Transcription
Something's broken. College degrees now cost more than ever and return less than ever. Houses are priced out of reach for an entire generation. Jobs can't keep pace with inflation. And yet, right now, it's never been easier to build real wealth. A 22-year-old with a laptop and no degree is out earning doctors. People are using credit to buy assets instead of going broke. AI just collapsed the cost of starting a business to almost zero. Both of those things are true simultaneously. And if that feels like a contradiction, that's because it is. That tension, it has a name, and once you understand it, you're not going to be able to unsee it.
Now, in order to really understand this, we have to go back in time. So let's jump in a time machine. Let's go back about 50-some years ago, to 1971. Now, for most of modern history, the dollar, the US dollar, was backed by gold. On that gold standard, money had a fixed relationship with something real. We call this an equity-based system. Gold had been money for 5,000 years. Gold is a commodity. When I have the gold, I have the gold. When you have the gold, you have the gold.
But when we ended that relationship, August 15th, 1971, then President Richard Nixon, he closed the gold window. Basically, what that means is that he made it where the dollar is no longer redeemable for gold. He severed the ties. And so we went from a gold-based system, an equity-based system, and we became a dollar-based, a fiat-based, a debt-based monetary system. The dollar now is pure debt. What that means is that governments can now create money without limit. There's no restraint.
Now, it's true for some of you that are going to leave the comments down below. It's true that from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, they did print money and they did continue to print more dollars than they had gold in the bank, which led to the 1933 seizure in gold, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. But in 1971, all bets were off. It was a now free-floating, fiat, debt-based, um, system.
But what happened next is the most important part. What happened was that asset prices completely detached from wages, as well. And they did this permanently. The cost of a house in 1971 versus today, in real terms, is crazy. Now, what happened next? Well, of course, if the dollars detached from, uh, gold, there's no restraint. We print unlimited amounts of dollars. Then asset prices also detach, and they detach from wages permanently, which means the cost of a house, um, the cost of a college degree, and the S&P 500 all rocketed higher while median income started lagging behind.
So, this is what really caused the path. You see, pre-1971, when we were still in a gold-based system, an equity-based system, the conventional path to wealth worked. In that path, we would go to school, we'd get good grades, we'd go to college, we'd get a degree, we'd get a good job, and we'd save money. You see, in that equity-based system, in that gold-based system, we could save. Things were cheaper. But that system was designed for a pre-1971 world, a world where a single income could still buy a house. This was a world where savings held their value. Most people didn't even invest in the stock market for another decade after that. At that point, one person could work, you could have the house, you could have the car, one person could stay home, we could save our money, and we could retire. Savings held value. That's when pensions existed.
But the thing is, is that world is gone. You see, the problem is the rulebook that's being handed down to kids, the, the rulebook they're supposed to follow, the, the blueprint to wealth, you know, the one that they get all through 12 years of going to school plus, uh, through college. Well, the problem is that rulebook, it hasn't changed. It didn't change in 1971. They didn't update the instructions, but they just kept handing out the same map. But the problem is, they hand, they were handed out a map for a city that just no longer exists anymore.
And to really understand this, we have to understand two different games. You see, there was the game we were supposed to play. And then there's the game we should be playing now. But most people haven't figured this out. And the reason why is you have to understand human nature. You see, humans are natural game readers. We love games, which is why we create game theory around things. If you've ever watched a child, a small child in preschool, for example, if you have kids, maybe you've seen this. And the child could walk into preschool, into daycare, whatever, they could walk into almost any situation. They go to the park where kids are playing, maybe even video games or sports, and they could just sort of watch the other kids and see what they're doing. And within minutes, they've figured out what the rules are. They figured out in their creative mind what game is probably being played. They can jump in, start playing the game. They can start testing out the boundaries of the game. They can find the edges.
All right, that instinct is hardwired. As a matter of fact, there's a school called Synthesis. It's a school that, uh, Elon Musk helped pioneer, and I had my daughter go to. It was like extracurricular. And so after regular school, she would jump on. It was online school. And this is exactly what would happen. They would basically jump on, and the instructors wouldn't really instruct. They would just say, "Hey, everyone's playing a game. Jump in." It'd be like a video game, and then my daughter would just have to like watch, see what's going on, learn how to start playing the game, and try to figure it out with no instructions at all. The same thing.
And the thing is, is because we're trying to keep that recognition of the game, game theory, learning how to observe a game and play a game and win a game intact. Because the problem is, over the 12 years of institutional education, it's been trained out of you. You see, school isn't designed to teach you to read the game. It's not designed to allow you to use your creativity. It's designed to teach you to follow a set of instructions. You know, come here, uh, do this assignment, get it done by this time, sit down, uh, wait for the bell to ring. When the bell rings, move over here, wait your turn, right? All of those things here. You know, they, they tell you what you're supposed to do, what you're supposed to do next.
But then what happens? Well, I continue that in college. And then by the time I'm done, most people enter their adult life. But the most important game, the most important game they'll ever play in their entire life, they're forced to play it. But they're playing that game without ever asking, "What are the actual rules here? Like, what game are we playing? What are the rules? Uh, who wrote the rules? Who benefits from these rules?"
You see, in the old game, the one that was pre-1971, we would earn income. We'd pay taxes first. We'd save what's left. We'd buy a house. We invest in, you know, our 401k, our pension. We'd wait 40 years, and that was great. This game was designed for a monetary system that ended in 1971. That was, that was designed for a sound money system, that was designed for a gold-based system, that was designed for an equity-based system. But in 1971, we went into a debt-based fiat system.
So, the problem is trying to play the old game in today's rules. Playing today is like showing up to play chess, but you find out that everyone else probably switched to poker or something like that. But there's a new game, and you can learn how to play the new game. And the new game is similar but different. In the new game, you acquire assets, and you acquire assets before liabilities. You use credit as a tool, but not a threat. You reclaim your tax capital instead of giving to the government. And I use the incentives and I invest that. I redeploy it. I invest it. And then I use leverage to control more than what I own. Doing this, then I can build income. And these are streams of income that don't require my time.
And how do I do all this? Well, there's a unique set of tools that we have today. The tools for this game is AI. It's accessible credit. It's fractional asset ownership. And it's global markets that we have access to. Now, none of this existed 20 years ago, right? And that's why the paradox. That's why while for most people playing the old game, it's never been harder to get ahead. But at the same time, it's never been easier because of these tools that we have. The barrier to entry has never been lower.
You see, the tragedy isn't that people are losing. It's that they're losing a game they didn't even know they were playing. Now, it's not because of laziness, and it's not because they're stupid, right? The old game, it just doesn't work anymore. The old game had visible proof that it did work, right? It worked for decades. It worked for a long time. Your grandparents, your parents' generation, they, they made it work, right? But that's, and that social proof is powerful, but it doesn't work anymore. We just haven't caught on to it.
You see, the system also actively defends itself. What do I mean by that? I mean that every institution, the school, the media, your financial advisors, who went to the same school, by the way, the banks, they all have an incentive to keep you in the old game. Like, for example, your advisor, they get paid to put you in a 401k. They're sales reps. Your bank, it profits when you keep your savings account open. The whole infrastructure, right, the whole conventional financial infrastructure, all that advice is built on the old game.
And there's a psychological cost to admitting the game changed. Because if the game changed, then it means that everything you were told was wrong. It's called cognitive dissonance. If, if everything I've been told is wrong, then everything I know must change. Everything I know is up in question. And that's very hard to accept. But if you look around you, right, if you just take a look around, the evidence is everywhere. The people getting rich right now aren't climbing the old ladder. They're building service-based businesses in 90 days. They're using tax efficiency to reclaim 40 or 50 cents of every single dollar. They're borrowing against assets instead of selling them. They're playing an entirely different game. I mean, the biggest financial risk that you can take right now isn't starting a business. It's not buying Bitcoin. It's continuing to play a game that was designed for a world that no longer exists.
Okay. So, now let me lay it out for you. There's five levels that you need to go through in this new game. I'm going to walk you through each layer one by one so you can understand the structural difference between the two games, right? We're going to go through the five levels of capital. That's what we're going to use as our reference point. All right. So, we start with level number one. Now, this, this level didn't change. This level number one is labor. In this, in this part, we're working, right? We have a job. We're trading our time for money. And in this role, typically, we're fully taxed, right? So, I'm working. I'm earning money. The government takes their cut off the top. I have whatever's left. And then I pay for my life. And maybe I save a couple bucks. The problem with that is, of course, it's not scalable, right? This is where most people spend their entire career. They're stuck at level one. Think of it like a video game. But the goal would be then to climb up to level five.
But let's go to level two. So, hopefully, after the government's taken their cut, um, I've spent my life, um, you know, for my lifestyle, and then I save a little bit. That's level two, savings. So, hopefully, I'm investing whatever's left after taxes. Right now, this is better. At least now I have a future. I have some assets that are growing, but it's still very slow. Okay, but this is where almost all conventional financial advice lives. As I said, go to school, get good grades, save for retirement for 40 years. Most people never get past level two, but we're going to get you to level five.
So, level three is ownership. We want to be owners. We want to own property, but more importantly than that, we want to be owners because in ownership, the entire business system, the entire tax code was written for owners. If you're not an owner, if you're in level one or two, you're punished. If you're in level three, four, or five, it's written for you. So, I want to own productive assets. These are businesses. This might be real estate, rental real estate. I have equity in other businesses. Equity in other private, private equity or venture capital, right? This is where wealth starts appearing. Of course, Bitcoin is one of my favorite assets to own. Um, and things like that. This is where the wealth really starts appearing because now your wealth is compounding every single year. Compounding means it's growing on top of growing on top of growing. 5%, 8%, 20%, 30% per year without you having to work any harder any longer. So, that is real wealth growth.
Okay, then we get to level four. Most people have never thought about level four or gotten here. And that is now collateral. In level four, we want to use collateral. We want to use assets to acquire more assets, but we do it without selling them. You see, most people, in order to acquire assets, I want to get a little bit in my S&P 500, so I'm going to work some hours. And then I'd like to get a rental property, so I have to work more hours to get the rental property. And then I'd like to get some Bitcoin. I have to work more hours to get my Bitcoin. But in level four, we use our assets as collateral. And that collateral allows us to use assets to get more assets. And again, we do that without selling them. How do we do that without selling them? Well, we borrow against the asset. We borrow against the appreciation instead of triggering taxes. I call it harvested appreciation.
What do I mean by that? Bitcoin has been going up at 50% a year. Uh, obviously not last year. Um, the S&P 500 is going up at 15% a year. Uh, so you have some growth. That's the appreciation of the asset. It's compounding on top of that. But if my Bitcoin went up by 20% or 50%, or my stocks went up 20%, there's some appreciation. And what I can do is I can harvest that appreciation using debt. And I do that because two reasons. Number one, I don't trigger taxes. If I trigger taxes, a big chunk of it, 20 to 50%, goes to taxes. But I also no longer have the asset to compound. And I no longer have the asset to be used as collateral for more assets.
Okay, finally, we get to level five. This is when you win the game. This is where we have engineered capital. What do I mean by engineered capital? I mean, we design a system where the balance sheet, your assets on the balance sheet, compound itself. All right, this is where tax savings, I can take all my earned income and write it off against tax depreciation. And all of that income now goes into assets, and it starts compounding like a flywheel. The capital builds assets. The assets are collateral. The collateral buys more assets, and it starts to have a loop, a flywheel loop that goes faster and faster and faster.
You see, most people spend their entire lives at level one and level two. Not because level three, four, and five are inaccessible. They never get to three, four, and five because nobody told them that the ladder even existed, right? They didn't step in and look at the world and realize there's a completely different game that's being played. They're just playing the game of being of doing what they were told to do. And so the key piece that you need to take away from this is that right now is the best time to do this. So you're not too late. You can still move into three, four, and five. Why? Well, AI has collapsed the cost of starting a business to near zero. All right, level three is more accessible than it's ever been in any time in history. Credit is available right now to you today. Credit's a tool. Now, it's always been available to the wealthy, right? But the knowledge of how to use it correctly is now democratized. We can now use tax-efficient strategies that used to require a team of lawyers that are now teachable frameworks that you can just use. You can just follow. There's a new game.
And the new game is the paradox. Again, the paradox is it's never been harder to get by. But if you learn the new game, it's easier. And it's not easier because the world got more generous. It's easier because the tools and the information have finally caught up.
So, let's go ahead and close this out, right? Let's go back to what we talked about in the beginning, right? As I said, it's never been harder and it's never been easier at the same time. And both of those are true. The old game is harder than it's ever been. The new game, it's more accessible than it's ever been. But the difference between the people winning right now and the people that are working harder, the people that are falling behind, it's not intelligence. It's not work ethic. It's not luck. It's which game they're playing. It's game theory. Can you spot a game? Can you join the game? Can you play the right game?
Now, the good news is that games can be learned, right? That instinct that you had when you were a kid, remember watching, like observing the rules, finding the edges, it's still inside you. It just needs to be cultivated. It needs to be dusted off a little bit. It needs to be aimed at the right game. Now, if you wonder what the right game is, well, that's exactly what the wealth operating system is built around. It's not a better investment tip, it's a better game. If you want to see the actual blueprint how to move from level one, two, all the way to level five systematically, I put together a full breakdown in a free training. I'll put a link to it down below if you want to check it out. But either way, observe the new game, learn the rules, jump in and start playing it, and get to level five as fast as you can. All right, that's what I got. To your success on out.