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

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro, para los que están lejos, los que no vende lejos y los que no vende cerca, para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos, para los que piensan y los que hacen, para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola, para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola en una tienda cerca de usted.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  And every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has also become the world's first trillionaire.

• 0:40Graham Stephan?

  At what point, though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden something has to break?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  It is profitable to keep you financially stupid. It is profitable to keep you poor. Most Americans today would rather look rich than be rich.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  Over forty percent of us are unfamiliar with Roth IRAs, money market accounts, and high-yield savings.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  It is so rigged, it is unfair. It is rigged towards investors.

• 1:04Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think is the biggest risk for the economy that no one is gonna see coming?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Right now, we have about forty trillion dollars of national debt. We are spending about two trillion dollars a year that we don't have right now.

• 1:16Graham Stephan?

  Do you think it's a negative that right now stocks are near their all-time highs?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, markets are high, but if you hold on, historically, it has been proven that you're gonna become wealthy.

• 1:25Graham Stephan?

  And what can the average person do to protect themselves?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  You're one paycheck away from your family being broke, because if you wanna be rich...

• 1:37Graham Stephan?

  Jaspreet, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for coming to Detroit.

• 1:41Graham Stephan?

  So you host the Minority Mindset YouTube channel with over two and a half million subscribers, and you've previously said that nobody understands how money works. How does it work?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  The average person thinks money is something you have to go to work to earn. No wealthy person thinks that way. The average person goes to school to get a good degree, to get a good job, to get a paycheck, to hopefully get a good raise, to hopefully get a promotion to climb the corporate ladder. No wealthy person thinks that way. What wealthy people wanna do is the opposite. They want to own the corporate ladder. They don't wanna have to go to work to make money. They wanna figure out how they can make money through their money. And the reason why I talk about this so much is because this is something that I wish somebody would have taught me. I did everything right.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  My parents came to this country, America, with very little, and they wanted me to become successful because they worked very hard. And in their eyes, the way you become successful is very obvious. You do what everybody says. You look at that career pamphlet, which says the highest-income people are doctors. So my dad was very plain about it. He said, "Jaspreet, you can either be a doctor or you can be a failure. You get to pick." And so, you know, I thought nothing against that. That makes sense. So I was on this path, getting good grades, studying hard, thinking that I'm gonna become a doctor. And then along the way, I started learning about money. And I learned that wealthy people don't wanna work to get a big paycheck.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  They want to work to own the assets that are going to pay them. And when I learned that, I started changing what I did, which changed how I earned money. And that was that lightbulb moment when I realized our economic system is not designed to reward workers. Our economic system is not designed to reward consumers. It is designed to make one person rich: investors. It is profitable to keep you financially stupid. It is profitable to keep you poor. And it made me so angry when I learned this, because when you look at it, banks profit when you're in debt. The longer you stay in debt, the richer they get. Corporations profit when you spend money. The more money you spend, the richer they get.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  You spend money you don't have, they get even richer. Wall Street profits when you don't know how to invest, because now you're gonna pay the highest expense ratio. The government profits when you don't understand how money works, because you're gonna pay the highest taxes. You profit when you're financially educated, but we're never taught that financial education. That's why I teach that.

• 4:20Graham Stephan?

  So it sounds like to join the investor class is not just a decision that you need to make in life to be wealthy. It sounds like it's the decision. What is the main difference between someone who has money and someone who's wealthy?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  When you have money, you can buy nice stuff. You can buy a car, you can buy some nice clothes, you can buy a fancy vacation, you can maybe even buy a house. But when you have money and you start spending that money, the amount of money you have starts to go down. If you have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and you start spending, it's gonna start to shrink. You could have a million dollars, even ten million dollars. But if you just spend that money, the money is gonna continually shrink and shrink and shrink. And that's why you hear the stories of athletes, celebrities, famous people who make millions of dollars but end up broke or bankrupt. In fact, today, about half of Americans who are making over a quarter million dollars a year live paycheck to paycheck with zero dollars to show for it, zero wealth. They have the nice car, they have the nice clothes,

• 5:17Speaker 01

  they have the nice stuff, but they have no actual wealth. Wealth is a matter of time. If you were to stop working today, how long will the money keep coming in? How long can you continue to afford your lifestyle? Because the average person will say, "Well, if I stop working today, I'm gonna be struggling, like in two weeks, a month, two years." Like, when is that time? And that's what wealth is. When you can say, "Oh, I mean, I can stop working today and it's not gonna change my life." Now you're wealthy. But the only way that can happen is when you are not reliant on your work to get paid.

• 5:58Graham Stephan?

  Can you stop working today?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:00Graham Stephan?

  At what age could you stop working?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  My late twenties.

• 6:04Graham Stephan?

  Late twenties? How were you able to do that?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I had enough cash flow on assets with low enough expenses that I could just live off my investments.

• 6:14Graham Stephan?

  Here's what I'm curious about. Because if you were able to do it, why didn't everyone else?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I wanted to become wealthy because I saw how hard my dad worked. I wanted to be able to buy his time back. He did not have the opportunity to have a Saturday and a Sunday off. I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him when I was a kid. So as a kid, I realized that I wanted to make money, because if I had money, I could say, "Dad, don't work anymore." But we couldn't, because my dad needed money to pay the mortgage. He needed money to put food on the table. He needed money to send money back to India. And so I knew that there was this importance of money, but at the same time, everybody around me keeps saying, "Don't worry about money, don't stress about money. Money is bad, money is evil." So it never made sense to me, which is why I started to really kind of dial in and understand, "Okay, money is important, but it's not your life." And that was what really kind of drove me

• 7:04Speaker 01

  to wanna start earning money, start investing my money, get extremely aggressive with my investments, and do that again and again and again, even as I was making big money. Like, I started growing my business more. And I was making money not to have a nice car, not to have a big house, not to go on fancy vacations. I was making money so I could buy more rental properties or buy more stocks or buy more assets. And so that was my core model. I'm making money not for myself. I'm making money to buy investments so I can live off of my investments.

• 7:40Graham Stephan?

  When was the exact moment that you first felt rich?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  When I was like 21, 22, I really wanted a BMW i8. I really, really wanted it. It is, exactly. It was those butterfly doors. I really wanted the BMW i8. And I started to make some better money when I was like 22, because I left the party business, I entered real estate. I was buying rental properties, but I started wholesaling real estate, and I was a real estate salesperson. I got my license. It took me a long time to start my, get my first commission check. But sometimes those commission checks are pretty big. Like, my first commission check, I think it was 10,000 bucks, which is a lot of money in one check. And I was like, "Oh my God, I'm making so much money." The problem is those checks are not consistent. Sometimes you get a big check, sometimes you don't get any checks.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  But I was like, "I'm gonna get a BMW." And so my dream was to get the i8, but I was like, "You know what? That's probably way too out of my reach right now, so let me get the 3 Series." And I kept going back and forth, because I was like, "Well, I could buy the 3 Series, or I could buy a rental property that will buy my 3 Series." And so I never bought that car. I just bought more investments. It was hard when you're young twenties, because you want the nice stuff. But I told myself, "No, I'm gonna just keep buying the rental properties. I'm gonna keep buying the rental properties." Then I bought more investments and stuff. And then eventually, I was like, "I can go buy the i8 today." I wouldn't even notice it. Like, it wouldn't really affect me at all if I bought the i8. But I don't really want it.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And I guess that was, if you say the moment I felt rich, it didn't feel like an aha moment, but when I knew that I could buy the i8, my desire for it also went down. Like, my desire for the car was way up here when I couldn't afford it. And as soon as I could afford it, the desire is way down here.

• 9:28Graham Stephan?

  Does that take some of the joy out of it, though? Because I thought the same thing. I had always wanted a Lamborghini, ever since I was like 15, 16 years old. Like, that for me was like the rail car. And I remember there was a point there where I decided between buying a duplex and getting a Lamborghini Gallardo Super Lussera. And I picked the duplex. And years later, it got to a point where you could go and buy the Lamborghini. You wouldn't notice it, but I don't want it anymore. And now the idea of buying the car just sounds like a hassle. But part of me thinks that, like, my gosh.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  But you would probably still want to buy a car now that's like five times more expensive. And so maybe it is like, you don't have-

• 10:09Graham Stephan?

  No, I don't think so.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  That desire did not translate into a new desire of like an even nicer car, like a Ferrari or even nicer Lambo or the 4GT.

• 10:18Graham Stephan?

  No, no, it didn't. Now, the SLS AMG Mercedes is the only car I want, but because I think it's also a good investment.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  So now you just don't care for cars?

• 10:26Graham Stephan?

  Oh, that's why I still drive the 2019 Tesla Model 3. Like, I just don't care. For a while, I was driving a thousand-dollar Volvo.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  So do you think then that suggests then that the desire to buy that Lamborghini came from some sort of like validation or filling up the cup?

• 10:43Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, it was more of like a trophy. Like, you get the car when you achieve a certain level of success. And that car for me was like the trophy. Like, if I could get that car, then that meant that all the work I did was worth it because I had this thing to show for it.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  You know what's funny, though? And then you own a couple of cars and you're like, I gotta get an oil change. I gotta go do this. I gotta get a detail.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Pay for insurance.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  And you end up not owning your things, but the classic cliche is real. They own you.

• 11:08Graham Stephan?

  Same thing with watches. I used to want all these. The desire for watches now is the lowest it's ever been. There's not a watch I want. And I started selling off like a few little things here and there because I just don't want them anymore.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you go from wanting material things to then wanting just freedom and wanting security. And I think that starts to change. Maybe also comes with age. When I was in my twenties, I was a lot stupider. And by stupider, I mean, a lot of ways I was just stupider. And I look back, I'm like, wow, I can't believe I did that. But, you know, you're young, right? So I'm not like beating myself over it.

• 11:42Graham Stephan?

  What do you do?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I mean, what I used to call fun in college is not what I would call fun now. Like, me and my friends, we'd get together. I didn't drink, right? So we'd have my friends come over and we'd put all the sofas to the side. And we said, we're gonna have a wrestling match. And we'd pull out milk and chocolate milk, because that was my thing. Because I was like, you know, I don't drink, so I'm gonna encourage people to be healthy. And we'd put out bottles of chocolate milk and milk, and we'd drink milk and wrestle each other.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  That sounds awesome.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  It was a lot of fun, man.

• 12:08Graham Stephan?

  Don't you do that, Jack?

• 12:09Speaker 05

  That sounds incredible.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  We could do it right now, man. Drake, can you get some chocolate milk? So yeah, we could definitely make that happen.

• 12:17Graham Stephan?

  Dude, I just imagine an inflatable pool where you just dump the milk in it.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  I actually thought that you were talking about like you were pouring the milk on you when you were wrestling. That's like, that's literally what I thought you were going.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Wow, we never went that far. But, you know, it's just like being kids, being dumb, just, you know, just things like that. Just like, we were just reckless.

• 12:37Graham Stephan?

  So if investing is one of the ways to get to a point of being wealthy, does it concern you at all? Or do you think it's a negative that right now stocks are near their all-time highs?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's a negative in the sense that it's more expensive to buy, but I don't think it's a negative that markets are high. Markets are always gonna be breaking new record highs. Historically, the stock market always goes up. It doesn't mean it always goes up, but over time, it always goes up. And I like to tell the story of my broke cousin, Bunty, here. And he's a hypothetical person, but he's the worst investor of all time. He made his first investment in 1987, right before Black Monday, the biggest one-day stock market crash in history. And he put $10,000 in. And then immediately, the markets fell. But he did one thing right, he didn't sell.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  So he held on, but he felt so bad that he didn't invest again. But then he finally built his confidence years later. And he made his second investment in 2000, at the peak of the market, right before the dot-com bubble burst. And he invested $20,000 because he finally built up some more confidence. He invested $20,000 and the next day, the dot-com bubble burst. And we saw the NASDAQ fall by 75, 78%. Now he was heartbroken. He said, I'm not investing again, but he held on. Some years go by, he started to build his confidence again. And he said, you know what? Okay, I'm gonna invest again for the third time. This time it was 2008.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  He invested $30,000 at the market peak in 2008. The next day, the housing market implodes, the stock market crashes. He's heartbroken again. I invested $10,000 before the Black Monday crash, $20,000 before the dot-com crash, $30,000 before the housing market crash. This is horrible. But then he starts to build his confidence again. And he decides to make one last investment, the year 2020. He invests $40,000 right at the market peak. He's so excited. The next day, the pandemic hits, the market's cut in half, and now he's heartbroken again. He invested $100,000 between 1987 to 2020.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And he only invested those four points at the market peak. But he did one thing right, he didn't sell. That $100,000 today is worth $500,000. If he reinvested his dividends, it's worth a million dollars. So, yeah, I mean, markets are high. You're gonna pay a premium to buy stocks when they're high. It's cheaper to buy them when they're low. But if you hold on, historically, it has been proven that you're gonna become wealthy. In fact, they did a study and they found that the best investors are dead people because dead people don't sell. And so if you go in with the mentality of what I call ABB, always be buying, you can build wealth in any market.

• 15:30Graham Stephan?

  Hey, by the way, speaking of this, I know we have all heard the saying, time in the market beats time in the market. But it's funny, the same logic also applies to starting a business. I think a lot of people spend months waiting for the perfect time to start when realistically, the most important thing is just getting the basics in place and then building from there.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Personally, one of the first things I would do is lock down your business name online because a professional website and domain immediately gives you a place for people to actually find you, understand what you do, and take you seriously. And that's why we love working with our sponsor, Northwest Registered Agent. No joke, they give you a dedicated business phone line, domain, website, and email, all for free. You can literally have a real business set up without purchasing anything or even forming an LLC. And the reason they do it is simple. They want to help you get started, support you as you grow, and keep you independent. You can own your own domain and website, and if you ever want to move it elsewhere, you can.

• 16:22Graham Stephan?

  That is why if you've been using your personal phone number for business, don't have a website, or you want an LLC, it's time to fix that. Just go to northwestregisteredagent.com/ICH to get started.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  That is northwestregisteredagent.com/ICH, or just click the link down below in the description to get started with Northwest's free identity services. Thank you, Northwest Registered Agent, for sponsoring this episode.

• 16:44Graham Stephan?

  So why do you think then there's such a disconnect between what's happening throughout our economy, people struggling, and the stock market that's just ripping higher?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Our economic system, as talked about this, is designed to make investors rich. We don't learn that. And it is happening at such an exponential level. During the pandemic, trillions of dollars of money was created. It was printed out of thin air. It went out in the form of stimulus checks, unemployment checks, PPP loans, grants, money for businesses. And at first, everybody felt rich. But I say, the most expensive kind of money is free money. Because everybody felt rich, they loved this idea of free money. But do you know who pays the price for free money? The person who doesn't know where free money came from. Because if you don't know where the free money is coming from, you're the one that's paying the price.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Because if we could just print money out of thin air, why do we have to pay taxes? I mean, the government collects about $5 trillion a year in taxes, but they printed about $5 trillion. So why do I have to pay taxes in the first place? The reason is, there's a cost to printing that money. And that cost is what I call a hidden tax. The hidden tax is the price of your coffee going up, the price of your eggs going up, the price of your house and your car and everything going up. It's inflation. And so the average person doesn't get that financial education because chances are, if you're like most people, you didn't learn about inflation and investing and cash flow in school. So you did what everybody else did. You studied hard, you got a good job, you're working really hard,

• 18:18Speaker 01

  trying to get that raise, trying to get the paycheck, thinking that's what you're supposed to do. But the wealthy are playing a completely different game. And now, when you start printing money, you start to see a bigger divide. The wealthy get wealthier, they get wealthier even faster, and it's happening so fast right now. In fact, you have a lot of financial guests on your channel. You've talked about the Federal Reserve Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank has what's called an inflation target of 2%. But have you ever wondered why they say that? What does that mean? It means they want, on average, the price of things to go up by 2% a year. And have you wondered why 2%? Why not 1%? Why not 0%? The reason why they want 2% inflation is because 2% inflation is low enough

• 19:00Speaker 01

  that the average person doesn't notice the prices of things rising. But it doesn't mean that the prices of things aren't rising. It means that they're rising low enough that the average person is not noticing a big difference day over day. But it's happening, whether you notice it or not. This was actually the concept that made my YouTube channel first go viral back in 2016, when I was talking about 2% to 3% inflation. And now, a lot more people know what inflation is, but it's not a temporary thing. It's been happening for decades, and it's gonna continue happening.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  Should we even be experiencing inflation? A lot of capitalists say that in a capitalistic economy, the natural state should actually be deflation. Things get cheaper because it becomes more efficient to produce goods.

• 19:43Graham Stephan?

  I don't think any capitalist- says that there should be deflation. I think every capitalist is actually in favor of slight inflation.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Well, I'm saying that capitalism, if running as it should, then it would be deflationary. A lot of things are naturally deflationary.

• 19:57Graham Stephan?

  Some things are, but some things wouldn't be.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  A lot of investors want inflation because inflation makes investors richer, right? Remember the three rules of money? Money flows to the investor. Inflation benefits the investor. Our economic system is designed to benefit the investor. So when inflation happens, it makes the investor richer. So a lot of investors, capitalists, want inflation. But there's a consequence to that as well, because that means the average person loses their buying power. Because when inflation happens, my paycheck doesn't stretch as far. I can't buy as many vacations. I can't buy as many nice things because more of my money is going just to my rent. So I have less discretionary spending power. So there's that yin and the yang there. But when you talk about deflation, I think what you're talking about is the prices of things falling.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Deflation has a kind of a different meaning. Because the reason why people hate deflation is because deflation also means asset prices are falling. Japan is an example of that. For decades, Japan faced deflation, not inflation. They faced an economy where asset prices are falling and things were falling. And now you're gonna say, wow, that sounds great, Jaspreet. What's the problem with that? Incomes were also falling. So imagine not getting a raise, you gotta pay a cut. And so that's why for decades, the Japanese government was printing money. They also kept interest rates very low. And when I say very low, I don't mean 1% or 0%. I mean negative interest rates.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  So they had negative interest rates, which meant I borrow $100 and I pay back 90. Kind of a weird concept, but it was the government that was borrowing the money. And it was their central bank that was lending the money. So the central bank didn't mind losing money in every investment. And so the government was able to borrow a lot of money. They were printing a lot of money and they were stimulating the heck out of their economy. They did that for decades to try to get out of deflation. Today, they're paying the price because now they're facing inflation. And now they're trying to control the inflation, which is also impacting the United States economy. Now you're gonna say, oh, how the heck is Japan on the other right end of the world impacting the United States?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Through a concept called the yen-kei trade, which means investors, Wall Street, were going to Japan and saying, oh, we could borrow a lot of yen for essentially free? Sign me up. And they were borrowing huge sums of money, immediately converting it to dollars, buying stocks, buying treasuries, buying real estate. Because now you're essentially borrowing millions of dollars for free. And you just throw it into the treasury market, throw it into the stock market, throw it into the real estate market, and you're getting an infinite return because your cost of money is free. And so now, as Japan's interest rates have gone up to fight inflation,

• 22:47Speaker 01

  that yen-kei trade has also been hurt because now Wall Street's saying, oh, we can't borrow this money for free anymore. I don't know if we want to do this, which means less dollars are flowing into the stock market.

• 22:58Graham Stephan?

  What do you think the actual rate of inflation is in the United States?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Take whatever rate the government says, multiply it by two.

• 23:05Graham Stephan?

  So you think it's really more like 6% to 7% right now?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  100%.

• 23:10Graham Stephan?

  How were they able to manipulate the numbers to make it look so much lower?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  So inflation is measured through a number called CPI. That definition of CPI, the Consumer Price Index, has been changed. I'll give you one example.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Uh, back in the day, CPI used to look at a number called, uh, housing prices. And so they would take a look at how much housing prices went up. And then they would take that number and put it into inflation. Makes sense, the housing price is shown in the inflation market. And flow shown in the inflation numbers. They don't do that today. They call it owner's equivalent rent. What the heck is that? So now what they're doing is they're surveying homeowners to see if you were to rent your home or sell your home, how much would it be worth? And they're taking people's perspectives of what they think the house is worth and taking that as the inflation number. So if we start to change the definitions, we can start to kind of manipulate the inflation numbers.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Don't forget, inflation is also an average. So the average person's expenses are like my housing costs, my car costs, my grocery costs, and my insurance. Well, those four things are make up maybe 80%, 60%, 50%, a huge chunk of your income.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  But it might not be that perspective or that percentage of the inflation number. Because now they're also gonna factor in the cost of toys, toy inflation. And so when we see toy deflation, the price of toys fall or the price of furniture fall, that brings the average inflation number down. So the average inflation number is the average across of all goods when most of your money is going to your house, your car, your groceries, and your insurance.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  So you would argue, even if you're getting a 5% raise year over year, you're still more broke with the raise than you were the year before?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:31Graham Stephan?

  Does that mean the system's broken?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  No, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

• 25:35Graham Stephan?

  Which is make investors rich?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  The system is rigged. It is so rigged, it is unfair. It is rigged towards investors. That's why I got so angry when I learned this. Because I thought I did everything right. I was checking all the boxes. I was working so hard trying to become successful the way that everybody tells you to become successful. But the way that people actually become financially successful is not by following the same path. It's by becoming an investor. And I'm not saying don't get a job, don't work to become a doctor. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying you have to, have to, have to have financial education on top of your formal education. Your formal education by itself is not going to make you rich. Your financial education is gonna make you rich.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  So if you were to distill the problem down for the average person, you would not say it's an income problem, you would not say it's a spending problem, you would simply say that it is a choice of investing?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Well, it starts with your spending, then it becomes income, and then it becomes your investments. Because even if you make whatever, let's say you make $50,000 a year, the first step is to learn how to live below your means. If you can't do that, it is going to be impossible for you to build wealth. You have to learn how to organize your money and spend less than what you're bringing in. And when you bring less, spend than what's, less than what you're bringing in, you save some money, you put some money aside for your investments. Now you start investing your money, and now you can do the math. If I'm investing, let's call it $5,000 a year, how long until I'm wealthy?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Well, if you're getting a 10% return on your money, just put that into a calculator and you'll see how long it'll take.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Is there an income that it is physically impossible to build wealth at?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  It depends where you live. In California, if you're, I think, under $110,000 a year with a family of four, you're considered poverty. In metro Detroit, you're considered rich. So sometimes you have to get out of where you are in order to become really successful. And sometimes you have to make some more sacrifices, which means maybe live smaller, live uncomfortable.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  So for someone watching right now and they're not investing, like what, at what level should they start considering as a first objective to increase their income? At what income should they be like, okay, I have to increase this?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing you should do before you do anything else is you gotta make sure you have a financial cushion. Start with $2,000. Save $2,000 as fast as humanly possible. Once you do that, and this is an emergency fund, this is not $2,000 to go out and buy a TV. The second thing you need to do is you need to pay off your high interest debt, your credit cards, your payday loans, and other things like that. Because if I told you, Jack,

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Give me $8,000 today. I'm gonna invest it and get a 20% return on your money. In 40 years, you don't have to invest another penny again. In 40 years, that $8,000 is gonna grow not to $100,000, not $1 million, not $3 million, not $5 million, not $10 million, but over $11 million. Now you're gonna say, "All right, sign me up, Jaspreet. I got $8,000." Well, the problem is, you're probably not going to get 20% returns. But do you know who is? Amex, Mastercard, Visa, Discover. And you're paying that every time you keep credit card debt, which is why you need to pay that off before you think about investing. When you don't have $2,000 and when you have this high interest debt, you're in what I call the financial danger zone.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Now, I'm gonna tell you something that probably will hurt people's feelings, but I don't say what I say to make people happy. I don't say what I say to make friends. I say what I say to help people be better with money. If you're in the financial danger zone, you have to make extreme sacrifice. That means no eating at restaurants, no name brand clothes, no vacations, and no more Netflix until you get out of the financial danger zone. Now you're gonna say, "Jaspreet, what do you mean no Netflix? It's like $15 a month." It's not about the $15 a month. The average American watches over two hours of television a day. If you're paying 15% to 25% a year in interest, you should not feel comfortable enough to sit there

• 29:49Speaker 01

  and spend two hours rotting your mind watching Netflix. Now you're gonna say, "Well, Jaspreet, had a hard day. I need to relax." Cool. Read a book about money. Watch YouTube videos about how to earn more money. Go drive Uber. Go do something to earn some more money or to learn how you can earn some more money or you can do something that way you can get out of the financial danger zone. Because, and I say this with as much love as possible, it is skinning you alive, it is screwing you over, and you're making everybody else rich except yourself. So start there. Step number three is you gotta start systemizing your money. The simplest rule that I teach is 75, 15, 10, which says for every dollar that you earn from here on out,

• 30:30Speaker 01

  75 cents is the maximum that you can spend. 15 cents is the minimum you invest. 10 cents is the minimum you save. That way now, whether you're making $20,000 a year, $200,000 a year, $2 million a year, you're always saving and investing before you spend all of your money. And now, you continue doing this until you hit a good savings goal for you. So, you know, if you're 25 years old, you don't need a year's of savings. You can be more aggressive. Maybe you only need three months of savings. But if you're 45 with kids and a spouse, more financial responsibilities, you might need a year's worth of savings, but you don't need more than a year. Save that year's worth of savings.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And now, 75, 25. You're spending 75 cents of every dollar that you earn. You're investing 25 cents of every dollar that you earn. And you do this in perpetuity.

• 31:24Graham Stephan?

  How much of this falls on the average person to take personal responsibility versus economic conditions?

• 31:30Speaker 05

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• 31:43Graham Stephan?

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• 32:09Graham Stephan?

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• 32:15Speaker 05

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• 32:38Graham Stephan?

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• 32:54Speaker 05

  By the way, speaking of saving time, summer's basically over, and this is the time of year where life starts to get busy again. Work picks up, schedules get packed, we're traveling, I kid you not, nonstop, and we literally have a million things going on. And at least for me, one of the first things that starts to slip is my health, and that's exactly where our partner, AG1, comes in.

• 33:11Graham Stephan?

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• 33:35Speaker 05

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• 33:44Graham Stephan?

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• 33:51Speaker 05

  So AG1 sent us over a care package, and I've been trying it out, and it genuinely tastes really good. It's also super nice to increase simplicity in my life. Because I'll admit, I'm not very good at eating my vegetables or making sure I'm getting all of these micronutrients. I don't know, it's complicated. But I have AG1, I can drink it every day, and it's great to fill in all of those nutritional gaps, and it's super easy.

• 34:11Graham Stephan?

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• 34:25Speaker 05

  One more time, that is drinkag1.com/ICH now that things are picking back up.

• 34:30Graham Stephan?

  How much of this falls on the average person to take personal responsibility versus economic conditions?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  You can't control economic conditions, but you can control what you do. You can blame your boss, you can blame the Fed, you can blame the government, you can blame everything all day and night long. It's not gonna change your outcome. I mean, you can blame everybody. You can blame me. You can blame you. You can blame YouTube. It doesn't change where you are. And so if you wanna change where you are, you have to take 100% of that. And you're right, I mean, yeah. Our economic system is screwing the average person. The Fed, when they print money, is screwing the average person. Certain policies are gonna screw the average person. Okay. Now what are you gonna do about it? And so if you wanna change your position, the best thing you can do is change what you do.

• 35:16Graham Stephan?

  How big of a problem is the wealth gap? That some people are doing extremely well, while others are really beginning to struggle?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, it depends from what perspective. I mean, it's a huge problem. But you can change which side of the coin you are on.

• 35:32Graham Stephan?

  At what point, though, does the wealth gap get so big that all of a sudden, something has to change? Or something has to break?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Well, if you look at history, any and every civilization that has rose has fallen because of a growing wealth gap. That was one of the key factors that has caused a civilization to collapse. When you have such a big divide between the rich and the poor, that is a sign, a signal, that is civilization is nearing its end. So it is 100% a problem when it comes from a civilization standpoint because you can't live in a society where you have some people that are incredibly rich and everybody else can't afford to buy basic necessities. Are we there yet? Well, it feels like it, but that is a huge problem.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And now, how do you fix it? You know, you can talk about politics and whatever they wanna do all day and night long. I can't change that, but what I can do is teach people how to start getting themselves out of that position.

• 36:36Graham Stephan?

  Is there ever a point where having too much money is actually bad for society?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I'm sure there is. But, but I think limiting somebody's wealth is just as bad, if not worse.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Do you think that that exact thing that you just said, limiting someone's wealth, was the differentiating factor between the other empires that have fallen because of a wealth gap and current status of the United States, which is like class mobility is still an achievable thing in America today? It's not easy, but it is there. Whereas back in the day with these fallen empires, it wasn't necessarily a thing?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It definitely has to do with it. The thing that you wanna pay attention to really is the currency. Because the currency is what led to so many civilizations falling. Because what we've seen happen time and time again is that a civilization starts to grow, they become powerful, and then they wanna keep growing. And so how can you keep growing? Is you start spending more money. But if you don't have more money to spend as a government, what do you do? You can raise taxes, but people don't like raising taxes. The other is, you can print money. And so what you start to see is civilizations start to print more and more money to boost the economy. And it works in the beginning because people feel rich. More money is created, more spending is happening, more jobs are created.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  People feel like their growing asset values are growing up, but that can only happen for so long. And eventually, people start to question that same currency. It's called devaluation of currency. And it's happened time and time again. And when that devaluation of currency starts to happen, people are working for money that doesn't really have much value. And now, what are you actually working for? And that's when you start to see the big problems. And that's the exact same thing that causes the divide between the rich and the poor. Because when you have money printing happen, that's what causes inflation. And inflation is what's making investors richer. Remember Money Rule Number Two? Inflation benefits the investor. Inflation makes the investor richer. And so inflation happens and makes the investor richer.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  They feel great at first, but at what cost? Somebody's gotta pay that money back.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  So if there is more opportunity now than there ever was in the past? Well, first of all, let me assess. Do you agree with that statement or do you disagree?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  100%.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  So it's easier to become wealthy now than it ever has been in the past?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  So why does wealth inequality actually happen then?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Goes back to the financial education. What are people doing? I mean, how else does anybody do anything? We go through formal education. Because I think if I become a doctor, I'm gonna become rich. I think if I'm an attorney, I'm gonna become successful. Well, a lot of doctors are broke. A lot of attorneys are broke. And I'm telling you this as an attorney.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  Do you think it's mostly education? Or do you think that it's mostly discipline? Because if you go to someone, I mean, I could be totally wrong here. But like, if you go to someone who's like morbidly obese and you ask them, you know, what's going on here? They're not gonna say, oh, like, I didn't know that if I ate less or like, I ate more healthy food, like, I'd be able to shed some of these pounds. They'd probably say something like, well, you know, I just don't necessarily want to. Or it's like, like more of a condition or something. That's maybe a horrible analogy, but you get the point.

• 39:47Graham Stephan?

  On top of what Jack said, I think education is pretty out there. Like, in terms of investing or saving money or making more.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  If you're in a bad spot, literally just say, I'm in a bad spot financially on anything. YouTube, ChatGPT, yeah, there's gonna be people giving bad advice. But Graham's probably gonna rank at the top, and so you'll probably be okay. Or a minority.

• 40:06Graham Stephan?

  Or a minority mindset.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Discipline is a part of education, but here's the problem. I want you to go outside and ask somebody, what's inflation? How much inflation are we seeing? What's our national debt? What is an asset? Tell me what answers you see. And you're gonna say, oh, okay, I don't have time to do that for this podcast. I've already done it. And I've gone to the streets and I've asked people the same questions. I've posted videos of me talking to regular people, asking, what is inflation? How much national debt do we have? How do you become wealthy? What is an asset? How do you invest your money? What is a bond? What is a stock? The average person has no idea. And it's funny, I get comments saying, well, how many people did you have to interview to find these? We didn't cut people out. We didn't have to. People, it's just, the education is available.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, many people don't know.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  But how much of that is actually valuable to know? Because there is like, kind of like that IQ curve

• 41:01Graham Stephan?

  Ah, this is funny.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  of like, people on the very far left are like, I don't know anything. So I'm just gonna put my, you know, all my money in index funds. And then you get into the middle of like, oh, I need to assess inflation. I need to assess this. I need to understand this.

• 41:14Graham Stephan?

  Sell options.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, CPI, this and that, all of this data analytics. And yet they get stuck in the middle, trying to time things, trying to do this, trying to do that. And then you go all the way over on the right side, like the high IQ individuals that are just like, yeah, all of that stuff still does exist, but it's not gonna necessarily dictate my investing decisions. And so the people on the high and low IQ side of the spectrum are essentially doing the exact same thing.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  I think you're wrong about where the low IQ spectrum is, because a lot of people don't know what an index fund is. And that's a huge chunk, and that's what I'm talking about. I don't care which way you invest, just invest. Investors are fine, but you have to start investing. The average American today is investing more money into the Netflix subscription than they are their actual wealth.

• 41:58Speaker 05

  Is that true?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  100%.

• 42:00Graham Stephan?

  There was a study that came out years ago, I made a whole video on this, that Americans are spending more money on coffee than they were on their retirement.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Half of Americans have no money saved for retirement. Half of Americans have no investments at all. I'm talking about 401K, IRA, stock market, crypto, whatever. They don't have anything. But many Americans have a Netflix subscription. And so when we're in that level of society, where most people have little to no investments statistically, but investments are how you become wealthy. Education is the first step to even understand that this is possible. Because if you were like me, you know, 15, 20 years ago, and didn't know what a dividend was, didn't know what an asset was, didn't know what a stock brokerage was, then yeah, I'm gonna be a little angry because,

• 42:50Speaker 01

  well, if I continued doing what I was doing, I would have had no idea how some people continue to become rich while I work a job, make a good income, have nice stuff, but I have no wealth. That's the problem. And it starts with education. Discipline is a part of it. Action is a part of it. I mean, there's so many things that are part of it, but you have to start somewhere. And education, if you can start learning how savings work, now it's up to you to decide if you want to do it. America's a free country. You have the freedom to become successful. You have the freedom to be a cat if you want. You can choose. But if you don't know what the options are, what are you gonna choose? You're gonna choose whatever you know. And if all you ever heard was, we can't afford nice things, that's for rich people. Rich people are bad, rich people are evil. Well, you grew up through this generational poverty.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  What is generational poverty? It's not a DNA that you have. There's no sign in your cells that you're gonna be broke. It's you grow up with this, what I call money trauma, which is you grew up learning that money is bad, money is evil, you can't have money. Money is, you know, this foreign thing that you can't ever understand. And that's all you think is reality. And until you get out of that bubble and realize, oh, my God, there's a whole world of financial education out here, now you can start to see something different. Because everybody knows formal education, everybody knows school. Everybody will tell you, yeah, if you wanna become successful, just get a good job, get another degree, get another whatever. But if you really wanna become successful, formal education is not bad,

• 44:20Speaker 01

  but you have to take financial education and put it on top of that.

• 44:23Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think is the biggest risk for the economy that no one is gonna see coming?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Right now, we have about $40 trillion of national debt, which means that our government today has spent $40 trillion that it did not generate. We are spending about $2 trillion a year that we don't have right now. So here's how our government works. The government has one source of revenue, taxes from taxpayers. Now, what are the taxes that you pay? Well, you're gonna go to work and you're gonna pay an income tax. And you gotta pay Medicare and social security taxes. Then you gotta pay your capital gains taxes when you buy a stock and sell it for a profit. Then you gotta pay your sales tax when you go to the store and you wanna buy something. Then maybe you buy a house and you buy a property tax. You have to pay property taxes.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Now we have to think about tariff taxes when you buy something from a foreign country. Then you have to pay corporate taxes if you're a corporation and you make a profit. Then you have your local taxes, you know, your California taxes or your New York taxes or maybe your city taxes. And you also have to think about your other taxes, which are things like cigarette tax, toll tax, alcohol taxes. And then you also have your death tax, estate tax. If you die with a lot of money and it goes, you know, to your heirs, that's another tax. So there's a lot of different types of taxes. The government's gonna collect about $5 trillion in taxes this year. Then they're gonna go and spend that money. Now, if the government was financially sound, you would think that they would maybe spend $4 trillion and save and invest $1 trillion.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  It's not what they do. They spend all $5 trillion, and then some, they're gonna spend an additional $2 trillion. But where do they?

• 46:07Speaker 06

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• 46:36Speaker 01

  Borrow the money. Because that money has to come from somewhere. They could borrow the money from people like you and me. I know you like to lend money to the government through your treasury or municipal bonds. They can borrow money from corporations. They can borrow money from countries like Japan, because Japan is the largest foreign lender to the United States. Or they can borrow money from the central bank, the Federal Reserve Bank. But the Federal Reserve Bank is not a bank, because you and I can't go there to deposit money. It's not a reserve, because it's not sitting on any cash reserves. It's not even federal, it says on its website. But they have the ability to print money, and they lend that money to the government. So when the government spends money they don't have, that money gets printed at some point. Some of it does. So spending money is inflation.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So now the government's gonna spend $2 trillion they don't have. Okay, cool. Well, now what has happened is we have $40 trillion of national debt. And then something really bad happened during the pandemic time. A lot of bad things happened, but I'm gonna talk about this particular instance. Interest rates fell to the lowest levels in the history of time in 2020 and 2021. And do you know what everybody did? Well, they refinanced their house or they bought a house, they refinanced their loans at a low interest rate. The government did the same thing. They refinanced all their national debt. Now, historically, we're gonna talk pre-2020. When the government would refinance their debt, one of the things they liked to do was get what's called long-term debt.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Usually like a 10-year or a 30-year loan, they would lock it in, just like a 30-year mortgage. They did something different during the pandemic. The government got a little greedy. They said, well, why would we wanna lock in a, I don't know, a 2.1% loan for 30 years? When we could get a 1.8% loan for five years? And so they started locking in these short-term loans at slightly lower interest rates. That was great for 2020 through 2025. Here we are in 2026. And about a third of our national debt is going to readjust in 2026.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Okay, well, why does that matter? Interest rates today in 2026 are a whole lot higher than they were back during the pandemic era, which means our national debt cost is about to go up. Not because we're borrowing more money, even though we are, but because the cost of that debt is going up. Well, why does that matter? Today, we are paying more money in national debt than we are our military, which means for every dollar you pay in taxes, 20 cents is going just in interest payments, not to make your life better, but just to pay back back interest.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Well, now we're borrowing more money, racking up our national debt. And you know what else is happening? It's about to get more expensive, which means more of your taxes are gonna have to go to paying back that interest, which means either we're gonna have to raise our taxes to keep funding things, or we're gonna have to print more money. And if we print more money, our national debt becomes more expensive. And not just that, now we're hearing more proposals about, why don't we just print money to pay back the debt? And now you can start to see the problem. Why don't we just pay off the Amex with the Discover card? And that's what we are getting closer and closer to. And if people start to lose faith in the dollar,

• 50:03Speaker 01

  interest rates go up more, hurts the value of the dollar, hurts the value of our country, and you can start to see how that becomes a big problem. So the national debt is a problem, and people will realize it's a problem after it really becomes a problem.

• 50:17Graham Stephan?

  What do you think to the counter of that, though? That some people say that AI is gonna boost productivity to the point where all of a sudden, we're gonna be making so much money that the national debt is not gonna matter as much as it does today?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  That's what the new Fed Chairman Kevin Worsch is saying. The Federal Reserve Bank says, goes back to what we're talking about with deflation. AI is gonna make life so much cheaper. It's gonna make things so much better. Great, let's see it happen.

• 50:43Graham Stephan?

  So how do you think this is all going to play out? And what can the average person do to protect themselves?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  How is it going to play out? Is you can take a look at history and anytime you have a, the United States is the world's economic superpower. We are the world's reserve currency. We weren't always the world's reserve currency. We only became the world's reserve currency after World War II around 1944. And so generally, historically, the world's superpower stays in power for around 100 or so years. You can plus or minus some decades, but around that time. We can't be the world's superpower forever, especially if we keep these types of spending habits. Now, we can extend our lifespan by learning to control our spending, by working to balance our budget a little bit better, by working to reduce our debt to GDP ratio.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  But if we just keep spending money free and freely, you know, eventually we're gonna have more problems. And we might not be the world's reserve currency forever. Now, when is that? Is it our lifetimes? I don't know. Is it this decade? Probably not. But eventually, that change will come. Every empire comes to an end. Sears was the biggest retailer in the world. If you talked to somebody 30 years ago and said, well, what are your thoughts about Sears? Everybody would say, oh, my God, it's the best, it's the biggest, it's the most profitable, it's the most amazing. Nobody would have thought that it was gonna go bankrupt, but here we are today and it's bankrupt. Amazon is not always gonna be in business. It's gonna rise, it's gonna fall.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Just like that, every empire is gonna have its up and its down. So how can people protect themselves? It goes back to exactly what we've been talking about. Owning investments is the way that you become wealthy, is the way that you protect yourself, is the way that you can hedge yourself against any financial downturn. Now, different investments have different, I guess, values. But if you can have a truly a diversified portfolio, that's how you can protect yourself.

• 52:41Graham Stephan?

  Does a diversified portfolio need to be spread across multiple different brokerages? Or are you good just to like pick one of them and then, and it's par for the course?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  By diversified portfolio, I mean diversified across different asset classes. So a lot of people think diversified means I'm gonna own some blue chip funds, some international funds, some growth funds and dividend funds. But you're all invested in stocks. Diversified portfolio is I own stocks, I own some real estate. Maybe I own some crypto, maybe I own some gold. That's a diversified portfolio when you own the different asset classes.

• 53:19Graham Stephan?

  What's wrong with owning 100% stocks?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  You're fully invested in paper assets.

• 53:23Graham Stephan?

  But let's just say that you own a world stock market index fund, the entire world, even though it's in stocks, couldn't you say that's still pretty well diversified?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  The total stock market fund, the Vanguard fund also goes down. So if you want to own assets that don't all go down at the same time, you have to own different asset classes. Take a look at the last 10 years. 2022, Bitcoin fell by around 60-ish percent. The stock market fell by around 20%. Housing market was booming. Gold prices were booming. 2020, the stock market fell by 30 some percent. Bitcoin prices fell, housing prices went up, gold prices went up. So when you start to understand that not all assets move in the same cycle, but all assets move in cycles, that's where having different asset classes can benefit.

• 54:11Graham Stephan?

  How is your personal portfolio broken down across different assets?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  I have five different assets. Number one is my own business, Brief's Finance. Number two is real estate. Number three is stocks. Number four is what I call speculative. This is me investing in startups and investing in crypto. And number five is investing in gold. Gold's about 2% of my portfolio.

• 54:30Graham Stephan?

  And what are the percentages of the others?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  We take out the business, uh, real estate's about 50%, stocks, 30%.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  The speculative, about 18%, gold, 2%.

• 54:41Graham Stephan?

  What's in the speculative, the 18%?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  That's the crypto, and that is the startups that I invest in. Startups have not been a good investment for me. Um, I, I haven't seen a return on my startups yet. Hopefully one day I will.

• 54:56Graham Stephan?

  Same with me.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:57Graham Stephan?

  Same with me. It's, you know what's so funny is I got pitched Grunz and didn't invest in that one. Everyone else I knew in the same funds, it's the same group of people who are just like, decided not to do that one. That's the one that had 100X exit, 100X, 100.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 55:17Graham Stephan?

  And that's the one I didn't buy.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 55:19Graham Stephan?

  Come on, man, come on, give me a break. Someone's gotta give me a break here, Jack.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  That's not the one that you didn't invest in. I'm sure that there are plenty of others that you passed up on.

• 55:29Graham Stephan?

  Text messages that say, hey.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Me too. And who needs 100X more? This guy. So we both missed out, that's fine.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  You guys are both doing good. You guys are both doing alright.

• 55:40Graham Stephan?

  We're doing okay. Anyway.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Your channel is doing amazing. The podcast is doing great. Sponsorships are booming. I think you guys, you guys just, you guys flew out here in class, staying at a nice hotel. You guys are doing fine.

• 55:52Graham Stephan?

  You put us in the hotel.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  You put us in the class, man. Thank you, by the way. Guys, this was, by the way, I mean, taking a step outside of this podcast for a second. You put us in a phenomenal hotel, the Shinola Hotel here in Detroit. I did not think it was gonna be like, I was amazed. There's literally an outside balcony. I have never in my entire life had a hotel with a balcony, like a, or an outside, whatever you would call that.

• 56:15Graham Stephan?

  Our hotel has a living room and two bathrooms.

• 56:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 56:19Graham Stephan?

  Two bathrooms in a hotel room.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  Did you use both of them?

• 56:22Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  You should. And also, you wrote, or someone from your team wrote like inspirational quotes on our, on our mirrors. Like, we didn't even have to check in. This was like white glove level service.

• 56:34Graham Stephan?

  Huge. So thank you so much. Even at the airport, we show up and it says Graham, Steph and Jack Selby.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Well, I can't take that credit. I'll say that. Dre, thank you, thank you to my entire team.

• 56:42Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, well, our team does an amazing job taking care of our guests. Because you know what? When, I'll tell you why. When people come out to, uh, or when we invite people to Detroit, the first thing I say, Detroit, Eight Mile, what does that mean? And so we want people to say, oh, Detroit, I loved Detroit. And so I appreciate that and, uh, it's part of my culture too. Uh, we like to take care of our guests and, and I really, I can't take that credit. My team does an amazing job. They, uh, they're out late taking care of everything. So I don't even know all that happened until you guys told me, so thank you.

• 57:14Graham Stephan?

  But I am, I'm trying to save you a little bit of money because in the text message, they said that we could put any like charges on the room or there's like a restaurant downstairs. I'm like, that's what, I looked at the cost of a coffee, $10. So I didn't do it.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Graham, I appreciate it.

• 57:28Graham Stephan?

  So if I could save money in any little way there, it's, uh, cause you got enough here.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  When our employee, Michael, first came to us, he offered to run our X account completely for free. And so we just kind of figured, why not? Well, he ended up absolutely crushing it. And so we slowly started giving him more and more tasks and now he's a full-time employee.

• 57:43Graham Stephan?

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• 57:50Speaker 05

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• 57:57Graham Stephan?

  And right now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/ICH.

• 58:01Speaker 05

  And ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster.

• 58:07Graham Stephan?

  It is no wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2.

• 58:11Speaker 05

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• 58:19Graham Stephan?

  So try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/ICH. Again, that is ziprecruiter.com/ICH. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. If I could save money in any little way there, it's, uh, cause you got enough here.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. Well, you know, you guys are doing an amazing job. Again, you know, for us, it's, we want to educate the world about finances because isn't it crazy that we all go to work every single day to earn money? But we're never taught about money? In fact, most people are actively avoiding the topic of money. I don't know if I told you guys this, but you know, my grandparents were refugees because my family is from a state in India called Punjab. In 1947, this state of Punjab was severed. And if you were a Sikh, which is the religion that I am, and you were on the west side, you had to migrate east or you were gonna be. So when that happened, my grandparents had to migrate east. And it wasn't like, you know, a luxurious migration.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Like my grandfather had a sword in his hand and the shoes on his feet and the clothes on his back and that was it. During that process, he saw his, they got attacked by a mob. He saw his uncle get his one and a half. He put him on a horse. That was the last time he saw him. He made it to the new east side of Punjab. He lost his shoes along the way, was barefoot, didn't have a place to stay, didn't have money to eat. And he talks about during that time, he said this in Punjabi, but the, the biggest disease is poorness, poverty. The reason why is in the Sikh religion, service, seva is a core fundamental tenet.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And he says, during that time, I saw so many hungry kids, kids that died from hunger in front of my eyes. I couldn't feed them. I couldn't even feed myself. And so when you have that level of poverty, you know, you, you want security, you want safety. My dad went through his own, there was other attacks that happened. He went through his own stuff. You come to America and you go through this level of like insecurity. All you want is security. And so when you want security, what do you do? You want a safe, secure job. And this is what gets me so riled up is we, we're told that the safe, secure job is, you know, getting a good degree. Yes, it can give you a good income, but that income by itself is not enough.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  If you want to actually become financially secure, just having a salary is not going to do it. Because what happens if you stop working? What happens if you want to stop working? What happens if you can't work? What happens if you lose your job? What happens if you get hit by a bus and your family needs an income? Right? I mean, I don't want to be dire, but you know, you have to start to think about these things. And if your sole income relies on you working, you're one paycheck away from your family being broke. Yet there are some people in this world that become incredibly wealthy. And we don't understand how or why. So we start to put these smoke screens that money is bad, money is evil, don't talk about money. But the reality is we're insecure about money. And when you're insecure about money, you don't want to talk about your insecurities.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  So you just put a smoke screen up above it. So we just don't talk about it. But my goal is try to, you know, I, I talk about sometimes things in a way that are uncomfortable. I do that deliberately because until you understand how this works, you can't make a change. And when you start to wake up now, you can start learning and take that first step. Then you can start getting disciplined, right? And then you get to make that choice. Do you want the watch? Do you want the car? Do you want the freedom? And most Americans today would rather look rich than be rich. We have more Americans paying a thousand dollars a month on their car payment than ever before. Thousand dollars a month on your car? That's just the car payment. We're not talking about the insurance, the oil changes, the gas. And how much investments do you have?

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  For many people, it's nothing. And so would you rather look rich with the Escalade or whatever, the BMW? Or do you want to be rich? Because if you want to be rich, you gotta sacrifice that BMW and the Escalade for a little while. And it goes back to that, that confidence. Because guess what? When I started to make a little bit of money, I wanted the BMW. I wanted to look like I was rich. When I started to make some serious money, I didn't care.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  So how do you feel that some people are confusing investing right now with gambling?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  What are your thoughts on prediction markets?

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Oh my God. There's a few things, I, I, I don't like using the word, word I hate, but there's a few things I really, really, really dislike. One is buy now, pay later. The other is prediction markets. You know, uh, we talked about startup investments, right? I had a couple of opportunities to invest in prediction market companies and buy now, pay later companies. Oh man, I would have been, made so much money on those investments, but I refused because I morally could not agree to invest in those things. Oh my God, it's absurd. I'm trying to just calm down so I can talk about this because it has got to the point, you can go into call sheet or whatever, you know, there is out there and you can start to predict. Is the stock market going to open up tomorrow or down tomorrow?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  You're telling me you're gonna bet on it instead of actually buying the investment?

• 1:03:27Speaker 05

  It's not really betting, it's hedging.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  No, it's gambling, it is betting.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  Well, you could hedge because if your portfolio is down, you could hedge that it's gonna open down and then you make.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Which is 100% a gamble. The way, the way that it works, one of the most popular bets on call sheet has been Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin gonna hit a hundred thousand dollars, 200,000 dollars, a million dollars, whatever? And I started to do the math. Why would anybody want to bet if Bitcoin is gonna hit, let's just call it a million dollars, instead of buying the Bitcoin? Because if you bought one Bitcoin, let's just say for a hundred thousand dollars and it went up to a million dollars, the most you're gonna make is a $900,000 difference. But if you bet on it and you got it right, you're not gonna make $900,000. You can make 10, 20, or even 100X that, which is more than even if I, and I don't recommend this, going into debt to buy Bitcoin.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  You're still not gonna get the same returns than if you just went and gambled that money. So you know what people are doing now? They're saying, wow, not only could I make these huge spreads on betting, how about I go into debt to start betting? And this is what I call phase three of the investment cycle. Phase one of the investment cycle is I want to buy an investment because I want to own the underlying asset. I want to buy Bitcoin because I like the Bitcoin. I want to buy a stock because I like the underlying asset. I want to buy real estate because I like the underlying asset. Phase two is I want more of that asset, so I'm gonna leverage it up with debt. I want to buy more stocks, I'm gonna use more margin. I want to buy more real estate, I'm gonna do zero money down programs. I'm gonna buy a lot of, just as much debt as possible to buy that real estate.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Same with cryptocurrency. Then phase three, this is what we've seen happen with every bubble in history, is now it's the derivatives. It's not the debt, I am gambling on the derivative of the original asset. If it's stocks, phase one is I'm buying the stock because I like the underlying company. Phase two is I am using margin to buy the stock. Phase three is forget the stock, I'm gonna gamble on the stock. I'm gonna buy these 4X futures on the stock, which is now a derivative of a derivative, so I can amplify my returns if I'm right. You can take a look at every market crash in history. We started to see these derivatives rise, which was a key indicator that there was a burst coming. Take a look at real estate.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  When the 2008 housing market happened, it wasn't because people were buying houses with no money down. Yeah, that contributed to it. But the real downfall that led to the fall of Lehman Brothers and all the big firms on Wall Street was now the derivatives. Was the, I'm going in and I'm buying the derivative of the derivatives, the CDOs, the mortgage backed securities, all that stuff that was happening there. And then all the other derivatives on top of that is what caused the house of cards to fall even more. And so now when we have these prediction markets which are booming, people are now not buying the underlying asset. They're not going into debt to buy the underlying asset.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  They're going into debt to buy the derivative of the underlying asset because I can 100X my returns.

• 1:06:32Speaker 05

  Is there ever a scenario where it makes sense to take on margin?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  I don't recommend it. I'm sure there is, people have gotten rich with it. So absolutely there are, I don't recommend it.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  We've spoken with two people in the past who say that mathematically, it's best to buy a 2X leveraged S and P 500 index fund. And if you're young and can ride out the volatility and keep buying over enough time, you'll see outsized returns.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  The math, doesn't always math for people. We could say, hey, look, just buy and hold an investment. But how many people sell when markets go down? Why is, you talked about the S and P 500. The S and P 500 has averaged about 10-ish percent a year for the last 100 years. The NASDAQ 100 has averaged 14, 15% a year, maybe a little bit more since inception. Well, why don't people buy QQQ instead of the S and P 500? I know people do, but talk about the average person. Because QQQ, the NASDAQ 100 goes down way more when markets go down. And that volatility is hard for the average person. And so, yeah, we can always talk about math and numbers, math and numbers don't always add up to success. I love Dave Ramsey.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  One of the things that Dave Ramsey always talks about, the money is just as much psychology as it is math. Which is why he preaches what's called the debt snowball, which is a pay off the lowest debts first, as opposed to the debt avalanche, which is paying off the highest interest rate debts first. The math says you're gonna save money if you pay off the highest interest rate debts first. But according to him, you're gonna get out of debt faster if you actually just stay consistent with paying off your debt. And if you stay consistent, the way you do that is just by getting those small wins.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  So for money, how much of it is psychological versus mathematical? If you were to give a ranking or a percentage based on this?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  A friend of mine is a very successful, he's a trader, also an investor, but he made his money through trading. And I, there's very few people that I can actually say that for, because I don't really know anybody who made money from trading except one guy. And what he tells me is it's 50% psychological, 50% mathematical. And what's interesting is he tries to teach the psychology of investing. He's like, yeah, you know what sucks about it? Nobody pays attention. Nobody cares about the psychology of investing. We just look at the numbers because we want to buy it for 100 and sell it for 1,000. But we don't understand the psychology associated with it, which is why the best investors are often dead people, because dead people don't sell.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  What I try to do is teach, like, I wrote a whole ebook on this called Always Be Buying, ABB. And the idea is with this idea of always be buying, you're gonna buy when markets are up, buy when markets are down, you buy when markets are sideways. You buy when there's a Republican in the White House, you buy when there's a Democrat, you buy when it's raining, you buy when it's sunny, you buy no matter what. And that has been proven to win historically. You talked about a spectrum, right? You got this like bell curve. Some people just gotta get their money in order and start investing in the S and P. S and P five hundred. Then there's a person that says, okay, you know what? The S and P five hundred is cool, but I want to do a little bit more. Because if I can get slightly better gains, I can have significantly more wealth.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  This is what we focus in on at Brief's Finance. The whole idea of for the person that wants to be a little bit more involved to get slightly better gains, how can it lead to more wealth? Because if you invest five hundred dollars a month for thirty years, get a ten percent return, you're going to retire with just under a million dollars. Not bad. The only problem is because of the rising cost of living, that million dollars might not be enough. So what can you do? Well, if you got not twenty percent returns or fifteen percent returns, but let's just say thirteen percent average returns, which is one hundred percent possible. You do the same five hundred dollars a month at just thirteen percent a year. You don't invest another dollar. You don't have to save another penny.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  You don't have to work another job. You're just investing the same amount of money, getting slightly better returns. Now you're not going to have a million dollars or one point five million. You're going to have over one point seven million dollars. You're going to have over seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars more just because you got slightly better returns. Not for everybody, but for somebody who wants a little bit more risk, that is an option.

• 1:10:54Speaker 05

  So would you then argue that markets are not perfectly efficient? And if you are an astute and disciplined investor, you can beat the markets.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Many people do. Not everybody, most people don't, but many people do. What do you think, Graham?

• 1:11:09Speaker 05

  I think such a small percentage of people out there could do it consistently. But I think there's also a lot of just bias that if you have, let's say, a million people all throwing darts and you tell those people that they could predict where they throw the dart and all this sort of stuff. Out of enough people, there's going to be like twenty people who are just like consistently correct. Same thing if you say like, can you predict red or black thirty times in a row? Like statistically, it's so impossible. But with a billion people all just guessing, you're going to have someone who just like gets it right. And it'll be like, oh, no, I just knew I felt it. You know what I always thought is if you split up the world into two single file lines and then you made each of them do rock, paper, scissors?

• 1:11:53Speaker 05

  And you and everyone competed against everyone, there would be one person that would win rock, paper, scissors. Like, you know, however, many times in a row, ten thousand times in a row.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  But the difference with rock, paper, scissors and investing is you can have a system for investing.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  You could have a system for rock, paper, scissors. It'd be I looked in his eyes and like if they should, they're a little shifty then. Or if they do rock, then they're more likely to do paper afterwards and like do enough calculations basically. Cause there is, believe it or not, a strategy for playing rock, paper, scissors.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  I'm sure there is. And so the people that understand that strategy are going to win, right?

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  All right, so beat me then.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  So you just.

• 1:12:33Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. I was showing.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  See, you have not to do. You haven't mastered the strategy yet.

• 1:12:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  But if you understand the strategy or a strategy, you have a better shot. You can't guarantee anything, but you have a better shot. And when you look for slightly better returns, it becomes a lot more accessible than trying to shoot for twenty percent returns. Because what we do here is we are actively looking for what we call a shift, a market shift. Where is money moving? And we like to do what's called boots on the ground, which is trying to get information from the people that are actually doing the thing. So our head of investing research, when we heard the news that President Trump signed a new executive order on drones. And what we did? We went to drone facilities, talking to drone executives to understand where is the drone market moving to find investment opportunities. It worked out very well for us.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Everybody's talking about SpaceX in twenty twenty six. You know what's funny about SpaceX? Everybody's talking about it after it hits the news because that's unfortunately how most people invest. They are reactionary. They invest after it's on the news. But by the time it's on the news, a lot of the real money has been made. Well, here's what's interesting. What we noticed is in twenty twenty five, President Trump signed two executive orders. Well, one executive order and a new tax bill. One of the executive orders was allocating more money towards space exploration. That was interesting. Then the tax bill, the one big beautiful bill act, we know it cut taxes for a lot of people. You know what it also did? It allocated more money towards space. Hmm. So we looked into that, my investment research head.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  And then we published a report on why we are starting to buy space investments. Those space investments went up in twenty twenty five, but they boomed going up to twenty twenty six with the whole SpaceX thing. And then we saw what happened to SpaceX. But it was understanding where the money is moving before it hits the news. That's research. That's a system. What everybody else is doing is they invest based off of news. When the tariffs hit, I mean, I got endless stories. When tariffs hit, do you know what everybody did? They panicked. Do you want to know what Wall Street did?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  They started moving their money. They were buying the global supply chain, things in the Panama Canal. They were buying different types of things where where money is going to move because they knew the global shipping was going to change. We saw that. We saw Wall Street firms were moving billions of dollars into these new supply chain and shipping companies. We found that we published that as a report to say, hey, this is what's happening. That ended up being a great investment. We're not right on everything. Sometimes we're wrong. Sometimes we're early, sometimes we're right. But the idea is when you have a system, when you have research, when you have something, it can help you get a better chance of being right. Can't guarantee it. You can have the best rock, paper, scissors system and still be wrong because that one person guessed something. But the idea is if you're just trying to do a little bit better

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  and you have a true system and you know what you're following, like if you're trying to find the money, try to take the emotions out. Now you have a better chance to get slightly better returns. And if you can get slightly better returns, it can lead to significantly more wealth.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  So what are the best opportunities that you're seeing today that the market's not priced in yet?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Here's what we do, or at least my head of investing research, I'm going to take his quote here. So the gold rush happened, right? Gold rush was everybody wants to go and dig up the next gold. The people that got rich was the people that were selling the picks and shovels because everybody needed a pick and shovel, right? To dig up the gold. But what we try to do is we do the iron, ore and lumber investing, which is the picks and shovels actually need lumber and they need the iron in order to produce the picks and shovel. So it's taking a one layer deeper. So that's how we try to do is we try to look a couple of layers deeper to find those types of opportunities. And so he was just in Brazil, going into certain mines over there, looking at how certain metals are pulled out of the ground. Because critical minerals are a big shift in our economy.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  There's a couple of reasons why. Number one is we have a trade war going on with China. President Trump put on huge tariffs on China. China has been the world's producer of certain metals. The idea is we need these metals in order to run our economy. And China is the only producer of them. What we did not know in the United States was how reliant we are, we were on China. How do I know that? Because United States Congress had a congressional summit. We were invited there. My head of investor research was sitting there as they said, we did not realize how much our defense systems, meaning our missiles needed minerals from China. So now we're trying to rebuild our supply chain.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  So now the United States government is investing billions of dollars to rebuild this supply chain of metals and minerals, which means more money, right? Because as an investor, you want to invest where the money is moving. The biggest spender in our economy is not you or me. It's not Nvidia or SpaceX. It's the United States government. So now the government is investing huge sums of money to build this new supply chain of metals and minerals. And we're trying to identify where they're going to do it. The other problem is certain metals and minerals are seeing a decreasing supply or at least decreasing easily accessible supply, which means we could be seeing shortages of certain minerals.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Because we need these in order to produce missiles and our defense stuff. But we also need it for iPhones. We also need it for AI and data centers. So we know how big of, you know, a thing AI is. It's not just in the United States. China wants to beat the United States in AI. The UAE, Dubai wants to beat the United States in AI. I mean, the whole world is trying to invest in AI. It's not just the United States. These data centers need more metals and minerals. For example, helium. What do we think of helium? That's what goes in balloons, right? Yeah. But you know what else helium is used for? Is used to cool down semiconductors. Because data centers get really hot. Okay, that's cool.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Well, you know, producing helium, there's, there's, there's not like a, we can't just get more. I mean, there's a limited supply of it. And do you know what else happened? Because of this war in the Middle East, a big producer of helium in Qatar was bombed. That means the production of helium is going to get hurt. Now, when are we going to see that in the economy? At some point, which means well, producing those semiconductor chips could become a little bit more expensive. And so when you start to understand these types of things, now you can start to do that again. Research, have a system to understand where the money is moving. But again, we have full time people that this is all they do. That's what gives us an edge. The average person is just trying to buy stocks to hear about on CNBC or Reddit or now ChatGPT. Again, I love AI.

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  But AI is only as powerful as the information AI has. And AI only has the information that's publicly available on the internet. But we're trying to go out and get boots on the ground to get more information, not to guarantee returns, but to improve our odds of getting returns because that's what we publish to our investors. It's like, where do we see these opportunities?

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  So Jack wants to know what stock to buy.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. I can't tell you what stock to buy.

• 1:19:49Speaker 05

  No, no, I don't want to know. Jack. Wants to know.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Jack, what I want you to do is I'm gonna set you up with Jackson over there and he's gonna walk you through because it depends. And here's why I'm saying I don't know. Because if I give you a stock pick, there's a lot more to it than just me telling you what stock you should buy. Because what's a good stock for me may not be a good stock for you. Because number one, we have three types of investors. There's growth investors, income investors, wealth preservation investors.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  And then there's Jack.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  And then there's Jacks. And there's gamblers, right?

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  There's zero day out of the money call options.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Growth investors are gonna have different types of opportunities. Income investors are gonna have different types of opportunities because they want cash flow. Wealth preservation investors, the people that have, you know, a couple million dollars or more, and we just don't want to lose our money, they have different opportunities. So when people say, what stock should I buy? Oh, my God. It's like, you can't answer that question because there's so much that goes into it. What's your risk tolerance? How do you want to make money? How long do you want to hold? And so this is where I can't tell you what to buy, but I can give you the research depending on where it is you are as an investor to start looking and researching. That's what we do. We're not here to tell you what to buy. We're here to show you where the opportunities are depending on what type of investor you are, and then you can go out and make that decision for yourself.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Because I like income. I like cash flow. It sounds like you don't. So we're gonna, you know, because here's the thing, right? You might think Nvidia is a great stock. I don't want to buy Nvidia. Their cash flow sucks. And so that's why what your goal is as an investor is gonna help dictate your investing decisions. But now we gotta, let's go back to the spectrum we were talking about, right?

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  Not everybody needs to do this, but everybody just got to get started. And you can just start with the S and P 500. It's great. But then maybe you want to graduate to the next thing and the next thing. Maybe you want some real estate, maybe you want some other stuff. But you gotta understand where you are because ultimately there's three things that will determine how wealthy you become. TMR, time, money, returns.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Time is how long your money has to grow. The longer you invest your money, the wealthier you're going to become. So you can either start investing last year, which unfortunately I don't think you can do, or you can invest for an extra five years, meaning you hold off on retirement. That's one option. You can work until 70 or 75 instead of 65. Option number two is you can invest more money. So Jack, on the side, you can start driving Uber in addition to doing the podcast. That's an option. You can have more money to invest more, or you can grow your business, or whatever it is you want to make more money. But you have to put more money into your investments. You can also live smaller. Option number three, if those two are not enough, is you can improve your returns. And if you want to improve your returns, you have to take on some additional risk.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  And you have to see now where on this spectrum of TMR you are to see how much wealth you need to be able to be free, wealthy, rich, secure, whatever your definition of or goal you want is, but you're gonna need some amount of money. Go to our website, briefs.co, and you can, you know, find calculators there, just plug in the numbers and see, do you have enough time to become wealthy? Are you investing enough money or are you getting enough returns?

• 1:23:00Speaker 05

  When does someone have enough money? And is there an amount that you say that they should shift from growth to preservation?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  I don't give recommendations, but here's how you could think about it. Wealth as a growth investor is relatively simple. It's the 4% rule. But this is what many people have followed. You might want to adjust it for whatever you are. The idea being if you have a million dollars of assets, you can live off of 4% of that, $40,000. Is that enough for you? Because what many, you know, financial advisors say is, if you can live off of 4% of your investments, you can just sell that and live off of that and you are wealthy. That's not my goal. I don't like that. I like cash flow. What's the definition of wealth as a cash flow investor? Your income exceeds your expenses. If your expenses are $5,000 a month and you're making $5,100 a month

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  passively from your investments, you are wealthy because you don't have to sell your investments and your income is paying for your expenses and now you're free. As a wealth preservation investor, it's a little bit different. The idea here is you just don't want to lose your money when the next market crash happens.

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  What do you think, Graham?

• 1:24:09Speaker 07

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• 1:24:39Graham Stephan?

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• 1:25:09Speaker 05

  I think probably $10 million is an amount that most people, I think, could be insulated from a lot of things. I'm talking like medical issues, family emergencies, expenses, while still living practically anywhere they want in the United States within reason. Like not driving Rolls Royces and Bentleys and Lambos, but like having a pretty decent house.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  But I want a Bentley and a Lambo. So how is that enough for me?

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Then I would say you probably need a little more. 10 million plus, you know.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  But what if I just want to live in Guatemala and live in a small shack with a Bentley? I'm giving, this is me with a, with, with.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  Well, it depends if it's a GTC. It depends if it's supercharged, if you got the Molliner package. I mean, there's a lot of.

• 1:25:58Graham Stephan?

  That's a really good point.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Personal finance is personal. That's why, you know, you can say 10 million, it's cool, makes a good sound clip. At the end of the day, it really depends. Personal finance is personal. For some people, 10 million is like, oh, my God, I'm gonna live free for the rest of my life. For other people, $10 million, I can't afford my private jet for one year with $10 million. So figure out where you want to be and TMR, calculate what is real wealth for you.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  But do you think some people get into somewhat of like a money trap? A psychological money trap where they're in pursuit of money. They reach an amount that any reasonable person like would be satisfied with with their goals. And yet they continue to push. It's a subconscious sort of thing.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Why did Warren Buffett continue working when he had more money than almost everybody in the world?

• 1:26:47Speaker 05

  One could argue he wasn't working for money.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  He wasn't. 100% he wasn't working for money. He was working because he loved what he did. It was fulfilling for him. Some people play the game. It's a business. Business is a game. Some people enjoy it. And so, you know, at some point you become really delusional and it's not about the money. Really, there is a point and maybe it is $10 million. If you're working beyond $10 million, it's probably because you're a little bit delusional and you're not doing it for the money. You're doing it because you love the game. You like business. Business is a sport. You play sports when you're young? What'd you play?

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  Played baseball, basketball, soccer, ping pong.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Ping pong?

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  Well, I mean.

• 1:27:26Graham Stephan?

  Frisbee.

• 1:27:28Speaker 05

  I roller bladed. I like ping pong.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  We got a ping pong table. We might have to set that up.

• 1:27:33Graham Stephan?

  It looks like a nice one.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Did you like the competition?

• 1:27:36Speaker 05

  I honestly love the, I love losing.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Okay, why'd you like losing?

• 1:27:41Speaker 05

  Because I feel like I can try as hard as I can. Like I feel challenged.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  You feel challenged?

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  So now imagine this, you never lost. You're so good.

• 1:27:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's not very fun at all.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Not very fun.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  I go to Lifetime Fitness in Vegas. I, maybe I shouldn't, but I go to Lifetime Fitness in Vegas and.

• 1:27:59Graham Stephan?

  There's a few of them.

• 1:27:59Speaker 05

  And I, well, there's two. And I absolutely obliterate every single person there. And this is not like patting myself on the back.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Like working out?

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Working out or?

• 1:28:09Speaker 05

  No, no, at pickleball. They have a pickleball court there.

• 1:28:11Graham Stephan?

  Oh, I thought you meant like at, like lifting weights.

• 1:28:13Speaker 05

  Why are you so shocked if I, if I said I would?

• 1:28:15Graham Stephan?

  Cause I see some like bodybuilders.

• 1:28:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, you know, I'm, you know, it's.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  We'll put you on the deadlift in our office. We got a legend there.

• 1:28:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, my back's hurting a little bit right now. Save it for later. But I go there and I play pickleball with these people. But these are like very casual players. I'm not a very casual player. Like I want to win. And it's not fun because I'll go, I'll want to play for a while and I'll end up, I'll end up playing one game and leave.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  I learned this the hard way. But when I was first like under the, on the hunt for money, I was chasing money.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  And, you know, I went through some hard things in my life where I realized money isn't what it's about. Money is one part of life. If you want, you really want to just be happy and fulfilled, and that means you have to be physically fit, mentally fit, spiritually fit, and financially fit. I call this my quadruped theory. Physically fit because you know, you want to look good in the gym, but also you just don't want to be sick. You don't want to be unhealthy. You want to feel good. Mentally fit because you don't want to be surrounded by toxic people and, you know, just people that are constantly bringing you down and very negative and just draining your happiness. Then they're spiritually fit. This is not about being religious. This is about your purpose. And I want you to remember

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  what I just said here about your purpose, because if your purpose is making money, if you wake up with $10 million, you're gonna feel so miserable. Because now, why do you need to get out of bed? More money? What is more money going to do? You need a purpose. You need a reason to get out of bed every single day than this financially fit, which is you want to be financially free. You want to have money so you can do more of the things that you love and take care of the people around you. When I started Brief Finance, I didn't do it because I needed the money. And this is like one of the things that, Graham, you were asking me, what was my goal? Do I want to get acquired or whatever? The reason I'm not after an acquisition, and I don't want to say never, say never, but the reason why we haven't sold, we're not after an acquisition, is because I started this because of a mission.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  I want to help me 15 years ago, 20 years ago. When I started the company, I, this is the first year I took a salary out of the company. This is the first year I took a dollar out of the company. Not a profit, I'm talking about anything as a salary. You know how much I'm paying myself? $5,000 a month. I am the lowest paid employee on payroll. Why? Because I'm not doing it because I, you know, I need the money. I'm sure it's worth a lot of money. Okay, but I don't, that's not my motivator. If I didn't have Brief Finance, I would be just fine. I do it because I want to. I do it because I need to. If I just wanted to make money, I would probably just go out and sell a $15,000 to $25,000 coaching program on how you can build your investments and just sell that on YouTube, because I

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  could probably sell a good amount of them and live on a beach and just do that. But guess what? You know, spiritually, I'd probably feel really empty, because I'm not fulfilled. And so you talk about, you know, money and a motivator. Dude, when you're, when you're struggling with money, money can be a motivator 100%. And I hate when people say, oh, don't work for money. Money is not a motivator. You become so out of touch, because when you're struggling with money, money is a motivator. When your parents are sick, money is a motivator. When your kids are sick, your wife wants a vacation, money wants, money is a motivator to get out of the hole. But after you become free, you know, a second or third Lamborghini is not a motivator. But that spiritual fitness is a motivator,

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  and oftentimes money follows. It's like a, it's like the score. You want to win. You do it for the competitiveness. You do it because there's a purpose behind it. You do it because of something deeper. And that's what gets you excited. I am excited to work. Why do I drive to come here? Why do I work every single day so hard? I love it. It's fun for me. I enjoy it. We're making a difference in people's lives. That's what I want to do. And I think about like, what would I do if I were to retire, quote unquote retire? I would be bored. This is what I want to do.

• 1:32:10Graham Stephan?

  So when you actually hit that point, how do you make sure you protect your money? I know you were talking before about maybe setting up trusts, or LLCs, or maybe having really good insurance.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is what I call the be great phase. There's two parts to this. The first is you want to be great for yourself and your family by protecting your assets. The other is be great for your community by also giving back, because I believe the more you have, the more you can give. Giving can be money. It can be time. It could be knowledge, which you should give. Now, how do you protect your assets? The first thing is understanding now how our, how our economic system works. I don't own anything in my name. I don't own a house. I don't own a business. I don't own any rental properties. Just Bree Singh is not the owner of them. It is the entities that are the owner of

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  them. Why? I told you about my first rental property. Well, I told you kind of the sunshine and rainbows part of it. There's a stormy part to that story as well, which is I brought in a nightmare tenant, because I didn't work in my property manager. I just put out a ad on, what was it called? The Craigslist?

• 1:33:20Graham Stephan?

  Craigslist.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Craigslist. And I just found the first tenant without qualifying them.

• 1:33:24Graham Stephan?

  That's what I did.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, hopefully it worked well for you.

• 1:33:27Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so.

• 1:33:28Graham Stephan?

  No, I had to evict them. They trashed my house. Yeah.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  You got off easy. So they were a nightmare tenant. I was 19. I was getting calls every day about, oh, I was cutting cucumbers on the countertop and I, without a cutting board, and I scratched the countertop. I need a new countertop right now. The place is a dump. It's a mess. I renovated everything. I'll put a new countertop. I don't know what I was supposed to do. Oh my God, I think, I think something's wrong with the electrical. I think the house is about to go up in flames. You need to get here right now. Bring the fire department. Bring an electrician. I'm freaking out. I get my electrician, or I get a electrician. We drive up to that property, the condo right away, find out that a lightbulb had fused. All this stuff goes on and on and on. Eventually, they decide to leave.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  We get a new tenant. Everything is good. I'm like 22 years old now, or something. And I get a packet delivered to me, saying, you're being sued. What? The tenant slipped and fell in your bathtub, because the tub was too slippery when the water was on, so they want damages. What? I didn't understand. They use one of those, you know, free attorneys that you can go through, whatever. Well, we found out through all the stuff that they actually slipped and fell at a friend's barbecue, but we're trying to come after the quote unquote, rich landlord. I'm like a young 20 some kid. I don't have any extra money.

• 1:34:49Graham Stephan?

  How do you find out they slipped at the barbecue? Hey, by the way, really quick, I just want to pop in and say that we were talking to Just Bree after filming this episode, and he was telling us about his upcoming livestream that he's doing. And we disliked it so much that we decided to actually partner up with him on this. So on September 29th, he is running a free live workshop about how to profit from the falling dollar, and also some of the most common investing mistakes that people are making in just a market like this, which is crazy. Again, it's totally free, September 29th, and there are two time slots. You could join either at 10:30 in the morning, or 8:00 PM Eastern. So if you've enjoyed the podcast so far, and you want to hear more, just click the link down below

• 1:35:31Graham Stephan?

  in the description to reserve your spot. What's going on in the market right now is just absolutely insane. So this should provide a little more context. Again, it is totally free. We just genuinely like what he is doing, and we think it could be of value. So again, the link is down below in the description to sign up, reserve your spot, totally free. Enjoy. Now let's get back to the episode. How do you find out they slipped at the barbecue?

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  I had hired a better property manager after I hired the first one. There was a chip in the bathtub, about a size of a quarter. And they made a complaint about it. So they sent a contractor to go fix it. The contractor goes there, they said, oh, the husband slipped and fell at a barbecue. We can't come right now. So my property manager documented it. They go back. Oh, he's still recovering from the slip at the barbecue. Documented. Third time, you know, we don't want it anymore. Documented. So we had this documentation. We then aligned that with their health records. Turns out, oh, it was the slip at the barbecue that caused the slip, not a slip in the bathtub. In any case,

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  it was an insurance thing. But do you know what else? I didn't own the property. The property was owned by an entity. And when a property is owned by an entity, the most that somebody could take is whatever is inside the entity. They can't come after my personal assets, because I don't own it. The entity does. So you're creating a new human. So you want to get a good attorney who can help you build these types of entities. The second thing is you want to get a good tax accountant, maybe a good tax attorney. Your biggest expense, as you start to become wealthier, is probably not going to be what you think it is. It'll probably be taxes, because you're paying taxes as soon as you earn the money. But the tax code, and I can show you, it's in the office, it's about 2,000 pages long, the

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  tax code. And the tax code is not what your tax brackets are. That's like one paragraph in the 2,000 some pages. It's the deductions, the write offs, the loopholes, that the people who can get the good accountants, get a good attorneys can actually use. So learn how to use the tax code to your advantage, because it is a rulebook that allows some people to pay less money in taxes 100% legally. We were talking about real estate before. The reason why so many wealthy people love investing in real estate, isn't just because of the cash flow. It's because of the tax breaks. You can make a lot of money in real estate and pay little to $0 in taxes 100% legally, through the tax write offs that

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  are allowed there. A lot of people think about, oh, the only way to get tax free wealth is a 401k or IRA. I don't have a 401k. I don't have an IRA. To me, I don't like the control that I get from it, because I can't access my money. But I can use real estate to grow my wealth tax free, because there's something called the 1031 exchange, which says if I buy a property for, let's say, $100,000, it goes up in value to $200,000. I can sell it, take that $100,000 of profit, pay $0 in taxes, buy a new property for $200,000, generate more cash flow, more write offs, and I can do that again and again and again, as long as I hold the property for at least a year. Now, it's not so simple, but you

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  want to have a good accountant who can help you with that. And this is where now having a good accountant to understand the tax law can help you. Understand I can pay less money in taxes. Then you need to think about estate planning. Get yourself a good estate planning attorney, a will, a trust. You know, for some people, a will is better. For some people, a trust is better. For some people, you need both. Personal finance is personal. Get an attorney who's going to help you, because the last person you want to decide where your money is going to go is the government.

• 1:39:19Graham Stephan?

  Still a good investment.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  100%. Just like the stock market. The stock market is at an all time high. Is it still a good investment? Absolutely. We could see the housing market go down. You could see it go up more. But my game in real estate is not to see prices go up. That's icing on the cake. If it happens, great. My goal is cash flow. This week, Jack, you're gonna love it. You can do the math. You can see how much am I gonna pay for the property? What is my cost? What are my expenses? What is my income gonna look like? And you could predict this much better than you can predict the price of a Pokemon card or predict the price of Bitcoin or a call sheet prediction. Because now you can do the math to understand what is the rental market in the area? And you can put in a little factor for you being wrong.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  You can even add in a little kind of line item.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  And now you can see, well, I am anticipated to make, you know, let's just say a hundred dollars a month of cash flow. Now you can start to predict that much better.

• 1:40:17Graham Stephan?

  What's your yield do you go after when you buy a property? Is it 10%, 12%? Like, what's your cash on cash return? Or what's the net return you look for at a property?

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  I don't look for net return. I look for cash on cash return. Let me explain the difference and I'll explain how much. When people think net return, they think, okay, I bought this property for a hundred thousand dollars. I'm generating, let's just say a hundred dollars a month in profit. And then it goes in for value to $200,000. So net return is, you know, the hundred dollars a month plus the growth in the property value. I don't care about that growth in property value. Yeah, it's nice. But that's not how I'm basing my investments because that's gambling to me. That's speculation. There's a chance that it goes up in value. There's a chance it stays the same. There's a chance it goes down. I can't predict that increase in appreciation, but I can calculate how much cash flow I'm going to get.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  So when I think of my investment philosophy, I look for cash on cash return, which is if I'm gonna invest a hundred thousand dollars today, how much cash flow is gonna come out, come into my pocket? I look for 7%. So if I invest a hundred thousand dollars today, $7,000 a year of profit after expenses hits my bank account.

• 1:41:27Graham Stephan?

  Now, you could argue that, let's just say it's 7%. Couldn't you focus that exact same time on your business and make way more than what you would earn from a property? And I understand it's maybe not apples to apples here and that the property is a bit passive. But I look at my own portfolio and I think, oh, man, if I borrow it this and I buy this, I could make this. Or if I just spend a little more time doing better at the business, I could just make triple that.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  You're 100% right. My business is gonna grow a lot faster than 7% a year. But diversification of assets. So you just build a system.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  The business makes some money. Some of that money is gonna go back in for growth, right back into the business. Some of that money is gonna go for savings. Some of that money is gonna be invested. And we talked about 75, 15, 10. So, you know, the business is gonna have its own system. The money is gonna come in from my investments. I'm gonna invest some in real estate. I'm gonna invest some in stocks. I'm gonna invest some in some other places. So you just build systems for how you're going to use your money.

• 1:42:31Graham Stephan?

  How do you make sure you're not distracted when you buy a property from taking your eye off the business?

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  You don't wanna chase the shiny object, but for me, real estate is passive. I have a great management team. It took me more than a decade to build it. And when I'm in the business, I'm spending my time in the business. I mean, you're, you have to figure out that time for you. I spend a lot of time in my business and a lot less time on my real estate.

• 1:42:56Graham Stephan?

  What are you buying in real estate? Are you buying apartment buildings, houses?

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, residential. You get that comment on YouTube, what should I start with? Real estate, stocks, crypto? Look for the opportunity and be an opportunist. If you see an opportunity where the stock market were to fall by 50% tomorrow, I'm not gonna say, oh, I must invest my money in real estate. I can't do that in the stock market. There's the opportunity. If I see an opportunity to invest in something else, I will invest in that. And, you know, it's wherever your knowledge is. Like, I haven't invested in self-storage. If I found the time and I saw an opportunity, yeah, maybe I would because, you know, it's fun to learn new things. But I've never done that before. I've never done hotels. I've never done commercial, minus one mixed use building. But that's, you know, it's just wherever you see your knowledge and then where you have the time to learn.

• 1:43:44Graham Stephan?

  Do you have an investing belief that people would disagree with?

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  I'm sure I have many. Number one, I invest in stocks. Robert Kiyosaki hates that. Number two, I invest in real estate. A lot of people hate that. Number three, I have some crypto. Warren Buffett would hate that. Personal finance is personal, but invest in what you understand. Now, the speculative is what I don't fully understand. I haven't really made any money with my startups, but I want to. So I'm gonna keep doing it because I see the opportunity there. Just, you gotta do what you believe in. I have a friend. He is a great investor in cars. I don't believe in investing in cars. I think cars are stupid liability to blow your money on when you don't have it.

• 1:44:22Graham Stephan?

  You've obviously never owned a Ferrari Scuderia.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 1:44:26Graham Stephan?

  No, and it shows.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. But I believe it's a stupid investment. It's a liability that loses value. I'm not against buying a nice car if you can afford it. I'm not against buying a new car if you can afford it. It's like flying first class. Go ahead, do it. But I am not a huge fan of, you know, the idea of investing in cars. I got a friend. He's got a, like a car shop. He buys broken up cars, fixes them, sells them for a profit. I would never do that. I don't know how to do that. I don't want to do that, but he makes a great living doing it.

• 1:45:01Graham Stephan?

  What's the best investment you've ever made?

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Myself.

• 1:45:05Graham Stephan?

  What was the specific thing that you did to invest in yourself?

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I spent a lot of time learning. I didn't grow up learning about investing. I didn't grow up learning about entrepreneurship. So I started by reading books. Actually, I started by listening to audio CDs. Then I read books.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Then I bought classes, coaching, hiring smart people. This is what I call financial tuition. So we talked about formal education, you know, your formal tuition. Financial tuition is the cost you pay to learn the money side of things. But do you wanna know the best lessons? It wasn't my books or the courses or the coaching. It was the mistakes I made. I have made so many expensive mistakes. I've made more mistakes than more people have even started. I have made so many expensive mistakes. I've made so many mistakes in real estate. I've made so many mistakes in business. I've made so many mistakes on YouTube. I've made so many mistakes and some of them are extremely costly.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Financially costly, mentally costly. It costs me sleep sometimes, but you learn way more from your mistakes than you do your successes. And people will definitely judge you and hate on you for your mistakes. And Sarah Blakely, who was the founder of Spanx, I heard her say this one time and it really resonated with me that when she was a kid, her dad used to ask her, what did you screw up at today? Not what did you do good at? What did you win at? What did you make a mistake in? To encourage you to make mistakes. Because if you can make mistakes, you are going to be willing to become more successful. So you gotta be willing to make those mistakes. You gotta be willing to screw up and you gotta be willing to do it again and again and again. Because you don't know the right path.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  But you can get there by trying all the wrong paths. And you don't know how many wrong paths you're gonna have to take to get there. It might take 10, it might take 15, it might take 100, but you gotta keep screwing up in order to get there.

• 1:47:04Graham Stephan?

  What do you do outside of making money? Cause I've never really heard you talk about family, hobbies, vacations, what you do like spare time.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  I'm a huge family guy, so I have a pretty big family. And I like spending time with my family and friends. I like working out. Me too.

• 1:47:25Graham Stephan?

  Now, we heard that you work out wearing that, like you just take your jacket off and you'll like lift. Is that true?

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  I, we have a little gym in the office, right? We took one of our conference rooms and turned that into a gym because one complaint that I had was we work so much, I don't have time to work out. So we brought the gym into the office. And yeah, I mean, sometimes you're just walking between one meeting to the other and you just do a bench press set. I enjoy it. It's fun for me. It's the competition and I enjoy just, I enjoy lifting.

• 1:47:50Graham Stephan?

  But you wear that shirt if you're lifting?

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, let's see, I'll turn, I'm gonna take 10 minutes to change my clothes.

• 1:47:55Graham Stephan?

  No, not 10 minutes. It's maybe you have an undershirt on. You just take this off and you.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes if I, if I, if I have like enough time, like if I have a 30 minute break, then sure, I'll take 30 minutes to do that. But if I got like a minute and a half, I'm just gonna go drop a set and go into my next meeting. So I like working out. I like, I do enjoy traveling now. I didn't grow up traveling that much. Traveling for me was going to India to visit family. Now I've been able to travel a lot more and thankfully my business and work and YouTube has allowed me to travel a lot more. I've traveled to you guys' house too in Vegas. Vegas is so beautiful. I like eating. I'm a big food guy. Food is like, like.

• 1:48:35Graham Stephan?

  What's your favorite dish?

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  I love Indian food.

• 1:48:37Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Indian food is like my favorite, but I like Jamaican food. I like, I can't even think of one food that I don't like. I love Greek food. I like sushi. This is not, there's really nothing. I love, I grow tomatoes, man. I love gardening. I have a pretty big garden in my backyard. I got tomatoes, I got eggplants, I got okra, watermelon.

• 1:48:57Graham Stephan?

  I'd love to see a garden tour.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:59Graham Stephan?

  Start a second channel. Do a garden.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  I love gardening, dude. Like, you know, I love being in the sun. I hate running. I like sprinting though, but I do run just for the, the pushing of it. I like being out in the sun and running in the sun when it's hot outside and the sun's beating on you. To me, that just feels so good. So, yeah, I mean, I like, there's very few things that I don't like. Olives. I used to not like olives.

• 1:49:25Graham Stephan?

  Oh, I love olives.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  But now I'm becoming okay with olives.

• 1:49:28Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I've kind of.

• 1:49:29Graham Stephan?

  The green ones or the black ones?

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Both. They're okay now. I used to hate them both, but you know, it's a.

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

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• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Very few things I don't.

• 1:50:36Speaker 05

  Hate's a strong word.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. But there's very few things I don't like. If you say, you know what? Let's go grab some chocolate milk and walk around the city. I'm gonna say, let's do it. I'll show you the best chocolate milk in Detroit and we're gonna go have some fun.

• 1:50:48Speaker 05

  And in terms of not drinking, have you ever had a sip of alcohol?

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  I don't drink.

• 1:50:52Speaker 05

  Is that more of a religious or is it personal?

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Started off religious.

• 1:50:55Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:50:56Speaker 01

  100%. And then it became personal because somebody made a bet with me in college. He said, I bet you $5 that you're gonna start drinking before you graduate. A freshman year. I said, you're on. So he never paid me that $5. I never drank. And then it became a business thing because I was in the party business. And one of the guys I was working with said, you know, just a piece of advice, don't drink because what happens to party promoters who drink is they use a very vulgar word, but you essentially pee away all your profits. I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. So I just, I never got into it. And then I saw like it changes the way you think and how you act. And why would I want to ever be in that state of like not being me? Because you know, why do people drink?

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  They're not confident a lot of times. It's like, I need to drink. People would say, I need to drink so I can feel more open and loose. Oh, my God. What? I mean, I, I feel open and loose, right? All day and long, right? See, I don't need to drink to do that. I can have fun. Like, we have nerf guns. Everybody's got a nerf gun in the office. I don't like having boring stuff. I'm a, you know, I'm pretty serious on YouTube and stuff. But you know, I'm a pretty goofy guy in that sense. Like, you're not gonna hurt my feelings if you make a joke about me.

• 1:52:08Speaker 05

  On the topic of a religion, you said you're a Sikh?

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  Yes, pronounced Sikh.

• 1:52:12Speaker 05

  Sikh.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  S I K H.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  S I K H. So I'm curious with the head.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  Turban, yeah.

• 1:52:18Speaker 05

  So when are you supposed to wear it? And when are you allowed to take it off?

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  You're supposed to wear it all the time, especially when you go out. So turban is, you know, what many people call it. In our religion, there's a lot of ways you can call it. A bhagri, short for bug or the star. It's a head covering. They come in many different shapes and sizes. You got smaller ones. You've seen, you'll see kids wearing smaller ones. When I'm home, I'll have a smaller one on. From traveling, sometimes I wear a smaller one. There's, there's a lot of variation, shapes, sizes. A lot of common questions is, number one, does the color matter? No, you can wear whatever color you want. A question I would get asked as a kid a lot was, is that your brain inside of there? No, it's your hair because we're not supposed to cut our hair. And so it's there to cover your hair. And it's the reason why we wear it is actually, it's like a identification.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  So the Sikh religion was born out of essentially conflict. And there was a lot of conflict that used to happen between different religions, different castes. And the idea was Sikhs are supposed to be protectors for people that cannot protect and defend themselves. So how can you identify a Sikh? One easy way is through the turban or another one is right here. This is called a kara. It's a bracelet. It's a way to identify a Sikh. So if you needed help, you can reach out to a Sikh and they're supposed to help you. By nature, we're supposed to be defenders.

• 1:53:43Speaker 05

  Are you born into that? Or is it something that you earn with age? Like, is it something where it's like your parents were Sikh and that makes you Sikh?

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  I can't speak for other people, but I was born into the religion. And my grandparents were very religious and they, they taught me a lot about it. They, I lived with my grandparents growing up, so they lived in our house. And so they taught me about it. Then as I got older, I kind of, for a little period of time, I drifted away. And then I started learning myself more about it. And I said, you know, this is something that I really like and respect because it's as much of like, you know, defending as it is about a philosophy, a way of life.

• 1:54:22Speaker 05

  What's the main philosophical point that speaks to you? That attracted you back to being a Sikh?

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  There's three core elements. Nam japo, vand shako, kirt karo. Nam japo means remember God. Vand shako means serve others before you serve yourself. Kirt karo means earn an honest living. And those, that's the core pillars, philosophy of the Sikh religion. Service is a big element of it to be able to want to make the world a better place. I'll give you an example. So I talked about, I'll make a business example. It breathes finance. We want to help people start investing, become investors, get better investments. Obviously, we can't guarantee anything, but we are on a mission to help 1.3 billion people be better with money. Why 1.3?

• 1:55:10Speaker 01

  In the American culture, 13 is often considered bad luck. Unlucky 13. In our culture, 13 is actually good luck. Because 13, the way you say it in our language, Punjabi, is tera. Tera is 13, but also means yours. So there's a story where one of our founders, our first founder, was counting vegetables to give and he, he got lost in the number 13. He kept saying, tera, tera, tera. The idea being, this is, what I'm doing is service to you and service to God. And I'm, my whole presence is to serve. So the number 13 is a good luck measure. So we are on a mission to serve 1.3 billion people.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  When we publish our investment reports, we publish them on the 13th of the month. And we don't advertise this. This is just something that I did as the, you know, founder of the company that I wanted to help kind of live with that service. Now, I get I'm not perfect. I'm not a saint. I'm not, you know, advocating that I'm anything like that. But for me, service, doing things to help others is an important part of what we do. It's an important part of what I do. Why am I in the city of Detroit? Because I want to help build this city. There's a lot that we can serve here in the city and in the world. So that's why we do what we do.

• 1:56:31Speaker 05

  I have to ask, do you have like a really strong hairline? Cause I've never seen like.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Speaker 05

  Your hair.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  I'm very fortunate that I have a good hairline. A lot of people that I know, they have a receding hairline. But no, actually, I'm very fortunate, very blessed. I got good genes for a good hairline.

• 1:56:49Speaker 05

  But when are you allowed to like have your?

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  You know, when I'm home, I'm going to sleep, I'll take off my turban. I'll put on a small one. You know, it's, it's, there's no like, oh, when you're inside the doors, you must take it off. We're not a like superstitious religion. It's, it's more of like, you, you wear it as an identity.

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  You said you're not allowed to get your hair cut, but wouldn't, like, how, how is, how does that work out? Because wouldn't it just grow forever?

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But your hair stops growing after a certain time.

• 1:57:15Speaker 05

  Oh, it does?

• 1:57:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, like my hair has been around my hips, at my hips for as long as I can remember. It hasn't really grown past that.

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  Can you wear a helmet? Like if you were to ride a bicycle or a motorcycle?

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, there, there's different opinions on this, but if you want to go.

• 1:57:31Speaker 05

  That's a good question. I, I am curious.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never wear a helmet when I ride a bicycle.

• 1:57:35Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Some people will, but if I tell you kind of like the core philosophy, core philosophy is your turban is your helmet. That's what people will fight for. And so people will ride a motorcycle without a helmet on. My family in India, they drive motorcycles without a helmet on. So, you know, it's, it's a risk, absolutely. But, you know, people understand also the, the turban carries a lot of value, a lot of significance, a lot of cultural significance, religious significance. A lot of, a lot of weight is put into the turban itself. And so, you know, covering it was something that would be considered disrespectful in that sense.

• 1:58:18Speaker 05

  Interesting. I like the idea of like identifying the people that like serve. That's pretty cool.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:23Speaker 05

  I would love to see a video from you on like, on religion. I find it really interesting.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  I feel like we just did one right now.

• 1:58:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I know, but you talking about like what specifically drew you to this? Just to separate from the Ice Coffee Hour. I, I personally think would be very interesting.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  All right, we'll make it happen.

• 1:58:40Speaker 05

  Cool. Any questions for us? Anything we could answer for you?

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  How do you guys feel the economy is doing?

• 1:58:47Speaker 05

  For Jack, he's selling call options. So he's, you know.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  So it doesn't matter if it's up or down.

• 1:58:52Speaker 05

  It really doesn't matter.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Speaker 05

  Personally, I think things are quite bubbly, but I know myself well enough that I'm not gonna try to time the market.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Why do you do call options? You know, you're probably gonna lose.

• 1:59:04Speaker 05

  Well, it depends. I sell covered calls on stocks. So like if there's a company that I like, that has enough volatility where I can receive like a somewhat meaningful percentage of the cost per share back every week, I'll continue to do that. And so to me, I like the guaranteed income. I like the hedging on a company that I, that I do enjoy. I don't see it as necessarily risky.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  Have you lost money with it?

• 1:59:33Speaker 05

  I have, yeah.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Have you made more than you lost?

• 1:59:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:59:37Speaker 05

  I've made more than I have lost for sure on call options. But he would have made more money just buying the underlying stock. Yeah, I would have made more money buying the underlying stock, but those are two completely different strategies. You would have made more money not buying your 4GT, but by buying. No, I actually made now more money. No, I know, but, but, but by buying, let's just say like 2X levered Google positions. See, it's like, it's completely different investment.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  A lot of people lose money with options, which is why I don't mess with options. And what I've heard is that the people that make the most money with options are the people selling the courses on how to do options.

• 2:00:13Speaker 05

  I don't sell education on options, but options is, it's a zero sum game. And so like the only argument that I would accept is that the only people making money are the people benefiting off the spread. But, but the way I see it is like, you have a person that's trying to time the market and you have the other person that's, that's selling the other person that ability.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  You have an interesting story. And I think you should share that one more time here because you came up on this podcast, built one of the biggest podcasts in the world through a very unique way. And I think a lot of people that are probably watching this are thinking, how can I build wealth?

• 2:00:52Graham Stephan?

  How did you build wealth? And how do you think the average person can start building wealth now?

• 2:00:56Speaker 05

  Well, I would say I built wealth because I always lived beneath my means. So like, obviously, it helped that I started earning a decent living at a relatively young age. Like, by the time I was 21, I was making, living like, a pretty comfortable salary. That was the first year, I think, I remember I broke like $100,000 was my income. And so I always saved as much as I could. And so I would say that that's like how I technically built wealth. But the way that I think most people should approach it if they don't want a classic W2 job is find a way to provide undeniable value. And so when I first started working with Graham, I gave him an offer that was so good that he would have been dumb to refuse.

• 2:01:39Graham Stephan?

  What was the offer?

• 2:01:39Speaker 05

  It was basically, I mean, granted, this is from like an online internet strange person because I emailed him this, right? But it was persistent. It was seven emails over the course of a couple of months. But I was basically just like, I will do anything that you need me to do. Whenever you need me to do it, charge zero money. I'm just there to try to help the cause. Like, I can drive to you, I can do anything.

• 2:01:59Graham Stephan?

  And he did?

• 2:02:00Speaker 05

  And so he gave me a task that he couldn't even pay people to do. And then I did that. And then I did it like this. And I did it like perfectly, like, that was all that I did, put everything else aside, and then slowly started like taking on more and more responsibility, until it got to the point where like my value was undeniable. And then it was sort of like a team, a partnership. Like, we were in this together. And then I was able to, like, come up with the idea of the Iced Coffee Hour podcast and, and create our business off of his pre-existing business. That was kind of its own thing. And then I just, you know, we have a percent split on that, so.

• 2:02:33Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. And that is the easiest way, I think, to build wealth. Because I could go to you, let's just say, let's say I'm a nobody and I could say, "I love Minority Mindset, and I have this way that we could make you an extra $500,000 a year. No extra work on your one. I'm just gonna take your content and repurpose it in this way, and I'm gonna post it on these, but I'm gonna do this X, Y, Z. And all I want for that is, you know, a small percentage, and I'll do all the work for you." And maybe you say, "Hey, let's just test it." And it works. Okay, perfect. Well, now you have a little percentage of that income stream.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Graham Stephan?

  There are so many ways that people could take advantage of just working with other people who are doing something that you want to get into and just put your own spin on things.

• 2:03:15Speaker 05

  If you're already making a lot of money, then it's more than likely that you're in an ecosystem where there's opportunity everywhere. Opportunity is like gravity. Like, it just, it all attracts like the same mass. Like, the people that are, that are driving it are the people making a lot of money. Like, it's, it's a whole ecosystem. If you can put yourself in that ecosystem, you can latch on to an opportunity that that person would not have done otherwise, even if they knew that it was a thing, just because their time is, let's say, worth $1,000 an hour, while yours is, at the current state, worth $10 an hour. And this opportunity is $500 an hour. So this person's, whose time is worth $1,000 an hour, it would not be worth it for them to take a $500 an hour opportunity, but it's definitely worth it for you.

• 2:03:55Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I also think working for free in the beginning, just offering a free service is the best way in. Our guy, can I shout out Anton?

• 2:04:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:03Graham Stephan?

  Anton's fantastic. So Anton came to me and says, "Graham, you're not doing custom shorts. I'll give you custom shorts. Let's just do 10 of them and say, it's on me. There's no risk to you. I'll do all the scripting. You just review it, you film it, I'll do all the editing, you could change whatever you want. There's no risk." And I did it. Anton was fantastic. So what do I do? Now I'm working with Anton full-time, and I'm recommending Anton to everyone who wants to do shorts, because he's just genuinely that good. Like, he helped me out, now I want to help him out. And so now he's working with like a few of the other creators. And then, you know, he's doing it for someone else. And now they go and like, "Oh, Anton's awesome. I'm gonna refer him out." And now Anton's business is booming. I'm not saying that was because of me, because he was doing well to begin with.

• 2:04:47Graham Stephan?

  But like, it certainly, it gets your foot in the door to all these other things. And you never know where it's gonna lead. And what's the worst case? It didn't work out with Anton. He spent, oh, a few days of his time working, it didn't work out. Oh, well. It's like, that's the worst case.

• 2:05:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. I love it. That's it. I would say that if you guys are looking to try to increase your income, make more money, then I would say the most important thing is to get within an ecosystem of people who are making a lot of money and provide undeniable value. And in my case, I sort of didn't have any regard whatsoever for my time for anything. I was just like, "Yeah, let me provide you value." So I was lucky, because I didn't have rent or anything. I was, I was eight, what, nine, 20, 19-ish, 20 at the time? I was young. So I was fortunate in that capacity. But if you guys do the same, I, I think that that, if I were to say anything, is probably the, the highest likelihood of, of making good money.

• 2:05:39Graham Stephan?

  But you know what? We were even thinking about doing something like this. There have been a few companies out there where we look at what they're doing, and we're like, "Oh, my gosh, you could easily make..." And I, it sounds like for example, you could easily make an extra $100 million a year in revenue, easily, if you did X, Y, Z. And we know we could implement that within the company so quickly if they just did this. And we know it. But they're not doing it, and they don't realize that they should be doing it, but we see it, because we're in that space. There are so many things that we just want to like, do. Obviously, our time is a bit limited. But you know what? Consulting at IcedCoffeeHour.com.

• 2:06:18Speaker 05

  There we go. I like it.

• 2:06:19Graham Stephan?

  For certain companies, I think it makes sense, like, oh, it gets me going. Jack and I were going back and forth with all these ideas. We could do this, this, this.

• 2:06:25Speaker 05

  But the important part is the ecosystem. It's like, if you're in proximity to people that are doing well, then, like gravity, they're gonna attract opportunity.

• 2:06:33Graham Stephan?

  I love it.

• 2:06:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Graham Stephan?

  Cool. Cool. Thank you so much. We'll link to all of your information down below in the description. For anyone who's not already subscribed to you, all your information is gonna be down below. Or if you accept the collab request, it'll show up against the Iced Coffee Hour. And then we could do the same for our episode, too.

• 2:06:50Speaker 05

  I love that. Can I also give you guys the ebook? To put in the description?

• 2:06:53Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:06:54Speaker 05

  Because you just wrote a new book on investing. I call it ABB, Always Be Buying: How to Find Opportunity in Any Market. We spent a lot of time on that ebook. We were giving it away for free. So I'll give you guys a link that you can put in that description, too.

• 2:07:05Graham Stephan?

  Thank you.

• 2:07:05Speaker 05

  Awesome. Link down below.

• 2:07:07Graham Stephan?

  Thank you so much. Thank you to all of our channel members as well, who get the content early, uncensored. Hope you enjoy this. And our next episode is already live, by the way, for channel members. So really hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much, and until next time.

• 2:07:21Speaker 05

  Until next time.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  Hunter Biden? Hunter Biden?

• 2:07:23Speaker 00

  Hunter Biden is now out with a new laptop crypto coin, and it crashed and burned, losing almost all of its value.

• 2:07:31Graham Stephan?

  What was going through your mind when you saw it go from 50 to 30?

• 2:07:37Speaker 00

  So the FBI has had physical possession of Hunter Biden's laptop for more than three years. Now, on that laptop is indisputable evidence of crime.

• 2:07:45Graham Stephan?

  Regardless of whether you get indicted or convicted, it can kill you.

• 2:07:49Speaker 05

  How much is that debt for fighting those legal battles?

• 2:07:52Graham Stephan?

  Like, about $15 million. The real power in Washington DC is money. The federal government's power is beyond anything that you can remotely imagine. How would you rate your finances, 1 out of 10? Right now? Yeah. A zero.

• 2:08:08Speaker 04

  He spent more than $200,000 a month on things like luxury hotel rooms, cash withdrawals, dental work, and payments on a Porsche. By the way, this is, we can edit this part out, it's off the record. Are aliens real, or are they? We should probably stop the cameras.

• 2:08:23Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:08:39Speaker 07

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