The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Investing Vs Real Estate Vs Crypto Debate: The Retirement Crisis Is Coming & They’re Lying To You About Renting!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellus lenses for myopia control. Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellas lenses at your child's next visit. When I grew up, everyone said to me,

Starting point is 00:00:30 that to generate wealth, get a job, get money, then get a mortgage. That's one of the worst pieces of advice you can give somebody. And your future self is going to be poorer because of it. But that's what everyone's doing? Because we're not taught this stuff. So what do you think the biggest money mistake the average person makes is? Being a saver. So just having your money sat in a bank account?

Starting point is 00:00:46 Yeah. It's a guaranteed loss. You're becoming poorer every single day. But there are plenty of ways to retire early and be financially independent. And that's including secret hack that makes people fortunes. So let's talk about making more money. This is the all. ultimate money-making masterclass.

Starting point is 00:01:01 As we are joined by three financial gurus with very different opinions and methods to build future wealth. So I want to talk about pensions, credit cards, renting, bad money habits, debt, passive income, spending money to look rich. The first, what is it that rich people know that the average person doesn't know?

Starting point is 00:01:18 Rich people are more disciplined, and they're doing the little things that compounded to use results. Like investing. But, for example, the average American spent more money on Netflix than they do on their investments. And if I invest $1,000 a month for 30 years,

Starting point is 00:01:30 and something like the S&P 500, I will have about $1.9 million. Or there's no asset in all human history that's ever generated as much wealth in the shortest period of time than Bitcoin. There's one problem. Bitcoin is high risk. And if any of those risks happen, let me finish. Do you want to have hope that you have the Bitcoin, or would you rather have more security?

Starting point is 00:01:48 You can reduce risk. It's our job to educate them. So if someone is $1,000, what would you suggest they did? I have a different take on this if you're trying to make more money. What about bad money habits? Because when you look at the stats, money is the number. one source of stress for Americans topping work, family and health. There's a three-step framework, so I want to get into that.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Number one. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

Starting point is 00:02:27 And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 20, percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. I think the first place to start is people want to know how they can make more money,

Starting point is 00:02:57 because if you don't feel like you have money, saving and investing in these kinds of things appear to be pointless. I also understand that that's not necessarily true. I think you can start investing and saving with very small amounts of money. But for those people that are asking that question, if they're listening to this now and going,

Starting point is 00:03:13 how does one make money? Like, you know, I've got this job. I'm working a 9 to 5. It's paying me 30,000 pounds a year or $40,000 a year, whatever it might be. Is the right question to be asking, how do I make more money?

Starting point is 00:03:26 And if so, how do I do that? I always think it's a combination of making more money and also saving more money. But let's talk about the making more money piece. I think that everyone is unique in their own way, right? You've probably spent more hours doing some sort of hobby that I have no idea about. You play paddle, for example. I've never played paddle in my life. So let's say you were Steve Steven from age 20 and you're a really good paddle player.

Starting point is 00:03:52 You can start to monetize this type of skill, which you have that I don't. But perhaps you know more than me, I could take lessons from you. Even if you're not, let's say, the pro paddle player that you are, I might still be willing to pay you 20, 25 pounds an hour for a lesson, right? Just because you're naturally better than I am. And so I would encourage people to kind of lean into what makes them unique and where they've spent a lot of their time. I think everyone has something that they're good at inherently,

Starting point is 00:04:19 figuring out what skills you have internally and how you can kind of monetize those. What do you think, Roam? I think one of the hidden things to do is you really are a function of who you're surrounded by. Invest in your network. And I don't mean that in a kind of cold-hearted, you know, I want to network with these people. But just surround yourself by people who are also trying to push themselves to push their income, push our opportunity set. And it makes it so much easier. If you're the only one doing it and you're around a group of friends, you're the odd one out and you're castigated for it. find other people who want to do the same thing

Starting point is 00:04:56 and you kind of help each other in that journey. So at an early stage, that's just one of the key things is to find people who also want the same journey as you. That really helps. Then it's still about the best leverage of your skill set and being honest with what your skill set is. Just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you should be a doctor just because you've graduated because you can do other things.

Starting point is 00:05:18 And it's figuring that that's not an easy bit, but you figure it over time by trying stuff. You know, we've all done multiple jobs, and we know what we're terrible at and what we've been good at, and you kind of overindex on the things you're better at, and that works. So if you're early, it's the time to make bets in yourself and your network, and that gives you the foundational tools, so then earn more income and then invest more. Was there a seemingly pointless job you did that ended up in hindsight making you the most money?

Starting point is 00:05:46 And what I mean by that is, I think about my experience doing telesales between the age of 16 and 19, that's probably the most important thing I ever did. like not only do I spend a lot of time talking now, but sales is a transferable skill across raising investment, persuading employees to come and join you. And I think there's nothing I did that was more important than tele sales. The single best skill you can acquire in life is to learn how to sell. To be comfortable around people and to be able to get a message across

Starting point is 00:06:09 is the single most powerful tool you can have in life. Everything you do, finding a partner in life, doing anything you do is basically sales. And it's all people. It's all people. So if I'm this 24-year-old, A 25-year-old and I'm ambitious. I want something big.

Starting point is 00:06:25 You got to find more income. You got to have more income to do it. If I'm a 25-year-old and I just want to be okay, I don't mind my job, I just want to invest, you know, whatever. You got to find the right investments. You've got to have a system for your money. And then you've got to create a plan. Anytime you get paid, you know how much money you're going to save.

Starting point is 00:06:43 You know how much money you're going to invest. And then you spend what's left. Because the difference between the person that becomes wealthy and everybody else is wealthy people save and invest their money first. Everybody else, especially in America, I spend all my money, I wonder where all my money went. And then if there's anything left, I'll try to save and maybe invest and hopefully I'll get rich. For me, it's all around based around what is your vision of your future self? How do you see yourself living? Because that is what we do. One of the sources of unhappiness is if your current state is not moving on the path of where your

Starting point is 00:07:19 future self wants to be, how you imagine yourself? So practically and tactically, how do they do that? How do they create this financial vision board? Is there, do they need to know certain numbers? Do they, should they get clear on if they want to be on a private jet or easy jet? Oh, man, I think, I think you know. If you have to ask yourself, hmm, do I want to fly on Spirit Airlines or do want to fly in a private jet, I think you already know that question. But is it important to be explicitly clear with yourself? Because actually, if I think of most of my life, I wasn't entirely clear And so you either end up chasing, just more and more and more. It's generally not a materialistic outcome.

Starting point is 00:07:54 It's generally an emotional outcome. Yeah. And that's why it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is. But you need to position yourself in that future self and say, what does it feel like? Do I feel secure? Do I feel this? Do I feel that? So it's an emotional thing and not a material thing.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Is that central to a lot of this? You talked about emotional elements is being okay with... what other people think of you. Yeah, that's the other thing, is social pressure, right? So you may have the vision of yourself, and you just say, I want the three-bed house, you know, with a little strip of lawn and your barbecue, and that's great.

Starting point is 00:08:33 And around you, people are like, you should try harder. Yeah. So they're questioning your own sense of happiness, and society does that at scale. And then even the whole media complex is about kind of how unhappy and how miserable you are and should be. It doesn't make it an easy place.

Starting point is 00:08:49 We're talking about emotional and psychological barriers here. How do we get over people, not just being scared of what other people will think, but so many people are scared of their own money. When you look at the stats around avoidance, 82% of Americans admit they avoid thinking about their own finances, and one in four Americans have avoided medical care because they're afraid of the bill and thinking about how much it might cost. For Gen Z, 67% of Gen Z and 58% of millennials say they avoid checking their own bank account

Starting point is 00:09:16 because it's too stressful, which is compared to only 30% of boomers. And in terms of mental health, money is the number one source of stress for Americans, topping work, family and health. 36% of people with debt experience clinical anxiety, 23% depression. So people avoid their own money. A lot of people avoid it because the financial world's full of jargon. You need to go to a professional for advice.

Starting point is 00:09:44 That's what people think. It's intimidating. You don't feel like you've got enough money. You're going to let them down, yourself down, your family down. So there's this whole kind of thing around it. It's the confidence that you can learn. Because a lot of people say, no, no, unless you're from an investment bank or you're an RAA or something, you can't do this.

Starting point is 00:10:02 But just a little bit of confidence to say, you can do this. A simple tip that I think people can do is just kind of figure out how much they spend on a monthly basis. Track your expenses for 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. and you're going to learn so much more about just your personal habits of what you do because sometimes I'll forget that I door dash something for $30

Starting point is 00:10:22 or I'll forget that $15 or $20 Uber charge and I'll just kind of file it away because I'm swiping my credit card. I don't really, I'm not aware of it. It's like if you're going to the gym and you're not aware of your weight, where's your starting point? So I like to give people a starting point

Starting point is 00:10:36 because then they can kind of have that small step to kind of start working towards their finances in that sort of way. 65% of America. have no idea what they spent in the last month, according to the U.S. Bank, and 60% underestimate their monthly spending by a significant margin. Right, and that's exactly what I found. I tracked my expenses for a month in 2014. I thought it was spending $1,500 a month. Guess what? I was spending $2,800. And I wasn't making that much. And I was like, how am I off by an order

Starting point is 00:11:04 magnitude of, I don't know, 60, 70%. And I find that even like all my friends I issue this challenge to, most of them don't make it to the three months. But I think as long as you have an approximation of what you're spending that can help because that means then you're going to have a little bit of a difference of what you make and what you spend and then you can save that money and I think that's one of the bad money habits of Americans as they don't save right so it's really good point which is a practical step to just heighten one's awareness because you need to have sort of informational awareness of where you're at to even understand what you need to do to get to where you want to go so yeah I think you need to start with the mindset you have to build the basics you got to get

Starting point is 00:11:40 rid of the credit card debt you got to save a little bit of money like you got to have some room because investing is all about taking the extra money that you have, throwing it somewhere to grow that money. And this is where there's a three-step framework that I'll talk about because there's a lot of ways to invest. At the very simplest is I can be completely hands-off. I can work with a financial advisor. I can give them a money and they can do everything for me. If you don't have a lot of money, you're not going to get a very good advisor. But there's a con and a cost to a financial advisor, which is the amount of money you have to pay because they're going a charge a fee. So if I invest my money, $1,000 a month with a financial advisor, I get a good

Starting point is 00:12:19 financial advisor who beats the market. They get 11% a year, but I have to pay one and a half percent a year. After 30 years, I'm going to have $1.8 million after paying $600,000 to my advisor. Stage number two is I can be a completely passive investor. It's a little bit more involved than an advisor, but I can just put my money into the stock market, something like the S&P 500, which is a group of the 500 largest companies in the stock market. It's kind of like investing your money into the United States economy. This has historically averaged 10% a year, which means if I invest $1,000 a month for 30 years, I will have about $1.9 million. A little bit more work than completely hands off, but still pretty passive. Then we have the people that want to

Starting point is 00:13:05 be more involved, what we call is a active investor. And it actually. active investor is somebody who now wants to invest their money themselves. And I don't mean trading. I mean actually investing their money. And now I'm going to be doing the research to find which investments I want to own. Maybe it's real estate that I want to own. Maybe I want invest in individual companies. So it's more risk for more potential return. A small edge can give you outsized return. Because if now I don't get a 10% return, I can get a 13% return. which, you know, we're not talking about 200 or 50% returns. A 13% annual return means that about $1,000 a month, over 30 years,

Starting point is 00:13:50 is now going to grow to $3.5 million. So about $1.6 million more than before, just with a slight edge. And you've got to figure out how involved you want to be. On this point of being an active investor and picking stocks yourself versus being a passive one, the data shows that passive investors who invest in the S&P 500, like you said, consistently outperform most stock pickers, Over a 20-year period, more than 90% of actively managed investors, so talking about funds there, underperformed the S&P 500 after fees.

Starting point is 00:14:19 So should people be actively investing, or should they just put the money in an S&P 500 and be patient? I say most people should not be active investors. In fact, I say 98% of America should not be active investors. Just be a passive investor because if you don't want to put in the work, if you're not willing to put in the time and the effort to research, you're probably going to lose. And many people do. So why do people want to be active investors if the probability is stacked against them? Well, if you get a little bit better returns, if you're willing to put in the work, you can get better returns. And it is possible.

Starting point is 00:14:53 We do see people that are doing it consistently. Is there an element of fun and entertainment? Absolutely. People like sports betting and... That's the problem. Because the fun is, I like researching versus, oh, I want to see my money go up tomorrow. If I buy a house tomorrow morning, am I going to go into Zillow in the afternoon and check what is my house price?

Starting point is 00:15:14 I'm checking in the evening. What's my house price? No, because you know that this is something I want to own for the long term. Well, when I go into the stock market, because it's so liquid, I buy a stock in the morning, I'm checking it at 15 minutes later. I'm checking at lunch. I'm checking at the bathroom. I'm getting anxiety because if it's going up or down, I'm a very emotional.

Starting point is 00:15:32 And that's that emotional control as an investor, which is just as important as the research that you're putting in. See, how fundamentally different all of this stuff is people are so screwed. They are coming out of university with massive debts. We looked at the stat earlier

Starting point is 00:15:49 off camera and when we were talking about the fact that the percentage of 30-year-olds who have a mortgage and are married has gone from 52% in 1950 to 12%. Nobody can afford anything. So if you look at the average

Starting point is 00:16:07 millennial in the US, and a Gen Z. They generally have a 401k if they've got a job, right? They have some sort of savings. But they're taking massive amounts of risk. A lot of us would look at them and say, this is ridiculous. Why are they taking risk for anyone that doesn't? Because there is no way

Starting point is 00:16:22 of closing the gap between buying, getting the deposit on the house, getting into a house, realizing that future vision of themselves. However reasonable that is, why? It's so far away. Because the cost of assets has gone up so much versus their incomes don't go up. You mean the cost of buying like a house?

Starting point is 00:16:38 house, for example. Yes. Or even however much percentage share of the stock market, the average salary does, stuff like that, you're getting less for your money. So your future self is automatically going to be poorer because of it because you could buy less of a house, etc. Explain that to me like I'm an idiot. Like I'm 10 years old.

Starting point is 00:16:57 And maybe in the context of this mug here. In terms of why is that worth less now based on what you said? The way of explaining it is money is the medium of exchange, the thing that you buy something with. If we all have a lot of money, we've all got a stack of cash on this table, and you want to sell that mug, we can pay anything for that mug because we've got a stack of cash. So that mug suddenly is worth, not the $10 it's supposed to be worth, it's suddenly we're paying $150 for the mug. Why? Because that money has no value to us because we've got excess money. So when you create excess money in the system, it's this debasement of currency.

Starting point is 00:17:41 It's an optical illusion that the value of assets are actually going up. They're not. It's the value of your money's going down. And this is this pain point because your earnings only grow with economic growth generally, plus your progression of your career or whatever it may be. But those things, the scarce assets are going up optically by the amounts they're lowering the thing. So what you find is salaries go up at about 2 or 3% a year. And the cost of the S&P is about 12%, 13% up every year.

Starting point is 00:18:17 And a house price is about the same. Gold is about the same. And that's because they're printing more and more money. Correct. Okay, that makes perfect sense to me. So I'm imagining you will have a big stack of paper in front of you, which you're using it to take some notes on. And if I was saying, I'm going to sell you guys this mug for some of the paper you have,

Starting point is 00:18:35 there, but then my team said you guys can have unlimited paper. This mug loses value because you can all just offer a gazillion sheets of paper for this mug. Well, it doesn't lose value. It optically will give you a gazillion for it as opposed to, you know, three sheet sheets of paper because we've got so much paper. It matters not. So I'll be thinking, wow, like this mug, it's worth a gazillion sheets of paper, but actually each sheet of paper is now worth nothing. Correct. Okay, great. And this is the problem that people are finding is they put money in a 401k, you compound it at 10%. For my generation, yeah, that was

Starting point is 00:19:09 how the world work, and it was great, and it worked, and now it doesn't work. So they need assets that go up 50% a year, 100% a year, which is ridiculous, but luckily we've been gifted of you. And so that's helped. Go on saying it. Well, it's crypto. Simplistically, it just

Starting point is 00:19:25 outperforms all other assets, even with the excess volatility. So Bitcoin, for example, produces about, since 2012, it's produced about 145%, a year returns. So that's 10x the stock market. And that's including three 70% drawdowns in the middle of it. A drawdown being a drop. Yeah. Well, you feel like you're an idiot. You're losing money. It's all going to go, you know, you've made the biggest mistake in your life. And it recovers,

Starting point is 00:19:52 and it keeps going because it's a technological network adoption model that's happening. So it's just sucking in more and more people. So there's now 650 million crypto brokerage accounts in the world which is more than all the stock market brokerate accounts added together in the world and we're seeing it all around the world because everybody can buy a share of something so as opposed to be able to buy nobody can buy a Fifth Avenue apartment here

Starting point is 00:20:19 everybody can buy a fractionized share of Bitcoin which is in theory a hundred thousand dollar asset but we can all put in ten bucks five bucks a thousand bucks ten billion dollars let me challenge it then so Bitcoin isn't based on anything though. Okay, I'm being a fudder here. That's my job. Bitcoin isn't based on anything. It is a database in the sky that isn't backed by gold or it doesn't produce any sort of valuable

Starting point is 00:20:46 asset as its byproduct. So why, how can we have faith in Bitcoin? It's essentially in its essence, before someone clips me, this is, I'm playing devil's advocate because I know they're just going to clip this part out. It is essentially many would say a Ponzi scheme, which is it only goes up if other people take part in it. And if everybody decides that it's not worth anything, then it's going to go to zero. So all money is social consensus. Everything. Gold has no real value. I can build a table with gold, though. I can rest some things on it, and it's a good, it doesn't rust. If you're building a table of gold, then the value is going to be much less. If everybody's building gold tables. Trump has. We do. That's true. And so, really, really,

Starting point is 00:21:31 Really, it's just social consensus. What do we as humans ascribe value to? But the problem with the 140%, like you mentioned, Bitcoin has fallen by 70 plus percent on multiple occasions. Let's go back to the S&P 500. A lot of people invest in the spy, the S&P 500, and still lose money. Why? Because when the, we go through any downturn, people panic and they sell. And if we look at, I mean, Bitcoin's, I think Bitcoin's 2009, when it started, if I'm not mistaken. If we look at the crashes from, you know, recent history, 2020 stocks fall by 30%, Bitcoin fell by 50%. 2022, stocks fell by 20, the S&P fell by about 20%, Bitcoin fell by 60%. So in those times, people who are in the S&P are freaking out. selling.

Starting point is 00:22:29 Yeah, but here's the thing. This is the risk-reward that people don't understand. If you've got a time horizon, let's say the average drawdown in the S&P during a bare market is 25%. A drawdown being a drop in prices. You're getting compensated 15% a year returns for that at best. In Bitcoin, the average drawdown over the same period will be about 70%. But you're getting 150% returns. turn.

Starting point is 00:22:58 If you're on the winning side, though, if I buy it and I can sell it for a higher price. Just hold it. That's the key. All of these are in a nice trend channel. They go up. So anybody can buy something and hold it long enough. It'll go up. Well, what about, let's look at housing.

Starting point is 00:23:14 We can say the same thing about housing. 2008 housing crashed. Just hold it. I have too much debt. I'm underwater. My bank's taking it from me. People are buying Bitcoin with debt. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:23 That would not recommend that. But housing's different because you can. can endlessly create more housing. And we have a demographic problem in housing that makes it more complicated. Demographic problem is, A, everyone's leaving the cities now. B, the generational gap. Maybe we can afford the boomer houses. We don't have enough cheap housing for young people. People are relocating, moving around. So we've got a very interesting mismatch in real estate now that makes it more complicated than it used to be. Absolutely. And I do want to say, I think the part that we fundamentally differ is not that there's value in cryptocurrency.

Starting point is 00:23:58 I own crypto, but the difference between you and I is you are all in crypto. For me, it's a speculative piece of my portfolio. So I invest in my own business. I have real estate, stocks, my speculative assets, and then a little bit of gold. Imagine how difficult to replicate what you've achieved in your amazing career is for the average person listening to this. Versus buying one thing in your Coinbase account, your Robin Hood account, and doing nothing. There's no cost. It's not like buying a house. It's not like servicing all the stuff. There's no debt involved. There's nothing.

Starting point is 00:24:32 In theory, but theory isn't reality. How many people end up losing money when things go down? How many people panic, especially with Bitcoin, because if we look at especially the early adopters of Bitcoin, who are those people? These are the people that, well, a lot of the average person is, I want to get rich. I want to get rich quick. It's I want to make money fast. versus the average person who's buying the S&P 500, this is somebody who is, I want to invest and build wealth for the long term. It's a very different mindset. If the average investor of this is 32 years old, and we said, no, you need to invest for the long run, they're never going to have a house.

Starting point is 00:25:08 So their whole vision of their future cells is utterly destroyed. So it becomes a logical thing to actually take more risk. It's logical for them, because they've got nothing to lose. So Bitcoin, you're saying, is 145% a year.

Starting point is 00:25:22 Yeah. And in recent years, as the trend rate of adoption grows, it's probably down to about 100% a year. Let's call it that for easy maths. But now, let's think about this just from a practical long-term perspective. Warren Buffett is arguably the best investor in the history of time. He has averaged about 19% a year over the course of his decades, making him a multi, multi-millioner. And so when we compare a 20% return from, one of the top investors in the world versus, hey, Bitcoin is going to give you 100% a year. There's some sense of something to be wrong. So even if I'm wrong by 50%, you're still outperform Buffett.

Starting point is 00:26:03 To put it in perspective, Bitcoin since 2010 has done, I think it's about 90 million percent returns. There's no asset in all human history that's ever generated as much wealth in the shortest period of time. And because it's not a random thing, it's actually a technology, and it's a network model of technology, as more people use the network, and we see with Bitcoin, government's buying it and asset management firms buying and everybody else, you have this network adoption model. And so what it creates is the same chart as Google or Amazon, all of these. It just goes up in a log trend over time with some volatility. So you've got a secular bull market, which means that overtime prices go up for measurable, understandable reasons. And it happens to be the highest performing asset of all time.

Starting point is 00:26:51 there's one problem. And it's volatile. The psychological thing you're dead right about, it's very hard when it falls 70%. I've gone through three of those. They're hard.

Starting point is 00:27:00 The problem is, just like with real estate, everyone has said, real estate only goes up. Well, how do you make money on that real estate? You make money when you sell, or you lose money if you sell.

Starting point is 00:27:13 Ultimately, this comes down to that. You make or lose money only if you sell. Well, what about everything along the way? and what if I need to sell during that 70% crash? Because what happens during those crashes? A lot of times people lose jobs.

Starting point is 00:27:27 A lot of times people lose their income. A lot of times people need that money during that time. And so now I'm desperate or I'm panicking. There's two things happening. And now maybe it's the end and I go in and now I lose money thinking that I'm going to make all this money. I think I can appreciate your love for cryptocurrency and your 100% concentration in cryptocurrency. And I'm not saying that's suitable for everybody, right? I've got the bottom of Maslow hierarchy of needs taken care of.

Starting point is 00:27:53 I've got a house. I don't have debt. It's easy for me. I've got multiple sources of income that I can take that back. I'm not saying that for everybody, but I can also understand why a 25-year-old can do that too because they've got nothing to lose. But do you think that if a 25-year-old puts their entire salary and savings into Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:28:11 and they lose it, let's say they'd run through a 70% drawdown, are they just putting themselves in a bigger hole for their future as well? maybe before there was a glimmer of a chance that they could, that they buy a house, and now they can't. The most important part of financial markets is the least understood is time. It's not just price, it's time.

Starting point is 00:28:31 So if you're 25 years old and you get wiped out, we've all done it. We've all kind of screwed up and had to move home to our parents. We've all done it. You can do that several times when you're young and it's okay. You just don't want to do it.

Starting point is 00:28:46 At age 50. At age 50. Sure. You really, really don't. You become more risk-averse, generally speaking. So it just depends where you are and how much time you've got to take that risk. But now, if I'm investing my money in Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:29:00 or really anything, a lot of the value is what some people refer to as, like, equity. It's, I bought it for, like, I started buying Bitcoin when it was $3,000. That other stuff is equity. It's invisible money, which, in my view, is theory. It's not actual money in my mind. a bank account, it's sitting there waiting for me to sell, hoping that when I go to sell

Starting point is 00:29:22 it's going to be a profit versus cash flow. If I buy a dividend paying stock, what's a dividend paying stock? Some companies have big profits. For example, McDonald's has billions of dollars of profits. There's three things that they can do with that cash. They can save that money for an emergency. They can take some of that money and reinvest it and open more stores and create better burgers, or the third thing that they can do, which some companies do, not all, is they can just give this money away to their investors, the shareholders. It's called the dividend. So it's a cash payment for doing nothing except owning that investment. So if I buy something, whether it's the ETF stock or whatever, that's paying a dividend or a rental property that's putting money

Starting point is 00:30:02 in my bank account every single month or year, that's money I can use to buy food, go on a vacation, do something. Here's what, let me tell you. You're getting paid 4%. Listen, so I started buying Bitcoin at $3,000 a coin. When I was at, I went through multiple crashes. I remember when $20,000 a Bitcoin was the, oh my God, we did it. And once they hit around $70,000, I looked at this and I said, wow, I have my real estate, my stocks, my speculative, which is crypto and startups, and the 2% gold, which is now looking extremely inflated.

Starting point is 00:30:38 I need to lower this, that way I can have some more income. So what did I do? I sold some Bitcoin about rental properties. That now rental property is putting money in my bank account every single month. The Bitcoin, it's a big number on paper, but it doesn't actually mean anything unless I do something with it. Could you have staked it, which means you can stake the cryptocurrency and make a monthly yield from it? Get a loan against it. Now, that's adding risk.

Starting point is 00:31:08 Well, what happened into, if I take an 80% loan, 70% loan, let's, let's, let's, I'll, I'll, 50% loan. Yeah, it's very volatile. So let's take a 50% loan, and Bitcoin falls by 70%, which it has. Now I'm underwater. Now what? Now the bank comes knocking on the door, margin call, you're forced to sell, and it's a foreclosure. My point being.

Starting point is 00:31:28 On my Bitcoin. I mean, I don't disagree. And really speaking, people should have the ability to have cash flow or cash for if things go wrong, right? That's really a super important thing to be able to have a long-term view, to be comfortable with drawdowns, to be able to invest in startup, so to invest in crypto or technology and all of this stuff, that makes sense. But I just don't think a dividend at 4% makes any difference to anybody.

Starting point is 00:31:54 Well, it does if you do it consistently, month after month, you have to year. But you need huge capital to start with to be worthwhile. No. If you start investing for a dividend income, I call it a decade of sacrifice, and this is why it's so hard. But if you're 33 years old now, you're sacrifice until you're 43.

Starting point is 00:32:13 You're going to become 43 at some point. And imagine if you're 43 and now you have the income to pay for that car, to pay for the house, you don't have to worry about it. Well, do you want to have hope that you have the Bitcoin or would you either have more security? Again, Bitcoin, in my perspective, high risk, high potential return. And I'm not saying don't buy it. I'm saying allocated in your portfolio in a way where you understand, you are you, are arguably one of the top crypto experts in the world. I'm not. I also am not the stock expert in the world. I'm also not the real estate expert in the world. What I do is I'm probably

Starting point is 00:32:54 going to be wrong. If my stocks crash, I have my real estate. If real estate crashes, I got my stocks. Crypto crashes, well, that's part of my speculative portfolio. I really don't care. And if everything crashes, I got some gold. So for me, I have to diversify against myself. because I know stocks crash. I know crypto crashes. I know real estate crashes. But if you're not starting with a lot of money, your strategy is the strategy of a rich person.

Starting point is 00:33:22 Oh, I've got houses and I've got dividends, and I've got some gold, and I've got a bit of this. That's the strategy of being rich. But I didn't start with all those. I didn't start with all those at all. I started with one. Where did you make most of your money? Being an entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:33:34 What were you doing? Taking obscene risk. I did. That was me. An entrepreneur is taking obscene risk. But if I'm making $50,000 a year, the first step, let's assume now I'm putting $5,000 aside, $7,000 aside a year. I can take high risk, high potential return, or I can be conservative or a hybrid. And not everybody should be taking all the risk because Bitcoin has risks.

Starting point is 00:34:05 And again, I'm telling you to somebody who owns it, the government could come in and change policy on Bitcoin. Quantum could change Bitcoin. People could stop caring about Bitcoin. And if any of those things happen, and all my money is in this very speculative asset, I'm the one that's carrying all the risk. So if someone is $1,000 in disposable income to invest, what would you suggest they did, Humphrey? My take on $1,000 is as it has change over the years. I used to say you could invest a thousand dollars but as as rule probably mentioned 10% on a thousand dollars is it's not that much right so like you know if you invest a thousand bucks in the SP 500 you get 10% next year you'll have 1100 dollars that hundred dollars is not going to change your life dramatically

Starting point is 00:34:50 so if i had a thousand dollars i'm investing in myself so trying to improve my skills to make more money at some point how exactly would you do that when i was uh still coming up i was trying to take a lot of courses online so i try to figure out different types of skills that i could that I could use in the marketplace. So I took an AdWords course back in the day for like 150 bucks that taught me how to do Google AdWords, and I would try to consult for businesses out there to try to make more of an hourly income on the side.

Starting point is 00:35:18 And Google AdWords, for anyone that doesn't know, is Google's advertising platform. Yeah, and now there's TikTok ads and Facebook ads, but anywhere where I could be more of value to another business, I knew that, economically speaking, that I could command more in the marketplace. So something with that like that would be great. So right now, clearly that is.

Starting point is 00:35:35 AI, because what you saw there is like a knowledge arbitrage with a new technology where most people didn't understand AdWords, and you could be the young guy bridging the gap for people's ignorance. So most businesses now would be dramatically more efficient and effective if they understood, even the basics of AI. So a kid could take a course in AI. And do you know what's crazy? If you read the top 10 books on AI, you'd be in the top 1% in the world in terms of knowledge. Yeah, I mean, if you just read the instruction manual of how chat GPT or Well, it works. You could probably be in the top 1% of prompt engineers, right?

Starting point is 00:36:09 And that could be a value to a business or service, right? That's probably where my career came from was we were the kids, 18, 19, 20 years old, that new social media because we'd messed around with it. So we sold it to companies. And that started my first business, and then there was soon hundreds of us. And there's a lot of these apps right now coming out from 18, 19, 20-year-olds. Have you seen that one profile of that guy who created Cal AI? Cal AI is this app where you take a photo of your food and then it sends it to AI

Starting point is 00:36:39 and it tells you how many calories are in it the guy's making 50 million bucks a year or whatever it is. Yeah, I saw that this morning funnily and a four million dollars a month he's making from a... Basically, it's an AI rapper, obviously. I think he has some secret sauce that he puts into it but a lot of kids these days are using AI

Starting point is 00:36:55 to try to leverage that and try to turn them into businesses. I do want to say though, I think with $1,000 And with what Jess Breit said, I think you can still make a decent income. If you can make a decent income, you can start to slowly save it and invest your way to some sort of semblance of retirement. I think you can still be able to retire and be financially independent without having to, let's say, bet your life savings on crypto. I know that I personally bought Bitcoin on $100, but I've sold it many times. I bought and resold it so many times because, you know, when it's up 10x, you're like, oh, like, you know, if you would get,

Starting point is 00:37:32 giving me a 10x return when I first bought it. I'm like, yeah, I'm taking that any day of the week, right? And so I think that's why it's so hard. It's like Bitcoin does produce 145% return since 2012. But in 2012, no one knew how to buy it. I bought it on some random, sketchy website. I got this, like, you know, this string of characters for my wallet. And I try to buy, you know, I try to buy a coffee at a cafe in Palo Alto.

Starting point is 00:37:55 And I didn't know that Bitcoin transactions took 30 minutes to go through. So I sent Bitcoin twice for a $5 coffee. Now, keep in mind, this is point. won bitcoins, right? This is 10K. It's an expensive Bitcoin. Yeah. It's an expensive coffee. I sent it twice and then didn't get it. And guess what? I still had to pay for the coffee with my debit card. So where do my Bitcoin go? You spent what?

Starting point is 00:38:12 20K on coffee. I spent 20k on coffee. Yeah, that could be the title of this video. Spent 20K in coffee. Yeah. I literally sent it to Kupa Cafe in Palo Alto if anyone wants to go there. I think the average person psychologically speaking, it's hard. It's really hard when it goes down 80%.

Starting point is 00:38:28 And if Jaspreet says you need money, like at that moment, you're going to sell it. But your point about, I mean, the primarily important thing is income. Yes. I mean, and that, and we talked about last time I was on the podcast, it's like, how do you just leverage the same skills in different ways that you can earn more money from it? Like the story I was told when I left university was,

Starting point is 00:38:48 speaking to a friend of my dad's, he was like, well, what are you going to do? And my father was in marketing, and I liked marketing. And but it was like late 80s, Wall Street thing was going on. And I'm like, well, I'm thinking about it. either going to work for somebody like Mars, do marketing, you know, great company, or go and work in the city in London. And the guy looked at me and said, it's really simple, Ralph. It's the same job. You're a salesman in both. One, you get free Mars bars. And the other, you get free money. And he realized, oh, there's actually arbitrage in what you can do with the same skill set.

Starting point is 00:39:25 Well, I would say there is a point. So I agree. If it was me with $1,000, I'm going to go out and invest in my income, read some books. get whatever I got to do, go start something because that's enough. But if we look at time, $1,000 compounded is decent. If you go back, 1971. How do I pay for my college loan and my house deposit and I want to get married and have kids? You're telling me I can't do that for another 20 years. If I took $1,000 in 1971, I invested that into the S&P 500 and I did nothing else. I keep doing whatever I'm doing my job.

Starting point is 00:40:02 and I only invests $1,000, I never invested another penny again. Today, that would be worth if I reinvested my dividends about $330,000. And I never invested another penny after the first $1,000 investment. Why? Because the S&P 500 has grown by a little bit over 10% a year from 1971 to now. It's something. Now, imagine if I invested $1,000 a year, $1,000 a month. Now, I can't say that about Bitcoin because,

Starting point is 00:40:32 Bitcoin did it and exist 50 years ago. I can't say that about Bitcoin because Bitcoin didn't exist 25 years ago. And so... How about Amazon? What about Amazon? That started trading in 2000, or even about Facebook, 2012. How do I know? Do we not invest in it because it wasn't around? It hasn't been around as long as gold. I mean, Facebook has been around less than Bitcoin has. Amazon creates a profit. It has a tangible value that you can see and feel because I can go on to Amazon. I order myself a brand new guacamole set. They'll be there in two hours. They didn't make a single profit until what, 2018? But that wasn't because they weren't producing a value, it's because

Starting point is 00:41:12 they were growing so aggressively. So you think if you had $1,000, you should invest it in the S&P 500? Well, I'm not saying you should. I think personal finance is personal. I think if it was me, if I have $1,000 extra and I'm just trying to figure things out, I'm going to go buy some books, I'm going to buy a class, I'm going to do something about how do I increase my income, going back to what you said. But if I'm saying, I'm saying, I just want to work my job. I don't want to go out and do all that. I would do half into the S&P 500,

Starting point is 00:41:36 and I would go half into individual companies. So more risk than the S&P 500, not as much risk as the Bitcoin. And the reason why I would do this is because this is something I enjoy. I like that research side of things, and I understand this is something that I could see returns with, like you talked about Amazon, like you talked about Microsoft and whoever.

Starting point is 00:41:55 There's potential. And what about you, Humphrey? $10,000. Does your strategy change? My strategy is probably more, conservative or traditional, it's probably 90% index funds, so tracking the SP 500 and then 10% speculative. And my whole goal for that 25-year-old would probably be to get to $100,000 as quickly as possible because at that point I think they get more options and flexibility

Starting point is 00:42:15 and they're able to kind of use that capital to maybe take more risk after that's still 10 years with the S&P, well, eight years of the S&P. About 7.84 years, yeah. But that also assumes that they're only doing the $10,000 a year. Maybe they can save and invest a little bit more. That'd be nice. But I think for a lot of people in America, if they can get a guarantee $100,000 in 7.84 years, I think a lot of people might opt for that. So I agree, but I'd remove the S&P. You do all crypto. No, I'd just do NASDAQ.

Starting point is 00:42:45 Oh, yeah, you do NASDAQ. So NASDAQ compounds at 18% a year. What is the NASDAQ? The NASDAQ is the NASDAQ 100, which is the top technology stocks in the United States. We live in a world that tomorrow will be more digital than today, guaranteed. need. And so therefore, these stocks tend to generate the most performance. And we've talked about many of these names. That is all in the NASDAQ. So a little arbitrage is if you want to shorten your 7.8 years to 5.5 years, 6 years, by the NASDAQ 100. It's an ETF. Zero cost, easy. And then

Starting point is 00:43:21 I would say, and then do 70% that, 30% crypto. And you don't have to care about anything. You're fine. Now, if you have a different risk tolerance, you can tweak those dials, or if you are more risk-averse, then you up your cash dial or some other more stable flow, whether it's gold, although gold is still driven by debasement of currency. They're all the same thing. They're all driven by the same macro factors. So, yeah, similar kind of idea. And the NASDAQ is great. I'd just say one thing. But just like with Bitcoin, the difficult part with the 18% is you've got to be willing to go through the downturns. And I want to make sure that that's clear, because, I mean, the big drop, 2000, the NASDAQ,

Starting point is 00:43:59 fell by 78% from its peak. During that time, the S&P 500 fell about 40%. So it's a bigger drop. Not to mention, the NASDAQ didn't get to its level until 2015. 15 years later of no money. It is still compounded more returns than the S&P. Absolutely, if you held on. So you can't live your life in fear of the drop.

Starting point is 00:44:23 100%. It's got to be in the risk-adjusted returns versus the gains. But how many people can hold on for? 15 years and say, you're one, no big deal, you're two, okay, you're three, you're five, it's going to go up, you're 10, it's going to go up. And by the way, year 10 was also another crash because all you have to do is dollar cost average. What's that? So dollar cost averaging is if you're young and you've got a bit of excess cash now, you know, you've sold your income a little bit, as opposed to just chucking everything in, or you do, you put your large sum in,

Starting point is 00:44:55 you've saved up your 10 grand, but now you've got maybe $500 a month of free capital you want to put into your savings. So when you have these drawdowns, you're actually keep buying. And what happens is it lowers your average cost over time, and you get to new all-time highs in your portfolio much before the market is. So for example, in the last crypto down cycle in 22, in 22, all I did was add as much as I could to my crypto. So I was at new all-time highs in my portfolio well before the market was because I'd lower my average entry. That compounds your profits over time incredibly. And is there something psychological there where if you commit to the habit of just putting $500 in regardless of what happens? You remove emotion. You remove a bit of emotion from it.

Starting point is 00:45:44 And the emotion is the thing that people struggle with. If you're investing in things that are more volatile, you firstly understand that you will see larger drawdowns when markets go down. Usually, they're all correlates. They'll all go down at the same time, all up at the same time. So you're going to do that. But if you tell yourself, that's an advantage for me because I can buy more, that's a secret hack that makes people fortunes, compounding. This is Warren Buffett's thing.

Starting point is 00:46:12 I 100% agree with that. He buys more companies in a bare market than in a bull market because... I agree. Yeah, I will 100% agree with that part. I call it poop. Panic leads to overselling. leads to opportunity, leads to profit. So I am on board with that.

Starting point is 00:46:32 But that requires a specific level of financial sophistication. No. Even your Coinbase app can just... Can dollar cost average? But how many people can dollar cost average down 70% for 15 years waiting to see that return? It wasn't 70% in 15 years. It was 70% in one year and then rallied ever since.

Starting point is 00:46:51 Every single year after year, after year it went up. And to see that down. Well, no, after the 2008 crash, the NASDAQ also again crashed more than the S&P 500. And then step back and look at the returns of the NASDAQ first. I agree. Over the long term, it's a great investment. But volatility is hard for the average person who doesn't have the emotional IQ and the financial sophistication to understand dollar cost. That's our job to educate them.

Starting point is 00:47:17 Yes. Our job is to help people in this journey and not get them to make decisions. decisions that compromise their future, we have to help them. I agree. And risk-adjusted returns and time horizon are two of the single most important thing. And so what I hear, I mean, through history, contrarians have made the most money. And also, I think the other thing that I've really pulled out from what you both were just saying there is, you need to set up a system that removes emotion and requires you to not make decisions.

Starting point is 00:47:49 Because it's in making decisions that your amygdala, the emotional center of your brain, is going to make a bad one. I think that self-awareness emerges from what you're both saying, which is, okay, my brain is going to panic, it's going to poop or whatever you were talking about there, and I need a system, which is panic-proof. So, you know that the best-performing brokerage accounts in the United States are dead people. That's true. It's a known fact, because they don't do anything. So they have these accounts that haven't been closed and they're inactive, they outperform all the active people. you are 100% in crypto

Starting point is 00:48:23 in terms of your investment portfolio yeah so you must be sat here thinking that actually when I asked that $10,000 question what should someone do with $10,000 you must be thinking that the right answer is to put it into crypto

Starting point is 00:48:38 the right answer for me is that to his point look I actually would say but you know this is an audience of people and people misinterpret things yes the answer is we've been given the gift of the greatest performing asset the world has ever been given. That's not just Bitcoin, it's the crypto complex. If you're very careful investing in top projects,

Starting point is 00:49:00 you can even have a broader diversified portfolio of that. You've had Ethereum, Bitcoin, Salana, Sue, all of these things, great. They will definitely outperform for a period of time. And that's based on macroeconomic factors, which is the debasement of currency, which we've talked about. That means all of these assets go by a certain amount and some outperform. it. The only two assets that outforms the basement of currency is the NASDAQ and crypto. This has been a persistent trend that is observable and measurable. So this is not a speculative

Starting point is 00:49:32 asset. What it is, is a Metcast law adoption model. Bitcoin is the adoption of, let's say, a money or collateral layer, like digital gold, we'll call it, while the rest of crypto is the new rails for the internet. So it's a technological investment. It is growing at twice the speed of the internet in terms of adoption. and has been since the first 5 million IP addresses for the internet and the first 5 million wallets. Twice the speed of the internet makes it the fastest adoption of any technology the world has ever seen, aside from AI now, which is now outpacing it. If we sit here in 20 years' time and you were wrong, what happened, do you think?

Starting point is 00:50:13 Well, firstly, in terms of investments, you have to always, once you have a high conviction bet, your entire job is to question yourself, not to keep reaffirming yourself. Sure, you end up reaffirming by questioning, and then you figure it out. For it not to have been true, what would have happened? The AI would have had a new system of money that it created. There has to be a competitor to this, because we're now in the game of nation. Nations are acquiring this, the Middle East nations, nations in Asia, the US wants to acquire it. So we've got South American nations.

Starting point is 00:50:50 So it's now the game of nations, it's geopolitics. This is a real thing. But what changes in 20 years' time? Well, in 20 years' time, we're in a very different world. The economic engine is driven by robots and infinite intelligence. We don't know how the economic machine works. We don't even not the value of money is when we go into that world. So I've talked about this before.

Starting point is 00:51:12 The economic singularity past 2030, the economic model breaks down. So the economy generally grows by a measure of population growth, how many people are in the economy, or coming into the economy or being born, productivity, how much output they create, and then debt growth is the other liver. What's happened here is the population of the entire Western world plus Japan plus China has been aging. So the rate of change of population growth is shrinking. They tried immigration, but that became politically unacceptable, so that stopped. So you've got the slowing economy. GDP growth has been slowing over time. Productivity, old people make less things. So it makes less economic output.

Starting point is 00:52:02 So we've got this mess, and then we got this debt, and we stopped that whole engine in 2008, and we need to service this debt. So, okay, so that's the system we're in, and this is why we're printing money to service this debt, because we're not generating enough output in the economy. But after 2030, this population part changes. We've got infinite artificial humans. You're talking about AI agents and robotics? Yeah, infinite.

Starting point is 00:52:29 So what does that do for the multiplier of that formula, population growth plus productivity growth plus debt growth, it breaks. Because you're going to have 20% GDP growth because you've had a huge rise in the number of AI agents creating economic activity and robots. And so what does that mean for me as the average person? For me, it's like the economic system starts changing.

Starting point is 00:52:54 We get to this world of abundance. We don't know what has value. What we as humans do, we change and retool to become more humans because AI and robots can't be humans. So we have to figure all of this stuff out. Investing, we were talking about this earlier, is like, well, does the AGI, is that going to be a better invest than any of us? Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:13 Artificial general intelligence of our smart. That's the next stage where it's smarter than any human that's ever existed. And we're very close to that. So, in which case, well, how do markets work? And when businesses are agents selling stuff to other agents, where do we play a role? So all I'm saying is my job, my whole life, has to be to look into the future, sort of 10 years out, and try and probabilistically understand paths. Here I get to like 2030, and it's like a dark curtain.

Starting point is 00:53:46 Just to flip that for a second, how could AI actually positively influence your hypothesis? I'm very positive about AI. I think humanity will come out of this just fine. I think economic growth that explodes is we can work a way of accrucing it to humans or society or whatever we want to do with it. So I'm not an A.M.I. Duma. Specifically on Bitcoin's value and price, how could AI make it even more important in it? Well, in the end, an AI is a, it requires two inputs. It requires, it's Masloff's hierarchy of needs is basically two things, compute and energy, and it needs to be paid.

Starting point is 00:54:29 These agents can't, you can't build all this agents of billions of agents running around doing things without paying for them. And agents will use agents, so they will, one agent will get an, the 10 agents to do all this task, they're all going to have to be paid. And the way of doing that is using crypto rails. Stable coins. Whether it's stable coins, whatever it is, but that whole crypto rail, you know, all of this new infrastructure for the internet, the blockchain, that's where it works. Often the difference between a company succeeding or failing isn't down to its product or strategy. It's down to the people on the inside. After all, the definition of the word company is

Starting point is 00:55:04 group of people. And some of the best companies in the world have been largely built, by A players because I'll let you in on a little secret. When you hire an A player, they go on to hire more A players and it perpetuates. The challenge is finding those first few A players. I found the majority of mine on LinkedIn who are a sponsor of this show. LinkedIn provides talent I could not find anywhere else, talent with the necessary skills and culture fit that I'm looking for. Whenever I've paid to promote a role on LinkedIn, I've been able to hire faster and of course better. The data supports this too. You'll actually get three times more qualified. applicants than if you posted the same role for free. So if you're trying to build something

Starting point is 00:55:43 truly great, you can get started by posting a job for free by visiting LinkedIn.com slash DOAC. That's LinkedIn.com slash DOAC. And you can post your role for free there. Terms and conditions of course apply. Do any of you remember a conversation I had on this podcast with anthropologist Daniel Lieberman? It was one of our most viewed conversations of all time. And the most replayed moment in that conversation was when I talked about this product. These are what I call Barefoot Shoes by Vivo Barefoot, which have significantly reduced support, which gives my feet the opportunity

Starting point is 00:56:15 that they desperately want to need to strengthen. If you've learned anything from this podcast, it might be that we're living in a comfort crisis, and that at all times in our lives, we're making this trade of whether to have more comfort now and therefore more discomfort in the future or a little bit less comfort now, but to be stronger and healthier in the future.

Starting point is 00:56:34 And for me, that is the choice to wear barefoot shoes. So if you want to start strengthening your feet and your body, visit vivobarfoot.com slash Stephen. And you'll get 20% off when you use code Stephen B20 at checkout. That also comes with a 100-day money-back guarantee. What have you got to lose? I wanted to ask you a question. The reason I went and got my phone is because I had someone contact me

Starting point is 00:56:58 that I knew from my childhood. Used to be one of my best friends. Frankly, not spoke to them in 10 years. Sent me a text message. and the text message they sent me is I wanted to get your opinion on this because I ended up saying to him listen I'm not the guy to ask about this I think you've misunderstood who I am hi mate I hope you well I got myself in a bit of trouble with some debt

Starting point is 00:57:22 about £40,000 so more than a bit of trouble after some advice and direction in terms of maybe passive income slash an avenue to try and work my way out of it is there some material I should be reading, watching, that you might know of? And I asked him, I said, what kind of debt is it? And he said, personal loans and credit cards, mate. And I said, like, how, I need to ascertain how urgent those debts are, and if it's causing any immediate issues.

Starting point is 00:57:49 And he said, well, they're not super urgent, but as a result of the high monthly outgoings, I'm a month behind my mortgage payment this month. So it, like, is, but it's not because I don't want to keep being in that position moving forward. It's costing me, circa, $1,000, $800 a month in repayments at the moment, and I can't get a consolidation loan. It's a perfect storm starting because I've just started a new job. And my partner is on maternity leave, and I have this debt mountain. It's starting to affect my family if I can't pay the mortgage, you know.

Starting point is 00:58:24 So I've got to change moving forward and figure out what to do. And you're the man to ask for advice. I was like, fuck, me, I'm not like. And then he messaged me again. And within an hour and said, hey, sorry, man, if you're busy, just wanted to nudge this. Then messaged again an hour later because I was on a flight and said, hey, I really need some help in direction, man. I'm quickly running out of places to turn. He's kind of in a hard spot because 40,000 pounds in debt with the interest payments of, let's say your interest rate is 15 to 20%.

Starting point is 00:58:51 That starts to spiral out of control a little bit. Like if he was under 10,000 pounds in debt, it's a little bit more manageable. But at 40,000, the interest starts to compound quite quickly. So, you know, you said he had a mortgage. He might even have to consider moving, selling, selling the home to at least get the interest payments under control or, like, reduce that amount of debt. It's kind of one of those situations where you just need to reduce every single expense possible and start really pouring all your money into the highest interest rate debt that he owns. So, like, you know, you can rank your interest rates of all your debts from highest to lowest and start at the very top, right? If it has 22% interest rate, you want to get rid of that first because,

Starting point is 00:59:31 that's what's killing them. At those levels of debt, it's really tough because I think a lot of people consider bankruptcy at that point just to kind of clear that amount of debt. Depending on what his income is, I've known, let's say, a waitress or a server that had $50,000 in credit card debt and just unable to get over it

Starting point is 00:59:49 because the interest payments were as much as their salary. So in those cases, unless you can get a personal loan from, let's say, a family member and kind of clear that debt, you're in a really tough spot. reduce your expenses as much as possible, put any extra money you have towards that debt at the highest interest rate possible, the highest interest rate thing, and then consider selling some assets if he has assets. Bankruptcy.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Bankruptcy. When should someone consider bankruptcy, and what's the trade-off? The trade-off is seven years. I believe your credit is shot in America. So, but I believe that actually, I think if you pull up a chart, someone sent me a tweet the other day of, like, bankruptcy lawyer searches in America on Google, and it's like been kind of like going up into the right, which is not a great thing. Bankruptcy just, you know, there's different types of bankruptcy that you can file for,

Starting point is 01:00:39 but I do know that it usually clears some, if not all, your debt, and you basically have to start over, but as a result, you lose a lot of your privileges, like, for example, no credit score. I read some stat, and you might know if this is true, but I read a stat that it said something to the effect that people avoid going into bankruptcy because of the stigma associated with it. But when they looked at the financial performance over 10 years of people that did go into bankruptcy, those that did typically were better off than those that tried to avoid it for the next 10 years. So, yeah. I don't know. That could be anecdotal. I don't know. That's tough

Starting point is 01:01:19 because if you have $50,000 in debt and you make $50,000 a year, it's, yeah. But bankruptcy in some ways is a good thing because it forces you to do crisis control. It's like your expenditure, what you're doing, everything becomes hyper-focused. Like you led in the beginning with about how people should look at their expenditure, right? When you're $40,000 in debt, you've not been doing that. Correct. And bankruptcy actually forces you to actually discipline that for an extended period of time where it becomes a habit to Stephen. That's why they outperforming the end because you've created the habit that you talked about right in the beginning of this discussion. Yeah, so I just found the stat here. It said, yeah, this is one of the uncomfortable

Starting point is 01:02:03 truths in finance, and the answer is often yes. Those who file for bankruptcy end up in a better place long term than those who try for prolonged periods of time to avoid it. And the research shows that people who file for bankruptcy typically get their debt wiped out and cleaned, and they removing unpaidable debt. And bankruptcy can bring immediate mental relief removing the crushing stress of unpaidable debts, people who avoid it often live in chronic financial stress, which spills into the health relationships and work. So in short, those who face bankruptcy head-on often recover faster and end up in a stronger position than those who keep limping along trying to avoid it. And I think somebody who's listening who may be in a similar or the same

Starting point is 01:02:45 situation, ultimately wants to know how do I get relief. Bankruptcy is one option, but at the end of the day, there has to be change, and that change is difficult. And that's the part that I think a lot of people have hard time talking about or comprehending. There is relief, but it comes with severe, extreme, and quick sacrifice. What do I mean? Number one, you've got to cut back your expenses as fast as possible in that situation. You have to sell as much stuff as possible. I mean, bankruptcy obviously works, but you also lose your house.

Starting point is 01:03:18 You also lose other things along with it. There's a lot of emotional toll with it. You have a family. You have a kid. I mean, it's also a big. reason people end up getting a divorce so it can also impact your life in many different ways. So you have to make

Starting point is 01:03:30 extreme sacrifices, and I mean get rid of the Netflix subscription, not because it's just costing you $15 a month but because the average American is spending more than two hours a day watching Netflix. And if you're in that type of situation and you're spending two hours sitting there watching whatever the heck is on Netflix,

Starting point is 01:03:47 how do you sleep at night? You shouldn't be sleeping eight hours a night. You better be getting up go and try to get some more money. I don't care if it's Uber. I don't care if you're working at McDonald's. find some extra money and learn how you can earn some more money. And, I mean, it sounds harsh, but the reality is if you want extreme change, it's not going to happen without extreme change. So could he sell his house, do you think, that assuming he's making the 50K,

Starting point is 01:04:10 which I think is probably accurate, having a vague understanding of his job and where he lives, etc. Sell his house and then move in rent an apartment. Would that free up capital? I mean, that would alleviate his current problem immediately, sure. He says here, after some advice direction in terms of maybe passive income, this word passive income, I know, are you stretching nuts? Why does it drive you nuts? It is a, there's like a passive income industrialisation complex that is, I mean, it is literally every millennial's dream is, I'm going to get passive income.

Starting point is 01:04:42 And it doesn't exist. We talked about property. Property is the least passive income you can imagine. It is awful. Every time I've tried to rent out property, there are so many. costs, everything goes wrong. It's just endless. You're paying fees. And people think there's a magic passive income. Everything comes with effort. There is no such thing as returns without effort. That's, even robbery comes with effort. There's no way of making money without effort or risking

Starting point is 01:05:10 something. And so when you're 40 grand in debt, how on earth do you think passive income is going to rescue you? But he's seen that on TikTok and on Instagram. Oh, we're, we're, we're are millennials in our 30s and we're now living in in Lisbon and we've got passive income from my house. It's like it's bullshit. It's social media dream that doesn't really exist. And that's never going to save him from 40,000 pound debt. Passive income can exist. The perception of what it is is the problem. I am struggling with money. I have no money. I got bills to pay. I need passive income. That's not how a works. The way it works is you take extra money, right? I have, I'm going to work and I'm

Starting point is 01:06:00 saving and invest in some money. I take the extra money that I want to put my two investments and I can put it into an asset, an investment that can pay me for owning it without actually working, without going to work to own it. Now, let me ask you about your real estate because I got I got to keep coming back to you, man. Did you, did you manage a real estate yourself? I've done both. I've had management agent and a manager myself. managing yourself is probably an absolute nightmare. That's horrific. And managing it with a manager is also probably a nightmare just in a different scene.

Starting point is 01:06:31 Yeah, because your yield is massively reduced as well. It is reduced. And then you take the trade off between whether you're going to do short-term lets or longer-term rentals. And there's the volatility in the short-term lets that you don't know what your yield's going to be. Long-term, different as well. Then you've got the tenants and how bad the tenants have been and the damage that they've done. By the end of it, you walk away, I think, really. It just wasn't worth the effort.

Starting point is 01:06:54 Well, I would disagree with the airport. Yeah, I mean, obviously people can do really well out of property. The work in real estate investment is learning the process. When I first started investing in real estate, it was a complete nightmare. And it was not passive, anything close to passive. It was a nightmare. What you don't know when you start is that there's a good property manager. There's also a bad property manager.

Starting point is 01:07:19 How do I find good property managers by going through a lot of bad. property managers and learning that process. And that is a painful process, a very time-consuming process. But when you do have the right team, it can be extremely passive. So I invest in real estate. What kind of properties are we talking about? Single family houses and multifamily apartments. And do you have lots of them? Not lots, but I have a decent amount. And how much of your portfolio is in buying properties and then renting them out to families? 50%. And what are your returns been like over year or a year for the last decade? So the way I look at returns. When I look to acquire property is I want 7% cash on cash on the money that I put in. So when I

Starting point is 01:08:00 look at return, I don't care about equity. We talked about this kind of a lot that if I buy a house for let's just call it $100,000 and it goes up to $200,000, I don't care. My goal when I acquire real estate is not to sell it and flip it for a profit. My goal is to grow the cash flow that I'm generating month after month after month from rental payments. It's really difficult though because if I, someone that hasn't done a lot of property rentals and stuff like that, the chance that I'm going to fuck up is so high. And I'm one of those people and I probably screwed up more than, more than I could count. It just cost me a lot of sleep, cost me a lot of stress. So you have to kind of be an expert. You don't have to be an expert, but you got to be willing

Starting point is 01:08:42 in the beginning, right? For the first number of years, it was extremely painful. But today, when I go want to acquire a property, I will look for the property, just like I do research on a stock or whatever I want to do. I do the work to research a property. In today's economy, it's much harder, not impossible to find those returns, acquire the property, hand over the keys of the property manager, give them the goals. And now I oversee the manager because I have a team now that is... It's a business. It's a business. It's like starting a startup. But it's not like starting a startup. Why? Because starting a startup, when I work in my company, I am working in my company, and I work a lot of hours. So I'm meeting with my employees. I'm leading the

Starting point is 01:09:25 meetings. I'm coming up with ideas. I'm leading the vision. With this, I acquire, I hand over the keys. I've already set the framework, and now you are doing the execution. That's a mature business. With my company, there's hundreds of people in the UK right now. But you're not the one that's starting that startup. I was the founder. And now what have you done? You've acquired more employees to get there. Which is what you did with your property managers. It's much harder to do that with a startup, though. How big does a startup have to be in order to, in order to be able to displace you as a CEO, to pay for the staff, to make the money, and then to hire a new CEO and to lead it the way.

Starting point is 01:09:55 Depends. My friend, my friend Ash, who was just with me last week in L.A. has four people in his startup. He's out in L.A. right now, in my house in L.A. with my girlfriend and my other best friend who's still there. And I watched, he's in the hot tub right now. I know that because every day at the same time he goes in the hot tub. And then they go for this hike, and my girlfriend sends me photos. What he's done is he set up as team of four people. They do personal branding on LinkedIn for people. And they're running it back for him in the UK. he's up in bloody the mountain with my girlfriend right now. That's beautiful.

Starting point is 01:10:22 But how many startups don't do get there? People are the start of business. When you described it to me, I was like, oh, that's just a business. It is a business. A steep learning curve to develop expertise. And then you put systems in place to make it sustainable. But the systems are kind of pre-established where you need to rent it out. You need a good manager.

Starting point is 01:10:41 It's going to find a good tenant. They've got to pay the bills. And it's not like a startup where I have to innovate and create an idea. I don't have to go out and build the blueprint. I am going out, I'm acquiring an asset that people already need. It's already existing. And then I'm going to put used to it by having somebody live there or use it. And then there's a team just maintaining it.

Starting point is 01:11:04 So what do you think then in terms of passive income? And is it real? But specifically, let's do this point of housing. Do you advise people to buy rental properties and then generate rental fees from them as a source of income? Well, you just heard Jasprey at how much work it would take. So I generally don't advise people to get into that business just because of the steep learning curve. And not everyone is built for that. And not everyone has capital for that.

Starting point is 01:11:28 So if you were just trying to get started and actually make some money, I just think the stock market is the most liquid and easiest place to get started. I personally rent and I plan on renting and just instead investing the difference of what my mortgage payment might be in my rent. I think in on the coasts like San Francisco, New York, I think Miami, that might actually be the more reasonable thing to do. I was reading a New York Times article that just came out yesterday and it said more millionaires than ever are renting in the United States and that it's tripled between 2019 and 2023. So in just a couple of years, millionaires are choosing to rent more than ever before. What's going on? My guess would be a lot of the millionaires are probably living on. the coast because they invest a lot or they have higher paying jobs and maybe it's slightly

Starting point is 01:12:17 unaffordable for them to buy a house and say San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles. In the New York Times article, it says they're choosing flexibility and liquidity over ownership and they don't want to be bothered with the inconveniences of home ownership, which includes paying a real estate tax and insurance, especially in markets like Florida and California where we're seeing a lot of natural catastrophes. Yeah, so the U.S. is a peculiar market because there's this high real estate tax in owning real estate. So all the time your returns are being reduced by that you pay, so whether it's like one and a half percent or two percent, whatever the number is. There's that and then there's the other real estate taxes that come

Starting point is 01:12:54 on top of it. Interest rates have been high. They've been high for a while now. So a lot of people have just been priced out of the market just in interest payments. But now because of mortgage payments So here, the difference is actually with the rental is a lot of rental people aren't trying to cover a mortgage cost because they own the property outright, so you get cheaper rates. So it's to do with price. The U.S. economy's not been super strong yet at Main Street level. Wall Street's had a great period of time, but Main Street hasn't. So people don't have excess earnings yet.

Starting point is 01:13:29 So I think it's a function of that, but it's probably a larger trend as well. I think also it's understanding what the opportunities are. I mean, there's a lot of flexibility with renting. I mean, I finally bought a house in 2025. I've been renting before this. So you bought your first property to live in with your family this year? Yes, me to live in was 2025. Why didn't you do it sooner?

Starting point is 01:13:51 Well, because when I was renting, I could take the capital and buy other rental properties, by other investments. So it made more sense for me to put that money to work somewhere else. So is buying a property as a means to generate wealth, terrible idea. As a means to generate, to buy it for yourself to live in or to? Well, but you know, when I grew up, everyone said to me that you get money, get a job, then you get a mortgage. And so like, that's what you did. That's one of the worst pieces of advice you can give somebody. But that's what everyone's doing. That's still what the vast majority of people doing. And I know that because I look at,

Starting point is 01:14:25 I look at my friends that don't have the same financial advice that I have from like my brother and my financial advisors, my accountants. And the first thing they do when they get a bit of money, is they go and get a mortgage, and that's because that's what their parents did, and that's what everyone's always done. Is that a good idea, right? Yes and no. No, I think these days, with how the economy's been set up, don't forget, when I was 24, 25, I was working in an investment bank. I wasn't the highest paid guy there. I was a 25-year-old. And to buy my first flat in London was three and a half times my income.

Starting point is 01:15:03 That equivalent flat and the equivalent income is 12 times. times. So rent makes much more sense now and you might as well invest, buy all the stuff that you think will drive returns. But a house, a primary house is not an investment, never will be. Because once you buy it, you don't sell it. You don't realize that equity. Maybe your kids do if you've got kids. So it's not an investment, but it can be an investment in your future. But there's like some optical illusion going on here because when I think about renting, I go, well, that money, I never see it again. But with buying a house, I'm paying paying into it. So it's like me depositing the money in a piggy bank. So logically, of course,

Starting point is 01:15:41 renting is wasting money. It goes to someone else I'll ever see it again. But that's not exactly true. If you go out today, I buy a half a million dollar house. I put 20% down. So I put $100,000 down. I finance $400,000. I get a six and a half percent mortgage. 30 years, my mortgage payment is $2,500 a month. Now, what am I doing? I'm not renting. I'm not giving money to my landlord, I'm building equity in my property. But banks also understand the same game. They front load your mortgage. What does that mean? When I pay $2,500, it's not $12.50 going to principal to build equity in my house and $12.50 for interest. It's principle being buying your house back for yourself. It's not half and half. It's almost all interest. In fact,

Starting point is 01:16:31 If you go on and buy the half a million dollar house today at a six and a half percent mortgage, 20 percent down, for the first 20 years of that mortgage, more than half of that payment is going to go directly to your banker's pocket with interest. It's not until year 21, that half of your $2,500 payment is going to go towards equity in your house. So it's all interest, zero equity, and then slowly move. like this. It takes 20 years to get there. And then what happens along the way for a lot of people, not everybody, for a lot of people, is along the way interest rates go down. I need some extra money. So what do I do? I refinance. As soon as I refinance, that amortization starts all over again. And so now I'm paying all this interest again. And my real equity that I'm building is not there. This is why I say it's not bad to buy a house. I think it's great if you buy a

Starting point is 01:17:30 house. But don't treat your house. Like you said, don't treat your house like an investment. Treat it like an expense. Buy it because you can afford it because you want it because you're ready, but not because you're going to build wealth. I agree with what their takes. I think that a home is an asset that you can't sell very easily. So that's also a good thing. Like if you have $100,000 to put into stocks or $100,000 to put on a down payment and you know you were just such an emotional person that the moment that the stock market goes down, 2% you're selling, and probably better to buy a house, right? You can't really sell your house in the tap of two swipes.

Starting point is 01:18:06 But in terms of an investment, it's like, usually it's much more than an investment of people. They buy them for psychological reason or emotional reasons or the sense of security. So I just say, like, if you're interested in buying a house and you can afford it, and that's great, yeah. And let's actually go with the best case scenario. So like I think you were mentioning this, I buy a house for, let's call it half a million dollars. It goes up in value to a million dollars. Oh my God, I'm rich, right? Well, it's

Starting point is 01:18:32 invisible, but yeah, I could take cash out refinance, but now I had to pay all that. But here's the problem. You now own a million dollar house. What does that mean? You have to pay property taxes on a million dollar house. So you got to pay a lot more property taxes. You have to pay insurance on a million dollar house. And so now if you pass this house down to your kids, great, they got a million dollar house. But if they can't afford the property taxes or the insurance on a million dollar house, now they have to sell it. is one of these really hidden costs that you don't realize. Particularly if you're in a hurricane area like Texas or Oklahoma or something,

Starting point is 01:19:06 suddenly your house insurance costs are prohibitive. On top of the taxes you pay, people don't think about that. So, Jasper, you're saying buy Bitcoin, right? Go all in. You're one coin away from everything. Zero cost. They've just clicked that. Clip that.

Starting point is 01:19:22 It's gone viral. But no one at this table would adopt buying a house as a house as a wealth creation strategy. No. You would all do many things before then. Yeah. Correct. Would that be almost at the bottom of the list of things? It's part of its age cohort. Who were you talking about? If you're

Starting point is 01:19:40 kind of like 38 years old, you've got a kid, you kind of cleared up some of your student debt payments. Okay, that security thing is fine, but it's not an investment. Anybody younger, just no. Yeah, if you're just talking pure dollar investment returns, I probably would rank it lower on the list.

Starting point is 01:19:58 is there any such thing as good debt? Because I remember at the start, you said clear up your debts. Is there a good debt? People make a lot of money on debt, but people lose a lot of money on debt. I just try to stay away from debt altogether. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, there is such the thing as like good debt if it's working for you and you're able to leverage that money to make more money. But a lot of people, you know, with leverage comes a lot of risk. And I know a lot of people got wiped out because they took on quote-unquote good debt, right? What's leverage? leverage is so for example in Jaspreet's example you put 20% down on a house and you take an 80% the rest of it as a mortgage that's technically leveraging your money because you're taking the 100k that you have and now you are affording an asset that's worth 500,000 dollars. If your home goes from $500,000 to a million dollars, you have a $500,000 gain, but you only put in $100,000. So technically your profit or your return percentage is much higher. It was leveraged by, that debt that you carried.

Starting point is 01:20:58 Well, I don't think most people know that they can leverage their crypto. That's right. You can borrow against it. So anyone can. You don't need to go to a bank. No, you can do it instantaneously in what's known as decentralized finance. Or there's a whole bunch of companies that do this, where you can borrow against your assets. You can even do it against digital arts. I'm a huge digital art collector, much like the art market. You can actually go and borrow against the value of the art, maybe 40, 50 percent against

Starting point is 01:21:24 the value. Explain this to me super simply. For someone that's like never even bought a Bitcoin before and is thinking about potentially buying one, but they would also like some way to have a little bit of cash. Look, I don't like it. Okay. I understand why, but the issue is you've got an asset that does this.

Starting point is 01:21:43 It's volatile. It's very volatile, and you're borrowing a certain amount against it. And you don't know whether it falls below that value and you get liquidated, then you've lost all of your Bitcoin. The whole game is if you're in a secular market, It's just don't lose control of your tokens. Own your Bitcoin all the way through, and you have a risk of screwing that up

Starting point is 01:22:01 for the extra 5% income or 10% income. In Ethereum, very different world, because you're staking. So you're getting naturally rewarded in the network. What does that mean staking? What it means is in Bitcoin, you actually get miners basically get rewarded for solving the algorithm, the computation.

Starting point is 01:22:22 In Ethereum and Solana and Suey and the other big blockchains, you basically get rewarded for securing the network. So you stake your tokens to secure the network because the more people then have this network connectivity between them, and you get paid for that. So in Ethereum right now, it's probably 4% yield. Okay, so just I'll try and summarize this like a 10-year-old.

Starting point is 01:22:45 But there's no risk in that. You're not getting leverage in that. So if I choose to buy Ethereum, which is a form of cryptocurrency, I can take my $100,000 of Ethereum, and on my phone in a couple of clicks, I can move it, I can press a button and move it so that it is staked. And when it's staked,

Starting point is 01:23:04 I am basically using my Ethereum to secure the network to make the whole thing more secure so it can run properly. And in return, they'll give me 4% of it as a payment every month. Well, not 4% a month, but monthly payments. Monthly payments. But 4% annualized. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:22 So you can get interest on your crypto. Yes. And then if you're a little more sophisticated, a little bit racier, there are then yield enhancements. So we talked about high-yield bank accounts. There's high-yield versions in crypto, and you can get up to 20, 30%. But now you're taking risks.

Starting point is 01:23:40 And I can also loan against my Ethereum. So I actually did this at one point. I don't do it anymore. But I had 1,000 Ethereum, and I put it, I took a... A thousand Ethereum, yeah. Yeah, I know. I actually, I switched it into Bitcoin a little while ago,

Starting point is 01:23:56 so a couple of months back, but probably bad timing. This is why Melody was terrible timing. You should have called me first. I know. Fuck. But, you know, people are emotional. I had a loan against it, so I borrowed a couple of million dollars at one point

Starting point is 01:24:12 to buy some other crypto assets against my Ethereum. And it was surprising to me that I didn't have to call anybody. I didn't have to ring a bank. I could just click a couple of simple buttons on my phone. And this 1,000 Ethereum I had, I managed to get a couple of million dollars paid straight way in cash straight to me. But I chose not to do that because the market's a super volatile. But it is an incredibly efficient, effective way of people.

Starting point is 01:24:35 If you were to, let's say you had $100,000 a Bitcoin, one Bitcoin, to borrow $20,000 against it? Yeah. That's not very risky. Or $5,000. Or $5,000. Whatever it is, it's not very risky. Or if you're in a different currency where you can stake it, very little risk, very, very, little risk. It's like lending to the U.S. government, I lending to the government of

Starting point is 01:24:56 Ethereum network. That's a pretty decent way of enhancing. It's hard to do that with stocks. It's hard to get a loan against your stocks if you have $5,000 of stocks, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, when I was younger and I had, I bought $10,000 of Facebook stock when I finally got some money. I couldn't think, I couldn't see a simple way of taking a loan against my Facebook stock. It wasn't until later when I had a private investment bank in Europe that my private investment bank were like, do you want 50% of your blue chip stocks as a loan? Yeah, it's probably usually reserved for people with more assets. But I do want to push back

Starting point is 01:25:33 a little bit on the staking yield. I do understand it's 4% virtually risk-free, but there are always going to be risks with, you know, the price of Ethereum, right? So like you're getting paid in Ethereum. This is a key thing, right? Your risk is the currency you're staking it. So if Ethereum goes down 50%, then your Fiat value of your stake could go down versus, you know, if you're getting a 4% high yield savings account, it's backed by the FDIC, it's virtually this. And there is another risk as well as Ethereum is actually annual staking. Oh, I see. And most of it is being done via a few businesses like LIDA, which are turning into short-term staking.

Starting point is 01:26:15 And so there's a duration mismatch that has some elements of risk in. What about? Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, when do you get paid? With the Ethereum state, you get paid every month, or do you get paid on the year? I was getting paid monthly. Monthly, okay. What about pensions?

Starting point is 01:26:31 Retirement. So in the UK, we call it a pension. I think you guys call it a 401K. But across the world, it's pretty much the same, across the Western world anyway. If I'm 25 or 30 or whatever, should I be paying into my pension as a way to generate to make myself wealthy someday? Is that a smart idea? I don't have a 401k. I don't have an IRA.

Starting point is 01:26:55 But the reason why people like these accounts and why they can work for some people is because they are tax-deferred accounts. Meaning, I can put my money in, whether I pay taxes an hour later. The money will then sit there, grow, and I don't pay taxes until I pull my money out. But there's a couple problems.

Starting point is 01:27:16 Problem number one is... I have very little control of where my money can be invested. Maybe this will change the Trump administration has passed a new executive order on 401Ks to change which you could potentially invest in 401Ks, but that hasn't happened yet. You have very limited options. They're primarily just mutual funds and many of them have a fee. I think nerd wallets that 92% of Americans don't know what the 401k fees are. So if you don't know which a 401k fee is, this is your notice to go check what the expense ratio is and you should know that.

Starting point is 01:27:47 So you have very limited options. you're going to have to pay a fee, which means somebody on Wall Street is going to be paid forever until you retire. Number two, I can't touch this money until I'm 60 years old, 59 and a half. If I do have to pay a 10% penalty. And number three, the whole discussion is you're doing this for tax benefits. But kind of like we talked about earlier, there's a lot of tax benefits that you can get outside of a 401k, which is why for me, I don't like it.

Starting point is 01:28:13 But I'm not everybody. For some people, it can be a great place because you're employed. lawyer might say, we're going to give you a 3% match. So if you invest, let's just say, a $3,000 into your 401k and they match it 100%. They might also just throw $3,000 into your 401k, but you have the same risks and concerns along the way. I don't think most people even know what a pension is, to be honest. I think we pay into it, but we don't really know what's working. And I saw this really interesting debate take place on X the other day where someone was, a guy who was saying in the UK, I've paid into my pension

Starting point is 01:28:47 my whole life, so I deserve it, and it'll be there when I'm ready. And then everyone underneath it was telling him that, by the way, it's not like some piggy bank that you get to break open. The money you paid into a pension was used to pay for the people that needed a pension when you were working. So you're talking about Social Security in the United States. Because as an employee in the United States, you have to pay into Social Security. So 6.2% of your income.

Starting point is 01:29:16 So you have a lot of taxes. You're going to have to pay income taxes on what you make, and then you have Social Security tax. So on your income, you're going to pay 6.2% of that, separately from your income tax, but 6.2% into this Social Security fund. And then your employer is also going to pay 6.2% into this fund. This money, in theory, is supposed to grow and compound. That way, when you retire, you have this retirement fund that's going to pay you every single year. You don't get to choose. I mean, you can choose when you pull it out.

Starting point is 01:29:46 but you don't get to do anything with it. The government's going to be in charge. This is what is running out of money in the United States today. Why? Because people that are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s that are paying into it today, it's not paying for their retirement. It's paying for the people who are retiring today

Starting point is 01:30:02 to pay for their Social Security benefits. And that's what people don't understand. They think they're paying into a piggy bank that they get to crack open and that will pay for them as long as they live for the rest of their life. I was looking at the biggest misconceptions around pensions, and the first one was that

Starting point is 01:30:16 my pension is guaranteed money for the entirety of my life, once I retire. Well, there is some truth to that, the part, in the United States at least, that you were guaranteed what the wording is that you're going to get the Social Security until you pass away. But the part that they never tell you, and there's no asterisk about this either, is how much that value of the check will be. So here's what's going on. people are paying into the Social Security Fund thinking that they're going to be able to fund their retirement every financial advisor historically has said

Starting point is 01:30:49 that retirement is a three-legged stool you have your 401k your personal retirement you have your own personal savings and then you have Social Security well you pay into Social Security by force because you don't get to opt out of it unless you are an investor you don't have to pay

Starting point is 01:31:06 your Social Security income or Social Security taxes on your investment income but you pay into this until you hit retirement age, and then you get to pull this money out. Well, the government is running out of Social Security money, but people misconstrue that because they say, oh, that means the government's no longer going to pay Social Security. That's not true. They'll still pay it, but they'll just print their way to pay it, which is what you've been talking about. So great, they're giving you a bigger check. The problem with that bigger check is that

Starting point is 01:31:35 bigger check can't buy you as much stuff. So, yeah, you're based off what the United States government says, assuming that they don't default, you're going to get the social security check, is it not going to be able to buy you as much as you thought before? The other big misconceptions are that people think their employer is putting enough in to cover their full retirement. They think it's the same as a savings account. They think they can access it whenever they like. The government will cover them when it runs out. And I don't need to think about it until I'm older. And lastly, my pension pot is tax-free. So the big shift that happened around 20 years ago was a show.

Starting point is 01:32:11 shift from what's known as defined benefit to divine contribution. So defined benefit used to work for Ford or American Airlines or whatever company. You retired, you got 60% of your final year's salary forever. That was bankrupting all of these pension plans because people were living longer, all the other stuff. And so they kind of changed it to define contribution. Basically you get out what you put in, plus the investment return. But there's fees, maybe you didn't give it to a good manager. Maybe you didn't know when they said, well, do you want to put it in bonds or equities? You're like bonds, and it didn't grow as much or whatever it was.

Starting point is 01:32:53 And in the end, you're just not sure that the average 401K in the United States for a baby boomer, I believe, is about $100,000. What age? A baby boomer, like 65? Yeah. I think it's right now around $200,000. Oh, $200, okay, fine. But it's not enough to retire. The 100 is not enough to retire.

Starting point is 01:33:11 There's 10 years of 20 grand a year. Right. So there's so little money in the U.S. pension system, particularly, that there is no hope for these people. This whole video on this called The Retirement Crisis became a huge kind of viral success years ago. Just explaining there is no way out of this for the pensioners, the boomers, all the millennials,

Starting point is 01:33:32 and everyone's going to have to change within this to figure this stuff out. I think you said it earlier today. You were talking about a Ponzi scheme. here you have one but nobody wants to say that but everyone is paying in to keep funding this thing but the only way it's running is because people are

Starting point is 01:33:49 paying it in the problem is there's not enough money coming in because remember we talked about the beginning the demographics there's less and less young people there's less and less young people because we're having less babies but there's tons of these retired people and this keeps going in perpetuity

Starting point is 01:34:05 because we're having babies so that's workers in 20 years time The babies now are workers in 20 years' time. We can forward-project this. It doesn't stop. So how the hell are we going to pay for this massive amount of baby boomers, which is in the United States is 78 million of them, largest cohort in history at the time, we can't pay for them.

Starting point is 01:34:24 And this is where the proposals are to tax your Bitcoin, the value of your assets, or tax the value of assets, or tax your investment income. But the UK's got the same, this whole wealth, everybody's got the same problem, everybody. What do you think I'm free in terms of retirement crisis? I think that, so I have a different take on, well, I think, first of all, I think Jess Breed and Roe, you guys and you were talking about Social Security, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:48 But I have a different take on retirement altogether, I think. I think 401Ks are good for the average person because it's a forced savings mechanism. A lot of people wouldn't contribute to a retirement account unless the employer offered it, right? And so the whole match thing is a great thing for behavioral finance. It's like, okay, if I do this, I get some free money from my employer, and at least I'm saving some money instead of nothing. You are working for that money is not really free. A 401K for anyone that doesn't understand is you agree to invest in a investment pot

Starting point is 01:35:21 alongside your employer. It is more like an individual retirement account that is awarded to you because you work for an employer. You have the option to invest within a 401K, and that 401K is typically tax deferred. which means that you pay taxes on it later in life. And what's the difference between that and a social security? A social security is a government program where you are required to pay into it every paycheck that goes into this big pot.

Starting point is 01:35:51 And then when you do retire, the government will send you a social security check every month. Okay. But I still think that there are plenty of ways to retire and retire with some sort of freedom, retire early. Have you heard of Coastfire before? No. Coastfire is another newer thing that's kind of on Reddit,

Starting point is 01:36:11 but it's a variation of financial independence retire early. And it's essentially you get your nest egg to a point where you don't have to invest any dollar into it after that. But because you get it to, let's say, a certain number, and that number is usually pretty reasonable, the investment returns if you're invested in the SP 500 will get you to a full retirement by the time you're able to retire at 65. So it doesn't mean you retire early completely.

Starting point is 01:36:36 But it means that if you get to your coast fire number, which is what it's called, maybe you have more freedom of choice in what you're working on. So, like, maybe you don't have to work for the employer that you absolutely hate. You can maybe go do something that's a little bit more suited to your lifestyle. You're still working, but you're not working too safe for retirement anymore because you hit that coast fire number. So, for example, at the age of 35, I think the coast fire number is like $150,000. If you can hit $150,000 by $35,000, if you have 30 years of investment returns at 8%, you'll have $1.5 million by the time you retire, which is a little bit more palatable for people

Starting point is 01:37:11 that are having a hard time wrapping their heads around. Am I ever going to retire? They're not going to retire in that. They're not going to be kicking up their feet on the sand beaches of Aruba, but you're still going to be doing something. And I personally think if I was retired, I'd be so bored out of my mind doing nothing, right?

Starting point is 01:37:27 So I'd like to work on something. The idea is you just don't have to work for maybe the job you hate or something like that. So if I hit the $150,000 in savings, and I put it into the S&P 500 and get the... 8% return. 8% return. By the age of 65, I'll have 1.5.0.9, yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:43 What's that worth then? That's true. That is another part of the equation is, with inflation, what is it going to be worth? And is this what you're trying to do? Because I remember an hour ago you said, I'm just trying to retire earlier words to that effect. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to be Coastfire. And Coastfire is, you know, however you would like to define it.

Starting point is 01:38:02 But, you know, I already think I'm pretty close, if not, I've already reached it, which is like I get to work on the things that I love. And I think that my retirement nest egg will eventually grow to a point where by the time I hit 60, 65, I'll be able to coast. Did you create a number, do the math on what you'd need to get to? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So you can project out your expenses of what you think your expenses are going to be on an annual basis and then kind of work backwards to that number. Okay.

Starting point is 01:38:31 Yeah. A lot of math involved, but you kind of have to do. do you on chat GPT or something just do. Retirement crisis. Hmm, that's concerning. That's concerning. So your approach is to do the Coast Fire thing. My approach is let's stay disciplined, consistent with our savings and investing, and actually get to a place where retirement might be possible. I love that idea. And that's the same as when I started with the manifesting your destiny. Sure. You say, well, I need this goal. How do I do it? We do this and grow up via investments right it's brilliant to do that and then you can take more risk sure if you isolate that

Starting point is 01:39:08 and say well any capsule i build now i can do whatever i want um that was the same idea that i have with the home it's like i've de-risked my life now i can take risk and that's a really nice thing to do and i love the way that you do it by saying well my future self wants this for me to do that i need to do this now and then it should take care of that now it's all there's always risky I didn't imagine, but yeah. And then you have extra dollars to do whatever you want with, right? I also love that you've been disciplined

Starting point is 01:39:35 on, like, what you like and what you know. Yeah. And I appreciate that, thank you. Because you said, I think 90% are in index funds and ETFs. That's what I would recommend for people. Oh, sorry. Okay. For me personally, I'm like 50, 60% index funds.

Starting point is 01:39:50 But still, that's pretty high and not having that, you know, shiny object syndrome or whatever you want to call it. I mean, that, that's not... You're accusing me of having shiny objects. I was just trying to engage to everybody here. but whatever it might be to be disciplined.

Starting point is 01:40:05 I think that's such a valuable trait and you talked about the scarcity mindset I think that's also a discipline mindset that you have that. So I would reframe that and I think you've done an excellent job. I think personal finance is personal. Right guys, I'm going to go get Steve.

Starting point is 01:40:18 The guest is here. Ready? Come in. Oh my God, Steve! What are you doing? This is the Bonchard face mask. It's good for blemishes, wrinkles, clears up the skin. It's red light. Have you not used it before? No. I've tried this before. It's

Starting point is 01:40:35 really, really good. It shines red light on your face, which helps increase and boost collagen production. I actually found it out because of the misses. Seeing her wearing it, she terrified me a couple of nights in the row. I thought it was to scare people with, but actually it's really, really good for your skin. So they are a sponsor of the podcast, and I've been using it every day for about a year and half now. Wow, Steve. I'm glowing, aren't it? Great. Yes. And the Bonchard ships worldwide with easy returns and a year-long warranty on all of their products. So visit boncharge.com slash diary for 25% off on any product site-wide. But you have to order through that link.

Starting point is 01:41:10 That's boncharge.com slash diary with code diary. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are. are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation.

Starting point is 01:41:33 We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. And so much more. In this circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have.

Starting point is 01:41:51 But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, to the link in the description below or go to doac circle.com. I will speak to you there. On that point of discipline, Humphrey, I have seen a couple of videos from you where you talk about the things that you stopped spending money on. And there is a narrative that says, you know, in order to get rich, or to save, to get to where you want to go with your financial goals, you should not have the Starbucks coffee. Sure. You should not do these things. What did you

Starting point is 01:42:22 stop spending money on? And what's your framework there? So I looked at it, I took a look at my expenses from 2014 and onward and just kind of like saw the differences in how my spending habits have changed. The first thing I stopped spending money on are Airbnb's. So Airbnb's used to be a great value. They used to be a unique experience. But these days, they're all kind of commercialized. And I feel like with the cleaning fees and all these fees, you end up paying more for less convenience as a hotel. So that's number one. I stopped buying food in bulk. I know that sounds kind of random, but I'm a single guy. Sometimes I get two gallons of milk and I can't finish it, right? So I'm pouring milk down the drain, or I'm buying 48 eggs at a time from Costco, and I'm just like, dude, like, I mean, I like the gym, but I can't eat 48 eggs in like two weeks or whatever that time is, right?

Starting point is 01:43:09 So that's another. And then another thing I did was I started to switch my car insurance because I moved into San Francisco, the city. I'm driving less. So I used to drive 15,000 miles a year. I drive 3,000 miles a year now. And just by calling my car insurance, I was able to save like $40 a month, just because. because my driving requirements are much lower. So those were like...

Starting point is 01:43:31 Explain that. Yeah, so, you know, a car insurance rates are dependent on how much you drive. And if you drive less and you move to a city, then your rates should come down. But I think some people are a little bit too loyal to their providers. They're not willing to compare rates because it's painful. You don't really want to do it. It takes time. But I think doing that, spending an hour calling your insurance provider, looking at different insurance providers,

Starting point is 01:43:54 not just for cars, but for homes too. you can save a lot of money because insurance is kind of commoditized. So it's like you're going to get coverage from many different providers. You might as well put them kind of in a bidding war for your business. I used to work selling car insurance. I used to, it was one of my tele sales jobs. I've done that as well. Yeah, and there was, interestingly, I don't think people know this.

Starting point is 01:44:14 But as I sat there in the car insurance call center, there's this bar on the screen that I can move in either direction to basically give you a discount. based on how the sale is going. So if I really think I'm going to lose your sale, all I do is slide the bar to the left, and it brings your upfront payment down and your monthly payment down.

Starting point is 01:44:36 But if I thought the sale was easy, I could bring the bar up in terms of the price I quote you and give you breakdown insurance and all these other upsells. And so I don't think people realize how negotiable all of their insurances are, even their phone insurance and all these other things. And sometimes you don't figure out

Starting point is 01:44:56 until you say you're going to quit. And then suddenly they give you some great offer where they're going to give you 50% off. Yep. Yeah. And the other way of approaching it is I never really sold for costs, a soul for income.

Starting point is 01:45:08 Okay. And that is saying, that is saying, okay, your lifestyle, as long as you're not being ridiculous, right? It's like, do I really want to not go to a restaurant or get that Uber Eats or whatever?

Starting point is 01:45:22 I understand, yeah. Because that's penalizing yourself. And that's not. nice thing to do always, right? It takes a lot of discipline and discipline is hard. But if you've got an equal, an opposite amount of discipline in solving for income, you actually move your lifestyle further ahead. So, you know, the rise of, I mean, I do three, four jobs, you do three, four, we all do lots of different things now. You do as well. We all got different income streams. You're almost better off to spend your energy thinking about how do I increase my income stream

Starting point is 01:45:53 than your cost basis. At a certain point, we agree, like Stephen's friend who sent him in the message, he needs to desperately rescue his cost base. But generally, if you're looking at a life plan, you'll get to your coastfire or whatever it's called quicker by solving for income than you will for cost. I just think lower-hanging fruit is solving for expenses,

Starting point is 01:46:13 which is like everyone can cut back a little bit, but everyone can't just like say, I'm going to make 2X more tomorrow. That's kind of a harder problem. And I think if you want... Well, you just trade off your time because, I mean, you can. If you're in a lower-earning job, you can drive an Uber and earn extra money, or you can do a bar of job.

Starting point is 01:46:30 Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah. It's like multiple revenue streams is now the way the world works because the cost of living has become so expensive that everyone's having to do multiple jobs. But with technology, we can actually do it much easier. Tomfrey's point as well, though, you can get a 30% pay rise today just by maybe bringing a pack lunch or walking somewhere or whatever else. And it's probably harder to get a 30% pay rise.

Starting point is 01:46:53 I think it depends on which stage of life you're in. Because now if you just stick with a lunch, if you're on that lunch example, packing lunch costs time. And depending on how much your time is worth, that one hour of time could be $20. It could be $2,000. And I think that's that key difference. And I think there's definitely times and places you've got to cut.

Starting point is 01:47:18 I fully agree with you on that. But I think at a certain stage, Look, I have still cheap with my money in multiple places, but I have, when it comes to time, so our office is in downtown Detroit. And my commute there is 45 minutes, but I don't drive. What I do is I get driven there. And the reason why I do that is because I can sit in the backseat and work. And one of the things that, you know, we publish daily financial news.

Starting point is 01:47:51 So sometimes something will be happening with our market briefs where, oh, this is important. And if I'm driving, I don't want to be texting and driving. So instead, I pay for an Uber or whatever and I go that 45 minutes there, it's 45 minutes back. And it's money out of my account every single day. But I get back an hour and a half of my time, which is worth way more than whatever I'm paying in my driver fees. So I think it depends on where you are in the stage of life because I wouldn't do that if this was way before. What is the biggest This is an open question to everybody

Starting point is 01:48:22 What do you think the biggest money mistake The average person makes is They spend all their money The two S's You're spending all over money And if you get past that Then you're saving all of your money Both of them are mistakes

Starting point is 01:48:33 Both of them are mistakes So just having your money sat in a bank account doing nothing You're becoming poorer Every single day I don't think most people know this I've got a friend who's steadily compounded his

Starting point is 01:48:45 His bank balance over time And I remember asking him I was like, how much money do you now have in your bank account? He's taking a really slow approach over time. He runs his business as a freelance. And he goes, I think probably about a million dollars. And I was like, it's just sat on your bank account. He was like, yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:59 And because he's scared. He doesn't know what to do with it. So he thinks just putting it in the bank account is the safest possible thing to do. Well, it's a guaranteed loss. Why? If your bank account, the average bank account in the United States today, not the high-yield accounts, but the average account is paying 0.1%, 0.5%, I don't know, something, something super low. If we just say inflation is 3%, meaning

Starting point is 01:49:23 the cost you have to spend out of the bank account to buy something is going up by 3%. And that's the reported numbers, not the real inflation that many people feel. Well, that means there's a net loss of 2.5% on that. So if I have a million dollars there, that's $25,000 of lost buying power. Roe, do you think companies, because a lot of my audience are companies, whether they're, you know, one-person companies or big companies. Do you think they should be putting their money that they have sat in their account into Bitcoin? In essence, if you're Microsoft, they have huge cash piles.

Starting point is 01:49:59 What does Microsoft buy with their cash? Really, they buy some investment stuff, but it's generally cash base. And then they may buy another company, or they may buy real estate, data centers, let's say. or they may buy their own shares back. All of those, three things that they buy are driven by the debasement of currency

Starting point is 01:50:22 and they get more expensive every year and they're holding a cash return of 3.5%. So it's stupid what they're doing because actually all your shareholder cash is not buying the equivalent of the actual things that drive the value of the company. But what about small companies? What if there's people listening now

Starting point is 01:50:40 that have companies where they've got a million, two million in the bank, they probably don't need it all for cash flow reasons. And so I do think that investing versus saving is misunderstood to go back to your original question. I think investing is much more important. I made the mistake of being a saver when I was young because, you know, the fear. All of that stuff meant I was super risk-averse. And I was an investment banker.

Starting point is 01:51:05 I was investing. But I didn't. So I made money from being in that industry. So I'm just going to hoard cash. I did worse for doing that. And then once we saw the banking system fell, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to take control of my own finances. So the same is true of a business that they're generating cash.

Starting point is 01:51:21 They shouldn't be sitting on a massively large amount of cash, but some liquid investments, I think, massively help. Because you're going to make your cash grow for you and your shareholders. And that's important. But don't let go of your liquidity, because when you really need it and you don't have cash, that's the worst thing in the world, particularly when you've saved the money. So in your business bank account, for Real Vision. Yeah. Do you put some of the money into crypto? It depends.

Starting point is 01:51:49 A lot of it gets reinvested for growth within the company. So you're making the decision is how's your capital going to grow? Is it going to grow your share price via reinvesting in the business? Or is it better to use the savings pool and buy other investments and diversify away? That really depends on your business where it is in the growth cycle. But if you're like a cash-generating regular non-growth style, business, then you're going to be generating cash. You might have taken some dividends out and bought a house and done of that thing. Yeah, there's no reason not to do some

Starting point is 01:52:23 relatively conservative investment strategy. Humphrey, you worked with lots of rich people advising them. What is it that rich people know that the average person doesn't know as it relates to money? Because there are money games that you discover when you get to see behind the curtain. What is it that they're doing with their money that the average person isn't aware of or isn't able to do with their money? Rich people are typically more disciplined. They're typically checking their bank account every day, right? They're doing little things that compound into huge results at the end of 10 or 20 years. And they're thinking in decades not just what am I going to do this week, right? They're choosing investment choices for themselves in 10 years, 20 years

Starting point is 01:53:08 from now, instead of choosing sports betting on the football match for 1,000 pounds, you know, that night. Because they know that their 1,000 pounds working for them today will be worth, you know, 10,000, 20,000 in 10 or 20 years. So it's more just like a long-term mindset versus a short-term mindset. Delaying gratification, yes. Were you writing down there? I was writing down how the system is rigged in the favor of rich people is it's extraordinary.

Starting point is 01:53:38 because it's the Charlie Munger quote of show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. What people get, once you get, it's not the 100,000, but it's like the people who've got 10 million in their bank account, they get loans that are called non-recourse loans. It's an extraordinary thing because unlike your friend, they don't have to pay it back. So a non-recourse loan means you're not legally liable for the loan in the end. Now, there'll be some provisions and how to do it, but why are they doing this? Why are they getting these favourable terms? Why are they getting the private placements in stocks before they go public?

Starting point is 01:54:16 Why are they getting all the best offers? Because they pay fees to the investment banks, and the investment banks desperately want these people because they have a lot of financial activity, and so they incentivise them. None of us get a look in at all of that. It's the same thing that I talked about with the hedge fund industry in the beginning. It's like they were incentivised by a phase to get information that was better than everybody else. And I think part of that is the ability that all we're trying to say to people is you don't have to play the same game. You don't have to pay anybody's fees. You buy

Starting point is 01:54:50 a Bitcoin, stick it in your Coinbase thing or wherever. It costs you nothing to run and you're outperforming a venture capital investor. There's simple things like buying an index fund. You're not paying the Wall Street complex $1,000 for active management. There's ways of hacking this. And it's not that expensive to do. Just before we move to Justprey, one of the things that I think you kind of both alluded to a little bit, and you said earlier on, was about how relationships make money. And because what I was watching when I was sat in that apartment with this billionaire is his friends and his contacts who had done business with him in the past were getting

Starting point is 01:55:25 the allocation, the prime allocation of being able to invest just before this company went public, which means that the next day it would multiply. But those were relationships. So if there is a strategy to build wealth, it goes back to what Rao said at the start, being around people and having good relationships is actually, I think, really, really unappreciated. I've got a friend, I can name my friend, called Harry Stubbings. He runs a podcast called 20VC. And on that podcast, he sits with extremely rich people.

Starting point is 01:55:56 The podcast, Harry's podcast, isn't as big as Joe Rogans. But because Harry has had two-hour conversations with the richest people on planet Earth and continues to do so, he's built one of the biggest investment funds in Europe, especially as like a guy in his 20s. I mean, I think he's raised, if I'm not mistaken, $750 million just from the relationships. And he said to me, he said, you know, the biggest value leverage I've built in the last five, 10 years isn't like the views. People have more views than him. It's he has, he knows everyone rich. And I think we underestimate that when we think about wealth creation, because if you can do what Rao said and get around rich people, help them in some way,

Starting point is 01:56:34 build those relationships. It pays dividends. What, forever? There's a great guy called Devesh Mackin, who runs a firm, an investment firm in San Francisco called Iconic. He was a young investment banker at Goldman, around the same time when I started there as well. But he was hired into the internet banking team in 2000. He turned up the office, but a month later, the entire thing was gone. Everybody was fired. And he was too. He was kind of two juniors to bother them. He fired all the senior bankers. And he thought, what did I do? I think he had no bosses left. So he just basically went to Silicon Valley and hung out in coffee shops and made friends. The people he happened to make friends with, with Mark Zuckerberg,

Starting point is 01:57:23 Reid Hastings, Reid Hoffman, all these people. But he then became their wealth advisor at Goldman, moved all to Morgan Stanley and then built his own firm, Iconic. And iconic is massive, It runs all the wealth for these Silicon Valley people from this network of meeting these random dudes building businesses when nobody else wanted to speak to them because they've gone through the big bust and he made his entire life on that network. Genius.

Starting point is 01:57:48 Probably at that cafe where I spent all my Bitcoin. The one with the gold door. You were there at the same time. Sending was your phone on Bitcoin? It's interesting because when we talk about systems and all these things for money, nobody ever talks about a system for managing your relationships. And the way that most of us manage our relationships is we get someone's number

Starting point is 01:58:10 and we hope that we'll cross paths again. But I think, I'm thinking about it, obviously I do this podcast where I meet so many great people, I should have a much better system for understanding those relationships, how I can be of service to those people, understanding their birthdays and all these other kinds of things. And not only would that be good for my mental health and more, friends, all these kinds of sort of social, psychological things. But in business terms, there's going to be opportunities, whether it's six years from now where I need your advice. The key to networks is it's what you put into the network, not what you take out. Yeah. So the people who have

Starting point is 01:58:48 the best networks I've ever seen are always the people say, how can I help you? Yeah. Hey, I've got something for you. You should meet so and so. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's never, hey, listen, what can you do for me? Yeah. That comes back. Karma flows back always to give as much into the network as possible, and the network gives back. I think that's what, in the case of Harry, he's also done. Because funnily enough, about a month ago, I said, oh, I've got this idea to do this thing. And Harry turned around to me 30 seconds within WhatsApp

Starting point is 01:59:15 and said, oh, I know insert name of this person who's the very top investing in Europe. I'll put you in a WhatsApp group with him. Put me in a WhatsApp group with this guy, sent a voice note, said, Steve's the best ever. Then he said, he said, Steve's way better than I am, everything. This is literally what he said. And then he said about the guy he put me in the WhatsApp group.

Starting point is 01:59:30 He goes, and this guy is also the best of what he does putting you two together, good luck. And immediately I thought, fucking hell, Harry's, what a great guy. And then the guy he'd introduced me to goes, isn't Harry such a great guy? And so I mentioned, hey, I'm like, listen, if there's anything I can do for you. But that's the karma. Honestly, I really believe in networks. I think the most important thing, your community, your network is everything.

Starting point is 01:59:53 And the absolute answer is you have to keep putting into the network. because if you try and extract from the network, it collapses. Because then you're just that guy who's making the phone call after 10 years saying, hey, Stephen, can I get some money from you because I've run out of cash? The last thing I wanted to talk about is the UK and the US and geographies generally and how much that plays a role. Because right now there's lots of political social conversations about the UK. People are a little bit duma about the UK.

Starting point is 02:00:25 Some people are optimistic about the US, some aren't. How much do you think about geographies when you're thinking about your wealth creation, your finance strategy? Does it play a role? So I was fortunate enough to live in London for a little bit over a month or so. And I did a number of podcasts out there. And I guess I could just ask you. The interesting thing about these podcasts is when I was talking to them, what they told me is that the majority of their listener base is in the United States. The majority of their money comes to the United States.

Starting point is 02:00:56 the majority of their sponsors come from the United States. It's not from the UK. And I thought that was very interesting because it's a huge market. But what they were saying is people who are really looking to grow in the United Kingdom, a lot of them at least, just from what I heard, would prefer to earn from the United States

Starting point is 02:01:17 because the dollar figures are much higher. Now, I don't have a lot of global experience outside of that, but I do think that the United States is more friendly for people that are interested in wealth growth, wealth accumulation. Maybe not the best, there's tax-free countries out there, but in terms of for somebody who is more entrepreneurial in that sense, I think you have a lot of opportunities here that you don't have other places. What do you think, Roam?

Starting point is 02:01:44 I'm a huge believer in geographic location for a number of different reasons. So I've lived in the UK, India, Spain and the Cayman Islands. I spent most of my working career on this side of the pond in the U.S. Spain is lifestyle arbitrage. The cost of living is even probably half that of the UK and a third of that what it is in the US or the Cayman Islands. 300 days of sunshine, incredible people, culture, climate, cost is very cheap, rent is cheap, to buy is cheap, everything.

Starting point is 02:02:13 Perfect lifestyle arbitrage. Problem is network. You're not surrounded by people who are ambitious doing different stuff. In a globalised world now where we can work online, it's actually doable. So we've seen a lot of Americans moving down to, Latin America. That's the arbitrage here or Columbia as well. So into South America, Latin America, it's cheap, high quality of life, relatively safe. And if you're in a business

Starting point is 02:02:35 where you can work online, you can get to your end goal, your coastfire thing super fast by doing that. If you want, to your point, if you want intellectual capital, there is only one place in the world that has it in such high density, the US. Capital and intellectual capital. Asia has it. India has it. It's all around, but they're all missing different forms of it. So it's using that for your end goals. What about the UK? I can't do it

Starting point is 02:03:02 because the UK's attitude now has become we just can't have nice things. They don't want to. If I speak to my friends, they don't want to invest. They just want to have the bigger house and the next car on lease.

Starting point is 02:03:20 People are institutionally unhappy in the UK right now. And there has been for a while. And so we don't have a culture of entrepreneurialism left. It's been stamped out. Europe too. So it's not just the UK. Everywhere in Europe, the same thing has happened. People just don't believe they can have nice things anymore.

Starting point is 02:03:37 When you think about the narrative that you understand of the UK, like what is the message? So if it was like a marketing slogan, the UK, you're an investor, you're an entrepreneur. What's in your head when you think of the UK? What comes out? Is it in reality or what would be? How would you sell the UK to others? No, I'm saying, like, what do you think the narrative of the UK is right now as an investor and entrepreneur? I think it just feels like a backwater.

Starting point is 02:04:04 Backwater. Yeah. It's an economic backwater. So don't forget, in the late 90s and 2000s, it was this entire centre of the world's financial industry. It was a central of the world's advertising industry. It was some of the, you know, all the creative industries. It was all based in London. We lost all of it.

Starting point is 02:04:22 Why? Regulation. So you think it's the government's government have misstepped? Yeah, the government misstepped and the US took the banking system back because how they treated capital requirements in the UK and Europe was different than the US. And they managed to get the Wall Street back to Wall Street. It had all moved. I was working for Goldman Sachs.

Starting point is 02:04:41 London was their biggest office. Same for JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, everybody. And we just stopped it. And now we're seeing it again. We've got Newark Industries rising. We've got AI, crypto. You know, AI came out of Cambridge. I think it was, you know, the Google Deep Mind,

Starting point is 02:04:55 I think it was Cambridge University for most of that stuff. And we dropped the ball. We dropped the ball in the finance industry, we dropped the ball in AI. We get this massive talent density coming out of Oxford and Cambridge, Imperial College and all these others, and we don't use it.

Starting point is 02:05:09 They all move to the US. We had the crypto industry of which we were part of that. We dropped that bull too. We dropped the whole ball on everything. And Europe is actively shutting the draw on every opportunity by saying we don't want to do this. Don't forget, they're a nation of old people now, most of Europe. So they rather just not have any change.

Starting point is 02:05:30 But if we go back to that economic formula for GDP growth, population growth is the key driver. You need a growing population over time, but it just needs to be done in the right way. So they're blaming that, but the whole economic machine is because nobody's had kids. The demographic problem is the structure of everything. and the problem is nobody's had kids

Starting point is 02:05:51 so you don't have economic growth so then you try and bring in new workers to create growth you don't want that so they get thrown out meanwhile the economy slows down people get pulled back they don't want to take risk anymore the whole system is now having to pay for the National Health Service to pay for these old people there's not enough kids to support all of that

Starting point is 02:06:09 the government's getting more in debt bond yields are going up everyone's like what's going on it's all been a function of demographics from day one closing arguments um humphrey closing position what's the most important thing people should be thinking about how would you round off is there anything that i didn't ask you that i should have asked you yeah i think that my my personal philosophy is just that personal finance just comes down to your income minus your expenses so know those two intimately know how to drive both of those two and then just really watch what you spend your money on right like the car pay the average car

Starting point is 02:06:40 payment in america is 745 a month stay away from that if you can try to try to be reasonable Everything is about being consistent and reasonable, and I think those small decisions compound to a much brighter future. For me, first thing is educate yourself. You don't know, we talked about what are your finances look like, what's your bank account look like, what are you trying to achieve? So you educate yourself. Learn about investing, invest above all things. Investing above saving is the only way you're going to get there, because if not, your money goes down. And then just do it.

Starting point is 02:07:13 Make a trade. make an investment, fail, learn, do it again and do it again, and keep learning, educating, and then surround yourself by a good network. Just whether it's even on Twitter, on social media, find a network of people that you can learn from, add to the network, and those things, you'll get ahead. You can't fail. If you educate yourself, just get started and then learn, keep doing it then and just grow a great network. And buy Bitcoin?

Starting point is 02:07:43 Obviously. What coins do you own in the crypto? So this is going to get more contentious now. So I actually own just one Bitcoin for posterity's sake. Oh, fuck. Okay. So I own... I'll delete the episode, then.

Starting point is 02:07:56 I own mainly Suey, which is the crypto network that came out of Facebook. But I'm also on the foundation as well. But I actually put most of my liquid net worth into that. And then I own a lot of digital art on Ethereum. because that's a long-term store of value for me. NFTs. Yeah, NFTs. And so I've moved around a lot between, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, and Suey.

Starting point is 02:08:22 I don't trade. So these are long-term holes. I might change once every two years, change my allocation. But it's generally all the big tokens. And just pre, closing statements. Well, first off, thank you, Raoul, Humphrey, and Steve of putting this together. And to add on to everything that you guys said, for me, I think there's a lot of For lack of a better word crap on the internet of people romanticizing and fantasizing how easy

Starting point is 02:08:47 it is for passive income or for insane levels of wealth where it becomes sometimes hard to see how you could actually do that. And what I'd like to say is, look, nothing comes easy, but change can always be made regardless of where you are, what your background is, where you come from, but it's going to take work. And I think the best thing to help your outcome to get to where you want to go is hard work, sacrifice, put in what I call a decade of sacrifice, that way you can have

Starting point is 02:09:17 what most people dream of. And the only reason why you're able to get there is because you're willing to do what the majority of people are not willing to do. And in a word, AI, positive about it, or pessimistic?

Starting point is 02:09:31 Positive. Best tool we've ever been given. Optimistic, yeah. Okay, good, refreshing. Very refreshing to you. Thank you. all so much for giving me your time today. I'm going to link the top three things that you tell me we should direct the audience to below. So I'll ask you after this conversation to give me three

Starting point is 02:09:49 things where people can find you. The first is going to be your channels. So your channels on YouTube. You're all very large YouTubers and have incredible channels, channels that I followed for many, many years. Is there anything else that you guys would like me to link that you think is going to be pertinent to the audience? Well, we have a free newsletter for investors that we publish every single day called market briefs. I think that would be a great one. I'll link that one as well. Anything else? Real Vision is a simple place.

Starting point is 02:10:12 It's a simple home for everybody's to find what they need. The website? Realvision.com or? Realvision.com. Okay. And Humphrey? And I'm building a website right now that's basically my guide, but it's my guide on different.

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Investing Vs Real Estate Vs Crypto Debate: The Retirement Crisis Is Coming & They’re Lying To You About Renting!

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