146 The Power of Money on Your Mind, Body, and Soul on with Kabir Seghal

"The idea of making money is sometimes more powerful than the money itself." - Kabir Sehgal If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/146. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 146 with Kabir Segal.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Now this interview is with a very special guest. His name is Kabir Segal and he's got an interesting life. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He is a banker. He is a music producer, musician, a jazz musician, and has achieved extraordinary results in his life. This book is about money, again, Coined, The Rich Life of Money and How It Has Shaped Us. We talk a lot about money, what it actually means, the value of money, the history of money, and what it's used for today, and really where it's heading in the future, where money is heading in the future. So I want to let him share a little bit more about his story right now. So let's go ahead and dive in and let me introduce you to the one and only Kabir Segal.

• 1:14Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. I've got a new guest on today. His name is Mr. Kabir Segal. How's it going Kabir?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  It's going great. Great to be with you.

• 1:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we've been meaning to connect for a while. We're finally on the line here talking about your new book, which is called Coined, The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us. But you don't know, you know a lot about money because you work in that industry, but you actually have a lot of different things you're working on. Can you talk about all the different diverse things that you've been doing? You just won a Grammy. You've written children's books. Can you talk a little bit about everything you do first?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, it's a, I guess it's a wide portfolio, but my sort of main, main role is, is writing books. I'm an author, this is my fourth book, and I've spent a lot of time researching the role of money in our lives. Uh, I guess I'm a record producer as well, and you're right, just last week I was in Los Angeles and we were, I produced an album called The Offense of the Drum by Arturo O'Farrell and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra. So Latin jazz album, and it won a Grammy Award. And so I guess I'm producing more, I've just won a pie eating contest and they say that, and the reward is more pie, so I'm, I'm being asked to do more albums, so let's see if that happens. And then, uh, right, I've written a few books, my fourth book, I wrote a book on jazz music,

• 2:38Speaker 01

  a book on the civil rights movement with my godfather, Andrew Young, and a children's book. And sort of my day-to-day work, I'm, I'm a banker on Wall Street.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Wow, and so why, what inspired you to write about money and do this book now?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  You know, I started working on Wall Street just a few months before the 2008 financial crisis, and I was really alarmed with the devastation that it caused. I mean, I wanted to know, like, what's happening in the brain when we think about money, when we deal with money, when we spend money? And I got, I started digging and I found some research, um, by economists, and I went into behavioral economics, and finally I got to neuroeconomists, people who study the brain, and I found that, you know, the money activates different regions of the brain from the reward and the fear centers, in the same way someone is, you know, about to receive a hit of cocaine. I was like, whoa, money's, money has a really profound impact on you, and you know,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  just thinking about money, when I say the word money to you, your skin is, uh, the conductancy is increasing, meaning that you're getting stimulation, and you know, actually touching money can numb your senses.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Wow, really?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so it's important to examine money in new ways, and that's why in this book I look at so many different aspects, from the biology, the neuroscience, um, so that we can have a more awareness of how money really shapes our lives without us, without it even really, we fully realizing how, how it does so.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Interesting. So why did you even wanna, I mean, how did you start learning about this in the first place? Why were you so curious about how money affects our skin and the way I react to things?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  It was really, it was really just a quest. I started reading books about the financial crises. And I thought, you know, the world did not need another book on the, on the financial crisis. There, there's many of them.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  But maybe the world needs, or maybe people would like to know more about how money has such a profound impact on us. And so there's a body of literature, you know, Thinking Fast and Slow, Danny Kahneman, who wrote this book on behavioral economics. He's sort of like the pioneer who won, he won the Nobel Prize many years ago for his work on behavioral economics, basically studying how, like, you know, he would identify sort of irrational behaviors for how we use money. So for instance, my dad plays the lottery every week. And I said, Dad, you know, why do you play the lottery? So, you know, I have, I might win it. I was like, well, you know, statistically, there's almost a zero chance you're gonna win it.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  But he's, he'll, he starts thinking about the people on the news that win it. He starts thinking about that one time. He managed like a few numbers and he got maybe three hundred dollars, four hundred dollars for it. And so Danny Kahneman calls this a cognitive bias. Okay. And so that is, uh, it's called the availability heuristic. So things that you can more, that are more readily available to your memory, we start to inflate the probability of them actually happening.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and this is all around us. So, you know, if I said to you, for example, let's go, if, uh, if you go into a library and you see someone with elbow patches and a tweed jacket on, is he more likely to be a concert pianist or a truck driver? You might say concert pianist based on how he looks, but there's only, I think, 10,000 concert pianists or violinists in America, whereas there's many, many more truck drivers. So the brain is not equipped to do like large statistical problems. And so when I started digging into it, there was a man named Brian Knutson, who works at Stanford University. He's like the leading, one of the leading neuroeconomists. These are, these are basically neuroscientists that look at economic decision making.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  And they, and they scan your brain while they're making financial decisions. So sure enough, um, he can, you know, when they give someone a, um, a shopping decision, they can scan your brain. And they can tell you before you're fully aware of it, they can predict what you're gonna choose.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and so that that makes sense. Obviously, like, all decisions are made in the brain, but they've even taken it further and they've they've found that there's actually specific genes. They've been able to correlate genes with if you possess one set of genes, you're more likely to have to take off to take risk your decisions and have lower FICO scores. And yeah, and conversely, if you have another set of genes, you're more risk averse and they'll have higher credit scores. So this is all to all to say that, you know, a lot of our financial decisions are being made at what's called a sub cortical level, like below consciousness. And I found it found this so fascinating and that's why I sort of delve it delved into it

• 7:15Speaker 01

  with gusto in the research for this book.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  I'm wondering, this just came up for me. I'm wondering if you know or you heard about how much people, the average person spends on or loses on lottery tickets over the gains they make. Do you know over a lifetime, like, what the average would be if someone does it, like, three times a week and?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I don't I don't that I don't know, but I do know that sort of loss aversion, this another heuristic called loss aversion, is that we value losses sort of twice as much as gains, meaning that if I gave you a if I gave you a bet or like, let me flip a coin and I was like, all right, you would want, you know, if I say if you win, you get $22. If you lose, you lose $21, right? So maybe maybe you should take that bet, but most people don't take that bet because, like, it's it's the the payment isn't that much. But if I say, listen, you're gonna you may lose a lot more money. People start to get sensitive. People start to value losses very much more than than gains. And that makes sense evolutionary

• 8:18Speaker 01

  because, like, we're supposed to be, like, avoiding losses because if you lose something, you could eventually lose your life. And so we're always mitigating risks. But to your question about how much money we've how much money people will expend on on gambling, it's it's probably a lot because, you know, gambling is very addict addictive, really.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Very.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  So so they take this brain scan of someone. There's the Harvard neuroscientist who scans someone's brains, scan a participant's brains. And then uh and he showed them money, right? And so then he compared it to people who are cocaine addicts. And he found that it was virtually indistinguishable. That money, money gets so much excitement um and that the the idea of making money is sometimes more powerful than the money itself, right? So you would actually show the money and that the prospect of gaining will be excited, would be very exciting. Then they would get the money and then the activation would not be as much.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, go ahead, sorry.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Well, they've also, they've also done studies, Brian Kudus, and again at Stanford University, did this very fascinating study where he, he took like men, heterosexual males, and showed them pictures of dead bodies, naked women and and money. And it was money that got the most activation in the nucleus accumbens, the reward center of the brain. And so, which is really fascinating, and so, but the question is why? Why is that? And I guess, I mean, you can only, you you you try to sort of answer with evolutionary logic, which is, well, maybe it's because uh you know, mu- we see money as really as a tool. We see money as a way that we we need money in order to get anything else. We need money to be able to provide for a partner and reproduce. So money is very deeply evolutionary.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And in fact, when they, when they, another brain scan, another brain study I've looked at is they show pictures of people destroying money. And then they scan people's brains. So what part of the brain activates? It's the part of the brain that is involved in tool making. So when people say money is a tool, that's not just like some kind of empty metaphor. There's actually a neurological basis for what's going on in your brain while we think and destroy and and and spend money.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Wow. I mean, what about before money was even around in the world? What were we feeling and thinking then? Did it, how did it, you know, there wasn't a, we didn't have this effect or did we? Or what what was happening?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, Louis, the the first currency in the world, people often say, oh, money was invented. Um, you know, there was bartering before there was money. And uh, you know, Adam Smith says this, Aristotle, uh, even even, that's his idea of how money was created. But uh, most anthropologists, a lot of anthropologists have gone back and looked at this question. They say, oh, wait a second. There's never been a society in the history of the world that's ever existed, which is a big claim, that relies exclusively on barter. And so when you go back and look at the historical record. Um, you look at, I guess, ancient Mesopotamia. Um, what what were they using as currency? Well, they were using, there was, there was a very strong, strongly in circulation.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  There was debt, like loan instruments, like people were loaning uh items to each other. It was mo- mostly in silver and barley. And uh it's not until seven hundred B.C. So ancient Mesopotamia, four thousand B.C. And then in seven hundred B.C. You get the invention of of of coins in a Western Lydia. Uh, and so you have this, you have this idea that really debt is the first type of currency. And this gets back, this gets back to like, uh, you know. Uh, when when you start thinking of debt as currency, it makes sense because if you think about sort of the the the early humans and they were hunting, now if you got, if you were out with a tribe, sorry, if you're out with a hunt and you get some, a big uh piece of game, some deer, right?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  You want to share that with everyone because one day, like you may not catch something and you want to be invited back to the tribe to eat. So like reciprocity is is really big. And so you got to think about the most important currency in the world isn't what's sitting in your wallet, isn't what's sitting in your back pocket. It's sort of the reciprocity. We talk about that. It's like, oh, I owe you something. Like, I I owe you this, I invested in my friendship. And so, you know, a gift, I mean, a gift is really, a gift is more than a gift. It's not just something you wrap with paper and ribbons. You're also tying the recipient to an obligation. And so in all cultures. That is what you mean. Yeah, uh, I mean, you're, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, like in all cultures, you know, to give a gift is to create a social debt.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And so I trace in the book, I trace the movement of gifts throughout different societies. And uh, you know, like I did this crude experiment. I was, I was out with friends and you can try the same one, you'll, you'll, you'll see, you'll see how how shocking um it can be. You, next time you go out for drinks with your friends in a bar, like everyone covers a round of drinks and then you you say, I'm not going to cover my my round of beers. And all the, all of a sudden, you'll go from being like the stand-up guy to like, to like the guy. Toolbag. Yeah, exactly. He's, he was like freeloaded. And it's like, okay, well, what, what, what happened? And it's like, well, you didn't honor the the primary currency, which is like social debt. And so it's it's there's all kinds of interest like I part of this book I studied I had traveled to

• 13:29Speaker 01

  part of my job takes me around the world to twenty five countries as part of my research. And one of the most fascinating places I went to was in Japan. And it's incredibly difficult to give a gift to someone in Japan.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Really?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And yeah, and it's it's just bizarre like I I offer I had a you know they're they have these really nice grapes. I went to a department store. I got these really nice grapes. I was gonna give them to a friend. And it's like forty dollars for grapes because they're like custom blended everything. So I gave them to some friends and they all rejected it and um and the ones that eventually. Yeah, exactly. The ones that eventually accepted the grapes, they hid behind a wall so they they wouldn't be seen as receiving a gift. And because they don't wanna be seen as taking something they can't repay. The word arigato in Japanese, you know, thank you, it translates loosely to like this burden is too difficult.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  So yeah, in Japan, it matters like how you tie a knot on a wedding present. So if you if you not if the knot is too loose, you may be sending a signal that you don't think the marriage will will will last. And and so similarly, when you go to a department store in Japan, um you don't they don't let you wrap the present because if you do, if you do a poor job, it'll reflect poorly on the store's image. So yeah, there's a lot of sensitivity. And the reason I bring this all up is because there's a lot of sensitivity there around social debt and like what is the etiquette around it? And going to Japan made me sort of so conscious of the fact that really

• 15:02Speaker 01

  yeah, there's money, but then there's like uh this idea of reciprocity, which is like the fundamental currency that we all live by.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Wow, this is fascinating. So do do people in Japan just not want to have to repay anyone ever? Or they don't wanna deal with the law of reciprocity or what is that?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Well, they do. I mean, it there's there's obviously there's there's a lot of gift giving and and the gift giving seasons are very lucrative uh in terms of, you know, the department stores. But there's a lot more, I guess, um I I guess the word is sophistication about how people go about it. So what am I? Friends, he was working in the eighties in Japan and he um, his mother passed away, I think while he was there. And so when he came back to his, when he came back to his desk, there was all these like, I think, um, presents essentially. And he asked around, what is the appropriate thing to do? And so he came back and um, he realized that he had to give gifts back to the people in half the amount that they had given him a gift. It's called a half gift. So there's, there's a constant cycle of gift giving.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  But it's very easy to slight, if you're not like clued into it, it's very um, it's very slight, uh, you can slight people very easily. And um, but there's, there's always this idea of debt, like for instance, father in giri, meaning father in law. It's like you owe a debt to your father-in-law.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  And there's even something, I mean, it's called on, on, and people are always saying, remember your own, remember your burden, remember your burden. And sometimes the, the only way you can repay your own to your parents is by you having parents, uh, excuse me, you having kids. Sometimes the, the, the own to your country in, in the, in the forties, the only way you could repay your own to your country was in killing yourself in war. And so there's this constant cycle of like, uh, feeling a burden. And a burden's very, very uh, controlling and, and, and so that's when you get like weird, weird situations. So this, this is social debt, but when you start to overlay financial debt instruments on top of social debt, like.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  What does that do to people?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it, it messes people up. Like again, look at ancient Mesopotamia, um, it was illegal to sell, I mean, thankfully, it was illegal to sell your wife or your um, kids into slavery, except, except when you're trying to settling it. You're trying to settle a debt.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  No way. So people would sell their family to let go of a burden they fa- they had from debt?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, in order to, and so that, that raises the question, why is creditworthiness more important than the sanctity of your marriage? Or the sanctity of your, of your family? And so that may get back into this evolutionary idea that if you're not trustworthy, you can be thrown out of the tribe.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Wow, this is fascinating. Now, there's so much we could go into there. But I want to dive a little bit more into the three parts of your book because it's kind of broken up in three parts, right? The mind, body and soul.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Can you talk about a little bit about each part of that? And dive in how money affects the mind, body and soul? Or how, or the reverse of that?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so one money, listen, money is, it intrudes on every aspect of our lives. So I wanted to use a biographical matter for to sort of relate it to everyone. And so in the first section, mind, I, I wanted to look at the idea of money. Now, you can say, what is money? Money, the traditional definition of money is the instrument of exchange. Okay, so it's a tool. But you can't really, if I looked at it just a baseball bat, I wouldn't realize, I wouldn't understand what the purpose of the baseball bat is. But the purpose of baseball is to sort of win the game and go around the bases. So I looked at the idea of exchange. Where does exchange come from? And so I traced this. I, I found myself in the middle of the, you know, Pacific, in the Galapagos Islands. I begin the book in the Galapagos Islands. And why do I do that?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Because I want to get to the point, I want to figure out where does exchange come from in the first place? And it may seem like a kind of, you know, way out there. But I really believe that when you look in the natural world, you know, a bee colony, ant colony, you go underwater, which I did. And you see that there's exchange happening all around us. It just happens to be called energy, right? And energy is the currency of the natural world. And so I, I go, you know, and I, I trace this, I trace the idea of money way back to the cell. And I look at how the beginning of the cell was based on, you know, two, basically two cells coming together and creating eukaryotes. And so the idea of symbiosis is all around us.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And so I traced this into the beginnings of man and the brain. And when, what ends up happening is we start to become aware. That symbiosis is beneficial to us, that we can survive by relying on each other. So we create tools to do that. One of those tools is called money. And so that's where I start this book of the idea of energy and the awareness of of the minds. And that's when I move into, you know, the neuroscience of money. What's happening in your brain when I say money? To the social brain of money, you know, traveling, looking at how how this how people define money around around the world.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  And so then the second part of the book, I move from the idea of money to like money, the thing. Like, what is it when you touch it? And so money is. How to affect your body as well. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So so money is sort of three things. Money can be hard, it can be metal. So I traced the history of metal money. And then it can be paper. So when you mean, you look at the creation of paper money under Kubla Khan and the Mongols um in in the twelfth and thirteenth century. And is it is it metal, is it paper? It's digital now. And lastly, I end with the future, it's digital. And obviously, there's there's there's what will the future look like?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  It's not, I don't just end with Bitcoin, but you know, a hundred years from now. Like, what are the science fiction guys talking about? And that's important because, you know, the first time credit cards were ever mentioned was in eighteen eighty seven. It was a book. It was a science fiction book. So we look at the science fiction literature. Yes, it was it was it was a book about some guys. It was called Looking Backwards. And it was a book about some guy who goes to sleep in eighteen eighty seven, who wakes up in two thousand. And what does he see? He sees these cards that people used to pay for things. And so when you look at the science fiction literature, how do we? How do you look at money? How what what do they use in space? So I go into space currency and what we can use for money in in in space. And and so that's that.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  That presents a very intriguing question because when you trade among what if you're in space and using money. It brings up the question of time. How do you trade things when time is relative?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Huh, this is insane, crazy. That's an interesting way to look at it. Wait, so this book was in eighteen eighty seven, you said?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was called Looking Backwards.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, that's insane. So you think we'll be trading currency in space in the future? And you're you're trying to figure out what that'll look like?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, what will money look like? Maybe we we define some new planet where there's a special type of metal and that replaces gold. Who knows? I mean, what are they using in Star Wars? They use something called latissium, which is like another type of rare metal. So that's what I'm looking at across the book. And then lastly, I look at the soul. Like, what is the, what, you know, almost every god, the major religions, talks about money. So I found myself in India. That was a Mother Teresa's home for the dying and destitute. This is where they bring in the people with lepers who come really, really to die. It's really sad and sort of tragic place.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  But at least they're getting some care. And I saw this kid, teenager. And I was like, you know, why, why are you here? And he, you know, he's from, he's from France, obviously a volunteer. And he'd given up his, like, his college career and he was not applying to colleges. He said, I'm here because I want to do what the gospel teaches. And I was like, wow, like when I was his age, I was trying to like take my assets. He is getting to a good university. Exactly, exactly. I had more difficulty with that one, but yeah, exactly, exactly. So, so that's the, so, well, and so then I went back and I looked at the gospels. And I said, you know, Jesus is always talking about money, even to the point where it's uncomfortable.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  When you look at the book of Matthew, eighty percent of the parables are about money. And so there's tends to be across all the faiths, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity. There tends to be a different type of logic. Like, there's a logic we all live by in the material world, which is more is better. We need, we need more to survive. Evolutionary, we need more, more, more. But across all these faiths, it seems to be that it's the inverse of this logic. Less is more, that, you know, when you start to lay, as Jesus says, lay up treasures in heaven, but not on earth, that's only then that you'll attain spiritual riches.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And so I look at this idea of why, you know, look at money, not only does it affect our minds and, uh, you know, our neural, uh, our neural wiring, it can also affect our souls. Because every god says, one of the tests for whether you get sort of permitted into the afterlife can be how you use money. Do you use it to uplift or do you use it as a tool, um, to oppress others? So money's really defining us. Money, money is really a test to see, uh, whether we're worthy to get to the next, to the next level.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  What is, I, I mean, this is fascinating stuff. What is with your work and research and all this? Also, you work as a banker and you're traveling around and working with lots of wealthy people constantly. What is, in your mind, the best way to look at, manage and facilitate money for your mind, body and soul?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Well, they say that, um, there's, there's a, some research on how much money is enough. And again, Danny, Danny Kahneman looks at this and say, you know, well, some people have, a lot of people look at, the, the people who are most obsessed with money are the people who have very little of it and people who have a ton of it. Um, and because you're, either you're always trying to think about how much more you can get to live or you're always worried about how to, how to manage your money. And so there's some evidence that shows that after you hit about seventy-five thousand dollars of income, um, and this is in America, that your general like well-being does not go up significantly. And that means, that means like you have enough to sort of get by and to, you know,

• 25:54Speaker 01

  seventy-five thousand dollars a year is well more than the median in, in America. And so that means that like your health is generally looked after, you would hope. And so after you get to that level, then it's sort of like you can start thinking about, hopefully about other things. And so thinking about this logic is.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  You you look my, I think the lesson here is look at what Hinduism says, and it's kind of an obscure way to answer this question, but there's a, there's a, this idea that Hinduism says you should go out and make as much money as you can. There's, it's your duty to make money. It's your duty to take care of your family. But there's also, but there, but what ends up happening, when you pursue the money, you start to get awakened to the fact that you need to eventually renounce it. And I think it's a great sort of pathway for us is that it's only in pursuing money that you realize that like it's not the end all and be all. You needed to sort of take care of yourself, but there will come a point in your life, whether sooner rather than later, um, that you'll, you'll need to sort of like start figuring out, well, okay, well, maybe this isn't,

• 26:57Speaker 01

  this, this, this creates like a, a yearning for me to do something more. And so that's, that's one principle I try to live by is like, you know, I'm trying to get more resources, but I know there's going to be a time where I need to, to, to do more with less.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Hmm. Wow. What's your definition of money?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Money, money. I define money as a symbol of value. And so that's a pretty broad definition. I mean, they can, we've already talked about the conventional definition of money, but money is really a symbol because it represents so many different things to us. Um, and so as I travel the world, I meet these, I mean, I try to meet people who are obsessed about money, but not in the way you may think. I try to meet the people who are collecting the money, the numismatists, the coin collectors. And, and the reason I do that is I was in Sri Lanka and I met the head of the Sri Lankan Coin Society. And I asked him to bring a few coins that represent Sri Lankan culture, society.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And so we, we sat there for a couple of hours looking at the symbols on the symbol, the artistic symbols on the money. And you can learn a lot about a country, a nation, just by looking at the symbols on the money. And, you know, just a, if you look at a coin, for instance, uh, I was looking at one coin. If it's made, it's very thick, that means that, that the coin was probably made in a period of like economic, uh, greatness. Uh, that's because that like, there was plenty of metal to use and they wanted to put in, they wanted to use their money. Uh, and, and they wanted to be proud about their money. But if it's very thin and very difficult to read, maybe it was a period of economic turbulence. Maybe there wasn't enough metal. Maybe they were using metal.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Uh for armaments to go to war. Maybe it's difficult to read, maybe there was a, it was a warlord leader who didn't really care about the education of his people. So money is really a symbol that reveals so much about the society in which it was made.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Wow, that's fascinating. What's the most powerful currency?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  The most powerful currency in the world?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I, I mean, financially, the dollar because uh and because in most uh central banks, the dollar is in- involved in most worldwide transactions. So I think, I mean, most of the commodities that the are like the like oil is denominated, energy is denominated in dollars. Uh most central banks hold dollars in their reserves. That's decreasing. So I think it's gone down to about six, from seventy to sixty percent in the last ten to fifteen years. And the rise of the euro, the rise of the Chinese renminbi is there. That's a very, that's sort of a financial answer to your question.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  That the dollar is the most powerful currency. But the most powerful currency in the world, I still think is social debt. It's like, you know, if you don't, if you don't return the favor, watch out, man, watch out.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  All right. What is your, what is, what's the biggest thing you learned about yourself and the decisions you make? And your ideals about money over this process of writing this book?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I, I think I learned, I think I learned that um money really is um so central to almost all of our problems. And so, I mean, Muhammad Yunus, who I'm a great admirer of his, he um he wrote the foreword to this book. And one of the reasons I was, I was so keen on him uh being a part of this project is because he's been able to look at how money helps the developing world. And, you know, my job looking at emerging markets is like, you can give charity to someone, you can, you know, we go, we travel throughout the world, you cut someone a check, great, but you're not really, it's not a really sustainable solution to their problems. And so he went out and loaned out money to um villagers in Bangladesh.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And they were able to pay their money back, pay the loans back. In time, they can create their own businesses. And so I started to see money throughout my research and throughout my, my travels. It's an incredible way to lift people up out of poverty, lift people up to a place that they need to be. Now, maybe that's not the most conventional wisdom um that you get working in an investment bank. But when I started, I was in New Orleans uh right before uh Hurricane Katrina. And I asked my godfather, I said, you know, I wanna stay here in New Orleans. And I wanna help the people of New Orleans rebuild, help the musicians come back. And he said, Kabir, if you wanna help people, go work in an investment bank.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Really?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I said, why? He said, learn how to make the money. And then give it away, but more importantly, help other people learn how to make money because, you know. Helping other people learn how to make money is incredibly sustainable. And it was, it was so central to what Dr. King was talking about many, many years ago.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Interesting, yeah, I mean, I, that's interesting you say that because my mission is to teach a hundred million people and to show them how to make a full-time living doing what they love. I believe when people can make that seventy thousand dollars a year. Uh, it doesn't have to be millions, but can make enough that's a full-time living doing something they love. They're gonna be fulfilled, they're gonna be happier, they're gonna be healthier. Um, they're gonna have better relationships with others and with themselves. That's interesting you say that, that uh.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's totally, that's totally right, I mean. And you, you're, you are uh Louis walking in, in the, in sharing the vision of, of Dr. King. Dr. King, he used to get into trouble, he used to say, I don't want to be a good Samaritan. And people said, what are you talking about? He's like, I wanna make sure. That whoever's been beat up, they were beat up in the first place. I wanna put a police officer in a traffic light on the Jericho Road. And so, well, you know, he was unfortunately assassinated, but his, his goal that he was pushing was. Um, helping poor people lift them out of poverty to make sure that they're, that they have enough money to fend for themselves. And that's essentially what you're doing. What we're doing is incredible work to sort of make sure people are. Are, are, are pursuing their passions, but doing it so in a profitable manner.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so your, your friend told you to, to go be an investment banker, make a lot of money, then teach other people to do that. And um, is that something you're doing? Are you teaching others to do that through this book or through other, other ways?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think so. I think this book is one element of that. I, I, I only partly listened to my godfather on that. I ended up starting an organization, uh, which helped, um, people, helped bring musicians back to New Orleans. And we created a booking service. It was, uh, basically you came to this website and you would book a jazz musician, really anywhere in one of the big cities. And then we would create a, create a gig. And then when we would take a tip and send those tips down to charities in New Orleans. So it was, it was a kind of a very, it was very inexpensive to run the website. But we were booking, you know, thousands of dollars worth of bookings every year. Uh, it was basically a, a stock brokerage for musicians.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  We've, we've since merged the charity with another one, but it was, it, it, it goes to show that like, you don't, you know, everyone's busy, everyone has, you know, things they're working on, but you can make a, a different theme in a small, in a small way to help other people find some sustainable way to live.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. Very cool. What's, what's next for you?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Well, this book tour is, uh, is coming up fast and furiously, so I'm focused, a focus on this book and, uh, hopefully, hopefully making it a success. And, uh, other than that, I'm sort of, I need to go on a vacation after, after spending so many years riding. Um, I'm looking forward to, uh, some relaxing after this.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hear you, man. You've been, you've been achieving a lot of great things lately, the book, the Grammy, everything, man. This is amazing. Um, what are you most grateful for recently, besides the Grammy?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Listen, I'm grateful for, um, it's, it sounds when we try to say it, but winning the genetic lottery. I mean, all of us really have, anyone who's sort of listening to this podcast. Um, it is not to be, to be, to feel so guilty for your fortune in life, but listen, I had two loving parents. I, I was, uh, born into a, a place and was, was educated, had, my parents focused on education. So oftentimes people say, you know, I'm responsible for my own success. And to, to a degree, that's, that's true, but I'm, uh, Warren Buffett even says, I won the genetic lottery. A lot of what you are doing in life were determined not by you, by your genes, by your disposition, by how your, things outside of your control. So.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I'm um, I try not to take myself too seriously. I try not to take my achievements too seriously because I know. I mean, my dad came from India to America when he was seventeen years old. And so what is my achievement in comparison to someone like that making a living on his own? So I try to compare myself. Not to the people who have more than me, to the people who have less than me. It makes me more peace to myself.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Hmm, I like that. What's the mindset that people should have? Maybe not should have, but what's a mindset, a powerful mindset? That is effective when thinking about money and making money. And investing and saving money and all those things and growing your money. What's a mindset that someone could have that? Will set them up to win in the best way possible for mind, body, soul?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  It it applies to money. It also applies just to life, which is, you know, I I um. I'm in the Navy Reserve and so when I go work out, there's this uh. Poster and it says greatness, you know, greatness is about giving up something good today. For something great tomorrow. And for me, that was, you know, going off Facebook for a few years and um sort of. Being just researching this idea of money and what it means to writing this book. Or for instance, winning a Grammy takes, it doesn't just happen. There's a lot of hard work that goes into the album. It's a two to three year project. So if you want to be great, if you want to make um a good amount of money.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  You have to realize that greatness is accumulated over the long term. It doesn't happen overnight. And so that means, and that you can translate that down to making sure that you're investing in the right. Emerging market equity. So there's there's growth in your portfolio, making sure that you're saving for success. And it it all comes back to that that cookie test, right? The kindergartners, the the kindergartners who. The kids who say, okay, if I wait twenty minutes, I'll take, you can get two cookies instead of one. If you're one of those people and you can defer your own gratification. Like most, you're you're gonna be all right.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Gotcha. What are you, um, can you talk a little bit about your money saving investing strategy? Your own personal one?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. My money, um, so I

• 37:33Speaker 02

  What do you do with it and where you put it? Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I keep most, I mean, I invest most of my, I have a 401k and I put most of my money in index funds. Most of the literature and the research shows that it's best to put money in index funds and not actively traded mutual funds because they eat away at, at sort of the, the returns you'll get through trading and fees. So index funds, I try to do emerging market index funds because emerging markets is sort of where the global growth is. So there's that. Um, I also try to, I mean, sort of in the, I guess the early part of my life, I would hope to think, but, and I try to put money into angel investments and, uh, but not crazy angel investments. People who are trying to make, who've already demonstrating profit and, and revenue.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So I try to, that's where my high growth is based and to have cash in a savings account and there's no, there's no return on that right now, but if the Fed decides to raise rates, then maybe I'll move more money back into savings.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Sure. Gotcha. So you keep pretty simple.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not complicated. And then I, and I'm, I'm really good on the cost side of things. I don't spend a lot of money on just like going out and eating. But I, I'm pretty Spartan with my lifestyle. I don't have a lot of things.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Spartan. I like that. Um, nice, man. Well, I want to acknowledge you before I got a couple of questions left, but I want to acknowledge you for the, the effort and the energy and the research and the commitment you've had over the years to getting to where you are now, not just with this book, but everything. I mean, you're a very well-rounded, well-balanced uh, and educated individual who's worked your ass off. I can see that you've worked really hard. You don't just become a elite level jazz musician, a producer, winning Grammys, a New York Times bestseller, writing different genres of books.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  And so I acknowledge you for your commitment and your, your hustle and your passion for creating information to make it easier for people to understand in a way that we can understand it. So thank you for that. I acknowledge you, Camille, for, for all that work, man. It's

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It's incredible.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Hey, man, I appreciate it.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Final, final question, and you kind of touched on it already, but that's what I ask everyone at the end. It's what's your definition of greatness?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  The greatness is what I said is about doing things for the long, long run. And I think that greatness is doing the is is being extraordinary at the ordinary things. And it's, it's like practicing every day, you know, it's, it's writing every day. It's, it's like saying no to things that are going to distract you. And so, I mean, we all define greatness in different ways, but for me, it's really about doing the small things every day that you can look back and say, okay, um, how did you achieve this, this, this? Well, I was working every day at it and you just see, you just, you may just see a trophy, but it's not just a trophy. It's a way of life.

• 40:33Lewis Howes?

  Coin, The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us. I'll have it all linked up on the show notes here. I'll tell you where to go in just a second, but Kabir, thanks so much for coming on, my man.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 40:49Lewis Howes?

  Thank you guys again so much for joining me today. And this episode is lewishouse.com/146. So you get all the show notes back about this interview, the links that we talked about, the things that we mentioned. You get an information on how you can pick up Kabir's book over there as well. Again, lewishouse.com/146. You're going to get all the information over there. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and let your friend know what it's all about. And if this is your first time coming on the podcast, thank you so much for being here. Please subscribe to the podcast. Please check out some of the previous episodes. We've had some incredible guests on here. Jack Canfield recently, we've had Scooter Braun, one of the biggest names in the music business.

• 41:34Lewis Howes?

  Tony Robbins, Marie Forley, a lot of incredible guests who've come on recently. And we've got some incredible guests coming up. So make sure to subscribe, please share it with your friend and keep coming back because I love having you here. And I appreciate you so much. So very grateful for Kabir sharing his wisdom today. Make sure to check out his book as well called Coin. And I'm excited. Lots of great things happening for me to introduce to you shortly. So stay tuned for the future episodes to hear what's going on. And you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.