of these kids in your school?"

I was like, "Okay, why not?" So we hosted this teen party, and it was a big success. At the end of the night, the DJ then starts paying out all the costs because we were going to go in 50/50 on this business venture.

Then we pay out the money for the security, for the venue, for the marketing, and then he says, "All right, let's count our profits." He has four bills in his hand—one, two, three, four.

There's four singles left: $2 for him, $2 for me. I saw that we put in so much work into this business venture, into this idea, into this first party, and we made $4 of profit, which we split 50/50.

At that moment, he was really upset, but I was really not upset at all because I was like, "This was fun." You know, it was a lot of fun putting this together, but in my mind, it was just one of those hobbies that I was doing because I needed to become a doctor.

Well, I did a few of those teen parties when I was in high school, and now it was time for me to go to college. I was 17 years old, and I get there, and I see everybody partying, drinking, blowing money they don't have, and I was shocked.

I had no idea that people went to college to party, and I had no idea people got the money to spend money on all this alcohol. I don't drink; I'm not into partying. But now I needed something to do on Friday nights.

So now I'm thinking, "What do I do? How about I take this teen party business concept that I had in high school and now do it in college?"

So I was 17, and I started knocking on the doors of all the bars, venues, and restaurants, trying to see if anybody would let me host a party there.

In the beginning, some said, "Sure, you can host a party here; we just need a $10,000 deposit." I didn't have $10,000; I was 17 years old.

So I kept going. Some said, "I need a $20,000 deposit." But eventually, I found this one club that said, "Yeah, you can host a party here; you don't have to pay us anything. Just pay us half of the cover charge that you generate."

Now I'm in business. I made the same arrangement with my DJ. I said, "Look, how about you DJ for me for free, and I'll split whatever profits I make with you?"

That was the beginning of my first real business. It was this party promotion company, which then became an event planning company, and it grew pretty big in college.

I mean, I started off by hosting these one-off parties. Then I was contracted by one of the largest clubs on campus to host their weekly college night. So I was hosting their parties every week. We were hosting official shows and after-parties, and it grew pretty large.

Now, as this business starts to make money, the first thing that I realized is I don't need a license or degree to make money. I thought that was something that I needed because I thought I needed these good grades to qualify for this thing to make money.

So that was the first kind of shock and realization. The second realization that I had was I knew nothing about money. I was making a little bit of money, and I was very fortunate that I started reading books about money and business.

I started reading these books, and the first thing I learned was the difference between an asset and a liability, which were things I had never heard of before.

An asset is something that puts money in your pocket; a liability is something that takes money out of your pocket. Wealthy people want to own assets. I was buying a whole lot of liabilities because I was working in this party promotion business, and I wanted to look the part.

So I would make a little bit of money, buy a nice watch, make a little bit more money, put some new rims on my car, put a new sound system in my car, put a new subwoofer in my car. I mean, I was blowing money on all these dumb things to look like I was rich when in reality, I was just making a lot of other people rich.

Then I learned about this thing called investing, which really started to upset me because I thought I was doing everything right. I'm reading these books that are talking about how every wealthy person invests in real estate.

I had no idea what that means. Nobody in my family is a real estate investor. I had never heard of this concept of real estate investing before. I don't know what it is, but if wealthy people are real estate investors and I want to become wealthy, maybe I should invest in real estate.

So when I was 19, I'm now studying to get into medical school because I still think that I'm going to become a doctor, and I was bored out of my mind because I would spend all day, 10 to 12 hours a day in the library studying.

This was around 2011, and the reason why I say the year is because if you remember, 2008 was the great financial crisis. That was when we had the real estate collapse in America, so real estate prices were decimated, and they didn't hit rock bottom until 2012.

That's why I'm saying this. So in 2011, I'm studying to take the Medical College Admission Test, the MCAT, and I'm reading these books talking about how wealthy people invest in real estate.

Now I'm making a little bit of money from this party business and have a little bit of cash in the bank. So during my breaks when I'm studying for the test, I start looking on the internet, websites of finance, and they all talk about how real estate prices have hit rock bottom, how real estate is being decimated in America.

So I was like, "Well, maybe I should start looking to buy real estate." On August 22nd, I took the Medical College Admission Test, and then on August 23rd, I purchased my first real estate investment property.

It was a small condo that I purchased out of foreclosure. A few years prior, it had sold for a little bit over $150,000, and then, like many properties, it went through foreclosure. The banks couldn't sell it, and it was listed on sale for $8,400.

That was the total price of the condo. So I came in with an offer of $4,000 because I don't know how this real estate investing stuff works. We were back and forth with the bank. The bank said, "We'll sell it to you for $7,000."

I tried to negotiate them even lower, and then the bank said that they had another offer on the table. So now it's a bidding war, and I had to pay my highest and best price.

So I said, "I'm willing to offer $8,000 to buy the condo, no more," and they accepted my bid. So I purchased this condo for $8,000. I put in a few thousand worth of work, and then I rented it out for $600 a month.

Now I start to question things. Why did nobody tell me about this? This condo is putting money into my pocket without me having to do something because I own this asset.

We're all taught to trade our time for dollars. We're all taught to work to get paid because that's what we're taught to do. But wealthy people are not working for a bigger salary; they're working for more assets because that can continue to pay you even when you're not working.

That's that shift. When I saw that, it really sparked a fire under me and really made me angry. I don't know why I got so angry, but I got angry because I felt like I was checking all the boxes.

I was doing good in school. I busted my butt in school. I was going to do all the right things, become a doctor, and do everything that I was told. But what I didn't realize is those boxes weren't my boxes.

Who created these boxes, and why is there this whole world of financial education that we're never taught? Because if this is how wealthy people build and grow their wealth, why is everybody else not taught this?

So I want to make a distinction here. Are you saying that in order to build wealth, people should buy a house?

No. If you want to build wealth, you have to buy assets. When people say "buy a house," what does that mean to most people's eyes? It means buy my home.

Yeah, I want to buy this nice place for me to live, which is what most people do when they get a bit of money. They take their salary from work, and then they go and buy a house to live in, and then they pay into the mortgage, which means that they are now building an asset, right?

They're building what many people call generational wealth, which is one of the biggest lies when it comes to money. The reason why is because your house is actually a money pit.

That's why I want you to think of your house as a liability. But I want you to hear me clearly: I'm not saying you shouldn't buy a house. I'm not saying it's bad to buy a house.

You have to treat your house like a liability. This suit that I'm wearing is a liability. This watch is a liability. My shoes are liabilities. Should I not buy them?

No, I got to make sure I can afford them. So when people think about buying a house, what do they think of? They think, "I'm going to build generational wealth. I'm going to build wealth. I'm going to pay it off, and I'm going to be able to have more freedom in my life because I can own this house."

Let's go with the best-case scenario. You buy a home for, let's call it $300,000. You pay it off, and throughout your lifetime, this $300,000 home grows in value to a million dollars.

Now you're going to say, "Just PR, I showed you this is an asset. My house tripled in value, more than tripled in value, and now I'm going to pass it down to my kids."

So now, yeah, your kids got a million-dollar house, but unless they have the income to support paying for a million-dollar house, they might have to find some more cash.

Now what do they do? Because you can't just pull cash out of this house, right? I mean, it's not an ATM. Unless you go to the bank, the bank will give you the cash because the bank says, "Oh, you have a million-dollar house. How about we loan you $800,000?"

But that's not an ATM because you have to pay that money back plus interest. Unless your kids have the income to pay for the property tax, to pay for the insurance, to pay for the upgrades, to pay for the maintenance, and the mortgage, they can't afford that house.

So maybe now they have to sell. Okay, now you sell it. You got a million dollars. Great. We're not even going to talk about taxes right now, but you got a million dollars; you're rich.

But if they don't have any financial education and you have a million dollars, what's going to happen? Well, let's think about this. If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?

If I went down the street and I asked the average person, "If I wrote you a check for a million dollars today, what would you do?" What are people going to say? "I'm going to go to the Bahamas. I'm going to buy myself a nice house. I'm going to buy myself a nice car. I'm going to buy myself some nice clothes. I'm going to go to the Gucci store, go to the Louis Vuitton store, and buy myself the extra guac at Chipotle."

That's what the average person will do. Now maybe you're a little bit more financially smart. You say, "I'm just going to live off of $50,000 a year."

But after 20 years, you have nothing left. Not to mention the fact that 10 years from now, that $50,000-a-year lifestyle is going to buy you half of what it can today.

So now let's go back to that situation. You thought you built generational wealth. You did a good thing about paying off the mortgage because you don't have to pay the mortgage payment.

But is that really the type of generational wealth that you want? Now, to fully hammer this home, I'm not saying it's bad to own a house. It's actually very great. It's an amazing thing to own your house free and clear because now you can rest assured you don't have to worry about the mortgage payments if you have the financial education.

That's great. But let's talk about now the real way to do this and build true wealth. When I buy my real estate investment properties and my property values go up, the rental values also go up.

The rent is what pays for the maintenance. The rent is what pays for the upgrades. The rent is what's paying for the property taxes and the insurance. The rent is putting money in my pocket.

This is cash flow that I can use. I can use this cash flow to buy a vacation. I can use this cash flow to buy food. I can use this cash flow to pay for my lifestyle.

But your house doesn't do that. You have to pay to live in your house. But people think, you know, they're getting their mortgage payments. They're spending whatever they are, you know, spending on their mortgage payments.

They think, "Well, we're kind of told that that mortgage payment is an investment into an asset." Your mortgage payment is a payment to your bank.

Banks are not stupid. In fact, they're very smart. Banks do something called front-loading your mortgage. What that means is if you go out and get a 30-year mortgage, which is what many people do in America, and you pay $3,000 a month on your mortgage, you're not paying $1,500 to your interest, your bank, and $1,500 to your principal, your equity.

The way it works is banks front-load your mortgage, which means for the first almost 15 years—it's about 14 years and 8 months or so—but for almost 15 years of your mortgage, the first 15 years, the majority of your mortgage payment is going directly into your banker's pocket in the form of interest.

Which means if you're paying $3,000 a month on your mortgage, for the first part of your mortgage, maybe $100 is going out of the $3,000 into your equity. The other $2,900 is going right into your banker's pocket with interest.

Now, yeah, after 15 years, now half of your mortgage payment is going to your equity and half is going to interest. But if you refinance before that 15-year mark, that starts over.

This is where banks understand the game. Again, I'm not against buying a house, but you got to understand the game of money, and most people don't understand that.

The mistake that people make is they buy a house they can't afford, and now they're paying all this money into their mortgage, thinking that, "I'm building wealth." They no longer have money to save. They no longer have money to invest into other real assets, and their money is just going to pay down their mortgage, thinking that this is going to build my wealth.

But you've been sold a lie. This term opportunity cost—most people don't know what this term opportunity cost means, but it appears to be very pertinent to what you're saying, especially when you just said this is money that you can't then invest in assets.

Can you explain what opportunity cost is and how it's impacted if you buy a house?

Sure. If you have, let's make the numbers very simple. You want to buy a $100,000 home, and let's say the banks require a 20% down payment—$20,000.

You could do a few things. Number one, you can take that $20,000 and go out and buy this house, and now that's how that money has been used. But if you use that money to buy the house, you lose the opportunity to take that $20,000 and say, "Use it to buy a rental property."

You lose the opportunity to use that $20,000 to invest in the stock market. You lose the opportunity to take that $20,000 and maybe build a business.

Now the question is, what is going to give you the best and most growth? Now hopefully this house that you buy will go up in value. It's not guaranteed.

We know the houses don't always go up in value, no matter what your banker says, no matter what your real estate agent says, because we saw what happened after the 2008 crash, where real estate prices were slashed in half.

It was as much as 93% real estate values dropping in the state of Michigan, where I am. So we know real estate prices don't always go up. Stock prices don't always go up. Businesses don't always work. Everything has a risk.

But now the question is, which risk do you want to take, and which risk do you want to take first? Are you in a situation now where you're ready to go out and buy a house, or do you want to build your wealth first a little bit more?

That's the question that I want people to start thinking: Am I ready to buy a house?

Then people say, "Well, if I go out and invest my money, the problem is housing prices keep going up. I'm chasing this housing market; it keeps getting more and more expensive."

And you're 100% right; it's a risk. But there's also a risk that housing prices could fall.

I think one of the biases that makes people want to buy a house is that they're currently renting, and they see that as just giving money away. So they think, "Listen, I could spend this money on a mortgage, and I'll own this thing one day, or I could spend this same $2,000, whatever it is, on rent, and I'm never going to own this thing."

Well, I'm here in Los Angeles right now. I had to stay in a hotel. That hotel payment is paying somebody's mortgage. It's paying somebody's college tuition. It's paying for somebody's stuff.

When I go to a restaurant and I eat out, I'm paying for somebody's mortgage. I'm paying for somebody's college tuition. I'm paying for somebody's bills.

Because when you go out and you're renting, that's what everybody says: "I'm making my landlord rich." Well, when you eat at a restaurant, you're making that restaurant owner rich.

When you go to a hotel, you're making the hotel owner rich. When I go and buy a mug, I'm making the mug owner rich.

The reality is, yeah, it's good to own a house, but are you ready to own a house? Can you afford to own a house? And what do you want to own first?

I rent where I live right now. I am making my landlord rich today. I also rent for my offices. I am making my office landlord very rich because my office rent is very expensive.

Do you feel bad for me? I hope not.

This is where we have to get over these money myths that many people keep selling you: that you can't build wealth if you rent where you live. You can't build wealth if you don't get a good degree.

That's not the way that the system works. See, there's the traditional rules, and then there's the real financial education money rules.

Again, I'm not saying it's bad to own a house, but it's bad to own a house you can't afford. How do you know if you can afford one?

Well, there's three parts to affording a house. You have to afford the down payment, you have to afford the monthly payment, and you have to afford the moving costs.

I'm going to start from the simplest one, which is the moving costs, because many people don't factor this in. When you buy a house, you got to move in.

I'm not talking about the closing costs. You might have to hire movers, which are expensive. You might have to upgrade your furniture, which is expensive. You might have to upgrade the house, which is expensive. Factor that in.

Then I want to talk about your down payment. People don't like when I say this, but I don't say what I say to make friends. I say what I say to help people be better with money.

If you want to afford the house, you have to have at least a 20% down payment. That way, you actually have some equity, some skin in the game. That way, you can actually afford the house.

The third part is you have to afford the monthly payments. Now, every bank is going to have a different rule for you. Banks have like the 28% rule and these other rules.

Sorry, just on that last point, why do people not like it when you say that?

Because it's very hard to pay a 20% down payment. Housing is expensive. You want to buy a $500,000 house; you have to have $100,000 as a minimum for your down payment, and that's extra cash.

Okay, now if we talk about the monthly costs, the simple way that I like to follow it is you have to have a system for yourself. You have to know how much money you are allowed to spend, how much money you need to be investing, and how much money you have to be saving every single month.

Then just factor it in. The way I like to look at it, a simple rule of thumb is something like a 75-15-10 plan, 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 that you invest, and 10 cents is the minimum that you save. Now let's do the math. If you know that you make, let's call it $100,000 a year, that means the max you can spend out of the $100,000 is $75,000.

So if out of that $75,000 you can afford your mortgage costs, you can afford your food, you can afford your vacations and lifestyle, then sure, you can afford it.

But if you can't afford that, then you can't afford that mortgage. The reason why I like to go by this rule is because some people are going to say, "I can live in a small house; I just want an expensive car and some nice vacations."

Other people are going to say, "I want a beautiful home; I don't care about the car and vacations." So now you can factor it all in there. How much can you afford out of that 75% of what you make?

Do you think people even know how much money they spend?

No. I was thinking, I wonder how many people listening right now know over the last six months the exact figure that they spend every single month.

Most people statistically are living paycheck to paycheck, so they're basically spending everything or more.

Okay, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, which means I make some money and I spend all of it or more. There's a joke that I like to make, which is in the traditional Indian culture, people make a dollar to spend 20.

In the traditional American culture, people make a dollar to spend $2 through the help of lines of credit, credit cards, and other forms of debt.

The reason why I'm going to take it a step back—I don't think you wanted me to go this way—I'm going to go anywhere anyway.

We live in what's called a credit-based economy, which means if you make $50,000 a year, you don't live off of $50,000 a year. At least most Americans don't.

We live in what's called a credit-based economy, which means you have the ability to spend the $50,000 you earned plus debt. Because as you make more money, as you have a good job, you become more creditworthy.

As you show the bank, "Hey, I made $50,000," they'll give you credit cards, they'll give you lines of credit, they'll give you whatever types of debt that they can. That way, now you can go out and spend $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 because that's what grows the economy.

The more money you spend, the richer somebody else gets. So now when you live in this credit-based economy with no financial education, people spend, spend, spend. The economy grows, grows, grows, and most people have no idea what hit them.

Do you know what's really interesting? Two days ago, I was having a conversation with one of my friends. I did a podcast about finance recently, and in there, I mentioned some of my friends, and then they messaged me on WhatsApp.

We were having a chat in our group chat, and for the first time ever, one of them asked me to guess. We're very close friends; we talk about money, we talk about how much money we have, etc. They said, "Guess who has the most money in the group?"

So I went through, and I did—I think this is this person's net worth of my five best friends, and I think this is how much cash they have.

Now, one of my friends who is very, what's the word, I guess frugal, lives a very simple life. As I was going through, I go, "You know what? This friend is this high-flying guy, lives in this amazing apartment, this person has all these wonderful things, this person's been successful in business, this person's successful in crypto."

But you know what? I bet my friend—I'm not going to say his name—I bet he's richer than everyone else in that chat, all of my other friends in the chat.

So I did my little prediction, and I said, "I bet you've got X figure." He replied and said, "This is my current cash position." He was richer than everyone in the chat in terms of cash combined.

This guy lives in a studio apartment. He never balls. He doesn't have a fancy car, doesn't have fancy clothes, and he's richer than the entire lot of my friendship group.

I thought, "God, there's something really important here." It's so crazy if you know the context of what I'm saying because I've got a friend in that chat who's built a big business.

I've got a friend—everyone in that chat runs businesses, is successful, but they're living in different ways. The one friend who runs the smallest business, who probably has the least income, is the richest.

Over the last couple of days, it's so funny. I was thinking about all the dinners I bought this guy, and I'm like, "I didn't know you were a millionaire! I would have been paying for everything!"

But this is really—I mean, if we ignore your friends, it's very easy to look fake rich.

Yeah, because everybody will give you a line of credit. If I want a Gucci purse and I can't afford the Gucci, guess what? I can buy now, pay later. I can open up a credit card and buy the Gucci and look like I'm rich when in reality, I'm just making Gucci rich.

In fact, one of the richest people in the world in 2023—he was the richest person in the world—is Bernard Arnault. He's the founder and CEO of LVMH.

He's the founder and CEO of the company that owns Louis Vuitton. Why? Because millions of people pay him to look rich when in reality, he's the one that's getting rich.

We assume that when you make some more money, you got to start looking the part. This is that mindset shift that we have to make.

A lot of people resonate who come from Indian traditional families. They message me saying, "Jay, I became a doctor," or "My wife and I are doctors. We make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. We make a great income, but we have no savings and no investments, and I don't know what to do."

The reason why is we have a Range Rover and a BMW. We have a nice house. We go on the doctor vacations. We have to look the part, but we don't have any money left over at the end of our paychecks.

It's a very easy thing to get caught up in because when you make more money, you become more creditworthy. Banks will give you bigger loans. When you make more money, you want to spend more money, and it's very easy.

You have to understand how to control that spending. That's why if you follow something like 75-15-10, one of the simplest things you can do to start is just always, no matter what, whether you're making $100,000 a year or $10 million a year, you always put money aside to invest.

You always put money aside to save, and you spend whatever's left. My friend doesn't invest. The friend I'm talking about doesn't actually invest; he just doesn't spend.

He just doesn't spend money, and he's just stacked up like a million dollars in cash whilst earning less than everyone else of my five friends in that chat.

It didn't take a long time. It took him four years or something—four or five years of just running this small business with a couple of people.

When I say a small business, I mean a really small business, like a business of maybe four or five employees, and he's built up a million dollars in cash for himself because he just doesn't spend money.

He lives at—he doesn't have like an ego. He doesn't care what people think of him. Yet my other friends who are earning maybe five times more a month have five times less cash than him.

It was so inspiring. It was honestly so inspiring because it says something about the importance of saving.

But who the hell wants to save? If I titled this podcast today something about saving, no one's going to click. It's not fun. Saving isn't exciting.

Who wants to go out and save $2,000? Who wants to spend less money? We want to buy more nice things. But unless you can control the spending, unless you know how to save, you will never build wealth.

Do you know for people that are in that paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, which I was in for many, many years of my life, where I'd get paid for my call center job, I'd go and spend the money, I'd pretty much spend all the money within the first couple of days of getting the paycheck, and I was just waiting the next three weeks for the next paycheck?

What advice would you give them about getting out of that cycle? Because you almost feel imprisoned by that cycle if you're in it.

Absolutely. Well, before I give the advice, I want to explain to that person what's happening because you are the prime customer for our economic system.

Banks love you because they can sell you payday loans. They can sell you credit cards. They can sell you lines of credit, and they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life, which means you keep making the bank rich.

Corporations love you because you're not going to think twice when we show you this nice bag, when we show you this nice vacation. You're going to want the stuff, and so we love selling you the stuff.

The government loves you because you're going to pay the highest taxes. Employees pay the highest taxes.

When you're in that situation, you are making everybody else rich at your expense. If you want to break out of this, the first thing you got to understand is you need to make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich.

Because when you're spending all your money, you are putting your money into their pockets, and you have to stop that. You got to keep that money for yourself.

You're in a boat. Think of it this way: you're in a boat, and this boat has water just flowing in, and you are sinking. You got to start by sealing the holes.

You got to stop the water leaving. You got to stop the water coming in. You got to stop the bleeding, and that means you got to stop the spending.

So if you are in what I call the financial danger zone, which is you don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt, if you are in that situation, you are in the financial danger zone, and you have to make drastic changes.

That means right now, no more eating at restaurants, no more vacations, no more doing anything that doesn't put money in your pocket, and no more Netflix.

The reason why I say this isn't because you're going to save $15 a month; it's so you can save two hours of your time a day. The average American is watching more than two hours of television a day.

If you don't have $2,000 saved up, if you have credit card debt, you cannot afford those two hours a day being wasted on TV.

That means right now you have to go out and start using the time to learn, start using the time to work, and start using the time to make some extra dollars.

So what do you do? Start selling stuff. Stop spending money. Sell stuff you own.

Sell stuff you own. If you have a TV that you're not using, sell it. If you have a car that you can't afford, sell it. If you're living in a house that you can't afford, sell it. Downgrade. Move smaller.

Then work to earn more money.

I've got to say, a couple of things that came to mind as you were saying that. Funnily enough, I put myself in the shoes of 18-year-old Steven Bartlett when I was in that small apartment with three or four immigrants in Moss Side.

I rushed home, and my rent was nothing. My rent was $115 a month, which I could not afford, and I could not pay. I was intermittently working between call center jobs, and whatever money I got, I spent.

Part of the reason I spent it, just PR, is because like many people watching, especially men, who sometimes feel the need because of the way society is, I was trying to get laid at the same time.

It's hard. When you're a young man—and I say young men in particular because the stats do support the fact that there is an expectation that men pay—when you're a young man, it's particularly difficult to do all of these things, to cut back and also get laid.

What am I going to do? Defer getting laid for 10 years? When I say laid, I'm really saying meeting someone and falling in love and having a life.

So what do I do?

This is why every Indian parent tells their kids to become a doctor, so their son can get married. It's the same concept.

But here's the thing: you have to pick your hard. Either life's going to be hard now, or it's going to be hard for the rest of your life, and you have to pick what's more important to you right now.

If we talk about balance, if you want to have a balance of everything—where you want to find a girl, and you want to make money, and you want to stay healthy—you are dividing your attention everywhere.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but very few people can actually do everything all at once. If your number one goal is to become wealthy, if your number one goal is to turn your finances around, you have to get serious about it.

Where you put your attention is where you get the results. If you want to be in a better financial situation, you are going to have to make sacrifices.

I can't come here and tell you it's going to be easy. Yeah, because that's going to be me lying to you. I got to be honest.

I did make a sacrifice, and for me, the sacrifice was I started a business, and frankly, that meant that I didn't have time to be going out, getting laid, or meeting people or socializing.

But my story arc ends with it going well, and then the romantic situation taking care of itself many years later once it had gone well because I was so focused on myself.

It's funny; there is a bit of a paradox to life that the more you actually focus inward, the more you become a magnet.

The more I focused outward, the more I pursued and chased and sort of neglected myself, the harder it was to get people interested in me.

I also want to say that when I talk about building wealth, I'm not talking about becoming a money-hungry, just money-greedy, evil person that just cares about money. That's not what I'm talking about.

I want you to live a holistic life because money is just one part of your life. But the second part to that, yes, I'm not telling you to never enjoy life.

I'm telling you to make a sacrifice for a period of your life. That way, you can enjoy the rest of your life and never have to worry about money again.

It's hard for us to naturally see life for seasons, especially when we're looking forward. When we're looking back, it's very easy to say, "Oh, that was that season."

I can sit here now and say, "Oh, that 20 to 25 was that sacrifice-everything-in-my-life-to-make-myself-something season."

Then 25 to 30 was like building and learning. Now, I can think of it. It's easier actually now to think forward in seasons now that I've been through some seasons.

But for someone that hasn't been through seasons in life, it's hard to think about life in those terms.

I now think of my life in these five-year seasons, and that helps me to say to you, even have conversations with my partner where I go, "This is the season I'm in, and it'll last probably roughly this long, and I'm going to sacrifice these things and prioritize these things in this season."

But it's hard for people to understand this idea. It's difficult, and that sacrifice is difficult, especially during a time where everybody's showing off everything on Instagram.

You look at your friends who have a crappy job, but they're driving around in nicer cars, going on better vacations, going to the nicer restaurants, and you're thinking, "What did I do wrong?"

Especially if you're a guy, you have a girlfriend, you have a wife, she's going to say, "How come they keep getting to go? Can they keep going to Cancun? They keep going to these nice restaurants. How come you can't take me to these nice places?"

Now you feel like you're doing something wrong because where is this discrepancy?

The reason why I call my show the Minority Mindset is because I'm a big advocate of not doing what the majority of people do.

The first time I made a million dollars in a year, I was in my 20s. I was driving a car worth $500. It didn't have a bumper on it. It was not pretty.

My wife sat in the car with me, and my employees drove better cars than I did. So you know, you got to be confident, and you got to work for something bigger.

You want a partner that's going to understand that. That's my belief, which is not the easy thing.

It's interesting because confidence is such an internal thing, and I just feel like I probably just didn't have it then because I think I was scared for someone to know that I was broke.

I was so scared to know for someone to know that I was broke that I just didn't entertain romantic relationships.

That is the reason why so many people will go into debt to buy vacations, to buy things, to buy stuff to look rich. Ironically, that's the thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life: because they're scared to look broke.

Now when you try to look rich, that's the thing that's actually keeping you broke.

There's another element to this, which is my life was pretty miserable. So when you have a relatively miserable life, when you don't have many nice things—see, you're working in a call center, as I was, until 11:00 at night, doing overtime, every overtime hour I could get.

Then because you're also so lonely, you're going home alone, walking home because you can't afford the bus. Anything that gives you a little dopamine hit—gambling.

This is why all the gambling shops are in the areas that struggle the worst financially because those—I mean, a lot of people say because those people are looking for that, you know, that big payday, that dopamine hit from a payday.

My TV in my tiny, tiny little bedsit room was like half the size of the wall. I was making reckless spending decisions because I think it gave me some kind of hit that I was missing in my life.

It gave me like a dopamine rush that was—and there weren't many things giving me a dopamine hit at that point in my life.

During that time, you are making emotional decisions. Yes, as many people are, and it's very difficult to speak logic to emotion.

But this is where now you have to be able to understand the difference because if you're listening to this and you're in that situation, you have to understand that if you want to continue being able to live that lifestyle, you're going to have to make some changes today.

Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in this lifestyle for the rest of your life, and it's only going to get more difficult.

That's the thing: if you want to become wealthy, the first part is just your own mindset. It's your own discipline.

Until you can conquer that, I can tell you everything about investing. I can tell you different ETFs and index funds to invest in. I can tell you different investment institutions out there.

I can tell you which stock brokerages to use. I can tell you just invest 15% of your income into this for the next 10, 20, 30 years, and you're going to become wealthy.

But until you can get over that mindset, you're never going to become wealthy. Because then what happens in that situation is when you're in that state of, "I just want to look rich. I just want to have that dopamine. I just want to have some nice things because I deserve it. I work hard."

You know what happens next? You're the one that gets caught up in all the get-rich-quick schemes because someone's going to say, "Look, put $1,000 into this; you'll have $10,000 in the next three months."

Or, "I'm going to show you you can live the laptop lifestyle. You can work five hours a week, make $10,000 a month, $10,000 a week. You're never going to have to worry about money again. Just buy this program."

Now you're a prime candidate because now you were driven by this emotion of, "I want that. I can't imagine if I had an extra $10,000 a month, and I don't even have to work for it."

Because you can't see past it. All you're doing is being sold by emotion.

You're the one that's going to get caught up in the get-rich-quick schemes. You're the one that's going to make the bank rich because you're going to stay stuck in debt.

Corporations are going to love you because they can keep selling you the nicest, the newest stuff because you want to look rich. You want to show it off to your friends. You want to show it off to the girls, and you get stuck in that cycle.

So I want to talk about what the money mindset is. But just on that thing you just said there, you said get-rich-quick schemes, crypto.

What's your point of view on cryptocurrencies and investing in crypto?

So I'll tell you where I invest my money so you can understand. I put my money in five places. I put my money into my own business. I invest my money into real estate, and I invest my money into stocks.

I invest my money into speculative assets, which includes cryptocurrency, and then I own some physical gold.

Starting with my own business, I run a company called Briefs Media. We're probably most known for our Market Briefs newsletter, where we break down what's happening in the financial markets.

So that's Briefs Media. Number two is I invest in physical real estate. So I'm going out to buy rental properties that I can use to generate cash flow.

Number three, I invest in stocks. This is in the form of investing in individual companies and investing in funds—funds are ETFs, index funds, mutual funds, where you can get investment into a broad basket of companies.

Number four is my speculative investments. Notice how I said number four; this is one of the smallest pieces now, which are things that I believe can go up very quickly but can also fall just as fast.

So the speculative assets, which make up a small piece of my portfolio, include things like startups that I invest in. It also includes things like cryptocurrency.

I own a little bit of physical gold. Physical gold makes up about 2% of my portfolio.

But going back to cryptocurrency, because that's what you asked, I think it is a speculative investment. I have made a ton of money in cryptocurrency, and I started buying cryptocurrency before it was as popular as it is today.

I began buying it in 2016 or so when Bitcoin was around $3,000, maybe 2016, 2017, when Bitcoin was around $3,000 a coin. I have sold some.

For me, I understand it can go up very fast, but it can fall just as fast. The issue that I have is when people now want to get into this idea of investing because now they're in this tough situation.

"I'm living paycheck to paycheck, and I hear about this financial education and investing. If I just dump my money into Bitcoin or crypto, maybe it'll 10x, and it'll have financial freedom."

That's where I have an issue because you're taking your money and you're going for your long-term investments into a speculative asset that hasn't been proven.

Maybe it will work, and you'll become a multi-millionaire. Maybe you'll lose everything. But I don't want to gamble with my wealth. I want to build my wealth with something established and then use the speculative assets as something that is speculative and treated as such.

In terms of your net worth, then how is it broken down in terms of percentage between these five things?

So if we look at real estate, real estate is probably close to almost 50% of my investments. Stocks make up probably right around 30%.

Speculative is about 18% of my portfolio. Sorry, just the 30%—how much of that is into individual company stocks versus ETFs?

It's about half and half. Okay, so 15% each.

Okay, cool. And then versus startups, it was a lot more crypto. Now it's a lot more startups. I sold a chunk of Bitcoin when it was breaking record highs, and I'm going to be using that money to buy some more rental properties.

Okay, and gold, about 2% of my portfolio.

Okay, and the reason why I buy gold—I don't consider gold an investment. I look at gold as a way of saving hard money because my theory is if I take $10,000 of cash and I take $10,000 worth of physical gold and I bury both of these things in my backyard today, in 10 years, what's going to have more buying power?

My theory is that the gold is going to have more buying power, and so that's why I own some physical gold. For me, it's this way of saving hard cash.

I look at it as insurance against doomsday, against something really bad happening, against something bad happening to our currency, something bad happening to the economy. That's why I own a little bit of physical gold.

But the problem with gold is when I own my physical gold, it just sits there in a vault. It doesn't produce cash flow. It doesn't create new value. It just sits there.

When I invest in real estate, it produces cash flow. When I invest in stocks, the companies are working to produce a better product to grow the profits. The gold doesn't do anything.

What about cash? Do you keep a lot of cash on hand?

Cash is definitely a position. I don't know about percentage, but I always keep cash. I'm going to break this down a few ways because I have one, let's call it bucket of cash, which is my emergency savings.

This is cash that is there to protect me against an emergency in my personal life. I also have a separate bucket of cash, which is my business emergency savings.

Then I have a bucket of cash which is there to be invested money. This is money that's waiting to be invested in real estate and then in stocks.

Then I also have another little piece of cash that's waiting to be invested more into speculative assets. So I have cash waiting to be invested in speculative assets, cash waiting to be invested in real estate, cash waiting to be invested in stocks, and then I have my emergency cash.

So I like to separate it all out. A second ago, you said that unless you have a money mindset, you're never going to be wealthy. What is the money mindset?

The mindset is, number one, you have to believe that you're going to become wealthy. What I like to say is you have to say, "I will become wealthy."

Why? Because if you don't believe you're going to become wealthy, it is going to be impossible for you.

I used to guest teach in Detroit public schools. Detroit is a very rough area—certain parts of it are still rough. Our office is in downtown Detroit, but there are parts of Detroit which are still very rough.

I suggested teaching in some of the public schools there, and these are good kids who were not exposed to some of the best things.

What I mean by that is when I would go into these classrooms, you'd first have to go through multiple metal detectors. There'd be police there. You might have to be pat down.

When I get into the classroom, I'd ask the kids, "How many of you have two parents in a home?" Almost nobody would raise their hand.

I would then ask, "How many of you work a job?" Almost everybody would raise their hand. As I got to know the students better, I also started to realize that these kids—high school kids—some of them are already in gangs.

Some of them have already been arrested by the police. Some have already been involved in these what we consider bad things, and they are bad things, but to the kids, that's just normal.

When I talk to them about these gangs, what they'll tell me is, "I don't have parents at home. I don't have a dad. I don't know my dad. My mom is working. How am I going to eat?"

"My brothers, this gang provides me some comfort because there's people that are around me. They give me food. They help give me money."

It's not a bad thing in their eyes. When I would come into these classrooms, I would talk about life, motivation, money, all things.

One of the things I'd like to do, an exercise that I would do, is try to get you to think about successful things. What are things that kids want? A nice car.

So I would ask these kids, "What is your dream car?" The responses that I would get were things like a Ford Mustang or a Dodge Challenger.

You know, these nice cars. But I would follow up with, "Why not a Bugatti? Why not a Lamborghini? Why not a Rolls-Royce?"

They would say, "Somebody like me can never have something like that, so I can't even dream about having these nice things."

That was really shocking to me. I mean, you are kind of suppressed to the point that not only do you not think that you can achieve it, but you can't even dream that you can achieve it.

You can't even achieve it in your own dreams. When you don't believe that you are worthy of anything more than a Ford Mustang, how in the world are you going to work for something nicer?

I'm not saying you have to work just for materialistic things, but this is that mindset shift that if you don't believe that you can do it, you are never going to be able to do it.

This is where the first thing is you have to say, "I will become wealthy." Sometimes you have to be able to find a taste of success and see what that looks like.

There are many ways to go by doing it. I mean, you can just go on to Instagram and see what success looks like to some people, but you start to define what is that success and tell yourself, "I will become wealthy."

Not that I might, not that I can, but I will become wealthy. The second thing is money is a tool.

The reason why I say that is because we've been kind of hinting at this throughout this entire discussion. The reason why many people are so scared to talk about money, the reason why money is such a taboo topic, is because we are insecure about our own money.

I just want to pause there before we carry on on the money as a tool point.

It's so interesting what you're saying about those kids. So interesting because I was thinking as you were speaking about stereotype threats.

In my previous book, I spent some time talking about self-belief and confidence and this idea of stereotype threats. Some of the studies I came across showed that if there's a stereotype that people like you—let's say black people like me—are bad at a certain thing, let's say math, before they do a math test, if they reminded a black person that they were black, just got them to tick a box saying that they were black, their performance on that test would drop.

They did the same with women. So if there's a stereotype surrounding your ability in something, if they remind you of that part of you before you do a test, your performance drops.

Importantly, in the studies, when they don't remind the black person or the woman about that particular feature of themselves, their performance is the same as everybody else.

It's interesting that you say that when you're talking about money, that we have a stereotype threat there. We exist in a world where we think people like us make a certain amount of money.

If the stereotype threat studies are true, that means that I'm going to show up in the world in such a way that's going to bring that amount of money about.

But it's not easy to genuinely believe outside of your stereotype.

100%. Outside of the context in which you were raised. I went undercover in a school in a rough area in Liverpool that was doing very poorly.

I was undercover as a school teacher, so I was getting to know the kids. I met this one kid, and I remember him saying to me about his plans for the future.

I sat there, and I said, "Do you know any millionaires?" He was like, "No, there's no millionaires around here." I was like, "Have you ever met one?" He goes, "I've never ever met one."

In that moment, I—his mom, which it's on video, it was a Channel 4 documentary I did—he then goes, "But I think I want to be a millionaire." His mom burst out laughing. She was on the sofa next to him, and she burst out laughing.

I remember asking her on camera, saying, "Why are you laughing?" She goes, "No, there's no chance."

It's like indoctrinated into your context, your family, your roots, your friendship networks that you can't make it. So it's hard.

It is 100% difficult, and it doesn't stop at any level. For example, when I told my parents that I didn't want to be a doctor, I was told by everybody, "I'm throwing my parents' sacrifice away."

Somebody like me can never make it in business because I don't know anything about business. No one in my family is a business person. No one in my family is an investor. No one in my family does this.

You've never learned this stuff before. You didn't get into business school. How are you going to do this?

I'm not saying this to compare; I'm saying this to explain that there are so many levels to this mindset block that if you cannot break out of this invisible barrier, you will never become successful.

When any employee joins my team, the first day we make every employee—every single one, regardless of a role—do this exercise. It's called the nine dots exercise.

You have these nine dots on the screen, and if you go to Google, you can see the nine dots exercise or nine dots trivia, where it's nine dots. We'll put it on the screen.

I'm not going to spoil it, but I will actually—that's the only way I can get it across. The way that this exercise works is you have to, in four lines, touch every dot on the screen without picking up your pen.

You have to touch every dot—all of these nine dots—without picking up your pen. So when you do that, you might say, "Well, it's impossible. How do you do that?"

This is where now—oh, okay, not going over a previous line, right? Not—well, you can go over a previous line, but you cannot pick up your pen.

If there's nine dots—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—you have to connect all four dots. Sorry, all nine dots with four lines. You can't curve the pen, and you can't pick up your pen.

It's not as easy as it looks. Come on, Stephen, show me how to do it.

What most people do is they start going like this, this, and then now we freeze up because I don't know where I can go next.

But the way that you do it is we're going to break the invisible barrier. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start the same way I did before, but instead of creating the same cut that I did last time, I'm going to break the invisible barrier, go a little bit further down, and now I'm going to come up like this.

Then I'm going to go this way, and then I'm going to finish it up like that. You break the invisible barrier. You go beyond what you think you can do because you blew past your own expectations.

We have this invisible box around ourselves, and this is what you want to be able to break out of. This is that mindset shift that you have to be able to make, and that's the first part of becoming wealthy.

When you talked about invisible barriers, it reminded me of a video that actually changed my life. It was a video of an ant. Some people have heard me talk about this video before.

This video shows an ant, and they get a Sharpie pen and draw a circle around it. The ant now believes that it's trapped in the circle. No matter what it does, it goes around, and it checks all the to the circle.

It thinks that it's trapped. We can see that that circle is a figment of its imagination.

When I see this, I think, "Oh my God, we've all got this sort of imaginary circle drawn around us." Then I watched this video of a spider.

They can do the same thing with a spider, but in this video, there's a moment where the spider accidentally steps over the pen. When it steps over the pen, it can never ever be trapped by the pen again.

You'll see it in a second. It's running towards it. So this is like an imaginary barrier in its mind.

If I just bring it forward a little bit, this is the moment here where it gets—wow, it's like a real wall. It thinks it's a real wall, and then it gets too tight here. It runs over it, and it can never be trapped again.

I love that because once you break it, you can't be trapped after that. You realize that it's an illusion that was trapping you the whole time.

This kind of feeds into what we've been saying about these stereotypes. For me, when I, at a very young age, was able to make my first money or start a business or turn an idea into a thing that put money in my pocket, that illusion was broken forever.

The illusion that the only way to become successful—you said the same thing—was to go to school, get a degree, get a job. You can't unsee it. You can't unlearn it.

You can't ever go and follow that same traditional path and do that again because you saw the other side. Until you get a taste of it, you're going to be stuck.

That's where, again, all success starts with your mindset. That's why I say, "I will become wealthy."

That first point, though, of awareness—just knowing the fact that you're trapped by something. It's not to say that I've broken out of all of my psychological barriers.

Now I'm just in a new one. I'm just in a new set of barriers. I think that I can be—I can have nine figures. I probably don't think I could be a billionaire or whatever.

At this moment, all of us, no matter how successful we think we are, are in some kind of circles. In every stage of your life, you're in some sort of barrier.

You know everything that you do now has to be constantly working to shock yourself. When I started my YouTube channel, it's kind of funny.

I didn't start my YouTube channel thinking that it was going to be big. The funny thing was I always thought that I thought big.

I think big. I'm going to start a business. I'm going to prove everybody wrong. I didn't start my YouTube channel to make money. This was kind of a hobby for me.

But I remember, and I laugh at this now, I told my brother when I started my YouTube channel, "If I hit 100,000 subscribers, I don't know what I'm going to do, but if I hit a million subscribers, I'm going to shut my channel down because there's no way it's impossible that my channel is going to hit 1 million subscribers."

There's not 1 million weirdos in the world that are going to want to watch this random guy on YouTube talk about guacamole and money, right?

The funny thing is I started making these videos. I started enjoying making these videos because I started talking about the things that I wish somebody would have told me before.

People started to watch, and people started to actually enjoy it and share it with their friends. Then we hit 100,000 subscribers, and I couldn't believe it.

We hit 500,000 subscribers, and I couldn't believe it. Then one day we hit a million subscribers, and I was like, "Oh crap, I hope my brother doesn't remember this promise because I don't want to shut this down."

But then we continued growing, and here I was, this guy who had been successful. I'm already investing in real estate. I've had some business success.

I broke out of this idea of becoming a doctor and started a business, and I'm still putting these limitations on myself that I can't start a YouTube channel.

Why did I do that? Because I had never done that before. I had never seen this happen for somebody like me before.

So is there anything practical that someone who's currently trapped in some kind of psychological barriers can do practically to help them be more expansive with how they think about their life?

What I do—and I don't know if I recommend this to anybody else—is I'm a little stubborn. I'm going to kind of preface it with that.

I do things to stick out and be different. So what I mean by this—I'm going to go back to what I said before. The first time I made a million dollars in a year, I thought originally that I would be flying in private jets and balling out and doing all this stuff.

But I knew that I wanted something different. I wanted to build this wealth, but I didn't want to now start living like everybody else.

I wanted to do something different, so I continued living small. That's why I continued driving around in this car because everybody questioned what the heck I was doing.

People were wondering, "Is Jaspreet actually successful, or is this guy a hoax? Is Jaspreet broke? Can he not afford a nicer car?"

I kind of put myself in this position of hearing the stuff and wanting to really—you talked about confidence. I wanted to really build my confidence to be that person that did something different.

I don't know; I get joy. I'm a weirdo. I get joy out of that. When I graduated law school, I told my dad before I graduated law school—even before that—I'm only doing this for you.

When it was my graduation day, everybody, you know, you wear a nice suit and tie, and you kind of get all dressed up to go. I told my dad, "Look, I told you I'm going to get you the diploma, but I'm going to do it on my terms."

So I decided not to wear a suit. I decided to wear a very traditional Punjabi outfit called a kurta pajama, which is a long shirt and pants.

I wore traditional shoes called jutti, meaning Indian shoes. For me, I just wanted to do that because it gave me this confidence.

Yeah, I mean, people will say, "What the heck are you wearing?" But for me, I needed that burst of confidence that I'm doing this for me.

I get fueled by people questioning me, and you have to find what fuels you.

I'm not sure if it's my duty to become wealthy. Is that just something you say out loud? Is there a way you can remind yourself of this?

I'm not a big fan of, you know, meditating on this idea of you become wealthy. I'm not a big fan of this woo-woo idea of "I'm going to become wealthy."

I'm going to become wealthy, and that's not how it works. But what I do believe is you have to keep reminding yourself and giving yourself the motivation and discipline in the beginning as to why you started.

Some fuel as to why you started. One of the things I like to talk about is what is your why? Who are you doing this for?

In our office, everybody has next to their desk this tackboard where you can put pictures or whatever it might be to remind you of why you're working hard.

In the beginning for me, it was about my parents. I wanted to make them proud. I wanted to show them that their sacrifices were worth it.

I wanted to show them that I could do something different. I wanted to show them that I could break out of the mold.

So I would put pictures of my parents on my board. I would put pictures of my future family on my board.

I was pissed off. I wanted to prove people wrong, and I was angry. I don't try to cuss on camera that often, but here we go. I was angry, and the reason I was angry is because when I made that decision to not become a doctor, the thing that I was told was I'm throwing away the sacrifice that my parents made.

I started a business at the time. I was working in the e-commerce world, and I started a sock company. Then the comments that we got were, "So just PR, you were going to become a doctor, now you're selling socks." It was just very reoccurring, just like, "Ah, you gave up your dreams. You gave up all the sacrifices that your family did. You don't even appreciate the sacrifices, and now you're just going to sell socks on the internet."

That was my fuel because I knew—I don't know how, but I knew—I was going to prove you wrong. Toxic fuel, 100%. It was just anger, just pure anger. I'm going to prove you wrong. Slowly, the business started to grow. I started to be seen on TV, and all these things started to happen.

I was fortunate that my business flipped. Now I'm not selling socks; I'm building this financial media company, Briefs Media. For me, there is a purpose for what I do. There are a lot of people that are lacking financial education. There are a lot of people that are working really hard that have no idea why they can't build any wealth. They keep hearing about how people are becoming so wealthy, investment levels are skyrocketing, billionaires are becoming even richer, and they don't understand.

People just get angry when, in reality, you can participate in that same game and win in this game because our economic system is designed to benefit investors. If you don't understand that, you will never be able to win in the system.

Point number two in your money mindset is that money is a tool. What do you mean by money is a tool, and how is that different from how everyone else thinks about money? You have to understand how money plays a part in your life. When I say money is a tool, what I mean by that is money doesn't make you a good person; money doesn't make you a bad person. It amplifies who you are.

What I'd like to say is that there are four fitnesses in your life. If you want to live a happy and fulfilled life, you have to be physically fit, mentally fit, spiritually fit, and financially fit. If you're physically fit, but you're on your deathbed, you're morbidly obese, having $10 million is not going to make you happy. All you want to do is be healthy again.

Mentally fit is about being happy. If you're surrounded by toxic people, if you're unhappy, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're just miserable, you're never going to be able to really enjoy life. Having more money is not going to fulfill that hole.

Spiritually fit does not mean religious; it means having a purpose. What is the reason for getting out of bed every day? What is the reason for wanting to go out and achieve and do something? Because if you have $10 million, what's the reason for wanting to get up and conquer at the very top?

This financial fitness—once you have the bottom three—gives you the most power and ability to live the best life possible. This is all about now being able to solve your financial problems, being able to not worry about paying your bills, being able to have the nicer stuff when you want and not have to worry about the price.

The thing about this that I want to really hammer home is if you don't have this financial fitness, now your physical fitness can get hurt because you can't afford the nice gym membership. You can't afford the healthy food. You can't afford to take care of your body. If you don't have the financial fitness, your mental fitness can get hurt. Financial problems are one of the leading causes of suicide and divorce. Financial problems can really stress you out, and they can cause a whole lot of anxiety and depression.

Financial problems can also ruin your spiritual fitness because if you can't pay your bills, you can easily lose your sense of purpose. So yes, being financially fit is its own part, but it all comes together in your life.

Number three to this money mindset: money is abundant. What I mean by that is you have to be willing to think bigger because oftentimes what happens is we start to think about the dollars that I'm giving as opposed to the dollars that I'm getting. If I pay you a dollar, you are getting rich off of me, but I'm not looking at what I'm getting. If I'm getting $2 from you, well, is it bad that I pay you $1?

No. Right now, we need to start to understand there's a lot of money in the world. Just because somebody gets rich, that doesn't mean somebody else can't get rich. The reason why we get this confused is because we assume that money is scarce, and this comes from our childhood. When you grow up, you're fighting for your parents' attention, and there's a limited attention span that your parents have. If you have siblings, now it's divided, and so you can't have all the attention.

If they're giving their attention to somebody else, that means you're not getting attention. It's a yes or no; it's black and white. But with money, that's not the case. You can be rich, and I can be rich, but we have to understand that there's a lot of money in the world. I mean, the United States government has $35 trillion in debt. It's a lot of money.

If you just take a small piece of that, a small piece of the dollars out there, you can build wealth, and somebody else can build wealth. Why is that particular point in this money mindset so critical? Why is it important to know that there's so much money out there? How does that change you?

So if you make $50,000 a year right now, what you might start doing if you become financially smart is you might say, "All right, I'm going to start living off of 75% of what I make, and I'm going to invest the other 15%." That means I'm going to live off of $30,000 and save and invest, we'll call it $20,000.

You might now say, "Ah, I like this idea of investing. I'm seeing the potential. What do I do? I make $50,000 a year. How about I keep cutting back? Now I'm going to live off of $25,000, $23,000." There's a limited number of dollars that you can squeeze out of this pie, but there's no limit to how much you can earn.

So what if I say, "Let's flip it up a little bit. How about instead of trying to squeeze more pennies out of this $50,000 you have, let's try to earn $500,000 a year now?" The first thing that's going to happen is you're going to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, $500,000 a year? My boss is not going to give me a $500,000 a year salary. What are you talking about, J?"

Well, okay, let's break this down. If you want to make more money, how do you do it? I don't know. Well, let's start learning. Where are you going to learn? I don't know. Google? YouTube? Okay, let's go to Google and YouTube. How can I make more money?

Maybe you start by learning how to ask for a raise. Maybe you learn to get a career change. Maybe you learn to change jobs, or maybe now you start to think a little bit differently and say, "Maybe you start to build a side business or a side hustle." That way, you can start earning more money.

But until you realize that it's possible to instead of trying to go from $50,000 to $55,000, $58,000 to $65,000, let's try to go a little bit bigger. How about $50,000 to $500,000? That's going to require, number one, you break out of that mindset shift, that invisible barrier, but also understanding there's a lot of money out there.

The last point here is I will become wealthy, which is different from the first point, which is it's my duty to become wealthy. We discussed the first one, which is I will become wealthy. The last one is it is my duty to become wealthy.

Oh, okay. Why is it your duty to become wealthy? Because I believe that it's up to you to take care of your family, to be the one that takes care of yourself, and that we can also help take care of your community. That is my belief that it is your duty to do so.

If you rely on the government or somebody else to do it, well, you are asking for problems. We've seen this in many instances. You might have heard in the United States, Social Security is drying up. It's never going to dry up because the government can just print more money and pay it out, but it's never going to be enough to live a great life.

People that relied on pensions—well, pensions are becoming a thing of the past. Some pensions have gone bankrupt, and people have lost that. So it is more important than ever for you to become financially sufficient and financially stable through your own financial education.

Trump has just been elected the new president of the United States of America. When you saw that news, did it change your thesis as it relates to wealth creation? Is there anything you're now going to be doing differently? Is there any new opportunities that you now see? Are you shifting your capital allocation towards more risky assets or less risky assets or real estate?

If we take a look at the last 15 presidents in the United States, some have been Democrat, some have been Republican. The stock market has gone up under Democratic presidents; it's also fallen under Democratic presidents. The stock market has gone up under Republican presidents; it's also fallen under Republican presidents.

So what does that mean? Well, if you're just investing for the long term, who cares? But for some investors that we'll call a little bit more sophisticated, you might want to understand what the president is going to do in terms of shifting government spending.

Now I'm going to make this a little bit technical, but let me kind of break this down. Our economy is measured through a number called GDP, and GDP is a measure of all spending that happens in our economy. In the United States, the largest spender is the government—30% of our GDP, our economy, is government spending—which means that there are certain entities, certain businesses that will benefit depending on where the government spends money, and that can then impact those stocks, it can impact those industries, and it can impact those businesses.

So now let's break this down. If you're a long-term investor, you're investing in the S&P 500, you're investing in just general ETFs and index funds and mutual funds, it does not matter. But if you are, let's say, a little bit more sophisticated, you want to understand the government shifts that are happening.

Now we can dig a little bit deeper. Prior to the election, we published a whole report in Market Briefs Pro on this, where we talked about if Trump is elected president, here are the things that he has said that he's going to do.

Number one, he wants to deregulate oil and gas. Number two, he wants to deregulate the financial service industry. And number three, he wants to invest in the military.

So if you break this down, oil and gas—these are companies that are investing and drilling oil. If these companies have less regulations and more ability to produce product and sell more product, they could see bigger revenues and bigger profits.

Number two, with financial service industries, things like the companies on Wall Street—if you deregulate them and give them the ability to do more things, they can make bigger revenues and bigger profits, and crypto as well. Since the news that he's going to be inaugurated, the prices have just skyrocketed.

Exactly. And number three is investing in the military. Now, what does it mean to invest in the military? Well, if we're investing in the military, that means that we're going to be practicing shooting more guns, shooting more bullets, having artillery, having planes, and other machinery. These are then done by private companies.

If the government can spend and choose where to spend money, and the government then decides that they want to spend more money or allow companies to be more free to do whatever they want in these industries, those industries then have the ability to potentially grow the revenues, grow their profits, grow the stock prices.

These can then create what we call a government shift because the government spending shifts, and that can create an investment opportunity for investors that want to be a little bit more sophisticated. But I'm going to say this again: as a long-term investor, forget the collection cycles. You're investing for the long term.

For those less sophisticated investors, as you were when you were 19 years old, you chose to invest in real estate as a cash-generating asset. Now, if I want to invest in real estate, it's my first investment as you did. What are the things that I should be looking out for? If I'm someone that knows nothing about real estate, what kind of properties should I be looking for? How big? Does it matter how much those properties cost? Am I looking for family rentals, studio apartments? What kind of things matter?

What you invest in is going to depend on what's best for you. But the way I like to look at it, for me—because I can't tell you what to do—is when I invest in real estate, I look for a 7% cash-on-cash return minimum. What does that mean?

So if I invested a dollar today, I want 7 cents of cash flow after expenses every year for my dollar that I invest. So if I buy, let's just call it a $100,000 house, and I'm going to keep it very simple—we're going to have no debt. I take $100,000 out of my bank account, and I buy this $100,000 house that I then rent out. That rent, after all the expenses, should then put at least $7,000 into my pocket.

Every year, that's what a 7% cash-on-cash return means. Now, for me, I prefer single-family houses or multifamily apartments because that's kind of where I got started, and I've found more success there. It's a little bit more innovation-proof because we know that offices can go up and down. If companies are working from home, offices can be affected. The retail sector can be impacted if companies are moving online, and we see that there's a lot of shifts happening in the retail spaces.

But at the end of the day, you've got to find what's right for you and how involved you want to be. When I invest in real estate, I want it to be passive for me. After I find a property, after we do the renovations, I want to give the keys over to a property manager. I don't want to have to worry about it.

Okay, so you don't become the landlord yourself and deal with the tenants directly? I do not. The reason why is I have all the things that I need to do, and I don't want to spend my time managing the property. I want to spend my time acquiring; I want to spend my time investing, but I don't want to spend my time managing.

What's the best investment you ever made? The best investment I ever made is the investment in myself. That has given me a much better return than any real estate, than any stock, and even than any cryptocurrency. When I say best investment in myself, it's two things.

Number one is the investment that I have made in my own education outside of school—so books, podcasts, classes, coaching. Number two, the failures. I have made a lot of mistakes. They have caused me a lot of stress, a lot of headache, a lot of money, but they have taught me a ton.

So we'll talk about real estate for a second. If we go back to the first condo, the sunshine and rainbows is I rent this property out for $600 a month. But the downfall, or the risky part and the bad part, is that I made every mistake possible.

Number one, I hired a bad contractor. Number two, I hired a property manager, which I didn't realize was a fake property manager. We didn't even sign a lease with the tenant. I didn't even sign a contract with the property manager. They weren't working with the tenants, and they gave the tenant my phone number.

So here I am sitting in my organic chemistry class getting calls from my tenant saying the property is going to implode because the light bulb fused. Then we brought in a bad tenant.

Can I ask you a question then? How could you have avoided all of this? Well, I could have either, number one, had a real estate investor that I could have talked to, which I didn't have access to. I read a lot of real estate books. So if you say, "What could I have done differently to avoid it?" Because there's people listening right now that are going, "Jesus, I want to get into this real estate game, but I don't want to go through that."

You can learn as much as you want; you're going to make mistakes. It is a part of the process. You can learn everything you want, but every real estate deal is unique. You are going to screw up, and I have made a lot of screw-ups. But once you get through the screw-ups, it becomes a lot easier.

I call it the hurdle. But then things get even more exciting because now I bring on a new property manager, and the tenants move out, and then we think everything is good. Now I get a letter delivered to me, hand-delivered. Well, this is a nice gift. It says, "Just breathe, you are being sued."

I said, "What?" Those tenants then sued me because they claimed that the bathtub was too slippery when the water was on. True story. Now here I have this lawsuit. I'm 21, 22. I have no idea what's going on. Just breathe; was the bathtub too slippery?

Well, I'll tell you exactly what happened. There was a chip about the size of a quarter in the bathtub. The paint had chipped. They filed a complaint with my new property manager. Thank God I switched property managers because what a good property manager does is they're going to document everything that happens.

So my property manager documents that, okay, tenant complains of a chip in their bathtub. We send out the contractor. The property manager sends out the contractor. They go there to fix the chip in the bathtub, and you know what the tenant says? "Can you come back a different time? My husband slipped and fell at a friend's barbecue, and so we don't want you to fix that chip today."

The contractor says, "Okay, we note this down." He tries to then fix the chip three more times, but the tenant denies it every single time. We thought, "Okay, just let us know when you want the chip fixed." The contractor is waiting; they never brought it up again.

Then we get this lawsuit saying that we were negligent, that I'm this evil, greedy human being because I refused to fix this chip in the bathtub, which made the bathtub slippery when the water was on, which caused this person to slip and fall and break their hip.

Now we go through the lawsuit process. Thankfully, I had insurance, but the insurance company still has to pay for the attorney. I still have to be involved through all the proceedings. Now they're claiming that because I didn't fix this chip, it made the bathtub slippery, and that's what caused this tenant to get hurt.

But we had the documentation saying that they slipped and fell at a friend's barbecue. Then we go through the hospital records, and we found out that this person slipped and fell at a barbecue, but they wanted to get some money out of this rich landlord. I'm a 22-year-old kid; I have no idea what's going on.

The insurance company had to settle. They paid $144,000 to make the case go away. It's interesting because even when people hear all of that, they think, "Gosh, I really don't want to go through that."

So, J, please tell me something to avoid some of those things. As you were talking, I was writing down some principles. The first principle that I wrote down, which could have avoided you a lot of that heartache, is to really, really, really, really take time when picking people.

100%. And we—no one does it. No one does it. I have an investment portfolio where I have 40, 50 companies now, and if there was one piece of advice that I'd give to all of those portfolio companies, which I know they are not going to listen to, no matter how passionately I say it, no matter if I bang on the desk, no matter if I scream or show them my scars, the one piece of advice I'd say to them is that recruitment is the single most important thing.

You can say that to people, but they still rush the process. They still will just go with their vibes and bias. They'll still just go with the person who sounds the smartest. They won't acknowledge the fact that they don't know what good looks like.

You don't know what good looks like. If you start with this base premise, which most people don't start with, which is, "I am really, really bad at recruitment," if you start with that, then you'll put systems in place to alleviate the downsides of you being really bad at recruitment.

If you had started with that when you were, I don't know, 20 years old or whatever it might have been, you would have gone to seek out someone else's opinion on which contractor to hire, which tenants to bring in, and that could have alleviated a lot of this pain.

It seems like I was in a rush. In a rush, yes. I wanted to get it done, and so I find the cheapest and fastest contractor, the cheapest and fastest property manager, the cheapest and fastest—or not the cheapest, but you know, the fastest tenant that I could bring in because I wanted to do it quickly. I wanted to get there fast.

It reminds me of people picking romantic partners. I was in a rush, so I ignored the red flags. It's funny because you said the cheapest. This is actually what plays out in business all of the time. I speak to these young founders that are starting businesses, and they go, "Steve, yeah, I know you say take time and hire great people, but look at the salary. This person costs $100,000, and this one's $50,000, so I'm going to go for the one that saves me money."

That is the trap. One of the most expensive things that you can do is be cheap. I learned that the hard way because I was born to be cheap. You know, I talked about how Indian people make a dollar to spend 20 cents. That was my family growing up, and that was the way that I was raised.

If you become a doctor, you'll make a nice six-figure salary. You can live off of $30,000 a year and save a whole lot of money, and I never questioned it. But this is a very kind of just don't spend money. That's how you build wealth.

Because if I give you money, that means I'm taking my wealth and giving it to you, and I'm getting nothing in return. It goes back to that mindset: money is abundant, and that scarcity thinking is one of the most expensive things that you can do.

So true. I'll give you a story of this. I told you I have—if you want to talk about mistakes, we can go for hours and days about my mistakes because I screwed up a lot. I had an accountant, and I figured that if I'm paying less money in accounting fees, I am saving money so my business can keep more money and build more wealth, right?

But one of the most expensive things that you can do is be cheap. So I had this accountant that was cheap, and all he did was file my taxes, kind of. I mean, he was late and whatever, but he was cheap. The monthly payment was cheap, so I didn't really care too much because I got the taxes done.

Then I always wondered why we don't talk about tax planning. What should I do? It's just like at the end of the year, I get this big email: "Send me all of your stuff," and then I don't hear from him for a long time. Then he says, "Sign this paperwork." I didn't really think much of it.

But then one year, it was January. I'm in my office, and I get a call early in the morning from my accountant. If you get a call from your accountant early in January, it's never a good sign. I didn't know that. He calls me and says, "Just breathe. How are you doing?"

I said, "I'm good. How are you?" Thinking I'm going to get some good news. He said, "Hey, I made a little mistake on the taxes. Could you do me a favor and wire $18,000 to the state of Michigan by the end of the day?" I said, "Excuse me?"

He said, "Oh, also, could you also, by the end of the day, please wire $100,000 to the federal IRS by the end of the day?" I said, "Excuse me?" Oh, and the last part, you're going to have to pay penalties and interest on this too.

It took me a minute to really absorb all this information. So you want me to send a hundred-some thousand dollars by the end of the day? Whose fault is this? I remember this response. He said, "It's nobody's fault."

You know, I didn't really process what he said, but I had to think through this. I said, "Whose fault was it?" It's my fault; that's whose fault it was. I wanted to blame him, but it was my fault because I was being cheap.

I learned I hired a new accountant who cost me many, many, many multiples more than what I was paying before. But you know the crazy thing is, it's actually saving me more money now because we do these tax strategizing, which then allows me to pay less money in taxes legally, even though I'm paying more money to my accountant.

This is one of the most pivotal things that I learned in the last sort of three to four years. My career—I’ve been in business for maybe, well, my first business maybe 15 years ago. But in the last three years in particular, I just got overly obsessed about hiring and recruitment and really how much the exceptional person costs is inconsequential to the long-term net impact I'll have on my business.

I remember I spoke to Jay, Jason, who's my older brother, who works in my company now. He's like a super smart, LSSE, actual scientist. He's like a calculator. I said to him, "Can you tell me where my net worth has originated from?" He said, "Your net worth is X hundreds of millions or whatever."

I said, "Can you go upstream and tell me where it came from?" He didn't come back and say, "Oh, you made this great bet or this investment." He said, "Effectively, what happened is you hired six or seven good people, and those six or seven good people ended up hiring a couple more good people and making a couple of good decisions. Those people made a couple more hires and made a couple more good decisions, and it propagated."

It reminded me of something Steve Jobs said. Steve Jobs said, "People think I've built this multi-billion dollar business because I'm so smart." In that interview, he said, "I've built my career by doing the really, really hard work of finding truly exceptional people."

It propagates. I A-players hire A-players; B-players hire B-players; C-players hire C-players. The game of business—I mean, the definition of the word company is a group of people. But the game of business is to assemble the best group of people, and if you're cheap, that mission is not possible.

You'll get a short-term win, but the long-term pain, which is that January phone call from your accountant when they say, "I [ __ ] up," you get what you paid for. It goes back to—we talked about touching the fire, right? Becoming successful means you're going to make mistakes. You have to make mistakes. You cannot bypass the mistakes.

You ask me, "How does somebody do this without the mistakes?" You're going to make your own. But the difference between somebody who becomes successful and somebody who does not become successful is they are willing to make those mistakes.

See, most people say, "I don't want to try to touch the fire. I don't want to risk it." But until you touch it, until you screw up, you're not going to know it's hot. You've got to be willing to screw up.

I want to add something to that as well, which I noticed in you. You just said that unless you're willing to make mistakes, you're not going to become successful. But there was a question I asked you. I said, "Whose mistake was it?" when I was talking about your accountant, and I was testing you because I was trying to see where you put responsibility today.

I think that point of taking responsibility is actually the biggest indicator that that mistake turns into a lesson. Your accountant [ __ ] up—clearly incompetent. But when I asked you whose fault it was, you said it was my fault. That immediately tells me that you have an internal locus of control.

You are the control of that decision, and your belief of where the control lies is within you. So in the future, you can do something about it. But when I speak to people about bad relationships, about bad hires, or about any sort of bad personal decision they've made—maybe a bad friend—99% of the time, they will blame the person that was a bad person.

What you did is what I think is the most important thing, and actually, the science cooperates that if you have this internal locus of control, internal responsibility for what happens, you're much more likely to be successful, much more likely to learn from it, much more likely to be happy, much more likely to be rich.

As you went, it was my fault. Can I tie that together now with wealth? When people ask me why is it that so many people are poor and struggling with money, I say there are two things at fault, and there are two ways you can look at it. There's the "it's your fault" and the "my fault."

I always like to talk about both of these because you have to understand this because it ties in very well. I appreciate all the kind words because I really do appreciate that. But when I say it's your fault, look, our economic system is designed to profit off of people being financially stupid, period.

Banks profit when you're financially stupid because that means you stay in debt, and they keep making interest for the rest of your life. Corporations profit when you're financially illiterate because that means you're going to keep buying their stuff and not think twice, and they're going to hire the best and smartest MBAs to get you to open up your wallets.

Number three, the government is going to profit when you're financially illiterate because that means you don't do anything outside of your W2 job, and you're going to pay the highest tax rates. You profit when you're financially educated.

So now what can you do? You can say, "They're the reason I'm broke. This company is the reason why I'm broke. My company is the reason why I'm broke. The government's the reason why I'm broke. The banks are the reason why I'm broke."

Well, that's not what I'm saying. That's just part one. The second part to part one, before I get to part two, is once you understand this, you can learn how to win. You can learn how to use the bank. You can learn how to use corporations because you want to have nice stuff. You can learn how to use the resources that the government has.

But now let's flip the script. The second part to this that you need to understand is your own responsibility. Because if you spend every dollar that you earn, you're never going to become wealthy. If every time you make money, you go on a nice vacation, you're never going to build wealth if you can't afford it.

If you just make money and you make everybody else around you rich before you make yourself rich, that's your choice. People don't want to take personal responsibility, though. You know, it's a topic I always talk about because that's like holding a mirror up to yourself.

It doesn't feel good, does it, to say that it was my mistake? I'm the reason why I don't have money. I'm the reason why I'm living in this little bedsit with these four strange guys when I was 18 years old, and I didn't have carpets on the floor, and I was shoplifting food to feed myself.

You know, that hurts to say that it was me. It's my deficiencies. The self-esteem doesn't want to take such an attack. And you know what? Here's the thing: it might not be all your fault. There might be a lot of reasons why you're in that crappy situation.

There might be a lot of reasons why you're struggling with money today. You might have grown up in a very crappy situation. You might have had horrible parents. You might have had a horrible upbringing. You might have had horrible surroundings. You might have been dealt a horrible set of cards.

Okay, now what? Now what? The question is, are you going to take that responsibility today going forward or not? You have to take that drastic responsibility. You have to take that drastic mindset shift, and that's what you have to do.

It's difficult. Who wants to blame themselves? But if you want to change where you are, they're not going to do it. Your banker is not going to say, "Hey, Stephen, you know you can't afford this car. Don't take this debt. Don't take this house." Because if they can sign you up, they're going to want to get paid.

They're in the business of making money, not for you, but for them. Gucci is not going to say, "Maybe you should buy some stocks instead of this purse," because they're going to want you to buy their stuff.

The government's not going to say, "Hey, why don't you take a look at our balance sheet?" I'm going to take this little tangent. The government says student loans are a problem. We've all heard that Millennials can't buy houses; they can't buy their home; they can't invest because they have student loans.

The government says student loans are a problem. Really? Let's take a look at the United States balance sheet. Your balance sheet is your asset and liability statement. The number one largest asset on the United States government balance sheet are student loans.

So here we keep saying, "Oh, student loans are bad." We keep hearing this from the government, but on the other hand, the government is so rich because of the student loans, because so many people are stuck in these student loans.

Guess what? You pay the highest tax rates when you are just an employee. I'm an attorney. I'm not your attorney, but I am a licensed attorney, and I spent a lot of time studying the tax law. What I can tell you is that the tax law rewards you when you are an investor.

In 2024, the CEO of Coca-Cola, James Quincy, is going to make about $8 million in cash compensation. He'll also get equity, but about $8 million in cash compensation. His top tax rate on that $8 million is going to be 37% on the federal taxes in the U.S.

Warren Buffett is going to make over $700 million from Coca-Cola dividends in 2024. His top tax rate is going to be 20%. He's making way more than the CEO, but he's going to pay less in taxes on a percentage level because he made that money as an investor.

We're never taught that. This goes one step further, though, doesn't it? Because if you look at someone like Elon Musk, they never even take a salary. These people—and people don't know about this thing called loaning against your assets. I didn't know about it, and I think it's a big secret that people need to know about.

Elon Musk is interesting because he's a risk-taker, and he chose to get paid not in salary. If we look at the tax benefit from this, it's because you are taxed not on your income. That's not what the tax code says. You are taxed based on your taxable income.

So now what every accountant, every smart accountant, is going to focus on is reducing your taxable income. What Elon Musk did is when he was building Tesla, he negotiated with the investors and the board that he wanted to get paid not with a salary; he wanted to get paid with stock options.

A stock option gives you the right to buy that stock, and he was awarded these Tesla stock options at about $6 a share. This means if the Tesla stock goes up to $7 a share, he could sell the stock option for $6 and profit $1 for each stock option.

Now he was given millions and millions and millions of these stock options. When the Tesla stock goes up to $100 a share, now he is rich on paper. He doesn't have any money in his bank; he hasn't gotten a salary, so he has no taxable income because he hasn't actually received any money.

He has the option to sell this stock for $6 and in return get $100. So net $94. But if he sold that stock, he would have $94 of income. Now you have a tax because you have taxable income.

So instead, what he does is he goes to the bank and he says, "Hey bank, I have these millions and millions of stock options that are worth billions of dollars. Would you like to loan me a million, $10 million, $100 million at 3%, 4%, or 5% interest?" No bank is going to say no because the collateral is so valuable.

What's the collateral? The collateral is the company; it's his assets, the stock options, which is Tesla in this instance. So then he gets, let's call it a $10 million loan from the bank. Now he has $10 million in his bank account, but it's not an income; it's debt. Debt is not taxed.

If you go out and get a mortgage for a half a million dollars, you're not taxed. If you do a cash-out refinance, you're not taxed because that's debt. Now he gets this $10 million of loans that he can spend to buy a house, to buy a car, to buy food, to buy vacations, to buy whatever you want.

Buy Twitter. And pay no money in taxes, and it's 100% legal. Now you're going to say, "Well, just PR, how does he pay it back?" Well, let's just assume that you're going to get a 5% interest on this. If the value of Tesla goes up by, say, 7%, he made a profit.

Now he can go back to the bank and say, "How about you give me an additional $10 million?" He can pay back the old loan because the value keeps going up. As long as the value keeps going up, no problem.

But you can start to see where this gets risky because if Tesla goes bankrupt, now we're talking about a house of cards that can collapse. Now you have all this debt that you've already spent and no more collateral. But in his case, if Tesla starts to fall in value, then the bank will call payment.

So if it, say, it might be, I don't know, Tesla falls from, let's say, $100 to $10 a share, they're going to call payment. He's going to get a—what's that called? He's going to get a margin call, which means that they're going to say, "Give me the money back quick."

Yes, and/or they're going to sell off the asset to get their money back quick, and it's a losing transaction. The bank will lose because if they start making margin calls, that's when panic hits. Now you have to scramble to sell, and now the bank is just trying to get pennies back out of every dollar that they lent out.

I'm going to get old someday, and I think a lot about making sure I'm wealthy enough so that I can take care of myself when I probably can't work. A lot of people talk about this retirement crisis in the UK and the US.

What is the retirement crisis, and why does it matter to any of us, and what do we do about it? This is a multifaceted issue. The first issue is we have this huge population of old people—Baby Boomers—that are retired or entering retirement that have not enough money.

This is not just the US; this is also the UK, like you said, which creates a few issues. Number one, who's going to take care of them? Number two, who's going to fund that taking care of them? The government doesn't have that money, and the people that are going into retirement don't have that money, and their kids, many times, don't have that money.

That's the first issue. Now, as we start to dig into that, we have people that are working longer, and it creates now this problem in the future that we can see today. If you're in your 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, teens, you can see that there's this problem that's happening.

How do we prevent that today? Because I don't know what the solution is for this retirement crisis. I don't have a solution for that. The average retirement savings for Americans age 60 is roughly $500,000, and the average age of death in the US is 77 years old.

So if you retire at 67 years old, which is the average age of retirement in the United States, then for the next 10 years, you're going to have to live off about $50,000. The stats say that—well, I actually got this from your YouTube channel, the Minority Mindset YouTube channel—said that the average American needs between $1 to $2 million to retire comfortably, according to USA Today.

We need about $1.8 million to comfortably retire. Wow. The reason why is every year we have inflation. So if you live off of $50,000 this year, you're going to need maybe $52,000, $53,000, $54,000 next year, more the year after that, more the year after that.

$50,000 doesn't buy you what it did 30 years ago. So now when we take a look at all these issues happening, the question is, what do you do today to prevent these issues in the future?

Starting with, in the United States, we have what's called Social Security, which is a government check that you get when you retire. The first problem with Social Security is that Social Security is drying up. This is a fact that if you read the headlines, they'll say Social Security is going to be dry by 2034 if nothing changes.

The problem is people are paying money in, but the government is paying out more than what's going in. From any business perspective, if you have more cash outflows than cash inflows, you have a problem. The reason for that is, well, number one, the math was wrong, and number two, people are living longer.

So when the government keeps paying your Social Security check longer and longer and longer because people are living longer, life expectancy is getting higher, that means they have to keep paying. That's not good for the government.

Now, on the plan right here to LA, I sat next to somebody who was telling me—I didn't verify this, but he told me that the government knew that this was going to be a problem from the get-go because he told me that the first recipient of the Social Security program lived to 100. I don't know if that's true or not, but you can Google that to see.

But that's the problem right now. Social Security is running out of money, and this is where everyone says Social Security is going to run dry. You're never going to get a Social Security check. That's not true either.

The reason why I say that is because the government won't let it fail. They'll either raise your taxes or they'll just print that money. But the problem with it is you will never be able to live comfortably off of Social Security. That was never the intention, but many people are looking at it as, "I'm going to be able to live comfortably from this government check."

But here's the problem. Let's take a look at what's happening today. Between 2024 to 2025, Social Security recipients are going to receive a 2.5% raise for inflation. What they're saying is we have this inflation in 2024, and because of this inflation in 2024, you're going to get a 2.5% raise.

There are two problems with that. Number one, that raise is not enough. Things are getting a lot more expensive, even though the rate of inflation is falling. I mean, a 2.5% raise is not going to keep up with the real cost of living growth that most people feel.

The second problem is it's a delayed raise. The government gives you a raise in 2025 based off of the inflation you had in 2024. So we already had this price growth, and then you get the raise next year. Guess what? We're going to have more inflation in 2025.

So relying on Social Security is a losing proposition, which brings the next part of this three-legged stool. See, you have Social Security, then you have pensions. Pensions have become a thing of the past. I mean, if you're under the age of 45, chances are you're not getting a pension.

Even if you're over the age of 45 and you're promised a pension, you better cross your fingers to hope that that pension fund does not go bankrupt because there have been many pension funds that have gone bankrupt, and people are left with nothing.

This leaves, number three, your own savings and investments. This is where we have so much lack of understanding because people are not doing enough. This goes back to the whole financial education. We make money to spend money. That's what the American culture is.

I make $1,000; I'm going to spend $1,000, maybe $1,200. But you're never going to be able to retire with that sort of mindset. Here's the second problem with that. I'm just going to lay the problem, so we'll come up with a solution.

You might say, "Well, I need a financial adviser." No good financial adviser nowadays wants to work with anybody under $500,000 in assets, maybe $250,000 in assets. Maybe if you get lucky, $100,000 in assets. But if you have under that, they don't want to work with you because they want people to have some money to actually make money off of, right?

The financial advisers got to eat too. So if you don't have the investments, you don't have the education, now you're stuck. This is where now your financial education comes in because if you want to build wealth, you want to have, quote-unquote, retirement, you've got to do something different.

You can't keep doing what the majority of people do because if you keep doing what the majority of people do, you're going to end up like the majority of people. Right now, that's broke, in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, fat, and unhappy.

I'm not saying this as a general term. I mean statistically, that's what the majority of people are, especially in America. So now let's come up with the solution because we have laid out the problem.

The first solution is define what is retirement. Because I'm going to get a little philosophical here, but I have my issues with traditional retirement. There's a saying that says, "Those who retire early die early." The reason why is because if you work from the age of 21 to 65, maybe 67, at a job you hate, but you work every single day, and all you're looking forward to is retiring at 67, you retire at 67, you have this great big retirement party.

Now you come home, and you sit on the sofa, and you start watching TV. You start to lose your sense of purpose. I've seen this very closely with people—not my family, but close to my family—where I've seen people who were healthy, energetic, maybe didn't love their work, but they had a reason to get up every day, go to work, retire, and literally go insane.

I mean, you have nothing to do, and now you start to see health issues that you didn't have before. You start to have mental health issues that you didn't have before, and all these things just start to happen when you were going to enter your golden years, even if you have the money to do things.

So when we talk about what is retirement, I want to caution everybody, or if you have parents, to start thinking about what do you want to do during retirement. Because if your goal is to do nothing, you might enjoy it for the first few weeks, maybe six months, but eventually, you're going to get bored.

So you've got to have something to do. Then is the financial side of retirement. What is retirement? I have a different definition than most people. Most financial advisers don't like me for the things that I say, but my definition of retirement is the same as my definition of wealth.

Wealth is, for me, when my cash flow from my investments exceeds my expenses. It's very simple. If my expenses are $4,000 a month and my cash flow from my stocks and my real estate and everything else is paying me $4,000 and $1 a month, I am wealthy.

So now the question is, how do you actually achieve this type of wealth retirement? The reason why I don't like the word retirement as well, besides the connotation of I'm going to do nothing, is they assume I've got to be 67 years old to hit this retirement when you can achieve this wealth way sooner, and now you have more options.

So retirement is wealth. Wealth is when your cash flow from your assets exceeds your expenses. How do you actually do this now? Well, you've got to buy the assets, and in order to do that, you have to have the money.

Many people assume that the way you get rich is by investing for passive income. You get rich by investing in real estate. You get rich by buying this cash flow. That's a lie. You have to have the money first.

You have to have the money to invest in real estate. You have to have the money to buy the cash flow. So if we just make the numbers very round and simple, if I need $70,000 a year to live my life and I can get a 7% cash flow on my investments, I need to invest a million dollars to have that $70,000 a year to fund my lifestyle.

Now you're going to say, "Where in the world are you going to get a million dollars?" You don't need it today; it can happen over time. Right? When people talk about retirement planning, they're thinking about 45 years.

So when we talk about wealth, why can't we talk about the long term? It's not going to happen in two days, but it can happen if you put in that work. So now you have to put aside this amount of cash to buy certain investments that can pay you this type of cash flow.

The second thing is, "Well, what about inflation, J? You talk about this all the time. The buying power of my dollar is going down. $70,000 when I'm 65 years old in a few decades is not going to have the same buying power as today."

You're right, but here's the thing: when you invest your money into dividend-paying stocks, which are stocks that pay you, or into strong real estate, these are inflation-adjusted investments. This means generally as inflation happens, rental prices go up. As inflation happens, stock values and dividends also go up.

This is where now if we start to understand this, you'll understand the power of this because it's actually a little bit more extreme. We've probably heard about the wealth gap in America and how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

The reason why that happens is because investment values grow faster than incomes, and inflation benefits investors. So you see how we start to tie this all together? Because wealth is about owning investments. The way you become wealthy is by owning investments.

Our economic system is designed to benefit investors. If we take a look at 2019 to 2024, over those five years, household incomes—the median household income—grew by around 18%. During those five years, the S&P 500, the stock market, has grown by almost 100%.

This means that the wealth for investors has grown almost five times, or about five times faster than incomes. This is why you can't earn your way to wealth. You can't save your way to wealth. You have to invest your way to wealth.

Remember, wealth is retirement. You might say, "Well, Despy, that's just because of the pandemic and everything that happened after the pandemic." Well, let's go back in time. Let's look at it a little bit broader.

Let's look at the five decades between 1971 and 2021. Over those five decades, household income increased by around 600%. Now mind you that between 1971 and 2021, we also saw the number of workers in a household increase.

In 1971, the average household had one person that went to work—the man went to work, and the woman didn't. That's how life was in the early 1970s. In 2021, many households are two household incomes.

So 1971 to 2021, the median household income grew by around 600%. The S&P 500, the largest 500 companies in the stock market, grew by around 4,000%. So again, inflation happens; inflation benefits the investor.

How do you become wealthy? It's by investing your money. So if you want to retire, if you want to build wealth, you have to be an investor, and you have to calculate what is that wealth number for you.

For me, the way that I do it is I do it through cash flow. Most of my investments, my real estate investments, pay me cash flow. When I buy a property, I buy it for the cash flow. Most of my stock market investments are dividend-paying assets, meaning they pay me cash flow dividends just for owning the stock.

Some of my investments grow in value; they're more appreciative, they're more appreciation. But when I think about retirement, for me, it's cash flow exceeding my expenses.

What about starting a company? Should people become entrepreneurs? Well, I think everybody in America needs to be a business owner, but the majority of people should not operate a business.

When you invest in a stock, you become a business owner. You don't operate the business. If I go out and buy a share of Amazon, I'm not working in the company; I'm not operating the company, but I own some of it.

Some people should start a business. I'm a huge advocate for entrepreneurship for the right person. Who's the right person? I used to think everybody needs to become an entrepreneur because when I started to see success as an entrepreneur, I crossed that invisible barrier.

I said, "Oh my God, people need to see this. You have to become an entrepreneur. You can do things on your own." I was preaching this to my friends. I got one friend of mine who was an engineer to quit his job and then join me.

He would come to my office, and I would talk to him about things, and I said, "You know, different ways you can do this." I realized pretty quickly he is not meant to be an entrepreneur. The work ethic was different. When he would go home, he didn't want to work, and that did not click to me.

What do you mean you don't want to work after 5:00? There's no stop point when you're starting a business. You've got to start. The second thing was the way you think about risk. It's, "Oh, well, if I invest $100, how fast am I going to make the money back? Am I going to make this money back?"

It became all these little analyses before you've even done anything. You've got to start. Then it's the innovation of what are you going to do. It's asking for a blueprint. "Tell me exactly what to do. Tell me exactly what to sell. Tell me exactly how to sell it."

I don't know what you are good at. I don't know what problem you can solve. I don't know what innovation you can create. This is where I go back to—I am a big advocate for entrepreneurship for the right person.

Who is that right person? Somebody who has this entrepreneurial itch, that you have this—I need to create something, this—I can't work for somebody else's feeling, this—I want to build something. It's very much like I don't care what it takes. I don't care what I have to do. This is what is my calling.

As you say there, you're going to have to tolerate uncertainty. When I say uncertainty, I mean comfort as well—the lack of a blueprint, the lack of certainty about how much you're going to make this month or how quickly you're going to make money or if you're going to make money.

Risk, which is you might have to put a lot of things on the line, including your reputation. And you said hard work as well. So are you willing to work seven days a week? You're right. You know, when people say that, they think it's super toxic.

But like in my own experiences of starting businesses, but then on every friend that I have that started a business, they'll all tell you that there's absolutely no such thing as 9 to 5. You work whenever you have to work. If you're at a bar mitzvah or a wedding or an anniversary meal with your partner, at any moment, you might get a horrible email, and you have to act upon it.

You can't say, "I'm going to save that till Monday," or "Not my problem." Oh yeah, and I'm going to add one more to that list: the willingness to be criticized.

Oh yeah. Any business you start, you are going to upset a lot of people at every stage of the business. I mean, this is really important because much of the reason why people want to be entrepreneurs is because they want to be their own boss.

But what's so interesting about the story you told about that tenant is you became her boss. Whenever I speak to entrepreneurs, there's one problem that always comes up. But today's sponsor, LinkedIn, has a solution, and I think you'll want to hear it.

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This diary won't change your life, but the habit it teaches you definitely will. The most unhelpful advice that I ever received was, "Don't sweat the small stuff." You have to sweat the small stuff. I sweat the small stuff. I always have, and I always proudly will.

Because small things that are easy to do are also easy not to do. It is easy to save a dollar, so it's also easy not to. It is easy to brush your teeth, so it's also easy not to. It is easy to make a 1% improvement, so it's also easy not to.

Understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins; it's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes.

So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it's truly beautiful inside. There are lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interactive elements. The purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, and develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life.

We're only going to do a limited run of these diaries, so if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team, then head to thediary.com right now. I'll link it below.

One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about as well is just a word that I think is so pertinent to everything we've talked about today, which I think is important, which is the word patience. Because there's some areas of my—it goes to what I said about my friend.

My friend, who's been in our group chat, has made more C than all of my other friends in that group chat, and he's done it by being boring and patient. He's just flown under the radar. When I think about my life and many of the investments I'm making now, I'm like, "Oh God, what is it?"

I'm looking over there; my friend's buying some crypto meme coin, and he's told me it's gone up 150x this month. I'm looking over there, and people are investing in, I don't know, they're picking stocks and stock trading, whatever, and they're telling me it's gone up 50%.

But in my wisdom, as I've gotten older, I've realized, like the tortoise and the hare, that boring and patient is such a wonderful investment strategy. It's such a paradoxical way to think. I have so many seeds that I've planted that are taking forever to grow, but I just now know, because I've got enough case studies in my brain, that that boring and patient approach to wealth will put me in a better position at the end of the game.

Yes, and you have to be sometimes impatiently patient. So if we talk about building wealth through investing your money, the numbers have shown that over the last century, the stock market has gone up by an average of 10% a year historically.

But many people lose money when investing in stocks. I mean, if you go around talking to people, "Have you invested in stocks?" "Yes, yes, yes." How many of you have made money? The hands start dropping. Well, if the stock market has gone up by around 10% a year on average every year for the last 100 years, why are so many people losing money?

Because we start playing the wrong game. Now what happens if you invest your money into the stock market? By the stock market, I mean let's just say you buy the S&P 500, which is a basket of the 500 largest companies in the stock market, for example—not financial advice.

If you invest in SPY, that is an ETF that gives you exposure to the 500 largest companies. We know that historically that's gone up by 10% a year, but that's not enough for a lot of people. So now I'm going to play this game of I'm going to try to beat the market.

Some people will; most won't. Some people are going to try to get into the game of investing in individual companies or maybe trading companies. Because even investing in individual companies, if you invest for the long enough period of time, you're probably going to win.

But many people now want a quicker solution, so now we start trading. We start finding hot companies, the next Tesla, the next Amazon. We see what Reddit says, see what Google says, and we start buying these things because we're excited.

But that excitement is what's killing your wealth because you're investing on emotion instead of investing on financials. This is where you talk about what's boring: just keep doing the market. Keep investing in the market when the market's up, when the market's down, when the market's sideways. Just keep investing because that has been proven to win.

We know that if you invest $100 a month from the age of 21 until your retirement, 65, 66, and you can get that same 10% return, you're going to retire a millionaire, assuming you only invest $100 a month from the age of 21 to 65 or 66.

It's so interesting because when I asked you earlier what the best investment you ever made was, you said the investment you made in yourself. Maybe we've not spent enough time really talking about how critical knowledge and skills are to wealth generation.

Maybe that is the first principle of wealth creation. Maybe that is the furthest thing upstream: knowledge and skills. You can dabble in stocks and whatever else, but really, over a 50-year time horizon, your knowledge and skills—and your knowledge might be of patience; your knowledge might be of real estate investing; your knowledge might be of whatever.

Your knowledge might be of a philosophy towards investing. Really, it's your knowledge and skills that are going to determine where you end up. So as it relates to getting those knowledge and skills, where's the best place for people to go? Other than, obviously, the Dio, you know, but outside of this podcast, where is the best place for people to go to get knowledge and skills that they can trust without getting scammed, without having to pay for some call from some YouTuber who's charging $3,000 a month for like a, you know, to tell them something that reading off ChatGPT?

What is like the best place? Well, the best place is to go out and do it. Screw up. Make mistakes. But along with that, start with what's free: YouTube, podcasts.

The best book you've ever read? The first book I'll start with, because the best is—it changes. The first book I ever read cover to cover was Rich Dad Poor Dad. The second book was Total Money Makeover. Rich Dad Poor Dad is by Robert Kiyosaki. Total Money Makeover is by Dave Ramsey.

The third book is a book called The Creature from Jekyll Island, which talks about the Federal Reserve Bank. Those three books are going to give you a foundation of money and different perspectives of it. So start by learning for free. Even before books, start by watching a YouTube video. Start by listening to podcasts.

Then you take the next step, and you start reading books. What I talk about is if you go out and over the next 12 months, you read five books on money management and investing—I just gave three—read five books on personal development and self-development, read five books on how to start a business, read five books on leadership, and then read five books on how to scale, market, and build your business, you're going to have an MBA-level education for a fraction of the cost.

Start with that, and then go out and make mistakes. As you grow, that's when you can start buying classes and other things because you'll find people that you might want to get consulting from. But start with that.

What is the most important thing we didn't talk about today as it relates to wealth creation? The most important thing that I think we did not talk about is we talked about the economic system, we talked about the principles, but I think we didn't get into the actual steps now of how do you preserve and protect your wealth and how do you now continue to use wealth protection tools.

Because there's a lot of that that every single wealthy person is investing a huge amount of time, effort, and money into that most people have no idea even exists. We started to touch on taxes, but there's so much more.

So on those wealth preservation tools, what exactly are you referring to? Starting with, first, your accounting and taxes. Then we get into the legal, your estate planning. What types of attorneys? What types of legal protection and shields and tools can you use to structure your business, your investments to protect you, but also amplify your wealth?

Then things like insurance, but then also your estate planning. Because you talk about generational wealth—well, generational wealth isn't just the money; it's what your money does after you die, and you can control that when you're alive.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question that's been left for you is, "What wakes you up every morning?"

Oh, I'm excited. I don't use an alarm. I get up by the purpose. I'm excited by the mission. I mean, I love what I do. The purpose, the mission—that's what gets me up every morning.

What about yourself and your own happiness and mental health? You know, I am happy. I've been so fortunate. I've always been one of those people. You could put me in a box, and I'd have a great time. I would turn that box into an airplane, and I'd be flying it around.

Before I came here, my wife recorded a video. I found this. We were in a hotel, and they gave these cans of water—okay, these two cans of water. I took them. I said, "Record this video." I went on the balcony, and I did a Stone Cold Steve Austin mock video where I opened up the cans of water and just dumped it on myself.

I don't know why, and I sent it to my cousins. I've been very blessed to—I can have a good time with anything. I'm a pretty light-hearted guy. I know I talk about serious stuff, but I've been very fortunate on that, and I can have fun in a lot of situations.

I'm not driven by materialistic things. There are certain things that are like I will spend money on luxuries. My wife got me into that, into like nicer hotels and nicer travel and those conveniences I like, and I want to keep my wife happy, so whatever she likes.

But I'm not driven by fancy cars, fancy clothes. That, to me, is not as important. I like to see change, and I want to help empower people. People, and that gets me excited.

If you had to bring it down to five things that are driving you, then what are those five things? Number one: taking care of my family.

Yep. Number two is my own purpose and mission and feeling excited, like my personal excitement. Number three is the mission—to continue to help people. Number four is to bring light to the community. Number five is to continue giving back and to help.

Just PR, thank you. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I've learned so much about so many things, and I've had so many ideas reinforced. Sometimes that's it. You know, I do these conversations because I've been out there in the world, and I've met people who have listened to these conversations about wealth and finance and money.

Sometimes in life, all it is is just a little seed of information that can absolutely change the trajectory of not just you, but the generations that come after you. That's exactly what you're doing. That's exactly what you've done on your YouTube channel for so many people that probably will never get to say thank you to you.

But it's to give these little seeds of inspiration and information, and you never really know which seed is going to change someone's life. But what you do is you just continue to plant them, and hopefully, those people will water them for themselves.

So thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for being so generous with your time today, and please do keep doing it because our education system is a bit of a cookie cutter and optimizes for creating people that are part of a system which doesn't seem to be designed with their best long-term interests in mind.

That's why we have these problems. That's why we live in this credit society. That's why we have these retirement issues, and that's probably why we have so many mental health issues and depression. But it's people like you out there that are giving us the information that gives us a chance—a chance to live a different life.

So thank you for that, JRE. I really appreciate you. Thank you for having me on. It was really a pleasure.

Chuck me that perfect TED. One of the things that I think about all the time, because my life is quite hectic and busy, is how to manage my energy load. As a podcast, you kind of have to manage your energy in such a way that you can have these articulate conversations with experts on subjects you don't understand.

This is why Perfect Ted has become so important in my life. Because previously, when it came to energy products, I had to make a tradeoff that I wasn't happy with. Typically, if I wanted the energy, I had to deal with high sugar. I had to deal with jitters and crashes that come along with a lot of the mainstream energy products.

I also just had to tolerate the fact that if I want energy, I have to put up with a lot of artificial ingredients, which my body didn't like. That's why I invested in Perfect Ted and why they're one of the sponsors of this podcast.

It has changed not just my life but my entire team's life. For me, it's drastically improved my cognitive performance but also my physical performance. So if you haven't tried Perfect Ted yet, you must have been living under a rock. Now is the time.

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