The Top 7 Money Making Hacks For 2025 That Are PROVEN To Work! Do Not Buy A House! Do This Instead!

2024 has been a year of shocks and surprises, before starting the new year, here is the expert knowledge you need to not just survive but financially thrive in 2025 Here are some of the essential pieces of financial knowledge for 2025: The power of compound interest How to break the cycle of living paycheck to paycheck Whether you should invest in cryptocurrency How to perfect your investment strategy The top 10 money rules Why most people don’t reach financial freedom The confidence rule for finance 00:00 Intro 01:34 Investing 101 04:52 Should I Use Investing Apps? 06:33 How to Invest With $100 09:20 Common Mistakes With Investment Accounts 11:07 What's the Proof This Is Actually a Good Way to Build Wealth? 12:27 Compound Interest: Watch Your Money Grow 18:17 The Biggest Debt We Pay 20:25 Find Where Your Skills Are Most Valued 22:43 The Most Valuable Bit of Information You Wish You'd Known Sooner 25:53 Finding Your Unfair Bet That Will Make You Lots of Money 27:57 Applying Your Skills to Get the Most Money 30:27 Example of Ways to Apply Your Skills 34:03 The Importance of Doing Deals 35:21 Where Do We Go to Learn How to Make Deals? 36:10 Playing the Tax Game 37:28 What Are the Tax Games the Rich Are Playing? 40:00 How to Bring Your Tax Down From 40% to 8% 41:20 Leveraging Investments and Tax 42:48 The Importance of Understanding Tax 45:03 Morgan Housel's Capital Allocation Strategy 46:32 How to Get Into the Top 5% of Investors Easily 47:51 Dollar Cost Averaging 48:29 What's an Index Fund? 49:40 How to Build Wealth Like Warren Buffett 50:59 The Importance of Patience 52:55 Play Games Not Many People Can Play 54:32 Don't Do This to Make Money 56:02 The Blockchain 57:37 Investing in the Blockchain 01:00:06 Everyone Is Equal When It Comes to the Blockchain 01:01:46 Crypto Use Cases 01:03:05 If I Own Crypto, How Do the Other Use Cases Benefit Me? 01:04:18 How Do I Invest in Crypto? 01:07:10 The Bank or Government Doesn't Control Any of Your Crypto 01:07:59 How to Get Out of the Living Paycheck-to-Paycheck Cycle 01:09:38 If You See This, You're in the Financial Danger Zone 01:10:53 Pick Your Hard 01:13:41 Seasons of Life 01:16:19 Wanting to Look Rich Will Make You Go Broke 01:17:53 Stop Making Emotional Decisions and Start Making Logical Ones Ramit Sethi: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/aSZvN6VtsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/EedVkJXtsPb Alex Hormozi: Instagram: http://bit.ly/40WnLMu Website: http://bit.ly/3UasFTS Codie Sanchez: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/u3G7Nk0tsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/VsOtmy2tsPb Morgan Housel: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/Xapn1IStsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/e0uZ1qUtsPb Scott Galloway: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/1ezLPGEtsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/lRQaCHGtsPb Raoul Pal: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/rwzfyoOtsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/gqdDHBQtsPb Jaspreet Singh: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/oGfm8vJtsPb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/FUu6rdLtsPb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Fifty-three percent of you are planning to make a new year's resolution about money, finance and investing this year because you want financial freedom and financial security. So we went through every conversation we've had about money, personal finance and investing, and we found the most replayed and most shared moments from those conversations for you. Everything from life-changing advice on savings, spending, investing, tax, crypto, buying a house and having a money mindset.

• 0:27Alex Hormozi?

  The most expensive thing that all of us are paying for is the information that we don't know.

• 0:31Codie Sanchez?

  So how do you make the most money humanly possible? It's two things.

• 0:34Ramit Sethi?

  Let me tell you a few key, basic things about investing in money.

• 0:39Morgan Housel?

  It's going to lead to amount of success that will literally put you in the top 5% of investors.

• 0:43Steven Bartlett?

  And never have to worry about money again. If you listen to this conversation, we believe your money goals will come true in 2025. So take notes.

• 0:54Steven Bartlett?

  I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. So what is the S and P 500 for anybody that doesn't know?

• 1:38Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  And what are the returns that I'm likely to get from investing in the S and P 500? I really want to simplify this for people that are at the very start of their investing journey. You know, because, I mean, this is what you spend so much of your time doing that I just think about my, my team here. Say at the Diary of a CEO, there's about 30 people. And we started talking about money one day and it was mind blowing how nobody in my team's lives had ever had the conversation with them about investing. We all think of investing as something that rich people after the age of 40 do.

• 2:08Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Steven Bartlett?

  Once you have a million dollars. If you don't have a million dollars, then the only other way to invest, we're taught, is to buy a house.

• 2:17Ramit Sethi?

  Ah, this is driving me insane.

• 2:19Steven Bartlett?

  It's true, though, isn't it?

• 2:20Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, and that's, that's the central part of my work, is that you can live a rich life, and that rich life can be richer and more vibrant and more personal than you ever imagined. If you want to travel, you can travel for longer than you ever thought. You can travel, for me, at nicer hotels. You can spend more time with your children, with your loved ones, whatever your rich life is, you can do that. But you've got to learn a few key, basic things about investing and money. So, let me tell you what I would tell my family. When they come to me, they go, "How should I start investing?" The simplest, simplest way that I advise my family is I say, "Get a target date fund." So, let me

• 3:04Ramit Sethi?

  explain what that is. A target date fund is one fund, just one, and you pick it based on the year that you're going to retire. So, if you're going to retire in 2050, if you're going to be 65 in 2050, you go and you find that one fund. It's called a Vanguard 2065 Fund, or Fidelity 2065, or Schwab 2065. There's lots of brokers. These funds, it's one fund, all you do is put money into it. That's it. The fund, like a pie chart, is automatically diversified. So, as you get older, it gets more conservative, because somebody who's 75 years old should be investing differently than someone who's 25. One fund,

• 3:48Ramit Sethi?

  all you have to do is set your money up to go into it every single month.

• 3:52Steven Bartlett?

  What is a fund?

• 3:54Ramit Sethi?

  A fund is a set or a basket of stocks and maybe bonds. So, we've all heard of, you know, companies like Microsoft, Google, whatever. A fund owns lots of these, right? And that's important, because we've heard diversification, like you should have diversified your investments. Okay, well, how do I do that? You don't need to go and buy 20 stocks and then figure out how much of each to do. That's too much work. And honestly, most people are not good at that, even professionals. You buy a fund which automatically owns lots of stocks, like hundreds of them. And over time, all you, the individual investor like me, have to focus on is putting

• 4:39Ramit Sethi?

  money into it automatically.

• 4:40Steven Bartlett?

  So a fund, essentially, I've got a hundred pounds that I want to invest. I find a fund. Where do I find these funds?

• 4:46Ramit Sethi?

  You can go to Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity. All those are great companies. What you're looking for, regardless of what country you're in, is you're looking for a low-cost brokerage firm.

• 4:57Steven Bartlett?

  So, but there's also apps and stuff that I can.

• 4:59Ramit Sethi?

  You can use apps. I don't like a lot of the apps because they gamify you to try to invest. They want you clicking and trading. I hate traders. You do not want to be a trader. Traders lose money. Investors treat investing like watching paint dry. That's how sexy it is. Trust me, I'm not getting my entertainment from investing. I'm going out, go watch a movie, go watch Netflix. But investing is boring and automatic. That's how it should be.

• 5:30Steven Bartlett?

  I used a company called Hargreaves Lans down in the UK who have an app when I first started investing. When I first started investing in funds, they had a very ugly app, so I wasn't very compelled to use it. I think it's better now, but I would use, just do it on desktop, which I do get your point because you don't want to, you don't want to be game, you don't want to screen all of that.

• 5:49Ramit Sethi?

  I like ugly. It should be ugly.

• 5:51Steven Bartlett?

  And you don't want it to be too accessible.

• 5:53Ramit Sethi?

  Correct.

• 5:54Steven Bartlett?

  I don't want to be able to check it every day.

• 5:55Ramit Sethi?

  No, look, on my phone, you will see no investing apps. There should not be. Why do you need to log in and check it every day? What's the point? In fact, I log, you know, most people should check it every three to six months. And here's how you check it. You log in on your desktop. Wow, it's up. Wow, it's down. Okay, bye. You're not tweaking anything. It's like making Thanksgiving dinner. Once you've put the turkey in the oven, just let it sit. Do not fiddle with it because you're only going to mess it up. And in this case, you're letting the turkey cook for decades.

• 6:31Steven Bartlett?

  And that fund, so I've got a hundred pounds, I go on a website.

• 6:35Ramit Sethi?

  Yep, Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, whatever they are. I have no alliance to any of them.

• 6:38Steven Bartlett?

  Neither do I. There's various ones in the UK. I actually do recommend Hargreaves Lansdowne just because it's simple and I think investing in funds, there's no fees, there's no fee associated with the investment itself. Obviously, they take, you know, they might take a percentage depending on which fund you're investing in. I take my one hundred pounds and investing in Hargreaves Lansdowne, you don't need, there's no minimum.

• 6:58Ramit Sethi?

  Great.

• 6:58Steven Bartlett?

  From what I understand. And there's no, if you invest in a stock, they charge twelve pounds per investment, but if you invest in a fund, it's free. I put my hundred pounds into a fund. The fund is essentially taking one pounds, one of those pounds, and investing one pound into Facebook, it's investing one pound into Google, one pound into Shopify, one pound into Spotify, one pound into Nvidia or whatever. It's doing that for me, it's managing it for me, it's making the decisions for me. I just put the money in every month, whatever I can, and I leave it.

• 7:26Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah. And let's go even deeper. I love that we're getting into the nuts and bolts here because, you know, honestly, most people, they do not know how to invest. Literally, what website do I go to and then what do I do? The fund owns these different stocks and some will go up and some will go down and it's inconsequential to you. All you need to know is you own this fund. Now that you've opened up an account and you've sent a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks, great, you've made one of the most important decisions of your life. Now, there's just one more thing you have to do. Set up an automatic transfer so that every single month, you have a certain amount of money going in. Now, if you don't know how much money, use my conscious spending plan guideline. What did

• 8:11Ramit Sethi?

  I say? Five to 10% of take home is a good guideline. All right. You should be able to do 5%, trust me. Anyone who comes to me, they go, Ramit, there's no way, must be nice, I can't afford. I go, show me where you're spending your money. I guarantee you, I can find 5% to send in every month. Now, you're not trying to send it in. I don't try to brush my teeth in the morning. It's a habit. Investing is even easier than brushing your teeth because you set it up automatically, the investment fund will automatically draw from your checking account. And it will pull in a hundred bucks, 500 bucks, a thousand bucks, whatever your number is. And so you're not going to log in for three, four, five months. You're going to log in a few months later.

• 8:55Ramit Sethi?

  You're going to be like, oh, my God. I didn't even realize that all this money is in here. When you add that plus compounding over many years, that is how real wealth is created. So I don't want anyone to think that you have to be rich in order to start investing. One of the ways you get rich is by investing.

• 9:19Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a friend that's currently actually in this building at the moment, and I had this conversation with them about a year ago, gave the advice that you've just given there. And about two months later, this individual, who I shan't name, came to me and I said, how's your, you know, your investments going in that fund? And they said, oh, yeah, I had bills. I had a credit card bill, so I took it out.

• 9:41Ramit Sethi?

  Oh, yeah, she treated it like a checking account. Investments for me are places to accumulate wealth. I don't draw from it. That's what a checking account is for. So if, what that is, is there's two parts to what your friend is saying. One is mentally, she's thinking that this investment account is just money I can draw from if I need it. So I would sort of gently change the way she thinks about it. The second is I guarantee her account structure is a little subpar. So here's how I would set it up. This is in chapter five. It's all automation because trust me, I don't want to spend time transferring money back and forth. That's, I don't spend any time on that.

• 10:25Ramit Sethi?

  You get paid, your money goes into your checking account. From your checking account, it is automatically transferred to a savings account. In fact, I have sub-savings accounts for vacation, car, down payment, all that stuff. So you have money set up for specific goals. Money is transferred to your investment account. It's transferred there. I'm not going to touch that money. I'm going to let it cook. And then I have my guilt-free spending, which is going out with friends, whatever I love. And my credit card bill is automatically paid off every single month. That's how you want to set it up. It takes a couple of weeks to set everything up. And then you never have to think about it again.

• 11:07Steven Bartlett?

  How can you prove to me that this is the way to make wealth? What case studies have you got that investing in funds over a long period of time is the path to financial wealth? Because, you know, it's you said earlier about the paint drying thing. The narrative that we see about why people and how people get rich is, you know, they sell a company or they have a lottery win, or maybe they buy some cryptocurrency and it goes up.

• 11:31Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Steven Bartlett?

  That's what we hear. So that's what we try and emulate.

• 11:34Ramit Sethi?

  Totally.

• 11:34Steven Bartlett?

  Prove to me that that's that this fund strategy is better.

• 11:38Ramit Sethi?

  Well, there's, there's a couple of things. First off, the research over more than a hundred, about a hundred years shows the returns of the stock market. And the returns tend to be, at least in America, they tend to be around 11%. 10 to 11%. And if you take out inflation, you get about 7 to 8% per year. Now, for anyone listening, they go, okay, well, what does that mean? That number means nothing to me. 7% whatever. If you go right now and you Google investment calculator and you just plug in your age, you plug in, let's say 200, 300 bucks a month

• 12:19Ramit Sethi?

  and you plug in 7% return and you just watch how that money grows. You will be shocked.

• 12:27Steven Bartlett?

  Jack, give me my phone. I'm going to do it now.

• 12:29Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, so let's search for compound interest calculator. And there's a really simple one. This, it's called Money Chimp.

• 12:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Okay, I've got it.

• 12:39Ramit Sethi?

  All right. All right, so there's four numbers we need to fill out here. Let's take a look. The first is current principal. That means how much you've got in the bank.

• 12:46Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to say $5,000 and I'm going to start when I was 16. Because if I'd saved my money when I was 16 and not spent recklessly, I think I could have had that $5,000 when I was 16. Annual addition, what does that mean?

• 13:03Ramit Sethi?

  How much can you invest per year? So for most people, they think about on a monthly basis. They might say 200 bucks a month, which would be $2,400 annual addition.

• 13:14Ramit Sethi?

  Okay. What do you want to say? I'm gonna say, can I say $5,000? Yeah, that's, you know, about 400 bucks a month. I think that's reasonable. I often find that with people making median or slightly above median salary, that there are hundreds of dollars a month of money that is unaccounted for, that if properly made intentional, could be invested. So, great, 5,000 a year. All right. Obviously, I could have, once I got past a certain age, I could have increased that, though, so. We're gonna talk about that. Okay. Hold on to that idea. Okay. How many years? This was you at 20? This was me at 16. Oh, okay. And how old are you today? 30. Okay, so 14 years. Let's just do it until today, and we'll see what happens. Okay. All right. 14 years. And then it says, "interest rate."

• 13:58Ramit Sethi?

  So what should we assume for that? Is that 8%? Yeah, 7% to 8%. I do 7% just to be super conservative, because I never want to be surprised on the downside. Right. If anything, I'm gonna make more. So 7%. All right, let's calculate it. Okay. What do you see? Damn. What do you see? $133,537. Yeah, that's what you would have had right now. Now, let's add some context. So, this is really important. You see a number that says $133,000 at age 30. Yeah. Okay. Is that a lot? Is that not? Hmm, I don't know. Let's break it down. At that point, you started with $5,000,

• 14:41Ramit Sethi?

  and you invested $5,000 per year. We assumed no raises, even though you obviously made more than you made at age 16. We assumed you stopped investing at age 30, which is obviously ridiculous. And you end up with six figures. Let's play it out. Let's take it until, hmm, 40. So instead of 14 years, you invested for 24 years. What do you see?

• 15:12Steven Bartlett?

  I would have three hundred and thirty six thousand dollars.

• 15:15Ramit Sethi?

  It's getting better.

• 15:16Steven Bartlett?

  From just five thousand dollars a year.

• 15:18Ramit Sethi?

  It's not much.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  It's fantastic.

• 15:20Ramit Sethi?

  Again, four hundred bucks or so a month is very modest. Remember, people's income goes up typically in their thirties and forties. And if you already are investing a little bit automatically, all you have to do is just tweak a number and it will take an extra couple hundred, three, four, five hundred bucks. Let's do one more. Let's go to thirty four years just because I want to see what happens. And then we're going to play with the other numbers.

• 15:41Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so investing from the age of sixteen until I'm fifty.

• 15:48Steven Bartlett?

  I would have seven hundred and thirty six thousand dollars in my account.

• 15:52Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, now I want to do the full, the full thing. I want to do a more realistic number here. So instead of fifty, we're going to go forty nine years. That takes you to age sixty five.

• 16:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Ramit Sethi?

  Okay, and instead of five thousand dollars per year, your income obviously went up from being sixteen years old. So I'm going to pick a number out of thin air and, and I'm going to tell you how I picked it. I'm going to say instead of five thousand dollars a year, it's actually going to be thirty thousand dollars per year. Let me tell you why I picked that.

• 16:29Ramit Sethi?

  In your early years, you don't have as much money, but you were still investing a little bit, which shows that you're dedicated. As your income goes up, you're going to start proportionally continuing to invest. So at a certain point, your income will be really high and that will bring that average up. That's why I switched it to thirty thousand per year. I actually think this is quite modest, but I'm going to go ahead and do it.

• 16:53Ramit Sethi?

  So here we have someone starting investing at five thousand dollars. They invest thirty thousand dollars per year. Okay, they grow it for forty nine years at seven percent. Do you know the math?

• 17:07Steven Bartlett?

  No, tell me.

• 17:08Ramit Sethi?

  Twelve million, three hundred and three thousand dollars.

• 17:13Steven Bartlett?

  So that's me, starting with five K, gradually ratcheting it up until I'm investing, well, investing thirty K on year, a year per average across those forty nine years.

• 17:23Ramit Sethi?

  Yes, which is a flaw in this because it's so simple. That money invested, you're not actually going to invest that much early on. You'll invest more later. So you won't actually, you'll maybe have a marginal amount less, but we're talking ten versus twelve million. That's a lot of money.

• 17:40Steven Bartlett?

  And then if I got eight percent, instead of the seven percent, I'd have seventeen point four million.

• 17:45Ramit Sethi?

  Yeah, but don't mess with that. Because this is what people do. They go, well, if I got thirteen percent, I'm going to invest in this P E fund. I go, don't do that. You're going to lose all your money. Just stop.

• 17:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Ramit Sethi?

  Seven percent is safe. It's conservative. That's why I am here. That's why I want to encourage people. You don't need to juice your returns. I hope you do get eight percent, but I don't want you to count on that. I want you to count on safe, stable returns. And what matters for you is the time you started early and the amount. You have a considerable amount to invest.

• 18:18Alex Hormozi?

  You know, the biggest debt, one of the things I, I love saying this, but like the biggest debt all of us pay is ignorance. And so I heard this close at this pitch years ago, and this guy got on stage and he, and he was like, hey, ma'am. He was like, how much do you make? She was like fifty thousand dollars. So you're at fifty thousand dollars on the whiteboard. And then you wrote a million dollars on top of the fifty thousand. And he subtracted it and said nine hundred and fifty thousand. He said, you pay life nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars every single year for not knowing how to make a million dollars a year. And it was a crazy concept. He was using it to close the audience, but I like, the most expensive thing that all of us are paying for is the information that we don't know. And that's like both frightening and also incredibly exciting because like.

• 19:01Alex Hormozi?

  Fish in the best ponds, right? Like, a good fisherman knows where to fish. And a different way of saying it is, find the people who value what you have the most. And I'm sure you've heard this, have you heard the story of the, the father and the son with the car?

• 19:14Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 19:14Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, so.

• 19:16Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe I have, but I'm sure I've got enough detail.

• 19:17Alex Hormozi?

  No, it's good, it's good. So there's, there's a father who gifts his son an old beat up car. And he says, you know, hey, I don't know if it drives or not, but you can take it down to the, the dealership down the street, see if you can trade it and get some money. He was like, okay. So he goes down the street, goes to the dealership. They say, we'll give you a thousand bucks for it. And he come, you know, hears him out, comes back home. He's like, dad, they said, give me a thousand bucks. He's like, okay. He's like, go to the impound yard where they, you know, break the cars up just for metal. He's like, see what they'll give you. Goes there and the guy's like, ah, I don't know. This might be 500 bucks of metal. Kid like, you know, comes back home. He's like, daddy, you know, he said it was gonna be $500. He's like, okay. He's like, hey, go down the street to that, uh, that antique dealership.

• 20:02Alex Hormozi?

  See if they've got anything that use car lot. He was like, okay. So he goes down there, talks to the guy. Comes back home, super excited. He's like, daddy, you won't believe it. He was like, this is a historic car. There's only like 10 of them left. He's like, it's worth a hundred thousand dollars. And so the father smiles and he's like, and the lesson I want you to know is that it's not necessarily who you are, but the people that value you the most. And so you can talk to different people and go to the people who value you. And I just, I, I love that story because from a, it's a, it's a huge business story in terms of like sell, sell where the fish are, where the big fish are. Like if you, if you're gonna go hook fish, go to, go where the whales are. It takes the same work, but a lot of it's just belief. People don't think it's possible. And so a lot of times you have to just keep leveling up and you sell your first $10,000 thing.

• 20:47Alex Hormozi?

  You sell your first $100,000 thing, sell your first multimillion dollar package. You realize that's the exact same thing. It's just, so maybe if I'm list, if anybody's listing right now, it is the same thing. It's the exact same thing and sometimes it's easier.

• 21:00Steven Bartlett?

  It's normally easier.

• 21:02Alex Hormozi?

  Like, you know, you've seen that meme that says like, uh, so what exactly am I gonna be getting for this $50 thing, right? And then it's like, uh, $50,000 clients, like wire sent yesterday. Like, what else do you need? Like it's, and that's totally true. Um, but I think there's a skill in understanding where to fish.

• 21:20Steven Bartlett?

  Certainly a skill. Information, it's information, it's even knowing that there was another lake over there.

• 21:26Alex Hormozi?

  All right.

• 21:27Steven Bartlett?

  And that's why, like, listening to conversations like this is so valuable for people because it lifts a curtain. And you go, what the fuck, you guys were behind here the whole time partying? That's what my business life has been like. It's like gradually, like, I think I heard Kevin Hart describe on Joe Rogan one time where he said, there's this other room.

• 21:43Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Steven Bartlett?

  Where these people are playing this other set of money games.

• 21:46Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Steven Bartlett?

  And then when you get in that room, you get, you're almost pissed off that nobody told you this room existed. But then there's another door.

• 21:52Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  And then you get through there, maybe a couple of years later, and you find these other people, these fucking billionaires that are playing another set of games. And you're going, what? And they're chilling.

• 22:01Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Steven Bartlett?

  They're just smoking cigars, they're not even doing any hard work. And you go, tell me the games that you guys have been playing in here.

• 22:08Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Steven Bartlett?

  And then again, the frustration is, and that's kind of what I feel like in my business life, it's been like where at the jump I'm charging. I don't know, I remember my first, we found our first deck from 2014, charging. I remember the package, we had gold, silver and bronze. It was like, you know, like $200 package for like support and then $500 and then the gold package where we threw everything in for a thousand dollars. And I remember one of my first clients, um, accepting that. And then I think today, like the only difference, okay, there's skills that have increased, but information is the big thing. Knowing how to do it, you know?

• 22:43Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about curtains that have lifted, that have really shifted the games you play from a value money perspective. Like where someone's turned the lights on, you go, fuck, of course.

• 22:53Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else that comes to mind?

• 22:57Alex Hormozi?

  I will answer it with the stair steps of how each order of magnitude changed in my income. So when I went from being an employee to self-employed, I went from making four figures a month to five figures a month. And that was for me, just like, I'm now in control. The level above that was I started having other people who worked for me and then went to six figures a month. Right? And then from there, stayed there, did the turnaround business, still had the same organizational structure, had another degree of leverage. And so the next degree of leverage was that I started licensing, so it was digital. Right? So the cost for, you know, cost of goods is basically nothing. But all of these things are about leverage. And so this is like one of my favorite topics in the whole world. But if we define leverage as the difference between what you put in and what you get out. So if you have a lot of leverage, you put a little bit in, you get a lot out.

• 23:42Alex Hormozi?

  If you have no leverage or low leverage, you put a lot in, you get a little bit out. And a lot of times, people who are listening to this and are not making as much money as they want, they're putting lots of input in and not getting a lot out. They have low leverage opportunities. And so, understanding how to get more for what you put in is the game overall. And so, the first level that I described was labor. It's just work. First, I was working for someone else, then I worked for myself, then I got other people to work for me. The first level, each of those levels was more leverage. Above that, I had media, which is the thing that I was licensing out. So, another degree of leverage. I made it once and I could license that out infinity. On top of that, I have capital. I can take capital, I don't have to sacrifice time in order to get something for it. So it's high input output. Above that would be some sort of technology.

• 24:25Alex Hormozi?

  You build the code once, in theory, obviously, you continue to improve the code, but theoretically, you build the thing once and then a million people can use it. And so, you want to stack as many types of leverage as you can, and as much of them as you can, because like Joe Rogan also has a show, and somebody else has a podcast. They both technically are using media as their vehicle for leverage, but he has significantly more of it. So it's not just like, "I'm gonna use all these," right? Yes, but it's also how much and to what degree. But like, Facebook had other people's money, he used media, had other people's work, max leverage. Amazon, same thing, right? They used every element of leverage and they maxed all of them out. And that's at least the curtain. And Naval talks about this, if you're familiar with Naval Ravikant.

• 25:09Alex Hormozi?

  He talks about these things as the elements of leverage, or four types of leverage. And understanding that, for me, has kind of been a blueprint for wealth overall. And then, you know, capital, there's degrees of capital, right? Like, first you can get friends and family to give you money. Then you can get, you know, institutional money. And then you can get public money, right? Which, you know, you saw like the IPO money, like the fact that the NASDAQ was 4X, the Dusseldorf exchange, is that where it was, right? There's just significantly more capital in that market. And so, same work, more zeros. And so, I love this topic, because I think that that's fundamentally like, the people who move faster in life don't actually move faster, they get more for every step.

• 25:53Codie Sanchez?

  If right now, you want to find where is your unfair bet that can make you your millions with your skillset that nobody else in the world can replicate except you, here's what I need. I would need a whiteboard, I would need a pen, which I would do if I was you, and I would need a smart friend. Perfect. Like, so I've got Stephen here. And at the top of the whiteboard, I would write, on this side, skills. Oh, my God, you're gonna see my handwriting like a doctor. And on this side, I would write money. And I would start writing down all the things that we're brilliant at. So let's pretend it's Stephen here. And we'll pretend like you don't have all the things that you have, but your core skillset.

• 26:30Steven Bartlett?

  You could put your hand on the screen, by the way.

• 26:32Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, it makes me nervous. Am I doing this like a boomer? I am.

• 26:35Steven Bartlett?

  The handwriting's a little bit, it's giving doctors.

• 26:36Codie Sanchez?

  Okay. Oh, yeah, look at that. Okay. So embarrassing. Okay, so social media, right? You're incredible at social media. What else are you probably good at? Well, you know a lot of people. You've got a network. What else? Well, it's not just social media, though. It's actually a few particular things. It's like YouTube, and I think you're one of the best in the world at short-form video, right? You're also one of the best in the world at like, a data-driven, social media strategy. So you can kind of say upfront, hey, we think this is gonna go viral because the data says this thing over here. What else is Stephen good at? He's charismatic. He can probably get people to agree to things just by talking

• 27:16Codie Sanchez?

  to them. You know, what else? British accent, you know, so probably you want more in-person interaction because we've got, you know, a very charismatic person. What else is Stephen really good at? Well, he asks a lot of questions.

• 27:32Steven Bartlett?

  This is my Hinge profile, by the way. I'm totally just gonna copy and paste all this stuff over.

• 27:35Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, good-looking, funny. Yeah, exactly. So, so we'll just say these. There's a lot more. Deal flow. But let's just pretend that all you're good at is social media, you're good at getting to people, which is a network. You don't even have to know rich people, just can you get to them? You're charismatic, you're data-driven. Okay, great, we've got all these skills. Now, how could we apply these skills to get the most money humanly possible? And I would do exactly what you said. So how do you figure out most money humanly possible? It's two things. It's the, how would I do this? It's the size of the problem.

• 28:08Codie Sanchez?

  It is the value of the solution.

• 28:13Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 28:15Codie Sanchez?

  And so if I'm thinking about this for you, if I go and I give your social media skills to a trade or service business, I'm not going to make that much money. How do I know I'm not going to make that much money? Because I'm going to go look up online, what is the average revenue of this business and the average profit margin?

• 28:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Codie Sanchez?

  Now, you probably didn't even think this way when you were thinking about it. But you guys look online right now, what's the average profit margin of a biotech company and average revenue? Let me tell you what it is. It's going to be like 50 to 80%. And it's going to be hundreds of millions that you could potentially get. Trade services business, a lot less. And so that's where I would start. Skills plus money really equals to three things, which is like sector, size of the business, and profitability of the business. And I would play this game. And what that might look like is you go, okay, I know that I have some friends in,

• 29:20Codie Sanchez?

  let's go to the places that we know have the most cash in Silicon Valley, in on Wall Street. If they could make a lot more money, if they had a lot more attention, because what I'm selling is attention, I want to get to the people who can make the most money with the most attention. And that means that I'm not going to go to Walmart, only has 6% margins. I'm going to go to the highest person that I could get to. And it'd be fun. If anybody's listening to this right now, try it. Like tag Stephen and I in your stories on Instagram of your little charts. And let's see, and I'll give feedback. Anybody that tags me in it, if you're like, here's the, here's what I think my skill is. Here's what I think the industry is. I'll tell you one way or another. And it can be fun. You can see other people's examples live.

• 29:57Steven Bartlett?

  So people, for people that are only listening on audio and then that can't see what the, um, this,

• 30:03Codie Sanchez?

  Chicken scratch?

• 30:04Steven Bartlett?

  Chicken scratch you've just drawn on this iPad. On one hand, you have, you list your skills. And then on the second side, you're listing the ways you believe you could make the most money from those skills, based on the size of the problem you'd be solving with them and the value of the solution. So for example, let me, let me try and play this game with you then. So, okay, so I am a writer. So I'm going to do my skills on the left hand. I'm a writer. And on the right, I'm going to write money. I'm a writer. I'm really good at writing stuff. That's it. And I kind of get, I kind of get the internet. So I kind of understand LinkedIn blogs and stuff like that. But that's it. I'm writer.

• 30:41Codie Sanchez?

  Let's go with what would be the worst. What would be the worst thing you could do if you're a writer?

• 30:45Steven Bartlett?

  To make no money?

• 30:46Codie Sanchez?

  To make no money. Because sometimes it's easier to do the negative.

• 30:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, working for a local newspaper.

• 30:50Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, local. I was thinking like fantasy books. Like you could write like fiction, you know, really hard to make money in. You could write for a local newspaper. That's an even worse idea. So I like that. So now you've got your, your bottom tier, right? Which is like 14 bucks an hour or something like that. Now, if you look about, I mean, you could Google this. What is the highest paying jobs for writers? I bet the thing you'd find on top, copywriter. Why?

• 31:13Steven Bartlett?

  I got a better one.

• 31:14Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, what's the better one?

• 31:15Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know why I know this? Because when I was in working in biotech, we could hire one, which is a medical writer.

• 31:19Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, so smart. Hyper specialized.

• 31:22Steven Bartlett?

  Honestly, we, so a typical copywriter, when I was working in my social media company, we might pay entry level 25,000 pounds, which is probably about 35,000 dollars.

• 31:31Codie Sanchez?

  Okay.

• 31:32Steven Bartlett?

  A medical writer, someone that can write about the psilocybin compound in my psychedelics business, would get paid 150,000 dollars or more. We just couldn't find some. We found loads of people that could write.

• 31:46Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Steven Bartlett?

  But nobody that had within their skill stack, even though it's quite easy to teach the ability to write using medical words, slightly medical words. It doesn't mean you need a medical degree. You could probably learn how to write, become a medical writer in a month if you really committed yourself to it. So that's the top.

• 32:00Codie Sanchez?

  That's so true. And same with finance. We go to the things we know. So you know biotechs, you know, there's a niche there. I know finance and I know that, again, it's one of the highest paying industries. So a financial writer, what would that look like? It would look like somebody who knows how to write, probably an investor update, right?

• 32:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:17Codie Sanchez?

  So hugely lucrative. And then the other thing you could do is, I guess I didn't even think about this before, it would be like size of the problem. It would be value of the solution. And then it would also be structure of your job. So like, if you're a copywriter, I wouldn't take a job for 35K. What would I do? I would say, hey, pay me, what is the salary you want to offer? 35,000? I'll take 10,000 so I can eat because I'm hungry. But can I have a percentage of the upside? That I drive above and beyond goal. So if I'm going to write copy that converts into revenue, like I'm going to write a funnel for your biotech company, or I'm going to write a funnel to get investors for you. If right now, per month, you get $100,000 through that

• 33:02Codie Sanchez?

  funnel, how about you just pay me an extra 10% of everything I drive above your 100K? So I think that's another way you can make more money is getting smarter on deal structuring.

• 33:12Steven Bartlett?

  Well, that's actually when I moved into biotech, how I got paid. And when I talked about being paid 1,000 times more than I would have previously, it's because the way I got paid was in options in the IPO.

• 33:23Codie Sanchez?

  Brilliant.

• 33:23Steven Bartlett?

  So I got given, in that particular company, I got given 400,000 shares effectively in the company at a certain price. And so when the company IPO'd at $3.2 billion on the NASDAQ in July 2021 or something, even though I'd only worked in the company for about six months, just helping them build out the marketing team, I think my like net return was on the equity value at the time, was quite close to 10 million. So six months work, 10 million return, because I, you know, and the really, really, the reason I did it was because I was so interested in psychedelics. But it just opened my eyes to the fact that any kid with social media skills and that knew how to structure a deal with these people could have walked in there and said, give me some stock in this IPO, and I'll run your social media for six months.

• 34:06Codie Sanchez?

  You're so right.

• 34:07Steven Bartlett?

  Could have changed your life.

• 34:08Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. And it's something I'm struggling with trying to get people to understand right now, is that even if you never buy a business, which is what people fixate on, well, I haven't bought a business yet. I haven't bought a business yet. It's like, God, you're never going to regret learning how to do deals.

• 34:21Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent.

• 34:22Codie Sanchez?

  You're never gonna, I think that is the most valuable skill set in the world.

• 34:26Steven Bartlett?

  I completely agree. And it's so unfair that people don't know about it.

• 34:29Codie Sanchez?

  It's so unfair, but it's also your fault if you don't know about it, because nobody's gatekeeping this information anymore. It used to be gatekept. Like, when I first started off in private equity, I wasn't allowed in the rooms where they were actually doing the deals and the terms. And if I wanted to see what the final terms were, like, I had to kind of, you know, sweet talk my way into figuring out how they structured it.

• 34:48Steven Bartlett?

  But it's an unknown unknown. So before I knew, I didn't know that I didn't know.

• 34:51Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. But now I think there's enough people out there talking about it where you're like, I mean, if you think about whether you like Donald Trump or not. What is he really good at? Deals.

• 35:01Steven Bartlett?

  The art of the deal.

• 35:02Codie Sanchez?

  Like, that's it. And that is what, I mean, Elon Musk. How does Tesla actually make money? They make money through credits, through credits for solar. So he was able to survive for those 10 years of building that company because he has some of the best solar tax credits in the world that he negotiated with the government.

• 35:21Steven Bartlett?

  So where does one go then? Where does a 25-year-old kid listening to this go to learn how to make deals?

• 35:27Codie Sanchez?

  Well, I have a book coming out.

• 35:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Codie Sanchez?

  Called Main Street Millionaire.

• 35:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, exciting.

• 35:32Codie Sanchez?

  I know. And we have, we have stuff, we can tell them about that later, too.

• 35:36Steven Bartlett?

  Well, I'm going to link Main Street Millionaire below so everyone can preorder it. I've preordered, I think, 10 or 20 copies of it, maybe a couple more.

• 35:43Codie Sanchez?

  But that's like 30 bucks and you learn almost everything you need to know about doing deal to start. And that book is only what you need to know. I made it on purpose, not really long, not overly intense. It is exactly what you need to know. And then if you like learning deal making and you like that book, then you go to contrarianthinking.com and we have courses and free newsletters and a community all about buying businesses. But that's where you should start.

• 36:10Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing I came to learn as I got money, and it was almost like someone pulled the curtain back for me, is how wealthy individuals play the tax game.

• 36:20Scott Galloway?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 36:21Steven Bartlett?

  And it's a tax game that the average person has no idea is going on.

• 36:24Scott Galloway?

  Got to talk about money. Tax avoidance is a key skill to building wealth. And by the way, we don't talk about, I speak openly about my, I won't call it tax avoidance, but my tax strategies. If you're, you know, it's like they said, if you're a prisoner of war, you have an obligation to escape. If you're trying to build wealth, you have an obligation to pay as little tax as possible. Do it legally. But Apple will issue their IP to Apple International in Ireland. And then they will use Apple Ireland. They will license their IP to America, charge them tens of billions of dollars, thereby increasing the income of Apple Ireland at a lower tax rate and decreasing the income in the US, thereby lowering their overall tax rate. That is pure tax avoidance.

• 37:11Scott Galloway?

  Every organization, every corporation does this to the hilt, and so should you. By the way, I will vote for people who have an alternative minimum tax. We have to raise taxes on corporations. The 25 wealthiest Americans pay between 6 and 8% tax rate. What are the tax games they're playing? Oh. The rich people. There's a bunch of them. First and foremost, it's you buy stocks, you never sell them, you borrow against them. Okay, explain that to me like I'm a 10 year old. Sure, you own $100 in Amazon stock. Yeah. You need money to buy something instead of selling the stock. And it's, say it's gone up 50%, I say it's doubled. You would have to realize a capital gain and pay long-term capital gains on that $50 gain.

• 37:53Scott Galloway?

  No, just borrow against it and let the stock continue to grow. And you pay a little bit of interest, hopefully from your current income. But basically, it's invest, borrow against it, and die. Put it into a trust and then pass it on to your kids. There's a lot of state arbitrage. Jeff Bezos just moved to Florida to spend more time with debt. Isn't that sweet, Stephen? Isn't that nice? No, it has nothing to do with his father. Give me a fucking break. He aggregated $160 billion in wealth. He would pay about another 8 or 10% in state taxes in Washington because he's got to leverage the public school system, the University of Washington, the Seattle Tacoma Airport, the hospital system.

• 38:33Scott Galloway?

  But in the US, you're allowed to piece out to Texas or Florida and pay no income tax. So all the people shitposting California or New York, show me someone who's all of a sudden can't handle San Francisco politics. I'm going to show you someone who needs to recognize a capital gain and has all of a sudden decided they like Texas politics. It's really not very, it's very disingenuous. There's, the tax loophole I've leveraged. In the US, there's something called 1202 or Qualified Small Business. So when I started L2. What's L2? L2 is my analytics company. I started it, I invested a small amount of money. Because it was a business worth less than 50 million, your business would qualify in the US as QSB Small Business.

• 39:18Scott Galloway?

  If you hold on to that stock in that company for longer than five years, when you sell it, the first 10 million or 10 times the basis are tax free. So the first 10 million out of L2 was tax free, zero. That makes no sense. If that sounds like we're screwing the middle class, trust your instincts. I invested in a company, brought a company out of bankruptcy. I invested two and a half million. The first 25 million, got very lucky, the company got sold for a lot of money. The first 25 million were tax free. These are, the tax code has gone from 400 pages to 4,000. And that extra 3,600 pages are to turn rich people into super rich people. Now, the myth around taxes is the following, that rich people don't pay their taxes.

• 40:02Scott Galloway?

  Actually, the sort of rich pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. So if you make all of your money from current income, that is salary, and you make a lot, you're actually paying more taxes than anyone. So mom's a baller. She's a partner in a prestigious law firm, making a million bucks a year. Dad's a chiropractor, has three people working for him. He makes 600, 1.6 million dollars a year, total ballers. In order to make that kind of money, they probably have to live in an urban center in a blue state, where at that level, they're paying 45, 48, sometimes 52% tax rates. But if dad decides to raise capital and buy a bunch of chiropractic clinics,

• 40:44Scott Galloway?

  and they become investments, and he sells them for 50 million dollars, his tax rate plummets. So you don't want to be a super earner. You want to earn enough money to invest so you can become a super owner. The top 25 wealthiest Americans pay about 8% in tax, right? So actually, the bottom half pay almost no tax. They pay a lot of consumption taxes, but it's the super earners that get screwed, what I call the workhorses. But once you make the jump to light speed and you own things, and you make your money from buying and selling assets, your tax rate plummets.

• 41:20Steven Bartlett?

  The really sort of actionable thing there for the average person as well is probably the first point where you said, a lot of what rich people do is they'll buy a stock. I'll spend 10K on Amazon stock and then I go to a bank and the bank give me a $5,000 loan against my Amazon stock tax free.

• 41:37Scott Galloway?

  Right.

• 41:38Steven Bartlett?

  And I just hold the Amazon stock. Now I've got 5,000 tax free. If the Amazon stock goes to $20,000 in value, then I can, I can go to the bank and say it's gone up now. Give me another $5,000 and I just spend and live off that money. Now, if the Amazon stock collapses, I'm fine because the loan was against the stock. So they'll sell the stock at a certain point as it's collapsing to get their money back.

• 41:59Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I mean, you don't want to get into too much trouble, but leverage is how smart people go broke. But the idea is that one of the great tax schemes in history is that stocks grow. Think of yourself as a stock. You, you go up in value a million bucks a year. You're making a million dollars a year doing a very successful podcast. Every year, the government in the UK is going to take 40 cents of that, 40% of it. If you own a million dollars in stock and it goes to 2 million, you don't get taxed on it till you sell it.

• 42:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So just never sell it.

• 42:32Scott Galloway?

  Never sell it.

• 42:33Steven Bartlett?

  And that's what Elon's doing with his companies. People say he's got, you know, 200 billion dollars, whatever. In fact, he's borrowing tax free against those companies.

• 42:40Scott Galloway?

  And then when he finally needs to sell it to pay off some of those loans, he moves to Texas despite the fact he built all his wealth in California.

• 42:47Steven Bartlett?

  Smart. I think one of the great advantages of life is, as it relates to wealth creation, is really getting good tax advice. Cause I've sat here over and over again with people that have great tax advice and some people who didn't have any at all. And the outcomes are quite frankly shocking. The variance in outcomes are quite frankly shocking. From one person going bankrupt to the other person becoming a multi billionaire. And it comes down to, some of it comes down to their tax strategy and how they thought about tax. And having, you know, being around a lot of people now that are masters in tax, it was like. Yeah, I'd describe it as someone pulled back a curtain that I never knew was there. And all these people were doing magic behind this curtain and no one ever told me that curtain existed. And it's called tax. We don't all pay the same tax.

• 43:28Scott Galloway?

  Because we're not supposed to talk about it.

• 43:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Scott Galloway?

  Again, not talking about it is rich people trying to keep poor people down.

• 43:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Scott Galloway?

  Because rich people talk about their taxes all the time. Brightest woman in my entire professional universe is a woman named Lucy Lee, who is my tax Yoda, who works at a big law firm that I pay 1,800 bucks an hour to, to figure out the smartest... When I set up a company, I talk to my tax person. When I'm about to get a big payment for my podcast distribution company, I talk to my tax person first. This is, it is everything, but the key when you're young is to become an owner, not an earner. You're an earner. You want to bust a move out of earning and develop an army of capital that goes out and kills for you at night. 500 bucks is a lot of money when you're 21. 500 bucks when you're 21 is 10,000 when you're my age, right?

• 44:17Scott Galloway?

  And it's going to go really fast. So just start. And then once you become a super owner, you have 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, a million dollars in assets. Then, then you can become a super tax avoider.

• 44:40Scott Galloway?

  That sounded awful, didn't it? Sounded awful. That sounded awful.

• 44:47Scott Galloway?

  Sitting here with your bucket of sand. Oh my God.

• 44:52Steven Bartlett?

  A bunch of melitas.

• 44:53Scott Galloway?

  That's right. Talk about, this is how we fuck the middle class, Stephen. This is how we really screw over the little guy.

• 45:02Steven Bartlett?

  What is your capital allocation strategy? How do you invest your money? This is, you know, this is the thing people want to know most about you.

• 45:08Morgan Housel?

  I keep it as painfully simple as I possibly can. So literally my entire net worth is cash, a house and index funds. And some shares of Markel, where I'm on the board of directors. And that's it. There's nothing else. My entire, I can summarize everything so easily and so cleanly. And truly, that's it. And it's not even like I have 20 bank accounts. I have one bank account, one brokerage account and like in a house and that's it. So simple.

• 45:32Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why index funds? You're the reason I, your capital allocation strategy is almost identical to mine. I want to talk about the house thing as well, but after reading your book, I stopped trying to pick stocks.

• 45:45Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Steven Bartlett?

  And I invested all of my available capital into index funds outside of investing in starting companies. So I'm a shareholder in, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 companies. I, all my other available capital is invested in index funds. And then I have a very longstanding, large position in Ethereum, which I've held for like six years or something.

• 46:06Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Steven Bartlett?

  Which has done me very well.

• 46:07Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  That is it. And the Ethereum investment is also based on the fact that I run a software business that is in blockchain. And I could see that developers are building on top of Ethereum more than any other blockchain. So that insight was really beneficial to me.

• 46:22Morgan Housel?

  And six years, so even with the big fall over the last two years, you're still up a lot.

• 46:28Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I, I think your book taught me that successful investing is when you lose the password to your investment account.

• 46:34Morgan Housel?

  Yes, that's exactly it.

• 46:36Steven Bartlett?

  I don't actually think you said that in there, but that's like, when I lose the password to my investment account, I'm so proud of myself.

• 46:41Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Steven Bartlett?

  Because it means I haven't checked it in forever. And so it's funny because you were coming today. I thought, oh yeah, well, I have all this money in these index funds. I'll check it. And I thought, fuck, I don't know the password.

• 46:52Morgan Housel?

  Good, that's why you're gonna do okay.

• 46:54Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so proud of you.

• 46:54Morgan Housel?

  The reason I do this, what's important is that I am not one of the people who says, nobody can beat the market, so therefore use index funds. That's not what I believe. I think there, I think it's extremely hard to beat the market and very few people will do it. But I think there are really smart people who can do it and people who I know who I could invest with. The reason I don't is not because I don't believe it can be done. It's because the variable that I want to maximize for in my investments is endurance. If I can just earn average returns for an above average period of time, it's going to lead to amount of success that will literally put you in the top 5% of investors. My parents are a great example of this. My parents are smart people, but they really, they have no financial background and they have like minimal financial interest, I would say.

• 47:36Morgan Housel?

  And but they have dollar cost average into index funds for going on 40 years now. And literally, if you look at the returns, they've never sold anything ever. And literally, if you look at the returns, they'd probably be in the top 3% of professional investors.

• 47:48Steven Bartlett?

  What is, for anyone that doesn't know, what is dollar cost averaging? And what is an index fund?

• 47:52Morgan Housel?

  Dollar cost averaging means you buy the same dollar amount of investments every single month, come hell or high water. Doesn't matter what the stock market's doing, recession, boom, bust. You say, I'm going to put $100, whatever it is, in the stock market on the first of every month. Now, most people who like have a 401k at work are doing this whether they know it or not. They have $100 or whatever removed from every paycheck and it goes into the funds that they own. And they don't have to do anything, whether you know it or not, you're actually doing it. The contrast to that would say, I'm going to buy and sell based off of how I feel in the stock market. I wake up, I watch CNBC, I decided to sell, and I'm going to put it back in when I feel better about the market. It's the contrast to that. An index fund is just a single fund that owns hundreds or thousands of stocks within it.

• 48:35Morgan Housel?

  And if it's diverse enough, if it's big enough, really what you're doing is you're owning a slice of the global economy, which is how I think about it. It's thousands of individual stocks in there, Tesla, Apple, whatever it'd be. But really, what you're doing is you're owning a slice of capitalism.

• 48:48Steven Bartlett?

  If I was your son and I said, Dad, prove to me that that's a better long-term wealth creation strategy than buying crypto or buying companies that I use or like, how would you explain that to your to your kid?

• 49:01Morgan Housel?

  Your ability to do well over the next one year or five years is going to have no role whatsoever on your lifetime ability to generate wealth. All that's going to matter is not what are the best returns you can earn. All that matters are is what are the returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time? All that matters is your endurance. It doesn't matter if you can double your money this year or even double your money again the next year. All that matters is can you stick and keep it going for 50 years? That's where compounding comes from.

• 49:29Steven Bartlett?

  Preview.

• 49:29Morgan Housel?

  All because the formula for compounding is returns to the power of time. That's not quite it, but like more or less that's it. So in that equation, if you understand the math, all of the heavy lifting comes from the exponent.

• 49:40Steven Bartlett?

  Give me a case study where someone has followed that strategy and done well.

• 49:43Morgan Housel?

  Okay, here's one way to explain it that I use in the book. 99% of Warren Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday.

• 49:52Morgan Housel?

  After he turns 60 years old, 99% of his wealth

• 49:55Steven Bartlett?

  Jesus.

• 49:56Morgan Housel?

  has been accumulated after that period. Because the longer you hold that four, the crazier the numbers get. When he was 60, I think he was worth about $3 billion. Lot of money, he's a multi-billionaire. But now that he's 90, he's worth over $100 billion. And he's given like $100 billion away to charity. So if he didn't do that, he'd be worth, he'd go from $3 billion to $200 billion. Since he's been 60. Because the numbers just get crazier at that point. He's worth $100 billion. So if his market, if his net worth goes up 10% in one year, he makes $10 billion. Which is three times that he was worth when he was 60. So that's when you look at somebody like Buffett, is he a great investor? Is he a great stock picker? Of course. But the real secret to his success is that he's been a good investor for 80 years.

• 50:38Morgan Housel?

  And if he had retired at age 60 or at age 50, nobody would have ever heard of him. He would have been like one of the other multi-billionaires who lives in Florida and plays golf. And like, you've never heard of him. The reason he's a household name is because he's been doing this non-stop since he's been 11 years old. And he's never stopped. It's just the endurance that's made him so wealthy. Not necessarily the annual returns.

• 50:59Steven Bartlett?

  Patience, it's a difficult thing. It also reminds me of the story that you talk about in the introduction of your book about the janitor Ronald James Reed.

• 51:07Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Steven Bartlett?

  Who, when he died in 2014, aged 92, had a net worth of over 8 million.

• 51:14Morgan Housel?

  And he was a janitor.

• 51:15Steven Bartlett?

  How did he do that?

• 51:17Morgan Housel?

  He took what very little money he could save from his job as a janitor, mopping floors at the gas station. He put it in stocks and he left it alone for 70 years. And that's it, that's all you need. That's all you need to do. If you have endurance and you're investing and you can keep it going for years or decades, you don't need to be a genius stock picker. And not only do you not need to do it, if you have endurance, you're going to beat literally 97 or 99% of the genius stock pickers. And what's so interesting about it is like picking the right stocks is hard. It's supposed to be hard. Like, there's no world in which everybody who tries to beat the market is going to do it. Of course it's hard, just like being an NBA player is hard. And, but having endurance is like largely in your control.

• 51:59Morgan Housel?

  It's so much easier to just be patient than it is to pick the right stocks every single day. And I think some people, nature nurtures, some people like probably Ronald Reed and my parents, just understand it naturally. It's not hard for them to be patient. But like, there are professional investors who work 80 hours a week. For thirty years to try to beat the market and they can't do it. Not only some, that that explains like most of them. And even the ones who can do it are maybe going to beat the market by half a percent per year, one percent per year. But if you can have endurance, that is, that's a bigger benefit than you can have by even being like a very successful stockbagger. Like somebody who outperforms the market by one percentage point per year and they can do that for ten years, that's amazing. That's like Mount Rushmore investor.

• 52:43Morgan Housel?

  But somebody who earns average returns and does it for twenty years is gonna have way more money. You do it for thirty years, you're gonna be filthy rich. You'd be like Ronald Reed, you can be a janitor who leaves eight million dollars to charity when you die.

• 52:55Steven Bartlett?

  Is buying a house a good or bad financial decision? My brother, who works in my company, and he's the one that introduced me to your book many, many years ago, said to me something along the lines of, Steve, don't buy houses to make money because you have the ability to play a different set of games that very few people can play.

• 53:14Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Steven Bartlett?

  And what I mean by that is he kind of explained it to me, he goes, listen, everyone can buy a house, so the returns there aren't gonna be huge. Go find a game that like only you can play, you'll get bigger returns.

• 53:24Morgan Housel?

  If you're buying a house because you think it's gonna be a good financial investment, stop. Like, even if it turns out in hindsight that it was, it doesn't matter. I think these are just purely lifestyle decisions. And I think so many people get screwed up when they're in a spot in their life where they should be renting because they need to be mobile. They need to move around to a new job, new career, new school, whatever it is. But they end up buying because they think they're gonna make money doing it. And that's like, that's the problem. So I own a house, and if I ended up losing money on it, I, I, I don't think I'd care. That's not why I'm owning it. I'm owning it just because I want the stability for my family.

• 53:56Steven Bartlett?

  People, people buy houses because they think that they're making loads of money.

• 53:58Morgan Housel?

  Because there have been periods of time in which people have made loads of money. Historically, like that's the anomaly. Historically, in the US and the UK, housing prices adjusted for inflation go nowhere. It's just been the last twenty or thirty years that there's this very brief window of time that owning a house was a great investment. Robert Schiller won the Nobel Prize about a decade ago for his work in showing that over the last hundred and fifty years in the United States, adjusted for inflation, most home prices have been flat as a pancake. It's just the last twenty years that have inflated people's expectations of what a house can do.

• 54:32Steven Bartlett?

  Statistically, there's gonna be at least one person listening to this that has made an offer as we speak for a house under the assumption that it's going to help them stack wealth.

• 54:45Steven Bartlett?

  If they were purely doing it for those reasons, what would you tell them to do instead?

• 54:49Morgan Housel?

  If that's purely the reason, run for your life. Don't do it. Particularly, I mean, it used to be, and maybe it still is like this in many cities in America and the UK, but it used to be that rentals were almost without exception shitty houses. There were no good rentals. A big change, at least in America in the last 20 years, is that most big cities have tons and tons of luxury apartments to live in, and they're great places to live. And they're in the city centers and they got beautiful granite countertops and they're great places to live. Don't fall for the idea that you can't live well if you're renting. I think that's the problem. And realize that if you're doing it for financial reasons, you're probably about to borrow a shitload of money for an investment that historically has been a very bad investment.

• 55:34Morgan Housel?

  Like, if you put it in those terms, like, what are we doing here, man? You're going to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for an investment that historically has been a loss? That's what you're doing here? You feel good about that? That's what I'd say to that person. Godspeed.

• 55:50Steven Bartlett?

  I would love to be in the room somewhere where that person has just looked at their partner after persuading them to make that offer because it was going to make them rich.

• 55:59Morgan Housel?

  Sorry, guys.

• 56:02Steven Bartlett?

  To make sure I and everyone listening understands what the blockchain is, it's this, public can think of it as this database in the sky. And the database in the sky is checked by everybody who has their computer on and is interacting with the database in the sky. So you no longer need a government or a bank checking the transactions and the contracts in the database in the sky. Because now all of our computers that are on, interacting with it, are in the background checking that if I send you one Bitcoin, if I do something on this database in the sky, it is in accordance with the history of the database. And it is in line with that database.

• 56:47Raoul Pal?

  Yeah. And to make it less complicated, it just makes it a source of truth.

• 56:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 56:53Raoul Pal?

  In a world where we don't even know who is who online, who owes each other what, any of these things, we now have a source of truth that everybody can agree on.

• 57:04Steven Bartlett?

  And everyone can see.

• 57:04Raoul Pal?

  And everybody can see.

• 57:06Steven Bartlett?

  And you don't need to trust anybody.

• 57:08Raoul Pal?

  And so that is a technology.

• 57:12Raoul Pal?

  Solves many things, problems that we don't even know we've got because they're so part of how we exist. So the technology is not about money. The technology is about truth and exchanging value and creating value in a digital age. Now, what is interesting and powerful about this technology? Is we've seen technologies similar before, the internet. We've seen broadband. We've seen these big global infrastructure things.

• 57:52Raoul Pal?

  Most of those, the internet was a public service good.

• 57:57Raoul Pal?

  Broadband was all built private sector.

• 58:01Raoul Pal?

  We didn't get to make money out of these things, really. Amazon made the money, or whoever it was building the broadband, they all went bust as well. What we've got here is this very clever thing that everybody in this blockchain gets rewarded for their role that they play.

• 58:24Raoul Pal?

  In maintaining the blockchain? In maintaining the blockchain. And because these things are scarce, and let's say Bitcoin being the most classic example, there's only 21 million that will ever exist. You've created this scarce asset that is a reward system. So the people who mine the Bitcoin, they use the electricity to solve the algorithm to get the Bitcoins to make sure there's only 21 million, well, they get rewarded. The people who verify the chain get rewarded. And then we can buy the asset, which is actually us investing in the future use cases of this thing. Are people going to use it for storing wealth or building stuff? So now you get this global infrastructure layer

• 59:09Raoul Pal?

  of which people can invest. Now, let's go back to the example of AI.

• 59:15Raoul Pal?

  AI, 99% of people listening to this will not be able to invest in it, apart from buying some of those big public companies.

• 59:25Raoul Pal?

  Because they're not accredited investors, they're not allowed, they don't get to see it, it's an insider, all of this stuff. This is the inverse. It is fractionalizable.

• 59:36Raoul Pal?

  So a Bitcoin, you don't have to buy one at 60, whatever thousands it is today, you can buy a fraction. So, remember we talked about property and the guys who own the big high-end property make all the money.

• 59:51Raoul Pal?

  None of us can buy the $50 million apartment in Manhattan and then do it up and flip it for 250 million. Now blockchain, we can all put 10% of our paycheck in it. Do you think people should? Yeah, and more, but the point being is this is the only globally homogeneous asset on earth. It's the same in Nigeria as it is in Brazil, as it is in London, as it is in Silicon Valley, as it is in India, as it is in Papua New Guinea. And everybody is on an equal footing. You can put the same percentage of your worth in it.

• 1:00:36Raoul Pal?

  Okay, that is mind-blowing. And it bypasses the banking system, the brokerage system and all the other incumbent things that get in the way of a Nigerian buying an international investment. So we've got a playing field that's leveled in the fastest-growing technology of all time, in the fastest-pre-tasting asset in price terms of all time, in the shortest period of time, that is globally available to anybody.

• 1:01:07Raoul Pal?

  And then you realise, holy shit, okay, this is important. Now, why that's important is because having more investors in it means the asset becomes more valuable, which means you're more likely to secure it. People want to join the network to earn some of these tokens to secure it. The more use cases get built upon it because people are making money and it bootstraps it. It's behavioural economics. It's an incentive based system to bootstrap the most ridiculous startup idea of all time, which is I'm going to entirely disrupt money and create a new internet. I mean, that's laughably stupid and that's what's happening.

• 1:01:45Steven Bartlett?

  One of the, I run a company called Third Web, which is a web three infrastructure business. We, we've raised quite a lot of money for the company, about thirty million dollars now. And we have a good team and it's interesting for me to observe the use cases because people come to Third Web to build on the blockchain. And one of the really interesting use cases we've seen over the last, I'd say 12 months, that's really exploded is, is gaming. People building web three blockchain based games. Because if you think about games like FIFA, which is a huge game, obviously in the UK, where we're big soccer fans, or other games like, you know, RuneScape back in the day, where you have assets in the game. In FIFA, you have a messy card.

• 1:02:29Steven Bartlett?

  In RuneScape, you might have a sword. The thing that the blockchain now enables us to do is to take those assets from the game and actually trade them outside the game. So I can, if the, if the sword was on Ethereum blockchain, even though I'm not inside the game, I can trade that sword on the Ethereum blockchain. And so one of the most exceptional use cases we've seen at Third Web is people building AI games. Oh, sorry, people building web three games because these assets are now valuable. It's great for the game developer. They've now got this brand new economy for their, for their company. And it's great for the people that own those assets in the game because they've now, those assets are now more valuable because more people can access them. And if, if I own Ethereum, if I own an Ethereum token, which I do, by the way, I've been stacking it and refusing to sell.

• 1:03:14Steven Bartlett?

  But how do I benefit from the fact that games are now being built on Ethereum?

• 1:03:17Raoul Pal?

  It's really simple. If we'd have all been given shares in Facebook when it started, we'd have all been hilariously rich. But we didn't. The V C's got it. And then it went to the public market. And then you have to have a brokerage account. You have to be approved, right? What this is happening, you buy an Ethereum token today. If Ethereum ends up becoming bigger and more uses, your token value goes up. It's as simple as that. So you get to participate in an entire technological revolution, really simply from your mobile phone. And you don't need anybody to approve it or do anything.

• 1:03:58Raoul Pal?

  Yes, there's regulation stuff, but simple stuff like that is pretty straightforward for almost everybody in the world. So therefore, we talked about how do you invest in your disruption in the future of technology? Okay, here's one where you can really do it and it's easy to do.

• 1:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  A couple of questions here then. So you said it's easy to do.

• 1:04:20Raoul Pal?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Steven Bartlett?

  Let's talk the practicalities. How do, does one do it? I can do it on my phone. I have to call someone. How do I invest in crypto?

• 1:04:28Raoul Pal?

  You just open a crypto account.

• 1:04:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Raoul Pal?

  With one of the big crypto providers, Coinbase, Kraken, crypto.com, who are in the Gemini.

• 1:04:38Steven Bartlett?

  What about this though? My bank, my digital bank is offering me to buy crypto on there. Should I do that?

• 1:04:44Raoul Pal?

  Yes, you can. And you could do it via PayPal. Start somewhere. I'm not going to say no. But you will go down the journey that everybody goes down, which is the easiest on ramp is the best. Revolut, whatever, I don't care. Do it. Get a feel for what it's like to own an asset that goes up and down a lot. Particularly down, when it goes down, it makes you feel terrible. And you've got to learn about how to deal with it. And then because it goes up over time, if you don't do anything and you've chosen a good quality asset that's provable as a, as an asset in itself. It'll probably go up over time. In fact, highly likely to go up a lot.

• 1:05:25Raoul Pal?

  And then you'll start thinking, do you remember Raul saying that the bank owns the stuff and I don't own it? And then he might say, oh, but the magic here is unlike the bank where I can't take more than 10 grand out. I can put it all on my little ledger device because

• 1:05:43Steven Bartlett?

  What's a ledger device?

• 1:05:44Raoul Pal?

  A ledger device is, it's actually, it's a company that provides it. But what it is, because this is just an address on a blockchain.

• 1:05:55Raoul Pal?

  And think of it, it's like your mailbox. You can send stuff to it, but you can't actually take it out.

• 1:06:04Raoul Pal?

  Like your emails, somebody can't read all your emails, but they can send you emails. Well, that, that part that's private, that secure pass key essentially.

• 1:06:18Raoul Pal?

  Well, you keep that to yourself and it's stored on a device. And there's a complicated way of doing it and you'll have to go through that, which is you have to have this seed phrase that does it. This technology will change quite soon. You know, fingerprints, face prints and a bunch of other stuff. But basically, a little USB stick will secure that you can go and put in the safe or go and take it to your nan's house or whatever it is, can secure your money, that it's only yours and nobody can take it out.

• 1:06:47Steven Bartlett?

  I have mine on a ledger. So I have my Ethereum on a small, it's kind of like a small USB stick. And then that USB stick is protected by like 24 words or whatever it is.

• 1:06:57Raoul Pal?

  That's right.

• 1:06:58Steven Bartlett?

  And those words are on pieces of paper in different countries at the moment.

• 1:07:01Raoul Pal?

  That's right.

• 1:07:02Steven Bartlett?

  And it means that no matter what happens, no matter where I am in the world, no matter who comes for me, I can always retrieve the X thousand Ethereum that I have on this ledger device.

• 1:07:12Raoul Pal?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Steven Bartlett?

  Unlike a bank where my account could get frozen by the government or they could empty my bank, they could freeze my bank. I can, I will always have that value.

• 1:07:22Raoul Pal?

  And also, you know, there's a famous example of the conversation of gold in the United States. And it's been done in many countries in the past. The good thing about this magic internet money is you have to physically cross borders with it.

• 1:07:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Raoul Pal?

  Think of all the Jewish people who had to take money and diamonds and gold out of Nazi Germany and out of Europe. It was hard to do. Here, you have to do anything. You just need to remember a seed phrase.

• 1:07:54Steven Bartlett?

  A seed phrase being basically a string of words.

• 1:07:57Raoul Pal?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Do you know for people that are in that paycheck to paycheck cycle, which I was in for many, many years of my life, where I'd get paid from my call center. I'd go and spend the money and pretty much spend all the money within the first couple of days of getting the paycheck. And I was just waiting the next three weeks for the next paycheck. What advice would you give them about getting out of that cycle? Because you almost feel imprisoned by that cycle if you're in it.

• 1:08:20Jaspreet Singh?

  Absolutely. Well, before I give the advice, I want to explain to that person what's happening. Because you are the prime customer for our economic system. Banks love you because they can sell you payday loans. They can sell you credit cards. They can sell you lines of credit. And they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life, which means you keep making the bank rich. Corporations love you because you're not going to think twice when we show you this nice bag. When we show you this nice vacation, you're going to want the stuff. And so we love selling you the stuff. The government loves you because you're going to pay the highest taxes. Employees pay the highest taxes.

• 1:09:02Jaspreet Singh?

  And so when you're in that situation, you are making everybody else rich at your expense. And so if you want to break out of this, the first thing you got to understand, you need to make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich. Because when you're spending all your money, you are putting your money into their pockets. And you have to stop that. You got to keep that money for yourself. You're in a boat. Think of it this way, you're in a boat. And this boat has water just flowing in and you are sinking. And you got to start by sealing the holes. And that means you got to stop the spending. So if you are in what I call the financial danger zone, which is you don't have $2,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt.

• 1:09:46Jaspreet Singh?

  If you are in that situation, you are in the financial danger zone and you have to make drastic changes. That means right now, no more eating at restaurants, no more vacations, no more doing anything that doesn't put money in your pockets and no more Netflix.

• 1:10:02Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:10:03Jaspreet Singh?

  And the reason why I say this isn't because you're going to save $15 a month. It's so you can save two hours of your time a day. The average American is watching more than two hours of television a day. And if you don't have $2,000 saved up, if you have credit card debt, you cannot afford those two hours a day being wasted on TV.

• 1:10:25Jaspreet Singh?

  And that means right now, you have to go out and start using the time to learn, start using the time to work and start using the time to make some extra dollars. So what do you do? Start selling stuff, stop spending money.

• 1:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  Selling stuff you own.

• 1:10:39Jaspreet Singh?

  Selling stuff you own. So if you have a TV that you're not using, sell it. You have a car that you can't afford, sell it. If you're living in a house that you can't afford, sell it, downgrade, move smaller, and then work to earn more money.

• 1:10:54Steven Bartlett?

  I've got to say, a couple of things that I came to mind as you were saying that. And funnily enough, I put myself in the shoes of eighteen year old Steven Bartlett. When I was in that small apartment with three or four immigrants in Moss Side Rush Home. And I was, you know, my rent was nothing. My rent was a one thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds a month, which I could not afford and I could not pay. And I was intermittently working between call center jobs. And whatever money I got, I spent. And part of the reason I spent it, just pre, is because like many people watching, especially men who sometimes feel the need because of the way society is, I was trying to get laid at the same time. And it's hard.

• 1:11:37Jaspreet Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Steven Bartlett?

  When you're a young man, and I say young men in particular because the stats do support the fact that there is an expectation that men pay. When you're a young man, it's particularly difficult to do all of these things to cut back and also get laid. And what am I going to do? Defer getting laid for ten years? When I say laid, I'm really saying meeting someone and falling in love and having a, having a life. So what do I, if I, if I'm living in a shoebox, which I was, I can't bring anyone back there. I can't take anyone for dinner. I can't take anyone to the movies. So what do I do?

• 1:12:04Jaspreet Singh?

  This is why every Indian parent tell their kids to become a doctor so their son can get married. It's the same concept. But here's the thing, you have to pick it hard. Either life's going to be hard now, or it's going to be hard for the rest of your life. And you have to pick what's more important to you right now. And, you know, if we talk about balance, if you want to have a balance of everything, where you want to find a girl and you want to make money and you want to stay healthy, you are dividing your attention everywhere. Not saying it's impossible, but very few people can actually do everything all at once. And if your number one goal is to become wealthy, if your number one goal is to turn your finances around, you have to get serious about it. Because.

• 1:12:47Jaspreet Singh?

  Where you put your attention is where you get the results. And so if you want to be in a better financial situation, you are gonna have to make sacrifices. And it's difficult. I can't come here and tell you it's gonna be easy.

• 1:13:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Jaspreet Singh?

  Because that's gonna be me lying to you.

• 1:13:02Steven Bartlett?

  I've got to be honest, I did make a sacrifice. And for me, the sacrifice was I started a business. And frankly, that meant that I didn't have time to be going out, getting laid or meeting people or socializing. But it's, it, it, my story arc ends with it going well. And then the romantic situation taking care of itself many years later, once it had gone well, because I was so focused on myself. And it's funny, there is a bit of a paradox to life that the more you actually focus inward, the more you become a magnet.

• 1:13:32Jaspreet Singh?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:13:41Jaspreet Singh?

  Yeah, and you know, I, I also want to say that when I talk about building wealth, I'm not talking about becoming a money hungry, just money greedy, this is evil person that just cares about money. That's not what I'm talking about because I want you to live a holistic life because money is just one part of your life. But the second part to that is I'm not telling you to never enjoy life. I'm telling you to make a sacrifice for a period of your life that way you can enjoy the rest of your life and never have to worry about money again.

• 1:14:08Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard for us to naturally see life as seasons, especially when we're looking forward. When we're looking back, it's very easy to say, oh, that was that season. Like I can sit here now and say, oh, that 20 to 25 was that, sacrifice everything in my life to make myself something season. And then 25 to 30 was like building and learning. And then I, I now, you know, can, can think of, it's easier actually now to think forward in seasons now that I've been through some seasons. But for someone that's hasn't been through seasons in life, it's hard to think about life in those terms. I now think of my life in these five year seasons. And that helps me to say to, you know, even have conversations with my partner where I go. This is the season I'm in. And it'll last probably roughly this, this long.

• 1:14:50Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm gonna sacrifice these things and prioritize these things in this season. But it's hard for people to understand this idea.

• 1:14:59Jaspreet Singh?

  It's difficult and that sacrifice is difficult. Especially during a time where everybody's showing off everything on Instagram. You look at your friends who have a crappy job, but they're driving around in nicer cars, going on better vacations, going to the nicer restaurants, and you're thinking, what did I do wrong? And then especially if you're a guy, you have a girlfriend, you have a wife. She's gonna say, how come they keep get to go, can, they keep getting to go to Cancun, they keep going to these nice restaurants? How come you can't take me to these nice places? And now you feel like you're doing something wrong because where is this discrepancy? The reason why I call my show The Minority Mindset is because I'm a big advocate of not doing what the majority of people do.

• 1:15:43Jaspreet Singh?

  The first time I made a million dollars in a year, I was in my twenties. I was driving a car worth five hundred dollars. It didn't have a bumper on it. It was not pretty.

• 1:15:55Jaspreet Singh?

  My wife sat in the car with me and my employees drove better cars than I did. So, you know, you gotta be confident. And you gotta work for something bigger. And you want a partner that's gonna understand that. That's my belief. Which is not the easy thing.

• 1:16:19Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:16:36Jaspreet Singh?

  And that is the reason why so many people will go into debt to buy vacations, to buy things, to buy stuff, to look rich. And ironically, that's the key thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life is because they're scared to look broke. And now, when you try to look rich, that's the thing that's actually keeping you broke.

• 1:17:00Steven Bartlett?

  There's another element to this, which is my life was pretty miserable. So when you have a.

• 1:17:06Steven Bartlett?

  Relatively miserable life when you don't have many nice things because you're working in a call centre as I was until eleven o'clock at night time doing overtime every overtime hour I could get then because you're also lonely you're going home alone walking home because you can't afford the bus.

• 1:17:21Steven Bartlett?

  Anything that gives you a little dopamine hit gambling this is why all the gambling shops are in the areas that struggle the worst financially because those I mean a lot of people say because those people are looking for that you know that big payday that dopamine hit from a payday. My TV in my tiny tiny little bedsit room was like half the size of the wall. I was making reckless spending decisions because I think it gave me some kind of hit that I I was missing in my life it gave me like a dopamine rush that was and there wasn't many things giving me a dopamine hit at that point in my life.

• 1:17:56Jaspreet Singh?

  And see here's the thing during that time you are making emotional decisions.

• 1:18:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:18:01Jaspreet Singh?

  As many people are and it's very difficult to speak logic to emotion. But this is where now you have to be able to understand the difference because if you're listening to this and you're in that situation.

• 1:18:14Jaspreet Singh?

  You have to understand if you want to continue being able to live that lifestyle you're gonna have to make some changes today otherwise you're gonna be stuck in this lifestyle for the rest of your life and it's only gonna get more difficult. And that's the thing is if you want to become wealthy the first part is just your own mindset. It's your own discipline and until you can conquer that I can tell you everything about investing I could tell you different ETFs and index funds to invest in I can tell you different investment institutions out there I can tell you which stock brokerages to use. I can tell you just invest fifteen percent of your income into this for the next ten twenty thirty years and you're gonna become wealthy but until you can get over that mindset you're never gonna become wealthy because then what happens in that situation is when you're in

• 1:18:58Jaspreet Singh?

  that state of I just want to look rich I just want to have the dopamine and I just want to have some nice things because I deserve it I work hard you know what happens next? You are the one that gets caught up in all the get rich quick schemes because someone's gonna say look.

• 1:19:14Jaspreet Singh?

  Put a thousand dollars into this, you'll have ten thousand dollars in the next three months. Or I'm gonna show you, you can live the laptop lifestyle. You can work five hours a week, make ten thousand dollars a month, ten thousand dollars a week. You're never gonna have to worry about money again. Just buy this program. And now you're a prime candidate. Because now you are driven by this emotion of, I want that. I can't imagine if I had an extra ten thousand dollars a month and I don't even have to work for it. Because you can't see past it. You're, all you're doing is being sold by emotion. And so you, you're the one that's gonna get caught up in the get rich quick schemes. You're the one that's gonna make the bank rich because you're gonna get, stay stuck in debt. Corporations are gonna love you because they can keep selling you the nicest, the newest

• 1:19:57Jaspreet Singh?

  stuff because you wanna look rich, wanna show it off to your friends, you wanna show it off to the girls. And you get stuck in that cycle.

• 1:20:04Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.

• 1:20:42Steven Bartlett?

  The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. They've sold out twice instantaneously, so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.