Afford Anything - My Bank Account Hit Zero ... Then I Got Rich -- with Jaspreet Singh of Minority Mindset

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

#759: At 19, Jaspreet Singh bought a rental for $8,000. What followed was a nightmare tenant, a lawsuit, and a later house stripped of its copper, and it taught him what the real estate books leave out. Jaspreet is the founder of Minority Mindset, a personal finance YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, and CEO of Briefs Finance. He’s also a licensed attorney who chose to build businesses instead of practicing law. Avoid these 7 expensive rental property mistakes → https://affordanything.com/rent In this episode, we discuss: How hiring the cheapest property manager can cost you the most Why skipping a $200 inspection led to his worst deal ever Why an employee who’s just coasting hurts a small team more than a weak one A simple two-list exercise that shows whether your hard work actually pays How the tax code rewards owners and investors over employees How a terrible market timer who never sold still turned $100,000 into more than $1 million Where AI’s ripple effects could create opportunities beyond the AI companies themselves Whether you’re weighing a first rental, a business, or simply investing more consistently, this conversation shows what each path really costs and how to learn those lessons for less than Jaspreet paid. 🔗 RESOURCES MENTIONED JASPREET LEARNED RENTALS, BUSINESS, AND INVESTING THE EXPENSIVE WAY. MAP YOUR OWN PATH FOR FREE 👉 https://affordanything.com/fiire Minority Mindset on YouTube 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@MinorityMindset Briefs Finance and the free Market Briefs newsletter 👉 https://www.briefs.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I had stacks of cash in my apartment. In order to continue funding these operations, my bank accounts were now zeroed. I got two or three of the overdraft fees and notices because I spent all the money in there, that I now had to pay all the cash that I had. That's Chaspreet Singh. He is the founder of Minority Mindset, a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million YouTube subscribers, and he's the CEO of Briefs Finance, the company behind the Market Briefs newsletter and a set of investor research tools.

He's also a licensed attorney who studied tax law but decided entrepreneurship is much more fun than practicing the law. He bought his first rental property at the age of 19 and then became a serial entrepreneur. He started a party promotion company, an athletic sock company, and then eventually a media and fintech company. Through that company, he has become one of the most watched personal finance educators in the nation. his YouTube channel has more than 300 million views and 2.5 million subscribers.

We open by talking about rental property stories, but that is just the door to a much bigger conversation because the bulk of the episode covers investing. We talk about building and running a business. We talk about TRM, time, return, and money. We discuss having an investing thesis. We talk about his three rules of money. And we talk about how he thinks about AI, data centers, energy, cooling, semiconductors, raw materials like copper.

Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. Today's episode covers all five of those with an emphasis on investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Paula Pant. Welcome, Jaspreet Singh to the show.

You have some rental properties. You and I have been afflicted by the same issue. Will you share what that issue is? Copper. Copper prices and copper robberies. I'm laughing, but it's a laugh of recognition because I know the pain. So have you had your drywall punched through and copper stolen from it? Yeah, a lot more.

Actually, I started investing in real estate back in 2011. and I grew up in Metro Detroit. In Detroit, our economy relied on essentially the big three automakers, Ford, GM, and Chrysler. During the 2008 crash, Ford been bankrupt, Chryslerman bankrupt, GM was on the, or sorry, forget which one now. One of them was on the verge of bankruptcy. I think it was GM. But they were all doing very bad.

And so that really hurt the Detroit economy, and that meant our foreclosure rate in the Metro Detroit area was extremely high. I didn't know what that meant because I was young. I didn't know what investing was. I didn't know any real estate investors. So to me, this was just like normal because I hadn't seen anything else. And I was also in college at the time. I was there thinking I was going to be a doctor.

I was running an event planning party promoting company. So I was making a little bit of money. I started reading about how wealthy people invested in real estate. And I had seen some people talk about that. But I didn't know what that meant. I just figured, okay, I want to be wealthy, so maybe I should own some real estate. So I started looking at rental properties for sale. I first was looking at properties that were $30,000.

And I was like, this is too much money. I don't have $30,000. I'm 19 years old. Right. So I kept looking and eventually I found my first property, which was a condo. It was originally sold for $150 some thousand. It went through foreclosure after $2,000. the banks couldn't sell it. It was listed on sale for $8,400.

Wow. And I was like, oh, I have the money for this. And again, I didn't know this was not normal. This was like my first time ever looking at properties. Right. At 19. That was 19. So I made an offer for $4,000 because I was like, well, well, what can go wrong? The bank countered for $7,000. I said, well, no, let's try to go lower. But then the bank said that there was another offer on the table, give us your highest bid. So now I said, okay, well, I kind of like this property because it's in pretty good shape, and it was in a good neighborhood. I bought it for $8,000. The bank said yes. I put in $4,000 worth of work.

And then I rented it out for $600 a month. Wow. I was 19. Now, that's a rainbow and sunshine part of the story. Yeah. Then what I didn't realize was, number one, there's a difference between a good property manager and a bad property manager. Yep. And there's a difference between a good tenant and a bad tenant.

I was 19 and I was excited and I wanted to start making money like yesterday. So I don't want to wait. So I had already found a property manager, but I wanted to find what that would put the most money in my pocket. And to me, that meant if I paid them as little as possible, I'm going to make the most money. So I found the cheapest property manager possible. Oh, I sense a lesson coming on.

It was a big lesson that came. And fast forward, they were very lazy slow. and they also weren't a licensed property manager. But in any case, I had found this property manager, so-called property manager. I wanted to list this property. They were now marketing it for a lease, and I didn't want to wait for them. So then I marketed it for a lease myself too. I found the tenant myself.

And then I told the property manager, hey, put them in the property. I said, okay. Well, that tenant never signed a lease either. Oh, no. And now this tenant turned out to be a nightmare tenant. where everything was the biggest problem in the world. I just renovated the property. It was a beautiful-looking property.

It's a condo. There's not that many things that can really be horribly wrong. There was one time where the tenant was cutting cucumbers directly on the countertop without a cutting board, and she scratched the countertop. And she would call me, leave me these like minutes, multiple-minute-long voicemails as I'm in class, crying, literally crying about how I can't live in this property anymore,

It is a, you know, disgusting. There's a scratch on my countertop. What are people going to think? I felt so bad. I then replaced the countertop myself. And I thought the property manager is supposed to be the middle person, but they just kept referring the tenant to talk to me. There was one time where the tenant called me freaking out,

left me voicemail after voicemail after voicemail after voicemail, saying that the property is about to kind of go up in flames and all this stuff. And I was freaking out. And I, you know, I drove there with an electrician. And it turns out that the light bulb went out. And again, I would have these, like, mini heart attacks because of this tenant. Now, some years ago by, the tenant eventually moved out. We got a new tenant who paid more who, after I got a new property manager, things were all now better.

And now I am 22 years old. And I got a big letter in the mail that says you're being sued. I don't know what that meant because I'm 22 years old. turns out that same tenant was now filing a lawsuit against me. With the previous tenant? Previous tenant. Wow. Because they said that the bathtub was too slippery when the water was on.

And so they were now asking for whatever sums of money because they said that they slipped because of that slippery bathtub. Well, one of the good things that I did was when I fired the property manager, I got a new one. The new property manager started documenting things. This is one of the real important reasons why if you're investing in real estate, I recommend a property manager is documentation. So they had documentation of showing that we were trying to do some work in the property.

And the tenant said that they had slipped and fallen at a friend's barbecue. And they hurt themselves. And so we couldn't do the work. Now we had the documentation saying, hey, you're saying you slipped and fell on the bathtub. But we have this documentation saying it happened at a friend's barbecue. Then went into the medical records and found out that they were lying. My insurance company now had to figure out do we fight this case or do we

settle it because insurance companies don't want to fight cases. They want to settle. So they ended up paying, I forget the exact number now, but it was around $14,000 to $15,000 to settle the case. But it was not enough to pay the attorney fees so the tenants didn't get a penny. Why am I telling you the story? It's nothing to do with copper, which is what we were talking about originally, but it shows you kind of like, I just jumped in and I made a lot of mistakes. Right. I was excited because I saw the potential now because I was making a little bit of money every month of profit because it was $600 of rent minus about $300 in expenses. So I was making about $300 a month in profit.

Was it worth it? No, in the first couple of years because I was like on the phone every day talking to the tenant. But I knew what the potential was. So now I started buying my second and about my third while I was in college of these rental properties. because now I was hosting my parties, then got my real estate license, I was wholesaling real estate. I was trying to figure out how to I make money.

And I started buying these properties for, first was $8,000. The second one was around $13,000. And the third one was a little bit more than that. But they were relatively inexpensive in decent areas. The third property that I bought was actually in the city of Detroit. This one I bought because my contractor, who I was working with,

who was also cheap, told me that, hey, I got this property in Detroit that I saw. It's in a great location. I've already checked it out. You should just buy it, pay me $5,500 to renovate it. You can rehab it and flip it and make a big profit.

Or you can rent it out and have a great rental property. I said, oh, that doesn't sound too bad. He already did the work. He's done work for me on a couple properties. He's been relatively cheap. So it should be good. And so I took his advice and I bought the property. I did not look at it.

And one thing that I did right, because I did a lot of things wrong, was I would get a property inspection on every property, which is when you have an inspector go through the property and make sure nothing is horribly wrong. Right. But I didn't do it for this third property, my Detroit deal, because my contractor already walked through it. And he gave me the thumbs up.

So I figured why I spent the extra $200 bucks or whatever for the property inspection. Well, I paid that price. deal was what I called my nightmare property. It was the worst deal still to date that I've ever done. And the reason why is because, number one, when I bought the property, it gave my contractor a few thousand dollars now to start the work. Weeks go by, I go to the property and nothing has been started. And so I call my contractor. He goes to go, I'll get there, I'll get there, I get there. A few more weeks go by. And I'm like, what the heck, dude? Like, we were supposed to be done by now. This property, I could have sold it or I wanted to keep it as a

rental. And so then he like said essentially he's running into some financial hardships. Turns out he wanted me to buy the property because he was having financial problems. He just wanted to check for another gig. And this was one way to get that happen. And so he got the check and then ran away and so I never saw him again, essentially. Wow. So I lost thousands of dollars to the contractor. And then I brought, I found a new person, an even cheaper contractor. Because I haven't, I have this problem that I don't learn from the first time. I learned the second mistake. The cheaper contractor said,

I will do the work for free. Just let me live in the property. I said, okay, deal. Because it doesn't cost me anything for you to live there. I need the work. I just got to pay for the materials. So I pay for the materials. He's going to live there for free, rent free,

and the work it's done because now he lives there and takes care of it. And now I'm in business. And so the contractor had a pretty good idea, which was just open up a chart. charge card at Home Depot that I can just go and get the materials so I don't have to keep bugging you. I said, that sounds amazing because I'm in school. I got things I'm trying to do. Yeah, let's do this. So I open up the charge card for him at Home Depot. And I'm getting these charges of paint and other just general whatever. And I'm going to the house and I'm saying nothing is getting

done. I'm like, where's the materials? What became clear was he was buying thousands of dollars with the materials to be used on other people's projects. So he was double dipping there because they would pay him for the materials. He would take the money pocketed, charge my card to get the materials and now he wasn't doing

the work at my property. So now I have this property that I've been sitting on for months. I have a person living in a property that's not on a lease that has actually now destroyed the property even more because he had a dog and the dog was crapping inside the property

literally just in the living room and it's just turned into a nightmare and now I have to evict somebody without a lease which took a long time and now I finally got the property back and I've paid now thousands and thousands of dollars and nothing has been done and the property is in worse shape now than when I started

so now I finally learned my lesson and I got a good contractor licensed and insured and also a lot more expensive I wanted to finally make some money on this property. I'm so deep. So I figured I got to do something to make some money off of this. So I paid this now license and insured contractor to come in and we realized just everything is wrong with this property. The plumbing doesn't even work. Somebody had poured cement

down the main drain. So the plumbing is not even living the property. The roof is not even a roof. There's like three layers of roof shingles on this property. City inspector comes out and says that the property needs to be lifted by seven inches. And I was like, who lifts houses? What are you talking about? Why? No reason. My neighbors had to do that.

It's not cheap. I'll tell you that. You can lift a house. It's just not cheap. Yep. And so all these things start coming up. And then we start the renovation. And here's what happens.

When you do renovations, now it starts to have commotion at a property because there's like trucks outside. There's people going in and out. And so it starts to drive. off a little bit of attention. And then the other mistake we did is we had a lockbox at the front of the house. Some people saw this as this is a vacant property where money is being put in. One day we go to the property and now, like we're talking about, the copper plumbing,

ripped out. Furnace, gone. AC, gone. So now I had put so much money into this property. I am months into the deal I am like so drained on this property and now I have to start

kind of over again and I had to I didn't know about the sunk cost fallacy I was just like oh my God I'm so deep into this property and now it got so bad

because I needed to make some money off of this property because all of my money I was buying rental properties I was doing my businesses and now was all good but now all my money was going into this property

and it got so bad that I said I was in the party promotion business, right? Right. In that business, you're paid generally with cash, at least back then, because the way that it worked was I would host a party at a club, and people would pay $10 of cover, and it was a $10 bill, and so at the end of the day, the club owner and I would split whatever money we would get, and so I would just keep that cash. So I had stacks of cash in my apartment.

In order to continue funding these operations, my bank accounts were now zeroed. I got, I think, two or three of the overdraft fees and notices because I spent all the money in there, that I now had to pay all the cash that I had. Like, I'm in my, like, cash reserves to keep this going. And eventually, we got this property fixed. We got it licensed.

We got it rented out, $800 a month or $850 a month. money is coming in, things are good, I'm now having a little bit of money in the bank, and then the city just happens to go out to the property again, without notice, for whatever reason. Again, this was like years ago. Detroit was bankrupt at the time. It's not the same now.

This was like, things are very different, but the tenant happened to be running an illegal babysitting operation. I didn't know that. Nobody knew this was happening. The tenant was just doing this. and so the city then said we need to evict the tenant and do whatever so then the tenant leaves and I'll have a vacant property again

and at this point I was so sick and tired of this property as I just sell it I sold it for more than what I bought it for but I lost so much money on this property I was little scarred but I say it with a grain of salt

because I learned so much in those probably 24 months of me dealing with this, that I got a decades worth of real estate experience and that one deal. The good news is that gave me the knowledge and the confidence and experience to not go and do much bigger deals because the one thing that I would tell myself,

because I did lose a lot of sleep. I mean, I haven't talked about the story in so long, and I'm just like going through it all again. I was like, how did I go through that? The one thing I kept telling myself was there are real estate investors out there that manage thousands of properties.

Like Donald Trump at that time, everyone had heard his name. I was like, he owns all these big buildings. He doesn't even know his tenant's names. It's not possible. So I have to figure out how do I manage my properties? Is it possible?

I know it's possible. I just don't know how yet. And that how is what I have to figure out. And so that's what I kept telling myself, which is why I continued in real estate after that. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. One of the lessons that I often try to impart on this audience is that learning from the school of hard knocks is incredibly expensive. Yeah, it's real-life tuition. Yeah, exactly. And what's funny is, you know, as you start to grow, it doesn't stop. Yeah. It's just the dollars get bigger.

And you add more zeros as you grow. So, yeah, the School of Hard Knocks never stops. Just the lessons get more and more expensive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's one of the benefits of what we do of financial education on podcasts through YouTube, through master classes, through all sorts of like financial education is basically someone's going to make the mistake. Learn from the mistakes of others so that you don't have to make it yourself. Yeah, you should absolutely invest.

Because for me, I read so many real estate books and I was like, I know what I'm doing now. And so I would absolutely recommend you read the books, take the classes, go through the coaching, do whatever. But understand that there's always going to be things that they don't tell you. Because in real estate, every deal is different. There's always something unique that you cannot expect. And so you don't know what that is until you go through it. And so you can only protect yourself

against so many things. Definitely learn. Yeah. But don't stop the action. Right. Because you're going to screw up. Like the screw up is, I cannot emphasize this enough,

just know what's going to happen. You're going to get punched in the face. It might not happen on the first deal, maybe not the second, but by the third or fourth, it'll definitely happen. And so be prepared for that. Like I had another situation,

where now it's become a lot easier. But I'll kind of explain now a situation and how you can see it's been handled. Maybe a few months ago. This is not the first time this has happened, by the way. But I got an email, and I was sleeping from my property manager around midnight. And he says, hey, just so you know,

a drunk driver drove into one of your properties and the police started there, don't worry, I've handled it. We're going to file the insurance claim. The tenants are okay. The drivers go into the hospital. They're okay as well. But the whole side of this property has been destroyed.

Wow. Sent the pictures. I saw it in the morning. And I said, okay, let me know what you need. He responds a few hours later. All set. We've already talked to insurance. This is what's going to be.

Nothing needed from you. Just wanted to keep you informed because of the damage on the property and because of the insurance claim. That was it. I don't have to follow up anymore because I know that I've found a good property. property manager, it took a lot of time, a lot of screw up. And you know, you ask, you know, how do you find a good property manager? I mean, I can go through like the 15 things that I look for, but somebody can tell you what to do. Right. But until you understand what to do, you're not going to know. Yeah. And the way you actually understand is by like, doing it. And you cannot

bypass that action. Yeah. And I have made more mistakes than I can count and more mistakes that I can talk about and more mistakes than many people, which is, I guess, on one hand, why good or bad, but it's helped me a lot in the long run. Right. You know, I think of it almost,

like if you're an athlete, let's say you're a soccer player, you get great coaching, get great trainers, if you're really serious about it, get a great nutritionist, like you get a great team, you also form a community

or join communities of other athletes. who can, you can talk to them about your problems in real time and get that real time accountability and support and feedback. And all of that is important, but also every single day you got to be out there on the field. You got to. You have to. It's exactly the same in real estate, in investing, in business.

Yeah, because you have to learn each lesson separately. You know, I didn't grow up with real estate investors around me. I also didn't grow up with like people telling me how to start a business. I was in multiple different businesses because at first I was like, I just need to make money to buy real estate. And then I realized that I kind of like starting a business. How about to build something that's more sustainable? I was running a sock company, like the socks on your feet. It was doing really well.

At the same time, now I started my minority mindset YouTube channel because I got screwed over so many times. That was why I started my channel is because I kept getting screwed over. that I was like, I wish somebody would have just told me the stuff. So it was a place for me just to share my stories of like how I got screwed over. That's how it started. My focus was not the channel because you don't make a lot of money in YouTube in the early. Like I was a licensed attorney at the time.

But I wasn't working as an attorney. I was fortunate to see success with my business and my, you know, investments that I just didn't need to. So my YouTube channel was my hobby because I wish somebody would have told me these things. But I was working on my sock company and it was growing. We had built this technology where it was a water resistant sock for athletes. So if it's raining outside and you're playing football, your socks don't get soaking wet. My goal was to be able to license this technology to like the underarmors and whoever's of the world.

We were starting to get some traction now. We were growing and we were starting to get picked up by the news, and we now had stores carrying us. This is not many, many years ago. And we were trying to figure out how we can get this, because I don't want to be in the sock business, I wanted to license the technology. But it was the proof of concept that I needed to show that people wanted it. And so I was working very hard to sell the sock.

And then there was this person who was part of this venture group who said, hey, I like what you're doing. I want to get you in touch with Under Armour. And so they were like all we need in order to like have a, and it wasn't a for sure deal, but a potential deal was you got to get your patent approved. So they're okay. Patent didn't get approved. Got denied. And so that happened at the same time that my minority mindset YouTube channel hit right around 100,000 subscribers.

So now I hit this crossing point in my life where, all right, where do I want to spend my time and energy? Like I'm okay financially. I'm not like the wealthiest person, but I'm okay. I don't get to worry about money. You know, I'm like, I'm very comfortable. My bills are paid for with my investments.

Like I don't have to work, but I also don't want to live like this. I want to do something else and I want, I want more. I mean, that sounds greedy and selfish, but I wanted more. And I also like entrepreneurship. So I was like,

where do I want to spend my time? Do I want to build a sock company? Or do I like this like education side of things that I'm doing? the minority minds of the YouTube channel was, I don't know, making a few thousand dollars a month or something. Like, it wasn't anything that, like, was significant. I never really looked at it as a revenue source. And I didn't know how it would make money.

But the SOC business was established. It was making good money. And I decided I'm going to shut down the SOC company and I'm going to work on minority mindset. I was creating content and I realized very quickly that for me, the content itself was not a business. If I wasn't making videos, this business stops working. Right.

And so what I tried to do was I tried to bring on other people onto my channel. So there would be like, I think I was publishing three videos a week. Monday, Wednesday was me. Friday was somebody else. It did not work. The Friday videos would get like one-tenth of the views as the Monday and Wednesday once. And I was like, what the heck is going on? So I stopped doing that.

I tried it again a little while later with somebody else, the exact same scenario that people are wanting to watch me. Like, why do they want to watch me? I'm just a random guy. And it was really humbling but also really amazing to know that. And I was like, this is not going to be a business because if I stopped making content, my business stops. I was like, okay, well, I need to create a business on the back end of this.

My original idea was, let me create a blog. the minority mindset.com and it is going to be an affiliate driven, just a website for finance that's going to make money from affiliate marketing. We're going to have ads and other stuff like that on the website.

I went out and I assembled a team. So we had a couple of people in my office and then we had probably hired like a dozen or so freelancer writers. And we started publishing content but I realized we don't have a strategy and I don't have the time because I was busy

with my other stuff. So I then went out and hired the biggest and best SEO blog agency out there. And it was like a six-figure contract for them to now come in and help manage and oversee the blog.

I said, okay, let's do it. Well, 12 months later, and half a million dollars down the drain, we made maybe a few thousand bucks and realized that this blog is not going anywhere. So now I realized,

ah, there's my school of hard knocks tuition. Yeah. You can't just throw money in a problem and expect it to get better. Just like every other problem in the world, you got to, business is hard.

And you have to actually put in the work to see the success. It doesn't just magically appear. So we made a pivot. And that was when I then started what was then the market briefs newsletter. We still have that today. But then it was like,

you know, we don't want to be in the newsletter business because there's so much more to it than that, we want to have a media company behind it. So that was when we then launched our website as well. Things then changed again in 2025 because AI was coming. We were talking about AI in the office in the early part of 2025. And this is not that far ago, which is kind of so funny to hear this now,

me say this out loud. But in the early part of 2025, what we were saying was, AI is not that good yet. It can't write content like a human. It's not going to be able to do the things that we can do. I was like, yeah, AI is cool, but it's just like a glorified Google. It's not that great.

This is like, again, early 2025. And then I started talking to some more people, people that were investors, people in different industries, people in tech. And they were talking about what they anticipate AI to do and how they're investing in different AI companies. And that was when I had what I called the oh crap moment When I saw where AI was going to go Now I kind of started having all these sleepless nights

I was like we now have a more established company We have a staff of people, we have an office AI is going to get good And I don't know when but it's going to get good If we are just creating content like articles We're not going to be able to compete against AI So then in 20205, I had an all-hands meeting with our company and staff, and I said, hey, look, I have something I need to tell you. We are on the verge of being bankrupt by 2035.

Actually, I'm wrong. We're on the verge of being bankrupt by 2030 because of how fast AI is getting smart. And if we don't change, we're all going to be out of a job. And so that was when we pivoted from being a media company briefs media to then briefs finance. It was about nine months of just grind of now pivoting the company, learning AI, hiring AI engineers, hiring the smartest like AI brains that we could get to now change our company from just being a company that produced articles

to now a company that built tools that were powered by media, powered by AI. So it's not that our media division is gone. In fact, our media division is even bigger now than before. We're publishing more articles than ever on our website. Our newsletters better than ever. But our business is not the media. Our business is now our tools because if somebody now wants to learn how to start investing,

they want to know how to value a stock, they want to know how to find a good stock, now we have the tools and ability to help that person learn even better and faster, not just with an AI chatbot, but with like really cool technologies that we've been able to build so much faster, this would have taken 12 months to build. Now we can build it in 20 days. We also change the name of the company to briefs finance. So the lessons don't stop. Yeah. They just get bigger and more painful as you grow. Yeah. Yeah, the lessons have more zeros on the end.

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but B-plus players can't build a company especially when it's young and scrappy and bootstrapped and you need like an A-team. All right. How honest do you want me to be? Oh, bring it. you started, I know you have experience in this. You want to know how I know? Because of what you just said.

I know you're doing very well and successful, but what you just told me is one of the most difficult things to learn. A B team cannot build a world-class organization. In fact, we have a motto that I talk about, that if you have an A player, a B player and a C player, the worst employee is not the C employee, it's the B employee. They kind of can stay under the radar and stick around way too long. A B employee is somebody who's just getting the job done.

Yeah. But they don't really care that much to make it great. Right. That is a toxic cancer. And it sounds very extreme to say. But when you are, especially a bootstrap, startup. You are trying to grow something. You want to change the world. You cannot have somebody who is just trying to get by. Especially if you're under, you're under, let's say you're under 10

people. That culture, whatever you have, it's going to spread. Whatever the culture is, is what's going to rub off on somebody else. And so if you have one person who's just getting by, they're coming in at okay time and, you know, they're clocking out of five and they're slow to respond and yeah they're getting the job done and they're doing okay they're fun to hang around they have a good attitude that person needs to leave and they need to leave immediately how do i know this because i have made a lot of mistakes so pretty much every one of my early hires is gone because in the beginning you want to well what i did was i wanted to hire people who were going to be creative and fun to hang around which was cool,

except they wouldn't actually get the job done. You as a leader of your company have to lead by example, number one. Number two, you have to know what it is you want done and be able to measure it. So I'll give you, like, we'll talk about the Market Briefs story.

We used to have this amazing writer for Market Briefs, amazing person, really cool attitude, and he got the job done. I would ask him, remember he was the writer now I'd ask him what are your goals he would say I want to grow a market braves about 100,000 readers

I said okay cool the question I never asked was how and what happens if he don't hit that goal because he was never involved with growth he had nothing to do with marketing all he did was write content and he knew I would like the idea of growth in the newsletter well if we only grew by 10,000 people he had nothing to do with that

if we grew by 2 million people I mean, I guess he could if he built some sort of referral systems or built something to help grow with the content. But all he was doing was writing the stories. And yes, if you have good stories, people will tell their friends,

but how much? Because there are ways to measure that, but we were not measuring it. I used to have these like abstract goal conversations. What do you want to see? And people would say, oh, I want to see the company grow by 300%. Cool.

But I never asked, how are you going to contribute to that? What are the steps that are going to be done? And what happens if we don't hit those goals? Can I hold you accountable for hitting those goals? Now it's going to be a much more uncomfortable conversation. Because if you say we're going to take a revenue from, let's just say, $100,000 to $200,000 and we only go to $170,000, whose butt is on the line?

Are you willing to take that accountability? That's more uncomfortable. But there are people that love that uncomfort. And so we went through real structural. changes. As we started to hire people that really cared about the mission, we had to obviously pay them more and find people that the hiring process got a lot more difficult.

We'd make people go through tests. Like they would submit work samples. We'd go through multiple rounds of interviews. So we would make it a lot harder to work for us. Now people would start joining. And they would say, hey, we had these big goals, but these guys are not pulling their end of the weight. That was like music to me.

So you're telling me that you're unhappy that someone else is not working. working as much, yeah, we should be together in the office. Why are we working hybrid? Wait, you, the employee, are saying you want to work in the office? Yes, because we have a mission we want to achieve. Now I started to realize that is the type of culture that we want. There's people that want to build something amazing, not people that want a job. It's a very different person. Yeah. And it does exist. And so now we said, all right, we're going to go back in the office. because it allows us to maintain our company culture. We move faster and we innovate better.

CMI. Culture, move faster, innovate better. And so that was now our reason for now getting back into the office. We had a culture shift where now as a new team members are coming in, they were the one saying, why are the older team members not working, not producing? And so now we started to, we had a lot of turn around. And so that's why only one of my early team members is still here today.

And so then we started setting what's called KPIs, which is a key performance indicator. We went through this transition of education, which was, how do you drive revenue for the company? And if you can't answer that question, you should not be working here. Even if you are a writer, you need to understand how you are driving revenue for the company. So we went through this whole education, not to be rude or mean. I mean, it's actually a really fun place to work in our office. We have a gym. We took one of our office rooms and we turned that into a gym.

Everybody has a Nerf gun. It's a very fun culture. But we are a culture now of success and excellence, not just effort. And that's a very different game when you start grading success as opposed to effort. Yep. Because you can work really hard. But if you don't drive any results, if you don't drive any results, If you don't drive revenue, I hate to say it this way.

Who cares? Right. That's what we have to teach. And I'll tell you one more story. I hired somebody earlier this year. And he came in from a different state. The hardest working person ever. I mean, he just bust his butt.

He had this culture of, you know, I'm going to work hard and I'm going to outwork everybody because I want to succeed. The problem was he wasn't actually succeeding. And so you're going to say, well, what does that mean? He wasn't driving any revenue. And he wasn't involved directly in the revenue side. He was working on the content side of things. And so him and I had a conversation. I said, hey, look, man, you got a great attitude.

You got a great culture. I want you to do me a favor. Write down, what are your five biggest time suck activities? Like, where are the five places where are you spending the most time and write them in order? So we wrote them down. Then we continued the conversation. And then I said, okay, do me something else.

Here's another piece of paper. Can you write down? What do you think are the top five activities that you do that drive the most revenue for the company and write them in order? So we wrote them down. I said, hey, let's pull out both of those pieces of paper now and let's compare them. The number one time spent activity drove zero revenue for the company. Number two, zero revenue. Number three, zero revenue.

Number four was number five on the list of revenue. And number five time span was number four on his list. I said, what do you see? And I don't have to say anything. He said, oh my God, I completely understand what you're saying. And so now he's turned from just a hard worker to a producer. And so it doesn't just have to be salespeople. If we don't have a team of salespeople like that,

we have one person who handles all of our partnerships. It's just about understanding now what are the goals that you have, whether it is revenue, whether it is growth, whether it is whatever, and hold people accountable. Now you can build a culture of excellence, a culture of, of actually hold accountability, and now people start to hold other people accountable. And it takes time to get there,

but you as a leader have to now be able to come up with and lead by example and now work to actually build that. It's not a place where a lot of people would want to work, but the people that do want to work there, they have a blast, and they make a lot of money. Because now not only do you get big salaries, we also have profit shares. And so people are here now to win together as the company.

But again, it is, we call it the briefs effect. Like, you come in 30 days later, the common thing is, I feel like I've been here for two years. It's only been a month. You know, we reset kind of that standard of how we want to work. Now for everybody, but for the people that want to be a part of our growth, you have to be willing to work

and our team level in terms, not just a job. Right. As you were building out this structure, right? So you're building job descriptions, you're building out the scope of work, you're building out the onboarding processes, you're building out the KPIs and the tracking, the project tracking systems.

Every quarter you're rethinking the org chart and what's that going to look like? A lot of that, it's the structural skeleton of the behind the scenes. Yeah. But you simultaneously have to be the public face of the company. Yeah. Sometimes being the public face is not necessarily directly correlated with the top

revenue generating activities. Yes. How do you juggle all three? Because we're talking three points of a triangle that are very different. So the first one is you can't do everything yourself. Mm-hmm. It's just not possible. I've worked a lot of hours.

Regardless, you just can't do everything. So you have to be able to now delegate the operations. Right. So not just delegating the work, but delegating operations, which is the communications, the skeleton, the company organization, somebody who can ultimately lead that, especially if you have a personal brand, there's a lot of value in the personal brand that's not always like

how many leads did you get or how many sales did you get, there's a different value, especially if it's like a passion project for you. There's just, if you try to do too many things, something is going to have to go. So you need to be able to now delegate, trust, and find somebody good to handle those operations. Then it is, give me the second question,

a third question again, sorry. I'm thinking about the three points of the triangle. One is operations. one is being the public face. Yeah. One is driving revenue. Yeah. Okay.

So being the public face is actually not what I wanted initially. The reason why is because for me, I never wanted a business that relied on me. Right. Keyman risk. I wanted to be a business. I wanted to build a business. But there is value in having a business that's supported by somebody well known. That was one of the reasons why when I started minority mindset, I didn't call it just but he'd sing.

I called it minority mindset because I thought that was going to be my business. Well, it turns out minority mindset was not going to be my business. Maybe I'll change it one day to just participate the thing,

I don't know. But Briefs Finance is not minority mindset. Different legal entities, different names, different, you know, everything on the internet. And so a lot of people

don't, who come to Briefs finance, they don't even know who I am. And they're going there now in ways that are not directly from me. And then on the revenue side, that was something that was also a tough challenge because in the beginning,

so the way that we made money was our market briefs, newsletter would have advertisements in it. I realized the advertising business is very difficult. Not that like selling ads is impossible, but that it fluctuates a lot. When the pandemic hit, there was a period where advertisements just plummeted

because nobody knew what was going to happen in the economy and all of a sudden ad revenue just fell like a rock. When 2022 markets were going down, ad revenue was going down. And so I started studying this some more and I realized that like if you look at any recession in the last 100 years, the first businesses to go bankrupt are often the media companies because they're reliant on advertisers. And when the economy slows down, the first thing that companies do with is stop spending money in advertising.

Right. That was scary. And I was like paranoid of, well, what happens if we go into a recession? What are we going to do? We're going to need money to continue paying employees. I don't want to have to lay everybody off. So that was when then we added in something to sell on the back end. In the beginning, I was a sole lead source because it was free.

I would promote it and we would generate leads. And now we had a customer acquisition cost of zero. and now we can monetize through advertisements and sell their products in the back end. This was great. The problem is, I wanted, not problem, but I wanted scale.

I want to build something that is bigger than me. And so if I'm constantly the only lead source, there's only so much that we can grow. And so this was something that we're always working on, but now we've begun to identify different ways that don't rely on me to generate new subscribers and traffic to our business. The first one like I've talked about is people coming to a website

because they hear about oil prices, they hear about inflation, or they hear about whatever, stock is going up or down. And so you search it and then Google or chat CPT or cloud or whatever AI then says, here's an article about it.

And it's our company's article. and now you can go and read about it and in the article it will say subscribe to market briefs and then you have entered our ecosystem. The other way is through paid advertising which is a whole beast in and of itself.

It's not easy. I know people say, you know, online say oh, spend a dollar and make a dollar 50 back. The amount of work it takes, I mean, the amount of head banging on the wall it takes to be able to get to that is so incredibly difficult. It's not as simple as turn on an advertisement.

I mean, maybe for one, I don't know, however 100 people, maybe it does work like that. Right. And the money just flows like crazy. There's so much involved. Yeah. Especially in the side of data that you have to be able to understand which advertisement is driving revenue versus not driving revenue. And if you are not a data ninja or if you don't have somebody who is a data ninja, you are going to make. meta rich. You were going to make Google so

incredibly rich because you were just giving them a blank check and they're just displaying your advertisements and you're going to get zero ROI on the back end. Yeah. And that was also a very expensive lesson. But I mean, you can only learn to do that through trial and error. Yep. We've tested

it. We've broken even. There you go. Yeah, we've broken even. We've never actually turned a profit on, I mean, broken even not counting the cost of our own salaries, I should say. Yeah. And that's a whole other cost of cost of your time and effort. But yeah, it takes a lot of work.

And if you don't have like real wizards that are tracking every little unique, I mean, our Google Sheets and HubSpot dashboards have become so heavy because our media buyers now have to know so granular what it's going on. It's not that it's impossible, but it's a lot of work. And so now we've now started to build different sources of. traffic into the business. That was not just me. And as we can dominate one, we go to the next.

As we do good at the second, then we can go to the third to dominate, then we'll go to the fourth. That's where we are right now. I'm sure we will add more later, but right now we are hyper laser focus on these three. What strikes me as you talk through this is what you are so publicly known for, which is is investing and your videos on YouTube, which you've got 2.5 million subscribers. Congratulations. That is so incredible. But what you are known for, and the thing that I imagine most people want to talk to you about when you go to conferences, work the cocktail party circuit, you know,

people probably want to talk to you about investing. Yet in speaking to you, it's clear that where your mind is at most of the day is the actual mechanics of growing the business behind all of that investing education and that investing information. Yes. How do you cope with the fact that what the public knows you for is not what you spend most of your time thinking about? Well, I don't try to hide that. I say it pretty often on my channel that this is my hobby. And the reason why is because the minority mindset channel, my goal is to help people be better with money. Period. And the way you become wealthy in this economic system is by being an owner. We're taught to be workers. Now, what does it mean to be an owner? Well, everybody in America needs to be a business

owner. And many people hear that and say, I need to start a business. I didn't say start a business. I didn't say operate a business. I said, own a business. Well, how do you own a business? There's two ways. You can build it, which is starting a business, or you can buy it. As soon as you take a dollar and you invest it into the Apple company, you now become an owner of the Apple stock. You are an investor. And now you get to share in the Apple profits. You don't have to work at Apple. You don't have to go and produce anything.

You just get a piece of the profits as the company grows. As soon as you go out and buy a rental property, you become an owner. If the property goes up in value, that's, you're not. your profits. If the property is generating positive cash flow, those are your profits. That's how you build wealth in this country. Now again, how do you be that owner? You can build it or you can buy it. I like entrepreneurship. A lot of people don't want to do that or can't do it or just don't have the ability to do it. That's okay. You don't have to. It is a very special type of person that actually wants to go through the pain of starting a business.

I mean, there is pain with anything you do. Right. But like starting a business, like you've got to be so committed when things go against you. Like I have a friend of mine. He is the epitome of wantrepreneur. Okay. And I say this with love. He's one of my good friends.

He is somebody that hates working a job. and has hated it so much that he would start buying real estate and has built a good real estate portfolio. And hated his job so much that he then quit his job because he was making good money from his real estate and said, I'm going to start a business. And I would guide him so much. But starting a business and owning real estate are two very different things.

Because real estate is really, I mean, it is passive, especially if you can have a property manager. Yeah. Starting a business is you have to understand customers. You have to understand product. You have to understand what it is that you're selling and be able to now do the marketing because he would constantly get sucked into this idea

if I just start doing this on Instagram I'm going to get 10,000 followers. Okay, well let's just say you did get 10,000 followers. How many dollars did you get at the back end? Because getting a follower and getting a dollar are two different things. And so then he said, well, if I have 10,000 followers and 1% of them just buy my product,

I'm going to make whatever. X, $100. I said, okay, try it. And now you realize, nobody bought anything. Oh, surprise, nobody bought anything. What did you do? Well, I sent one DM out to these people. Okay, well, let's try to do this and this. And so it's this constant, like, emotional, like I get excited to do something and then I get very turned off when it didn't work. And then I get excited because they hear this new idea, paid advertisements. If I spend $100, I'll make $150 back. and you do it for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and it didn't work. So now you're back down to here. And then you hear about drop shipping.

So let me try this thing. It's going to work. And then you realize 90 days later, it doesn't work for 97% of people. And then you hear about 4x. You hear about something. It's just this roller coaster. We're just chasing this thing that you hope will be easy to work in the back end. I am sorry.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It does not work like that. It is hard. And one of the hardest things is to stay committed because you're going to go through ups and downs. You're going to go through a bunch of crap, but you have to be willing to commit to what you want to do and then go through those ups and downs with it.

And so, you know, a lot of people will say, I remember I used to say this too, I like marketing. I don't want to do Instagram or I want to do this. When you build a business, everything is there. There's Instagram with business. There's advertisements with business.

There's sales with business. There's operations with business. There's content with business. And now you can do everything, but you can't, just like what you say. I mean, you can afford anything, but not everything.

It's the exact same. You can do anything, but not everything. That's the difficulty of like understanding that you got to know who you are and where you are. It's okay not to build a business. building a business is a way to make money, but it's not the only way to make money.

You can work a job. And guess what? Some companies pay a lot of money. And you can also get ownership in those companies you work at, some of them, depending on what your skills are. And other companies will pay profit shares. And so now you can understand that, you know,

you don't have to start the company. There's many ways to earn money. But the question is, what do you do with that money? And what you do with that money is you have to be an owner. You have to be an investor. that's something that I stand behind across everything that I do, even with my employees, I tell them, I look, you are going to make a lot of money here

because you are getting this profit shares, you know, in addition to strong salaries, but you have to be an investor. And so we teach investing to my team. And so, yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of my time building the business more than I do on the content side. But the content is my passion to help teach the same thing, which is you have to be an owner.

period. Yeah, the same underlying principle. And that is, I should note for the people who are listening, that is the very, the core definition of a minority mindset because the majority are taught to consume. To consume. It's crazy. You know, our economic system is designed to make investors rich.

We're never taught to be investors. And that's the part that really is so confusing. And it's why is, I mean, everything that, I used to be so angry about this because I didn't grow up learning about money. I didn't grow up learning about investing. Nobody in my family was an investor. I grew up thinking that if I became a doctor, I'm going to be rich because doctors have status, they have credibility, you make so much money, and that's all you need to do.

But then I learned about this world of financial education, and financial education is not the same as formal education. Why did I never learn this? And then I started to dig deeper and deeper and I realized, like, I call it the three rules of money. Number one is that in our economic system, money flows to the investor. Which means when you go spend money at Chipotle, it's not the workers that are getting rich. It's the owners of Chipotle. It's the investors in Chipotle.

I mean, that's where all the extra dollars go. Oh, okay, that starts to make sense. Why was I never taught that? number two is inflation benefits the investor. So now what does inflation mean? People now understand that inflation is like the prices of things going up. That's fine as a definition. It's not exactly what inflation is.

Inflation is really the inflation of our currency, but the prices of things go up. Well, what does that mean? It means your Chipotle bowl is extra. You got to pay more for the extra guac. The extra guac is extra, the extra meat is extra. And so what used to cost you $6 is now $8, 10, $12, whatever it is nowadays. Well, who do this extra dollars go to?

Visit the workers. They might get a small raise. But what we've seen is that incomes haven't gone up to keep up with inflation. Not over the last five years and not even over the last 50 years. So all the extra dollars are going to the owners, the investors. So when you spend money, it's the investors that get rich. When inflation happens, it's the investors that get rich. And then when you look at the tax code, our economic system,

that's also designed to make the investors richer. I went to law school. I spent a lot of time studying the tax law. And what I learned is that there's a 2,000-page tax book. It's our tax code. And there's like one small section about how you pay taxes as an employee. It's the Earned Income Tax section. and you pay these set tax rates.

This is the tax bracket that everybody's talking about, the top tax rate of 37%. Everything else, the other 1,99 pages, is about different ways that you can deduct taxes for people that are not employees. So when you are now an owner, an investor, you get lower tax rates or higher tax breaks. Because as an investor,

now you get to qualify for what's called long-term capital gains. And long-term capital gains has a top tax rate, not of 37%, which is what you pay as an employee, but of 20%, which means you can make more money and pay

half in taxes, keep more of it yourself. And then if you are doing something like real estate investing, well now it gets even more interesting. Yeah, you're smiling because I know you know this. Yeah.

Because now you get bigger tax breaks. you get to take the depreciation right off, you get to have the 1031 exchange, which essentially means you can make more money and pay $0 in taxes legally. Get a good accountant, get a good attorney. But that's what made me so angry because I found this out by accident.

When I graduated high school, I thought I was going to be a doctor. That was like beat into me by my parents that just putting they're going to be a doctor. Yeah, yeah, I get it. When I was a kid, people didn't say, what are you going to be when you grow up? They said, are you going to be a doctor or an engineer? That was the only question. Exactly.

Napoli family. Exactly. Yep. Very same. So I was like, you know, I'm going to go into college. I know I'm going to be a doctor. This is my time to try something different because I know I'm going to do medicine for the rest of my life. I took a business internship.

I made, well, let me give the, it's a funny story. I made this decision to do a business internship. And in my mind, business meant being a jewelry store owner. Because I saw how aggressive Indian jewelry store owners were. But my mom and like, I was like, oh, that's a business person. Because they just sell the crap out of their jewelry. Yeah. I was like, I'm going to go intern with one of them.

It can't be that hard. And so I just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. And summer's getting closer and closer. And eventually I was like, you know, I should probably apply to one of these like, internships. And I have no idea how I landed in my inbox, but I got an email. And it said, looking for a business internship this summer. Heck yeah. And it was just talking about how there's this once in a lifetime opportunity to intern with a business Titan and you can learn the ins and outs of business and see how business actually works from somebody who's done it.

I was like, that sounds cool. Like, this kind of fell on my lap and I applied for it. And, you know, I had done like different like entrepreneurial ventures. So I guess I had like a cool looking resume. I got accepted. And I had no idea who it's with. Like I was so naive and I was just

going with the flow. So I meet this guy in a room with like the other interns. And again, I still don't know who he is. You know,

he's just like, all right, you know, it's going to be very tough and we're going to do these things. You're going to learn all this. It's going to be the best internship of your life. And it's going to be very hard.

You're going to work very hard. And I was like, oh, that doesn't sound really fun. Whatever. He's like, just come on time. So first day of the internship, I showed up late.

and he just destroyed me in front of everybody. And I was like, what the heck? Who was this guy yelling at me at the first day? I'm only five minutes late to the internship. And he's thinking, if you're going to come late, don't even show up again. But then I realized that this guy is a billionaire. He had built this huge consulting company. He owns all these businesses.

And he was appointed by the president to have his company lead the restructuring of one of the big three automakers. I was like, wait, wait, what? And so he told us we're going to go see his headquarters because we were just working in this kind of small little office. Like, it wasn't that big. It was just like a small office with just the interns and him. I didn't realize this was his private office.

He just has like a 4,000 square foot private office just for him in one of his homes in Michigan. So he was like, we're going to go see my headquarters in Manhattan. And I said, okay, so he was like, okay, we just signed this. so we can go and get it. I didn't have to buy a plane ticket. I was like, okay, he's going to buy it for us. He takes us to an airport. I was like, I've never seen this before. Turns out we're going on his private jet. I didn't know that people could own private jets. And now all of a sudden, I was like, oh my God, like light bulbs were going off. Like, this guy owns businesses.

He's not working at them. Like he built them. He's owning them. He's using his money to buy businesses. And that's what he's teaching us. And I had this, I mean, it was like, I don't know, probably 60 days of internship, the biggest lessons I learned was realizing this is possible. That was now when I started my quest of like, I need to learn about this money thing because I'm not doing it the right way. Like I thought medicine was how you become successful,

whatever successful is. Right. But I wanted to understand financial education first. There was a stat, you're familiar, of course, with white coat investor. Yeah. Jim, the guy who runs it, posted a stat on social media that said, I might be misquoting the exact figures,

but it's something to the effect of 25% of physicians who are 60 years old or older are not millionaires. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I was on the white court investor one time, and a few of my friends are doctors, and then they reached out to me, and I was like, this is the first time we listened to my stuff, man.

I've been telling you for so long. But yeah, no, it is crazy. I mean, it's just, yeah. At the age of 60. It's not 30. Yeah. It's not 40. Yeah.

50. 60. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a massive difference between even earning a high salary and knowing how to invest it. 100%. That's ultimately what my channel is for. It's to help people realize that.

And then with briefs finance to help people now. actually take action on that. Much of what you talk about involves the selection of individual stocks or individual assets. Where does an index fund strategy come in with this? Index funds are great.

You don't have to pick individual stocks. Some people will because they like that. And so there's ways to research that. But look, you got to start somewhere and I'm not going to recommend anything because I don't do that. but the S&P 500 is such a great place to start because you get exposure to the 500 largest companies in the stock market.

And so now when you have a situation where Sears is one of the largest companies in the world, which they were, and they start to struggle, you don't have to change anything. Because once Sears starts to do bad and they're no longer part of those 500 companies, the S&P 500 kicks Sears out and they replace it with another company,

which is doing better. Like when Amazon was growing, Amazon comes into the S&P 500, Sears gets kicked out, and it's completely passive for you. So it's a great place to start. What I always teach is more than what you're investing, you have to start with your investing strategy.

And so I like to give the story of my hypothetical brok cousin Bunti. And let's say he's the worst investor of all time. The first time he invested money was 1987. right before Black Monday. He invested at the peak $10,000. And the day after he invested, we saw the biggest stock market fall in the history of time

when Black Monday happened and markets fell by I think 20-some percent that day and then it continued to go down for a little while after. But he did one thing right. He didn't sell. Now, he lost his confidence so he didn't invest any more money.

But then years later, he said, okay, markets have been going up. I'm ready to start investing again. So he invest $20,000 this time. But it wasn't until the year 2000 that he invested again. Right at the peak, right before the dot-com bubble burst, he invested for the second time, $20,000. The day after he invests his money, the markets crash and they start going down because the dot-com bubble burst, we saw internet stocks, followed by around 78%.

Now he lost his confidence again, but he made one good decision. He didn't sell. So now he's just holding on to his stocks, watching the markets go down and then start going up again, and he finally starts to build some more confidence. You know where I'm going with this. And then the year 2007, 2008 come. And now he has the confidence to invest a third time. This time he says, okay, you know, I have some more money.

I'm going to invest $30,000 at the peak. The 2007-2008 stock market peak. And he buys the $30,000 and the next day markets crash. The housing market implodes. the stock market gets cut in half. People think the economy is going to essentially collapse. But it is one thing right. He doesn't sell.

Now he really lost his confidence because that was a really bad crash. And it takes him more than a decade to feel ready to invest again. And then he finally invests one more time. The year 2020, the pandemic. And now he invests $40,000. Right at the peak. And the next day, the market shut down. because the pandemic hits, the economy is getting shut down,

and we see the fastest stock market crash in the history of time. Over those four periods, the $10,000 in 1987, the $20,000 in 2007, 2008, the $40,000 in the year 2020, he had invested $100,000 total. But he did one thing right he didn't sell. Today, that $100,000 would be worth about $500,000. but if you just reinvested the dividends,

now his $100,000 is worth around actually a little bit more than a million dollars. All because he didn't sell. And so this is why I teach what I call ABB. Always be buying. The way you win is not by trying to time the market. It's not by trying to predict what the market's going to do. It's just buying.

Every week, every two weeks, every month you just buy. Now, the easiest way you can start buying is something like, you know, the S&P 500, a broad market index. there's a chance that that will not be enough, especially today, because the cost of living is growing. We can all think back of how much groceries have increased in price over the last five years. We can think back to how much cars have gotten more expensive. We can think back to housing and how much more expensive it is. And so as you start to see how the cost of living is growing, now you can start to understand,

I might need more money. And if the average market return isn't enough, you might need more. And so this is where you have three options. You can increase the time, the return, or the money. TRM. Those are the only three things that will determine how wealth do you become.

When it comes to time, a lot of people don't want to work later and you can't start investing last year. So we can't often change the time. So that leaves the return and the money. Now, you can invest more money you can live smaller, you can work to get more money,

which is an option. But it takes a lot more effort and work because now you might have to get a second job or you might have to cut back on your lifestyle. Again, that's a great option for some people in certain stages of the life, but not everybody wants to do that. Which leaves option number three,

increase your returns. Anytime you try to increase your returns, you're going to increase risk, but with better research, you can lower that risk. And so that's what we try to do is help you with that research side because now

maybe you want to invest in, I don't know, the NASDAQ 100. The NASDAQ 100 is a group of the 100 largest companies in the stock market that are not financial. Right. SpaceX just joined. Which is very interesting.

But it's very volatile. The NASDAQ 100 is when the 2000 dot come, burst, it went down 75, 78%. What you want to understand with that is, yeah, it has grown faster overall, but it's also gone down way deeper. And so if you don't understand that, you might be the person making everybody else rich because you're selling when markets go down and buying when it's at a peak because

it's much more volatile. Or maybe now you want to get into more niche funds because you believe that. technology is growing and I want to invest in semiconductors or data centers or maybe you believe that because Americans are just generally getting older, we're going to need more health care. We want to invest in funds that give you exposure to aging health care stocks. Or maybe you believe that the Chinese economy is going to grow or the emerging market countries are going to go. There's funds for that. Or maybe you're like me and you're just like cash flow. There's funds for that as well. So, you know, I believe index funds, ETFs, they're great.

You just have to know, I like to teach ABB, always be buying. And then some people will want to take on even more risk, again, for more potential return, and say, screw that, I want to invest in the individual company. I want to invest in SpaceX, which is a much different gamble, especially when it's an IPO company. But, you know, any IPO company in the first 12 months, doesn't matter what the company. company is. It is a little bit of a gamble because IPOs go through so much fluctuation. They go through the lockup period, meaning the insiders might not be able to sell for X number of days. Right. And then when they do, you could see more liquidation. You don't know market interest. You don't know where the real value is yet. And the public float is actually quite small.

Yes, especially for SpaceX. Yeah. So, you know, there's the first 12 months for an IPO are really kind of a gamble. Right. But now you can start to look at individual companies and say, I believe that this company is going to do great things I want to invest in it. And again, nothing wrong with that. Just understand that if you're not doing the research, you're now flying blind. And you're just hoping that you're making a good investment.

So that's what I try to teach and then provide the tools for that. It sounds as though the underlying premise is first, you have to come up with an investment thesis. And then once you have your investment thesis, then from their fund selection or individual stock selection. You got it. Yeah. So it sounds as though much of what you do

is you help people formulate that thesis initially. Yeah, I mean, it's really just a matter of knowing. You know, we say personal finance is personal. Do you want growth? Do you want income or do you want to preserve your wealth? And you have to be able to know that first thing because people say, I want to make money. what does that mean?

Right? Do you want $5,000 a month in cash flow, $50,000 a month in cash flow? Do you want to see the value of portfolio go from $100 to $1,000? Like, what does that mean that you want to make money? Okay, now that you have worked to identify that,

are you going to be able to invest money consistently? Like, do you know how to live below your means so you always have money to invest? Because investing is not investing $1,000 today and then never investing again, is constantly investing. Ideally, putting money aside every time you get paid,

take 15% of your income and put it into your investments. Every time you get paid, whether it's every week, every two weeks, every month, just put this money aside into your investments. Now, it doesn't mean you have to invest it today,

but put it aside to be invested. And now how you invested is going to depend on your strategy. And that's where now you've got to be able to identify, identify what's right for you. As you teach, you're speaking to a crowd, and this is true anytime you're talking to a mass audience,

a crowd that has a very different set of incoming knowledge. So you're simultaneously speaking to beginners as well as more sophisticated investors. How do you balance that when you're presenting to an audience of two and a half million? I think for me, I just, I want to speak to myself. I noticed that when I started learning about money, people would just make things complicated. I had no idea what the heck they were talking about and why they were making it complicated. So people would say things like securities and equities. Equity is just a fancy way of saying stock.

You don't have to say equities and sound smart. And then you hear the truth. pressure yields have jumped by 30 basis points. What does that mean? And so as I started to learn what they meant, I was like, why are people making it so complicated? Yeah. Just speak in English.

Because everybody understands it then. Jargon free. Yeah. It's jargon free. And so that to me was I think, you know, it doesn't matter who you are. People like simplicity. And I know I do.

Because even like when I'm talking to somebody, if they talk in just all these like fancy words, there's a chance they don't really understand what they're talking about. And so if you can break it down so a five-year-old can understand, well, you have to understand it pretty well to be able to do that.

And so for me it was just been, I think, just simplifying things. Part of the beauty of that is that when you simplify things, you explain what it is and then you can always, something that I often do is I'll say the fancy word for that is blank.

Yeah. And it's a way of then teaching the jargon so that people have that better understanding while also just explaining in plain talk. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to do it. Yeah. So far, we've talked about real estate.

We've talked about the behind the scenes of running the business, being an entrepreneur. We've talked about investing. What we haven't discussed so far is this particular moment in time. End of 2026, AI is much better than it was even in January of 2025.

One of the most humbling lessons of learning and investing is the acceptance that we cannot predict the future. But we can have some directional guesses broadly about where things might be headed. Yeah. Do you have that? any ideas on where things might be headed as we, in this last quarter of 2026 and as we go into

2027? Well, I think predicting over the next six months is very difficult. Predicting over the next six years is much easier. Because we know that technology is being adopted at a rate faster than ever. AI is growing. It's not going to go away. Is AI a bubble? Only time will tell. I mean, there's a good chance that it is. Some people believe that it's not. If it bursts, Does that mean AI is going away? No. So AI as a new industry is absolutely an opportunity in that sense because still so many people don't know how to use it. So many people have not adopted it. But if I had to predict, I would say that 10 years from now, there's going to be a lot more people using AI than today.

Then we can just kind of go down that rabbit hole because if we need more AI, we're going to need more energy. because every query that you put into chat, GPT or Claude uses a lot more energy than a question in Google. So that means we're going to need more investments into energy, whether there's nuclear or electricity or the power grid. Then we can look into the next layer, which is every time that you ask a question into AI,

that information has to be stored somewhere, that's stored in things like data centers. So we're probably going to have more need for data centers 10 years from now. Then we could take a look at the cooling of the data centers. That is a whole thing in industry in the end of itself. And we could take a look at, well, in order to power all of this AI, we need semiconductors.

And that's a whole industry in and of itself too. So technology is something that I believe is not going to stop, even if we see a market downturn. I think 10 years from now, technology is going to be more prominent and a bigger thing than it is today. on the flip side, I think inflation is not going to go away. I think that's going to continue to be a problem. And the level of inflation is going to fluctuate, that has an impact on people.

We know that inflation makes savers poorer, and it makes people working a job. Your salaries don't stretch as far. That makes it a more need to be an investor. I don't think that trend is going to slow down. And I think there's going to be a lot of changes geopolitically, meaning like countries are going to try to take the number one spot as the world's superpower. By now the United States is number one. But we know that China and other countries are aggressively investing in AI.

That way they can grow their economies to be bigger and stronger than the United States. Again, that is another shift of money moving, which also couldn't create opportunities. as well. I think that's three big things that are happening right now that over the next 10 years, if I had to give a prediction or guess, I think AI inflation and international money, our places of our money is moving. We had a guest on recently. She echoed the same thoughts with regard to the support around AI, the infrastructure around AI, data centers, semiconductors. She named a whole list of things. She said the same thing in terms of we don't know necessarily which public facing companies are going to succeed. And if you think back to the early days of the internet,

you know, we didn't know if it was going to be Netscape browsers or Internet Explorer. We didn't know what tools we would be using. But the guts in the back end, there's to a certain extent, a bit more, I don't want to say predictability. It's the thing that fewer people think about because it's less public-facing. Yeah. But it's the, it is that fundamental skeleton. Yeah.

When the gold rush was happening, there was the people that were trying to dig out the gold. You don't know who's going to win. Right. But there was the people that were selling the picks and shovels that way people could dig the gold.

And it was the picks and shovel people that got rich. And that's what you're talking about in the spine of AI. We don't know if it's going to be ChachyPT or Claude or Gemini or perplexity or whatever. But we know that they all need

data centers, they all need energy, they all need cooling systems, they all need semiconductors, that's a given. The other part to that, what we joke around about, not even joke around, just one of the things that we talk about in our office is there's pick and shovel investing, but what we really like is what's called the iron and ore investing, which is the raw materials that you use to make the pick and shovels. So the lumber or whatever is, you know, the actual head of the shovel. So investing in those materials and understanding that because there's a lot of changes happening in that industry as well.

Where there's supply chain changes with minerals and metals around the world. There's demand shortages and apply constraints for others. So there's, again, many different layers that you can look at the investments. And that perfect symmetry to exactly how we started this conversation. Yes. Copper. Copper. Copper.

Exactly. I mean, and copper is just one of those examples that, you know, copper is a metal that is used in every part of our economy. We use it to build houses. We talked about that. Use it in phones. We use it to conduct electricity. So every part of the economy uses copper. When an economy is growing, copper generally goes up in price because the demand rises.

And now because of AI, we need more. more and more copper, but the problem is we can't produce as much copper because producing more and more copper is difficult after you've kind of extracted all the easy to get copper. And that's where we're going right now, is we've seen a huge run-up and demand for copper, but the actual supply of copper has not been increasing at that same rate. What does that mean? Well, we'll see what happens. But, you know, there's, that's one example.

we had one of our team members, one of our investment analysts. He was just in Peru looking at some of the minds out there because there's a lot of investment going into some of the different mineral and metal mines out in Peru. He's going out to Brazil,

looking at some of their minds. He's coming to New York, looking at some of the graphite minds here. There's all these things that are happening. And so what we try to do is we try to, or analysts at least, go into the fields to talk to the people,

to see where money is moving. Because our thesis, talked about thesis, is somebody who's actually digging up the medal knows more about it than somebody sitting at a J.P. Morgan. Yep. Sitting at a Bloomberg terminal. Sitting at a Bloomberg terminal. And so, you know, we want to talk to the actual people to get real boots on the ground research

to understand how investment and money is moving. Is there anything that you've recently discovered by doing that that has surprised you? I think the metal industry is probably one of the biggest ones. One of the things that we realized is when this was a big shock, when the United States put tariffs on China, China responded and essentially said no more rare earths for you. Rare earths is just a fancy way of saying all these metals and minerals.

China was one of the world's provider of these metals and minerals. us, the United States, were sourcing all these metals and minerals from China. We did not have a way to get it ourselves. What we, the United States, didn't know, was how reliant we were on China. And not just that, our entire economy and military

was incredibly reliant on China. We learned this because one of my analysts was invited to a congressional summit in Washington, D.C., where they were talking about the United States' new plan to rebuild our supply chain for metals and minerals because of China, you know, rare earth stuff, stoppage. And that was when we discovered how blindsided we, the United States, were because we did not do an audit of our supply chain

to produce our products, to produce our missiles and event stuff, that we were relying on China to be able to produce our missiles, and then China stopped it. And so we couldn't produce our own stuff. So that was, I would say, one of our big shocks when just going out and seeing, we didn't realize how reliant we were. There have been two shocks recently. So one is what you've just described. We didn't realize how reliant we were. Yeah. The other is almost the opposite. It is when there were blockages at the Strait of Hormuz, there was an initial huge spike in gas prices, and then it leveled off. So you saw in February, March, you know, you saw the initial, initial massive shock.

At that time, analysts were saying, oh, it would go to $8, $9 a gallon. That prediction never came to pass. And why was that? It was because, in part, it leveled off, also in part because of China. And I think that was an effect that many people never expected. So there were downstream second-order effects that were not obvious from the beginning. The other part of it was, at least with the Strait of Hormuz, we didn't realize that there were other shock absorbers that would take on stress that we hadn't anticipated that would make things not as bad as we feared. So kind of two examples, one where we don't realize that we're so reliant and therefore we have greater risk than we realized. The other, we have more shock absorbers.

than we realized and therefore we have less risk than we realized. Yeah, I could see that. But ultimately, I think the bigger thing we must be aware of is that some of these risks will play out and we can keep kicking the can down the road, but we can only kick it down for so long. And the longer we keep prolonging it, the bigger the problem gets.

And so whether that's the impacts of high oil prices on the economy, the impacts of high inflation, the impacts of a high national debt, the impacts of the government constantly spending money we don't have, impacts of money printing. All of these things have consequences. And you're right, each one of those are a risk that have risk absorbers out there. But the risk absorbers don't always mean that the risk goes away. It means that oftentimes the risk just get kicked down the road for a later time.

but the problem doesn't get fixed. So imagine you chop off your arm and you get a band-aid. It's not going to fix the problem, but that's kind of what we're doing, is we're trying to solve big problems with small band-aids, which might temporarily, I mean, in this instance, it won't stop the bleeding, but we just keep kicking the can around the road.

Yeah. The risks that may come to fruition might be different than the ones that we'd feared. Yeah, 100%. Well, that seems like a bit of a bummer note to end it on. Well, you know, it's also an opportunity. I think that's the way we should frame it. Because any time things change, it creates opportunity. And a lot of times people focus in, like you said,

on the negative sides of things. But just remember, shifts are a part of our economy. And they create wealth. or the people that are financially savvy. So the people that are listening to you, they're building their financial education. They're the ones that are actually taking action. And so for you, this is everything,

every change is opportunity. Every time the government changes policy, good or bad, we call it whatever you want. It is a shift in money, which creates an investment opportunity. Anytime Wall Street changes where they invest their money, it creates a shift in money, it creates investment opportunity.

Anytime people change their spending habits, it creates an investment opportunity. Anytime there's new technologies that creates an investment opportunity. Anytime there's a change in economic policy creates investment opportunity. And so just understanding that there's opportunity and everything, but you have to just understand now where that opportunity is.

And, you know, it starts with just the basic foundation of understanding ABB, always be buying, have the money to invest, and now where do you invest? Now goes into your thesis and it goes into what are your goals. Do you want growth? You want income or you just want to preserve your assets and then making sure that whatever you're investing in fits your goals because personal finance is personal. Excellent.

Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Well, thank you, Paula. You ask great questions. This was a lot of fun. We went in a lot of different directions this podcast, which is really cool. Yeah. If you want to learn more, I have a YouTube channel, Minority Mindset.

And then you can check out Briefs Finance at briefs.com. We have a free news editor called Market Briefs. You can see that on our website at briefs. Or you can just Google Market Briefs and you can subscribe to a free newsletter there. And then we have a suite of different tools for investors who want to start researching their investments and take the investments to the next level.

Thank you, Jasprey. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, the cheapest option can end up costing you the most. Jaspreet's first contractor takes us money and disappears. So he hires an even cheaper one who offers to do the work for free in exchange for living in the house, which sounds like a great deal, until he finds out that the contractor's actually stealing from him and nothing gets fixed. And then he has to evict somebody, but he doesn't

have a lease, which takes a long time. And so the lesson here, this goes way beyond real estate. This is a lesson for any business or any financial decision. When you pick the cheapest contractor or the cheapest insurance policy or the cheapest financial advisor. Cheap is often the most expensive choice because you pay the difference later plus interest. So eventually, Jaspreet learns not to hire the cheapest person, but rather to hire the best person, the reliable person, the skilled person, the qualified person. And that's what actually moves the needle. So I open up the charge card for him at Home Depot

and I'm getting these charges of paint and other just general whatever and I'm going to the house and I'm seeing nothing is getting done. I'm like, where's the materials? What became clear was he was buying thousands of dollars with the materials to be used on other people's projects. There's a quote from Oscar Wilde. Cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing and if you're constantly looking for the cheapest person

or cheapest choice generally, you're often going to get something that also lacks value. Now, it isn't a direct one-to-one correlation, but in real estate there's a saying, good, fast, cheap, pick two. That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, compare where your hours go

with where your revenue comes from. And when I say revenue in this context, I mean, we're talking about business in this particular example, but this could be where you're investing, investment returns come from, where your side hustle money comes from. I mean, compare your inputs to your results and see where there's a mismatch. Jaspreet describes an employee who works harder than anyone else in the office, but barely moves the needle. And so Jaspreet gives

him two sheets of paper. And on the first sheet of paper, he lists the five activities that take up most of his time. And on the second sheet of paper, he lists the five activities that create the most value for the company. And then they put the list side by side. You can do this exercise yourself. If you want to raise, you want a promotion, you want more income, start by moving more of your week towards the work that actually drives results. I said, hey, let's pull up both of those pieces of paper now and let's compare them. The number one time spent activity drove zero revenue for the company. Number two, zero revenue. Number three, zero revenue. Number four was number five on the list of revenue. And number five time span was number four on his list. I said, what do you see?

And I don't have to say anything. He said, oh my God, I completely understand what you're saying. And so now he's turned from just a hard worker to a producer. So that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. Get off the get rich quick roller coaster. So many, people fail by just bouncing from shiny object to shiny object to shiny object without sticking with anything for long enough that they're actually going to make money at it. So Jaspreet tells the story of a friend who hates his job so much that he quits to start a business with cool, awesome. But then the friend just bounces from one shiny idea to the next to the next to the next. Instagram followers, paid ads, drop shipping, 4X, every single idea starts with a lot of excitement

and then doesn't make money right away in the first 90 days because like almost nothing does, he doesn't stick with anything long enough to get really good at it. And then they get excited because they hear this new idea, paid advertisements. If I spend $100, I'll make $150 back. And you do it for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and it didn't work. So now you're back down to here.

And then you hear about drop shipping. So let me try this thing. It's going to work. And then you realize 90 days later it doesn't work. And then you hear about 4x. You hear about something. It's this rollercoaster. We're just chasing this thing that you hope will be easy to work in the back end.

I am sorry. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. It does not work like that. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Jaspery Singh. Thank you so much for being an afforder, for being part of the Afford- Anything community. If you want to not make a bunch of mistakes as a rental property investor, we have a free guide to help you not make expensive beginner mistakes. You can download it for free at afford anything.com slash rent.

That's afford anything.com slash rent. Free guide to avoid the seven mistakes that beginner rental property investors often make. Also, we have another freebie. If you want to work your way through the five pillars of building wealth, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, entrepreneurship. We have a free workbook that you can use. It's interactive. It's filloutable. It's completely free. Affordanything.com slash F IIRE. That's afford anything.com slash fIIRE. So if you're interested in rental properties, afford anything.com slash rent. And if you're

interested broadly in personal finance in building wealth overall, big picture, afford anything com slash F-I-I-R-E. Thank you so much for being an afforder. This is the Afford- Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. That's the biggest honor we can receive. Please share this with your friends.

Thank you so much for being an afforder, and I will meet you in the next episode.