The Iced Coffee Hour - Money Expert: Exactly How To Make $1,000,000 From NOTHING! | Sahil Bloom

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

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What is the money for? Being mega rich is wildly overrated. I don't think most people would want to be me. Once you are mega rich, there's all sorts of money-created problems that pop up. Most people, they say they're in the season of building. So they're like, okay, well, I'm going to build and make a whole ton of money. And then I'm going to get freedom and purpose. If you keep saying later about those things, later just becomes another word for never.

So how do you escape the trap them? It can't be about money. the recipe for making a whole lot of money is not that difficult. There's a fundamental misconception about how you make money. You make money by creating value for other people. Every single thing you want is on the other side of a little bit of struggle. So what do you think are the best opportunities today for the next few years? I think that the most interesting opportunity right now is...

Saul Hill Bloom, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. I'm thrilled to be back. So you are a New York Times bestselling author, and you also have managed billions of dollars in assets. You have a lot of very controversial takes about money. You've said that there are four levels of financial wealth. Poor, not poor, rich, and mega-rich. While not poor is better than being poor,

mega-rich is actually worse than being rich. Why is being ultra-wealthy worse than being wealthy? This might be my most controversial take on money. Basically what I'm saying is that being mega rich is wildly overrated. And yet probably all of the listeners are going to say like, that's my goal, right? You're like trying to go make $100 million. I want to go be mega rich. I spent time as I was researching over the last three years with thousands of people all

across the financial spectrum, people like just scraping by on through some of the world's foremost mega billionaires. And my basic premise here is that there are four levels to this game. There is poor. You're scraping by. You're poor. So walk us through actual numbers. If someone's listening right now, how much money do you have to have before?

It depends where you live. But let's just say, like, you're not able to fund basic needs. Like I'm talking. Like broke. Yeah, you struggle. Like paycheck to paycheck, really struggling to pay for, you know, food, shelter, basic needs security. Like if you're talking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you're at the bottom of that. You're struggling to get by.

Not poor is once you've broken out of that. Like you can pay for all of those basic things. and you're starting to have small levels of basic pleasures. Like maybe you can go on a vacation a year. You sort of like can start to afford some basic experiences. You can go out to eat with your family. And there's a huge leap in your well-being from being poor to being not poor. Like that is an enormous leap forward for anyone.

It doesn't matter, you know, what your standard was before. It's an enormous leap. Being rich is sort of the next leap from being not poor. And that is like all of your. sort of simple pleasures in life are affordable. Like you've taken care of all of the money problems. Like you no longer have random money stresses. If you're talking like, you know, New York City, that's probably like 10 million dollars

of liquid net worth is like the top end of being rich. Anything from like a million through 10 million dollars of net worth in probably a major city is like you're rich. You can afford to live where you want. You can go on, you know, you can travel whenever you want. You can afford to eat out. You're not worried about all of that. The problem is people get to that level.

They've solved all of their money problems, and yet they keep striving for this bigger number to try to go be mega rich. And my whole point here is that once you are mega rich, there's all sorts of money-created problems that pop up, meaning like things that only happen when you have an enormous amount of money. So like your identity starts to have issues because you're all super tied up in this like whole world of money.

You have issues with children and raising well-adjusted kids, becomes an enormous problem when you have a ton of money. So suddenly, you've already solved all of your problems. You're not solving anything new at the, at the mega rich level, but you're creating a whole bunch of problems for yourself. But it sounds like that's a problem with the character of the type of individual that usually makes it up to that level of wealth, as opposed to achieving that level of wealth and then that amount of money

kind of being a cancer or plague to your, like, character. It depends how public you are about it, too. If you walk down the street and no one has any clue, you're less of a target. Less of a target. I think what you're assuming, though, Jack, is that, like, we all have perfect agency and control over our own behaviors and characters. And the reality is, so much of who we are and how we approach life and our expectations are driven by our comparison set and, like, our environment. So, in other words, if I say I want to live a simple life, I'm like, I'm really happy with the simple things. Like, I could make a lot of money, but I'm not going to live a fancy life. And I want to do that in Omaha, Nebraska. That actually could. be reasonably easy for me to do. But if I want to do that same thing living in New York City, it's going to be very uncomfortable and very difficult because my comparison set is all these fancy, really rich people around me who measure their, you know, self-worth on the basis of where they vacation and how much their kids' private school tuition is. If that's my comparison set,

suddenly like, it's mymetic, right? Humans are pretty mimetic in the way that we approach life. And so I think it is a trap that the vast majority of people fall into that, you you become and you chase this idea of being mega rich, not realizing that it's actually going to create a whole bunch of problems. If it's a byproduct of just taking action, like you're chasing your purpose, trying to go and build something, I get it. But when you're chasing it as the end,

it leads to a whole bunch of issues. So how do you escape the trap then? I think the biggest way you escape it is that it can't be about money along that journey. Like if you are going to become mega rich, it should be a byproduct of the fact that you are trying to go and build something that you really care about, not because you were just trying to be mega rich, because you think it's going to make you happier. So you as an investment banker, I feel like that's

kind of, I mean, you don't do that because you're super passionate, generally speaking, about like buying up small businesses and this and that. You do it because you want to become rich. Mega rich. So how does that like cognitive dissonance apply in your life if you wanted that, but now you're saying this? Well, I think there's a lot of really miserable investment bankers who've made a whole lot of money and get to the top and are like, Oh, I actually got, I would call it a Pyrrhic victory. It's like a victory that might as well be a defeat. Like you win the battle. You make a whole bunch of money. You think this is going to be the thing that makes you super happy and content and fulfilled. And then you wake up one day and you have four divorces and

five kids that won't talk to you. You're like, oh, shit. I won the game, but I lost the much bigger picture of war of trying to build this life. It's the reason why I think thinking about these things before you go and do it is the most important thing. Because then you can try to avoid these pitfalls, right? Like you can make sure that your kids understand the value of hard work. They're not given all these things. They're not insulated from failure at every step along the way. There's definitely actions you can take, but I would say it's a trap that the majority of people fall into on that journey. It's pretty rare that you come into contact with a mega, mega rich person who is not suffering in some way, shape, or form from the pitfalls of that money. So tell me about these billionaires

that do also have this fulfillment and peace of mind. What makes them different than most billionaires that are a slave to working hard and making a lot of money? I think Richard Branson is probably the best example of a billionaire who has sort of done it right in finding balance in his life. I just co-hosted a retreat with him actually. He has this private island, Necker Island, right?

It's like this crazy island in the British Virgin Islands. he's owned it for many years. It's an amazing story because I think he bought it for like $50,000 or something back in the day. And obviously it's probably worth $100 million. I mean, it's in an insane property. And hosted this retreat there with him. And I gave this talk talking about like the fact that there are these different types of wealth and building your life so that you have thought about that along the journey. And he came up to me at the end and just said that it had made him really think. He had like, you know, been up at night thinking about it. And my reaction was like, you've kind of lived by this without knowing. Like, you didn't have a name for it, but you've lived

by it. Like the guy on his journey to building this thing that has made him billions and billions of dollars has managed to, at age 75, be in extraordinary shape. He's got his whole family there with him. His kids are super well adjusted, like really kind, loving souls. He works on stuff that he really cares about. He's got a lot of freedom. Like, he has really done that. And the way that he did it was that he thought about it all the way. Like, that was designed into his life the entire journey. So it was never this whole game of like later. Most people, they like, they say they're in the season of building. So they're like, okay, well, I'm going to build and make a whole ton of money. And then I'm going to get freedom and purpose. And then I'm going to focus on my

health. And then I'm going to be there for my kids more. And then I'm going to spend time on all that stuff. And the sad thing is that if you keep saying later about those things, later just becomes another word for never because most of that stuff is not going to exist later like your kids aren't going to be five years old later you're not going to magically wake up with freedom later it's not like you you have to design it into your life and so he did that and now as a result at 75 he very much looks like it so what questions should people be then asking themselves on a daily basis to not fall into any financial trap in the bad way or in the way of having too much money one question what is the money for It's a question that no one thinks to ask. You're like, I'm chasing money. I'm going and doing these things. Oh, yeah, I want to be a billionaire. I want to do this thing. I want $30 million. Whatever the number is. You never asked yourself, what is the money for? What is it? It seems easy to say, well, I get a nice house by the beach. Graham, what's the money for? Niceer house. Why a nicer house?

It's something I want. Why, though? More square footage. But why? More activities. What activities are you going to do? You're going to sit in your studio and work? No, I have a drum room.

So you're going to have a bigger drum room? Yeah. Is that really why? Yeah. Okay, that's great. People stay over the house. I want a little guest house on there, a nice view. And you think, a bigger yard for Bailey.

And you think, oh, okay, that's a good one. Future kids, all that stuff. I get that. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, exactly. And you can't do that right now? It would be stressing it.

That's good. But like that's, that vision of saying like, I know what I want my day to look like. Like, what am I actually doing? I'm wake up in the morning. I want to like play some drums when I wake up in the morning. And that's like, I'm going to be able to create this drum room if I make more money. I'm going to be able to create this space where my kids are going to be able to be outside and in the pool.

My whole vision when I like went and wanted to start making money was that I wanted to be able to take my son in the pool at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. Like that was what the money was for. I was like, that's what I want. And to me, like, I have that now. I can do that. That doesn't mean I'm going to just shut down my pursuit of like my ambitions and doing things. But I also have to be able to pause and appreciate that I created the life that I actually wanted, that I can do that.

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if you raise money from other people. Because you're just getting leverage on other people's money to go and do something. If you think about the hourly rate on certain investments, like I have an investment that I made where I put $25,000 into something. This was actually just personal. And I think it'll end up making me multiple millions of dollars based on what this company is doing and what the outcome is going to be. That decision was made in 10 minutes.

The hourly rate on those kind of decisions is extremely. extraordinary. That's why, by the way, like, there's so many people out there that do like little day trading on the side. And my hot take on this is like, unless this is your full time job, you should never be trying to outperform the market. And people go crazy when you say that because you're like, well, I, you know, I made 200% last year. I did this and that. If you can outperform the market consistently, please stop what you're doing on your day trading. Go raise a hedge fund and let me invest in it. Because it is so rare. that anyone can outperform the market. It just doesn't happen consistently. So do you just flat out not believe any like 4X trader, any day trader, swing trader that says, oh, yeah, I beat the market? No, I don't not believe them. I don't think they can do it consistently over a long period of time.

What's a long period of time? You know, five plus years. So what do you think about people? I'm sure there are a few people out there that have done that. There's always exceptions. But if you are doing that and you are legitimately doing this consistently, if you do not go raise a hedge fund, you are an idiot. So my understanding, their defense towards that would be you just can't do it with large sums of money

because you have people that are day traders with alleged or like they claim they have bank rolls of $20 million, but they only regularly trade with like $150,200K because the more money you're putting in, for some reason it's not like... It starts moving the markets. Like you make a $2 million investment and something now. Maybe if you're trading in like tiny things that are... aren't liquid, maybe. That might be true. But like, people that say that they like swing trade the S&P 500 futures and consistently outperform the market, I'm like, please go raise a hedge fund

because you will be a billionaire. What about Forex? I don't know nothing about Forex. I mean, again, I'm like, these are efficient markets, man. There are people whose entire job, smartest people in the world, allegedly, whose entire job is to outperform markets. And a basket of hedge funds did not outperform the S&P 500 index. I always find it funny that there are professionals out there who spend their entire lives decades doing this. And meanwhile, you see some 19-year-old who's saying, oh, I found a way to consistently make money in Forex, and I'm going to teach you how to do it. I just don't see it. Well, I'm going to teach you how to do it. He's going to make his money by selling you a course on how to do it, not by actually doing it. If someone can outperform the market,

the best way for them to monetize that unique, extraordinary skill is to raise a billion dollars of someone else's money and go and do it, because the performance fees you're going to make on being able to do it are astronomical. It's the reason why Ken Griffin has, you know, a like a $100 million penthouse on the top of Manhattan. It's the reason Bill Ackman is worth $10 plus billion. Like, if you can outperform the market and you have this unique skill, please go raise a head on. So what's interesting is that it seems like the new thing is these prop firms that are popping up. And what this is, is that you could go and you pay a fee to trade with a certain amount of money. And once you prove yourselves on these these platforms then they'll say oh we'll give you 5,000 to trade on our behalf

once you've consistently made you know eight to 10 percent a month it's not really that new it's been around and it's interesting it's a very interesting model and it's also one that recently has been getting a lot of press because there's been there are hedge funds that have like tip lines where they will pay you for giving them trade ideas and what's been happening is that there's some enterprising people out there who basically were going and digging up inside information on deals or on stocks and submitting it to hedge funds, getting paid for it. And it's this weird legal gray area where the hedge fund didn't know that it was insider info. They could just say, like, oh, that was a good trade idea that someone sent in. But like, obviously, if there's some random guy

from Bulgaria consistently sending you these trade ideas on some esoteric stock and you're like making absurd amounts of money on this, clearly something was like, the guy had access. to like some truck driver that knew the inventory levels, whatever. But it's this weird, like, legal gray zone that's happening. Yeah, what's crazy for me are the short sellers, where you could basically go and write this hit piece on a company and say at the bottom, you just disclose, we have a short position in this and we financially benefit with the stock price going down. But they're able to make whatever alleged claims they want, drive the stock price down,

profit from shorting the stock, and then exit. How is that any different than an investor? going on CNBC and saying whatever they want about the upside of a stock and trying to pump it up. I think it's totally fine as long as you disclose your position and bias. So I could say, hey, I love this little small cap stock. Oh, by the way, 90% of my portfolios in this. It makes up, you know, X amount of dollars. And this is my bias.

I think as long as you're forthright about your financial interest and saying whatever, then I'm open to it. I feel like they both. Short sellers get a really bad rap. in the market, but they provide an actual, like, important service to a market that there's pressure down on stocks as well, and there's people selling and sharing information on that, on the downsides of these assets. Like, I just think all of these things are helpful for market liquidity in the long run as well. But I do think, like, I mean, the worst version of all of this

was the SPACs. It's like there was no, there was no boundaries. on what you could say about the future earnings of these companies because you were able to project these companies outward, which you're not allowed to do if you'd filing a normal S1 prospectus for like a traditional IPO. And so that got abused badly, right? Like people were just, and everyone, it was the ZERP era, right? So like everyone wanted to buy into these crazy financial projections

for these companies that fundamentally their business model, they just lost money on every transaction, and there was no pathway to making margin. And, you know, a lot of retail investors got destroyed by that. Although really quick, I just want to say that you guys know how much I enjoy getting a good deal. Like, I've made entire videos about how to save money by making coffee at home. That's why any time I find a way to make your money go further, I get really excited. And today's sponsor, Wayfair, helps you do exactly that.

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front door. That's why Wayfair is your trusted destination for all things game day, from recliners and TV stands to cookware and grills. So shop, save, and score today at Wayfair.com. Again, that is W-A-Y-F-A-I-R-com with the link down below in the description. Wayfair, every style, every home. So where have you lost money? In too many places. I mean, I've lost money on the vast majority of startup investments, right? like startup investing, I think startup investing is like the sexiest thing that actually makes objectively no sense to do. I like, look, I mentioned figure. That's a great one. Obviously, that'll be a great outcome. That is going to cover the losses on like 80% of the other things that I've invested in as an angel investor or as a with my venture fund. Because look, like,

you're speculating on things that are ideas at the start. You're basically betting on a person that they're going to be able to figure it out. Markets change. Things change. the vast majority of them won't become successful. And even if they do become successful, it's pretty rare that they end up getting to an outcome where they exit or they go public, where you actually get liquid on the money. And so, I mean, I've lost money on the vast majority of this.

I've also, as a rule, any time I've tried to have a hack or a shortcut, I've gotten punched in the face. What I mean by that is like, any time I thought to myself, oh, I could make this much money this fast, I got destroyed on the thing. Like what are a couple like NFTs got just how much did you lose on NFTs?

Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oh, and I had to pay taxes because I like are you trading them. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, yeah. Like I got wrecked on on NFTs. The only thing that again, to the example of like one good thing offsetting,

I've done very well on Bitcoin because I bought it a long time ago and I've just never sold it and held it. And every single other crypto thing. any other crypto tokens and NFCs I've gotten destroyed on, but it's all made up for by this one buy and hold long term thing. So now my new rule is like, I don't do any trading. So how much better off would you be had you just bought the S&P 500 instead of all of these alternative investments, spreading your portfolio across NFTs, Bitcoin, alt coins, private equity, etc? I would not be better off only because I had access to a few.

few very unique things by virtue of like the networks that got created through these investments. So like when you when you think about an investment, there's a few things to consider. There's the financial returns purely on the surface. Then there's like the amount of time you're going to have to invest into this thing. And then there's what other value you might get from being involved in this. And so, you know, money is very easy. Like you're like, how much money am I pushing into the center of the table for this investment? The time is when people often forget. of like if I'm investing in multifamily real estate and I'm going to actively manage it, there's a whole lot of headaches associated with that. I have to factor that in because that's

real money that I'm putting in in the form of time. The last piece is really heavily skewed towards like in the angel investing or in private equity. When you invest in a deal, you're also going to have access to like the room, you know, the room where it happens on this stuff. So like being involved in a specific deal might be a bad financial investment for that one deal. But if it gets me access to a whole bunch of really smart people that are then going to do more deals, that actually might be a long-term positive move to go and do that. So what stage are you at then in those like categories of financial, like on your financial journey? And what would you say is your main goal financially? I am like probably right at least for where I live. Like I think I'm like right on.

the border of rich and mega rich. And it basically hinges on a few, like if these investments ever got liquid, I would definitely be pushed over into the ladder category. But I'm not like a money guy. Like I'm not a, I don't care about money stuff.

So I'm not like, I'm wearing a running watch. How much does that shirt cost? I don't know, 40 bucks, Buck Mason. Oh, it looks like an expert. Buck Mason is great. I have a drag. Actually, yeah,

I have a jacks. I mean, but like, one of my huge things, by the way, on like, you have to know, when you buy something,

there's like, there's the cheap version. Then, like, when you're talking about something that has utility, like a shirt or bed or furniture or whatever,

there's like, there's the cheapest version. Then there's the version that is like the best quality from an actual utility perspective. And then anything above that, all you're paying for is brand. So,

like, the difference between a $40 shirt and a $500 shirt, like, there's no difference in quality. At some point, it's just, it's just a nice shirt. And all you're paying for is you're just handing someone money for the brand that you got on it. What brands, if you're trying to trigger people here, do you think of the biggest rip-offs? The biggest rip-off brands. I mean, anything that's like a big, you know, where you have a big logo on it, where you're trying to status signal, no, uh, uh, no, not Lou Lou Lou Lehm. I don't know, my wife wears Lulu Lemon. I'm like, I don't know. It doesn't

seem like. They're pretty nice, I will say. Yeah, that's nice. It's, but like, the biggest rip-offs are when you're getting charged for the fact that they know the reason you're buying this thing is to try to impress other people. So, like, that is what they're praying on your insecurity, right? Like, that is what a luxury brand is. Like, you don't carry around a bag because you're like, oh, I love the way this bag makes me feel. You carry it around because you're trying to signal to other people that you are impressive and of a level of status that they should admire. Like, we spend the vast majority of our luxury purchases, if you were to ask your yourself when you make that purchase, would I buy this if I could not tell a single person that I

had it? If I couldn't take a picture on Instagram, I couldn't show it to anyone else. If you ask yourself that question, I call it the bot status test. Like, am I trying to buy status? Usually the answer is no. You're getting this because you want other people to think you're cool in some way. There's nothing wrong with that, but you also have to acknowledge how often you are living for the benefit of a whole bunch of people that are never thinking about you. Like, no one is as impressed by your stuff as you think they are. They don't care. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about money that hold people back? I think that when you are starting out on your journey, you build in your mind this impression

that an incremental unit of money equals an incremental unit of happiness. Money equals happiness, right? Because it does in the early days. Anyone that tells you money doesn't buy happiness is lying. Scientifically, it's actually proven, shown across every study that in the early days of your life and on the early part of the curve, money directly buys happiness. The challenge is humans are really bad at adjusting to something when the fundamental calculus has changed. And again, the science is pretty clear that above certain levels, that incremental unit of money does not drive the same incremental unit of happiness that it did in the early days. But we're like mice chasing the cheese. And so what happens is we are still convinced that it will.

We convince ourselves that our happiness is on the other side of just a little bit more of whatever it is. And we lose sight of everything else on that journey. And that is basically the trap that everyone falls into that leads you to this like, you know, rich yet miserable existence, which you honestly, I mean, I could not conceive of that when I was in my 20s. I was like, what do you mean you have it all? You doing all the things and you're miserable? How's that possible? But that's the reason it happens. Do you notice any difference in mindset and money habits when it comes to like Gen Z, millennials, boomers? And is one of those maybe better than the other? Yeah, I mean, I would say Gen Z, all the recent surveys that I've seen show that Gen Z has these like dramatically higher expectations for what it means to have made it. I think there was like a survey recently that I saw that said it looked at all the generations and like how much money do you need to make in order to have like made it financially.

And it was basically like $200,000 a year was the number for like boomers, Gen X, millennials. And then for Gen Z, it was like $600,000. It was like completely off the charts. And look, I think like the most common interpretation of that would be like Gen Z's cooked. You know, they don't understand money. They're so crazy. But the other piece of that is like, look, they've also come of age in a time when inflation was through the roof. And how's, like, it is untenable to own a starter home in most cities if you're just like earning a normal salary.

And so I think that like there's reasons why people feel that way. It's also crazy. Social media has cooked our brains in a lot of ways. You're like, I hired a 27 year old kid last year. It was his first job. He was like working as personal trainer before. And when I first hired him, he was like, I'm going to be making a million dollars a year by the time I'm 30. And I just looked at him.

I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean you're going to be making me? He was like, oh, I'm just going to be involved in some different stuff. I was like, there's a fundamental misconception about how you make money. You make money by creating value for other people. To earn a million dollars a year, you have to create $10 million a year of value. And if you do that, you actually probably will in some way. Like, you'll probably capture enough of that value to make that money.

But like, value creation is what making money is about. The recipe for making a whole lot of money is not that difficult. It is just create value and then receive value. And creating value is just identifying problems, creating solutions, and then scaling those solutions. At all points in time, if you're trying to make money, you need to be doing one of those three things. And if you were to go start any job and you just find ways to be valuable to everyone around you, you will find a way to make a lot of money over the long term. It's just not going to be like the immediate dopamine hit instant gratification that social

media tells you it will be. So then what are the most overrated wealth milestones people still chase. Overrated wealth milestones. Um, I mean, having a million dollars. Yeah. Why is having a million dollars overrated? Uh, because it doesn't, there's no change in your life from a million versus like 800,000 is what I'm saying. It's like it's not like, uh, um, like in the, in the diamond world, there used to be this like very funny thing in diamond prices where, uh, if you were to buy like a 1.99 carrot ring, uh, the price was one thing. Uh, the price was one thing. thing. And then if you were to get a two-carat ring, the price was like 40% higher. And it's because, like, we build up in our minds these, like, the next threshold. And so they're praying, again,

on, like, the guy, you know, is going to go in and, like, it's his insecurity. He's like, no, I'm going to buy the two-carat ring. So they priced it up a whole bunch. We build up, like this significance to these certain thresholds like that that actually have no bearing on your life. It might feel good to say I have a million-dollar net worth. But a million-dollar net worth is not what it was 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Like, the whole idea of a millionaire was like this big, you know, this big thing. But like being a millionaire, now that's probably like $5 million to have that same level of of financial significance in how you're able to operate.

What is more important, having a lot of money or making a lot of money? Cash flow. Really? Really? I disagree. Yeah. I disagree. Having a lot of money too better than making.

Anytime anyone's talking about having a lot of money, all they're actually talking about is cash flow. And like, everything comes down to cash flow. When people are like, oh, how much is enough? You see all these debates online, 5 million, 10 million, 30 million. All you're actually doing is in the back of your mind, you're doing this math on it's sitting there what your actual cash flow is that comes off of it. The cash is not guaranteed.

Exactly. What do you mean cash flow is not? Cash flow. So for example, I'm talking. It comes off of accounts and everyone always does this. You're like, oh, I've got 10 million sitting in the stock market. That's just going to get me, you know, it's going to get me 500 grand a year. But there says who.

There are things like failure rates with a 3% withdrawal rate off of X amount lump sum invested in a broad market index fund. Like those you can actually apply a certain math to so you can have certainty. Okay, there's a 0.01% failure rate for this sort of investment. And I can withdraw safely this amount per year as opposed to, you know, I've worked in this sector and I feel like if I job hop, I can get another job paying this amount. And then your future is just uncertain with that way. Whereas like you have more broad data all saying that, okay, if you withdraw this amount,

your failure rate is this percent. If you're posing this question, as like, would you rather take $10 million today or a million dollar salary per year? Obviously, you're going to take the $10 million today. Like, yes, I would 100% do that because like the safety and the financial security of doing that is going to matter.

But if you pose it as like, oh, I have these skills and knowledge to continue to grow that million dollars a year and I have, you know, an ability to like do that across a diversified stream of cash flows, I would take the million. I think broadly speaking, it kind of dictates. the way that like the common argument of hey I'm not making that much money but I make a little bit like enough to save a little bit and you're like okay great invest that in a broad market index fund

that's one route or the other route which is like okay invest that on trying to develop a new skill and trying to day trade or trying to drop ship or trying to do this trying to do that because I'm just I'm just saying one route is like investing in yourself and and trying to increase your income and then the other one's saving for the future to try to build up a nest egg so So everyone should build up a nest egg. Go through a couple of basic financial things. The best investment that you can make is having six to 12 months of cash in an emergency fund, which is so paradoxical because everyone's like, well, I'm not getting any yield on

that. That is the peace of mind that you get from knowing that you are okay for a long period of time will allow you to see opportunities much better. That is the single best investment I have made is just having that sitting there because then I know I can actually capitalize on risk without worrying about these things. It gives you the flexibility and the freedom to go and chase the bigger picture things that allow you to go and do that because you know you're safe on the downside. The analogy is like a Formula One car driving around a track. What allows them to do that effectively is the fact that they know and they're confident in their brakes.

Because if they weren't confident in their brakes, they could not go really fast into a turn. But they know the brakes are there. Like that's what the emergency fund does. You have these breaks. The second piece is like this whole thing of side hustles, investing in yourself, a lot of times those are just like basically distractions masquerading as good opportunities. You're like, oh, I'm going to invest in myself. And really what it is is like I'm going to take 30% of my cognitive energy and put it

towards this random thing that is speculative that I'm not sure if it's going to make me any money, but it sounds good versus taking that same 30% of my cognitive energy and doubling down on the value that I can create in my main thing. and you know like you like us having a discussion about uh you know doing a podcast tour you're like well why would we do that if we can just like focus on doing incredible episodes creating incredible clips that maybe are going to go viral and do really well like that's actually a good point right you like this is my main thing that same cognitive energy if i start now like piecing it into 20 side hustles i could just deploy into the thing that i already know works and like logically the way to

think about that is say I want to, you know, I have my main job and then I want to like maybe start a side hustle agency. Like, okay, well, let me just think about this. The side hustle agency for that to be successful, what do I have to do? Well, I have to like figure out what my offer is. I have to go send a whole bunch of cold messages to people. I have to then go take meetings with those people. I have to convert those people. Then I have to provide the service. Then I have to retain them. That's my path to making money on that. All of that energy that you could have put into doing that and how speculative that is, all the things that have to go right for that to work. What if you just put that towards creating way more value at your main thing?

Would you not be able to make more money by like doubling your value that you're providing to the main thing that you're doing? That is why, assuming this other thing isn't like your life's passion, your life's work that you have to go and do it. If it's just a money play, you're better off doubling down on the value you can create in your main thing. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one.

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Again, that is CozyEarth.com slash ICH with the link down below in the description. and if you get one of the reviews, just let them know that we sent you because that would mean the world to us and we would love for them to continue sponsoring these episodes. Thank you again, and now let's get back to the podcast. What do you think about hustle culture? It seems like that's really fall into the side lately.

You think so? Yeah. I think it was really big 2018 through like 2022, and it seems like people have shifted from that to like a work-life balance. I don't think so. Really? No.

Dude, that was the whole like Andrew Tate thing. Like that's like, that's the whole like, you know, Imongodzzi, Tjr, like, Bradskills. I don't think they're a hostile culture. Yeah, I think it's all about, like, work really hard, grind, make a bunch of money while you're super young, buy a Lambo, live in Miami.

That's like, maybe the Miami. Ben realize you're miserable, Ben get married, have kids, yeah. I think it's still pretty heavily promoted. I think that hustle, I mean, I worked 100-hour weeks for the first seven years of my career, and I benefited from that enormously in terms of what I learned, the experience, the networks,

and also the money that you make from doing it. Like, I don't know that, I don't think it has to be that you like demonize hustle culture. Like I think it's great to work hard when you're young. I mean, it's the one time in your life where you don't have all the responsibilities and you don't have all these people counting on you in the same way. Like you can really focus on yourself and on building this base that you're going to benefit from for the rest of your life.

It's actually the best time. Like when your kids are super young, it sucks having to work 100 hour weeks because then you're away. like you're missing this time that you are literally never going to get back. When I have to work hard now with a three-year-old, I feel it way more than before I had kids when I was like sleeping on a mattress on the floor of an apartment at my first job. I didn't care. Like I could go into the office Saturday and Sunday and work 12-hour days and I was just like, this is awesome. I'm in the trenches with people. So I don't know. I mean, I like, I'm still old-fashioned in the sense that I just don't think there's any replacement for hard work.

And so no matter what you're doing, if you're working in finance or if you're, you know, trying to build your business or your hustle. You're not going to build a great business without working hard. You were in private equity for seven years. How many hours per week did you work? And what was the true comp progression over those seven years? I would say the average over those seven years was 80 hours a week. And that's not me like trying to sound cool or flexing on it. Like that's just there was a lot of work to be done. And we all took pride in getting that work done. Like you're in the trenches with a bunch of people and you're getting compensated for it. Like, You know, at the analyst level in private equity, depending on how big your fund is, you're probably making anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 a year.

At the associate level, you're probably making anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 a year. VP level, again, depending on fund size, you're making somewhere between $500 to a million. And then once you get to the principal and managing director ranks, you're making a million plus. The real comp in private equity is not in your annual account. though. It's it's in carried interest, which is the profit share that you get on the fund and the fund performance. And that is where people have made extraordinary amounts of money. And even for me, not having been there for that long, that is where the vast majority of the wealth that I have associated with my time there is, is tied up. It's in the fact that you get, you know,

private equity fund, the standard model is 20% of the profits that the fund generates. So if you have a billion dollar fund that doubles in value, you made a billion dollars in profits, the fund, the managers of the fund get to keep $200 million roughly. And that gets split up. Obviously, the founder of the fund gets the vast majority of that, but like trickle down $200 million to a group of 10 or 15 people, like everyone is getting a whole bunch of money on these deals. And so that really is the bigger thing, but that vests typically over like seven years. So you're getting that over long time periods, that's really like a retention tool for keeping people in the industry. What do you think about the carried interest loophole? They've been trying to get rid of this

loophole forever. I mean, Obama talked about it. Biden talked about it. Trump has talked about it. No one's getting rid of it. Explain what it is. So the carried interest loophole is the idea that carried interest, that money that you're making the profit share on the fund, gets taxed at long-term capital gains rates rather than ordinary income. So all of your like cash comp, your salary and your bonus every year, say you're making a million dollars as a VP, that gets taxed at ordinary income, right? Like you're, probably, if you're in California or New York, like you're paying 50% at some point on that, on that million dollars. But then you make most of your money, most of your actual cash that you were generating in this line of work is like these huge lump sums from these payouts when you,

when you buy and sell companies. And that could be 10.000. million dollars, $20 million, and it's getting taxed at long-term capital gains. You're paying whatever, 25% on it total instead of 50. And people are always debating whether or not that cash is like investment income that you should be paying long-term capital gains or if it's just part of your income. My personal take is it's pretty clear that it's income. And I get why there are people that don't want it to go to income. It's a huge, huge difference maker in your long-term wealth creation. But to me, it's pretty hard to argue that it's actual investment income. Like, yes, you put your own principle at risk when you raise a fund. You might put, you know, maybe a fund

has five or 10 percent of their fund capital is the manager's money. But like, it's hard to argue that the money you're making out of this is like real investment income on that. It's clearly like, it's for your work, it's income. When I looked into this, it seemed like it was a scapegoat for people to call these fund managers evil and that they're the problem and that they're why we're spending so much money and they're responsible for the national debt and why we don't get as much tax money

and they're the ones cheating in the system. Meanwhile, a lot of it goes out to Social Security. That's going to make you favorable. It's the truth when you look at how much social security generates versus how much they pay out, the math just doesn't even work. And the carried interest loophole

is like 0.000,000, like there's so many 0.0 and then 0.1 of that versus anything else that you could do that'll make more of a difference than getting rid of that one thing. I mean, it's tiny, right? Like, it's one of these things that it's a great talking point for politicians

because it's so easy to say, like, look at these mega billionaires and they're not paying their fair share on this thing. It's like it's an obvious political talking point that really doesn't have a huge impact on the national budget, right? Not at all. Just as you said, I do think that it's just like, it's always going to be something that keeps coming up.

And then what you're going to go and look at is the donations and where a lot of these politicians get a lot of their campaign donations from. And there's always some big private equity guys that are funding, you know, $50, 100 million into these super PACs. And so, like, who do you think is not getting, you know, who do you think is like pushing the background agenda on this stuff, right? It's the people that are funding the money. So follow the money on it. Yeah. I don't think it's going to change. It's something like, I think it's $4 million a minute is how much we go in debt as a country.

I think the new tax bill is interesting for a few reasons. I think the whole gambling change is really interesting. Have you seen this? I have. We were in Vegas, so it feels very relevant. But this is kind of crazy because the new change in the tax bill to how gambling is treated sort of craters the professional gambling industry. So I'm told that if you're a main source of income is gambling, then that,

doesn't apply. This is more meant for... Really? That's what I'm told. Who are you told that by? Twitter. Oh. But here's the thing. In my defense, in my defense, there are tax experts who have analyzed this plan and they say, based on our interpretation of this, if you qualify as a professional gambler where this is your full-time main source of income, this is not going to apply. It's going to apply to the people who are trying to deduct gambling losses against gains casually as like a side thing, not their main source of income. It's probably more important for people who are non-professional, though. The change in the rule is that, you know, it used to be that you could deduct 100% of gambling losses.

Against your gains. So if you made $100,000 and then you lost $100,000 gambling, you didn't have any tax that you had to pay because it was offset. Now you can only deduct 90% of gambling losses. So if you make $100,000 and you lose $100,000, there's only $90,000 of that loss that you're allowed to deduct. So you have a $10,000 taxable gain. pay taxes, even though you have no money from your gamble. Why, my, my confusion was why they did that and who it benefits or what their reasoning was for it, unless they just don't like gambling. And that's their way of, you know, curtailing

that a little bit. Yeah, I don't know. Actually, I didn't understand the logic behind it. The one interesting, like, second order effect from it has been, have you seen these, all these prediction markets that have blown up and are going viral? So I'm an investor in one of them called Cal She. And Cal she has like blown up in the news recently because they offer prediction markets on sports games, which basically just looks like the same thing as like going and betting at a sports book, but it's not regulated by the same entity. So they're regulated by the CFTC. And as a result, it's not considered gambling losses if you lose money on it. It's a financial contract. It's prediction. It's event contract. And so if you want to still,

do your same gambling now, but still benefit from the 100% offset of losses versus gains. You can just do it on these prediction markets and benefit from what it used to be. I'm wondering who's slipping this into the bills. It's always someone who has an agenda who says, hey, we're going to give you some funding, but we want you to slip in this paragraph. And this is going to benefit off. We don't know. Dude, it could be prediction markets going in and saying, hey, this. But you would think the Vegas casinos would really be against this. But in reality, I don't, I don't think it impacts the average person because they're not, they're playing with a thousand bucks here and

there. You know, if they win or lose a few hundred, I don't think they're not logging it. They're not. And the casinos aren't keeping track, like, unless you have a player's card of like, oh, you won 100, but you lost 200. You don't think it's impactful for all the people that are doing, like, you know, draft kings, random sports betting on their phones now, all this. I mean, gambling has boom. over the last few years as it's... I think negligibly, like, realistically, even, like, when I go to the casino, I don't log my gains and losses.

I feel like very, very... Yeah, live here. Yeah. I don't gamble often, but you would just put it in a hundred box, and if you win or, like, it pays for dinner or you lost it all. Yeah. But you're talking about casino gambling.

Like, what about just on your phone? Like, the number of people that are just doing sports betting on their phone now is phone. I think of my friends that do, and I don't think that they care about the tax consequences. I think that's kind of like a very niche thing. Like, most people are just on W2 people that get paid out and they get their taxes withheld and like, okay.

You know, they don't actually go in, even investments. Like, they don't consider realized and unrealized. You mean they don't care about the tax? Like, they're just not going to pay taxes on it? No, they're just not thinking about it. But, like, not thinking about it is fine until the IRS comes and you get audited and you have it. They're not, I guess our friends aren't gambling at levels where it's, like, going to be more than, like, $100 in tax. I hope so.

And I feel like gambling is one of those things that, like, you know, been increasingly legalized. And everyone's, like, talking about all the benefits from not drinking is, like, the new hot trend. of like, oh, people are drinking less and less. And you're like, okay, but they're gambling way more. And you're like, so you traded one advice for another. What do you think is better? Drinking or gambling? Drinking.

Drinking is better for you. I think drinking is, my hot take on drinking is that I think that, I think that the whole zero alcohol movement is going to be a net negative for the health of society because people are drinking less, but as a result, even if they're getting a health benefit from that, they're not hanging out with their friends. And so I think like people are drinking less and they're like, oh, my sleep score is sick, but they're super lonely because they're not going out. That's interesting. Yeah, you see Gen Z right now is not socializing as much as they were.

They're not getting in relationships. And the amount of, I think it was like virgin 30-year-olds living with their parents was like the highest level ever in history. But that could be because they don't have the social confidence that just having a, you know, a beer would like give them that bit of a boost to go up and talk to that person or just want to get out of their parents' house. Yeah, whenever you say this, people say, like, well, if you had to drink to hang out with your friends, they weren't really, really good friends. But I'm just, to that, I'm like, I just, to me, having a drink just helps you loosen up. You, like, have a better time. It's enjoyable. Like, I still have a drink probably once a week. Like, I'll have a glass of wine with my life

or I'll go, like, if I'm having a dinner with a friend, I'll have a drink. And I love it. Like, it just, it's a net positive to my life. Even if I, like, yeah, it's a little next. for my health, okay, I'm fine with that if it, you know, creates the type of like social settings that I like with people. I just think that, um, on the like statistics around this, it's pretty clear. Like, uh, teenagers in the U.S. are spending 70% less time in person with their friends than they were two decades ago. A couple weeks ago, I saw a stat that just was showing the percentage of people in the U.S. who are married and own a home before age 30, it was like 50% in the 60s, 70s and 80s,

and now it's like 11%. It's falling off of a complete clip. Yeah, I mean, I kind of understand the reason why. Why? Home prices. Rising home prices. Incomes really not keeping up with inflation and the price to buy a home.

And then the internet, that you could just do anything you want online. There's no real reason to go out and hang out with your friends because there's so much a lot. You don't go to the movies anymore. No. People don't go like out.

It's just hang out, watch movies on Netflix, streaming services, TikTok. No one goes out shopping anymore either. Like besides groceries, but like I would never go to the mall and go shopping. I wouldn't really do that before either, but now I'm especially never doing it. It's just I could go online and find exactly what I want, ship it, and returns are so easy these days. Yeah, partying is down. Partying is down bad in the U.S.

If you look at like the percentage of people who said they went to a party in the last month, it's like just completely falling off a cliff, 70, 80, 90 percent down. over the last two decades. But again, I'm like, okay, so we're drinking less, we're optimizing our life in this one area, but are we just harming ourselves in another one? It's probably going to be an issue when you look at the birth rates, and then at some point we're going to be a bit like Japan. We're already like that. We're not that bad. We're on that trajectory, for sure. The demographics in the US are really bad. I mean, Elon Musk is like always talking about this, right? This is like, their big thing. What are the main concerns with the demographics? Just that we end up

up in a world where you have a ton of dependent age people and not enough working age people. So you end up in a country where, like Japan, where, you know, the average age is over 60. And so you have a whole bunch of people that aren't working that need services provided to them. And it's all paid for by young people that there aren't enough of them. So here's what I think. There's really only two options. One is you financially incentivize people to have kids. That's certainly an option.

I don't think we're going to do that. The other option is just really incentivize good. legal immigration and bring people from other countries who want to live and work here, I think those are the only two options. And I think Japan is going to be doing the same thing. At some point, I think they're going to make it very easy for people who want to live in Japan to go and move to Japan. They could live their full time. They could work there. They could integrate within the society. Maybe there's some requirements there. But it's a beautiful place. And when they don't have that amount of people, I bet they could select for who they want to

move there. I think they're going to make it very appealing for U.S. people. to move to Japan. And then the U.S. is going to be like, wait a second, you can't take our workers. And so the U.S. is going to have to do something. I know a lot of people that are at the age of having kids, and their primary concern is being able to financially justify having a kid. Whereas now I feel like everyone's like, okay, I have to build up this sort of a nest egg. I have to have this amount of money coming in.

I have to have a house so I don't have rent when I'm having a kid. Whereas back in the day, it was kind of like, have a kid, kind of figure it out. So I don't know. Why do you think that that's changed? Like, why is there such a, you know, concern around that now versus the past? I think people care about money more than they used to. Like, I saw this one Jerry Seinfeld clip a long time ago where he was like, back in the day, people didn't care about money like they do today. Back in the day, people would ask you, what do you do for work?

Oh, I do this. Oh, that's a cool job. That's what they cared about. It wasn't like, how much are you making? How much money do you have, which is kind of like the narrative of conversations now? Back in the day, it was just like, do you have a cool job? or do you not? And so I don't know exactly why that is,

but I think, like, maybe it's materialism, consumerism, you know, marketing, how every company is telling you what you need and how it's, you know, you need to buy the newest iPhone, the newest car, to have the coolest things, to attract the coolest partner.

Maybe it has something to do with that. I think it's maybe people are just getting a bit complacent, you know? It could also, and it's probably a combination of that, too. Life has gotten too appealing to sit on your couch and scroll on TikTok. Get anything you want delivered

on Crave. You could break up that totally burrito into four equal payments over the year. DoorDash is the bane of human existence. You can spend a lot of money on those things, man, without realizing. But everything is there. Everything you need is within a room and you're totally satisfied. I mean, that's also the problem, by the way, with, like, young people dating, with, you know, committing to long-term relationships.

Like, all of this stuff is all tied together where you, like, you live in a world where at the touch of a button, you can press the, eject button from anything, right? Like, oh, I don't, I don't really feel like going out. Like, eject button, okay, it all gets delivered to me here. Like, I'm dating someone and it's no longer like the honeymoon phase. Like, well, I have a thousand options on my phone on this app. So, like, eject button on that. And the problem is the vast majority of good things in life, every single thing you want is on the other side of a little bit of struggle. Like, the best relationships are built through crawling through the mud with someone over a long period of time like engaging in hard conversations being able to navigate that getting past that honeymoon phase

and recognizing that uh you know all of the growth that comes from from the challenges and if you're so quick to press the eject button as soon as it's no longer amazing you're never going to actually experience the good that was on the other side of that struggle so what do you think are the best opportunities today for the next few years uh to make money yeah speaking of money I think that the most interesting opportunity right now is AI enablement for small and medium-sized businesses. If you are a young person right now and you are technologically savvy, you could be making an enormous amount of money by consulting directly with companies that have no idea how to use AI or implement it into their workflows. huge companies can go and afford McKinsey or Bain or whoever to come in and do this for them on these enormous projects. But small and medium-sized businesses are not getting hit up by those big consultancies.

And you as an individual can go out and build a legitimate high cash flow consulting business going in and doing this. And it's pretty easy. You're going into businesses that are fundamentally pretty simple. You're going and evaluating their workflows. You basically have them record everything they're doing. you maybe go in and spend a couple days there, and then you're effectively just going to create a playbook for them on how to implement AI to improve their workflows.

I think that a young person that understands AI and has a pretty decent understanding of some of the models that are out there and the capabilities can go build in $100,000 a month business doing that very quickly. And what's holding them back? Agency to go and do it. I mean, you have to be willing to put yourself out there, right? Like, you have to go send 100 cold messages to people.

You have to create pitch decks. You have to actually, you know, build up some level of confidence to go into these rooms as a young person and be able to help them with this thing. Part of that is just recognizing that you have a completely unique lens on the world that these companies run by slightly older people do not have. Like my mom runs a small business and she's constantly asking me, like, how should I be using AI for these things? And I'll give her the most basic thing that she should do, whatever it is. and it's like world changing, the most basic thing. So you also have to realize that like for a lot of these operations that you'll go into, you're not going to have to like wow them with some extraordinary new use case.

Like sometimes it's just giving them the system to implement something very basic that will very quickly create a meaningful impact for them. So I was reading earlier today that users of chat GPT are reporting lower levels of like brain function because they become so reliant on chat gbt what are your thoughts on the future of people just becoming to reliance on this because i'm finding now that like when i get a text sometimes and i maybe hastily would write something i'm now screenshoting texts to chat gbt and i'm saying give it give me a good response to this and it's just give me like a nice response and i hate to say but the responses are better than what i would have written they said a lot of

lot gentler. I think we're cooked. Yeah. I think we're cooked. I mean, I'm like, I'm, I have a three-year-old kid, right? So like, when you have a kid, you were fundamentally going along the future. Like, you know, you're having a kid, you're like betting on the future in a lot of ways in a really meaningful way. I'm terrified.

I think that there are a number of like meaningful causes for concern. I think on the thinking front, this is my most immediate near-term one, which is, we are outsourcing our general thinking to these models. And if you think in a simple sense, what you outsource in life will atrophy. If I go hire a private chef, after a couple months, I'm going to suck at cooking because I outsource the thing.

So I'm not going to be good at it. I'm not flexing the muscle in any way. If you start outsourcing all of your general thinking to these models, you are no longer going to be thinking as much. You're not going to be wrestling with ideas in your head. You're not going to be sitting there with them. As a result, that is going to atrophy. there's this story of Max Planck.

You know who he is? Max Planck. He's the German Nobel Prize winning physicist. And he goes on this like tour around Germany after winning the Nobel Prize. And he's giving lectures everywhere. And his chauffeur is driving him around to all these things. And the chauffeur says to him, like, I've listened to you give a hundred of these. I could just give this whole lecture.

I've memorized it. And so Max Planck says, like, sure, go up and do it. Gives him his tie and the chauffeur goes up on stage and gives the whole lecture perfectly from end to end. The crowd doesn't even know. They all stand up and applaud. And then someone asks a pretty simple question. And the chauffeur is like, hmm, that's such a simple question. I'm going to have my chauffeur in the back answer it. And it's Max Planck standing there with the chauffeur hat on. The point is there's really two types of knowledge. There's real knowledge and then there's chauffeur knowledge. Like chauffeur knowledge is that surface level stuff that you

mostly see with people now because we've outsourced our need to think deeply. about these problems to the AI. And so what I worry about is that we end up in a world where we are just humans, just chauffeur level thinkers, just surface level thinkers. And a lot of the problems in society are created by, you know, chauffeur level thinkers masquerading as real thinkers across any area. And so I just, I worry a lot about that.

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Do you think anyone could be an entrepreneur? And who shouldn't be an entrepreneur? I mean, if you broadly define entrepreneur, absolutely. I think anyone can identify problems and go and create solutions. I don't think everyone should, though. I think anyone can, but not everyone should. Who shouldn't? If you are not the type of person that is willing to truly have everything on your back,

you should not be an entrepreneur. I think that the harsh truth of entrepreneurship, is that most people say they want freedom, but they actually just want the illusion of freedom, they wouldn't survive a day with the reality of it. Because entrepreneurship is not the glamorized version that you see on social media. Entrepreneurship is like being up at one in the middle of the night,

stressing about whether or not an invoice is going to come in on time and whether you're going to meet payroll or whether you're going to be able to close that deal that your entire company's hinging on or whether you're doing enough or whether you need to pivot the company. There is nothing comfortable about it because it's a recognition that everything is on you

at all points in time. Who's better at being an entrepreneur, type A or type B people? That's a good question. How would you define type B? Type B, I would say, more impulsive, more quicker decision-making, a little bit more chaotic,

disorganized, not super great at planning. Yeah, I mean, I think on the surface, actually, paradoxically, type B people would thrive more as an entrepreneur. The risk with type A people as entrepreneurs is that you're so organized, you're such a good planner,

you're a perfectionist, and you never do anything, right? It's like the trap of information gathering. Like, dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Like, I'm going to go read all the things, I'm going to gather all this information. I'm going to take all these courses.

I'm going to read all the books and do all these things. And you get this big dopamine hit from it and say, like, oh, look at all the stuff I've done. But you haven't actually done anything yet. Like the real person has gone and failed 20 times while the other person was reading all the instruction manuals on it. You can't read zero to one by Peter Thiel and think you're an entrepreneur. Like, real entrepreneurs have gone and tinkered with a whole bunch of stuff while the other person was reading a book.

And so if you think about it as like entrepreneurship is really, about awareness and action. All life is really about awareness and action. And the whole goal has to be to have a razor thin gap between awareness and action. From the moment you gather that information to the moment you are acting on that information, you need a razor thin gap between the two. And type A people, because they're perfectionists, tend to have a big gap. You like sit, you're gathering all this information for a long period of time. You're like stewing on it, planning all of these things, where someone that's just willing to go out and test it and figure it out, screw it up and adjust, adapt, they're going to be more successful in the long run.

Now really quick, I just want to say that when Jack and I first started the ice coffee hour, we have to figure out everything ourselves, from the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to get guests, every day presented a brand new challenge. That's why, if you're starting or growing your own business, you know how valuable today's sponsor is, and that would be Shopify. Shopify is basically your all-in-one business partner. They power millions of businesses worldwide from major brands like Mattel and Jimshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. Fun fact, if you've shopped online in the U.S., there's a really

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So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business ideas into So sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash ICH. There's also a link down below the description. You could just click it right there. Guys, it's $1 to try it out for a month. We've had so many people on this show that have made millions of dollars with their shop. Shopify store. I've had a store. Graham's had a store. He hosted bankroll coffee, his coffee company on Shopify. I have no complaints. You want to try it out, maybe create a million dollar business, $1 a month at Shopify.com slash ICH. Thank you again to our sponsor Shopify, and now let's get back to the episode. Now, one of the biggest challenges when it comes to growing a business is knowing

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take your business to the next level. Upwork just makes the entire process easier, simpler, and more affordable with industry low fees. So don't wait. Post a job today and hire tomorrow with Upwork. So if you want to post a job for absolutely free, go to Upwork.com or click the link down below in the description. It is upw-O-R-K.com. UP-W-R-K dot com. Huge thank you again to Upwork for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. How do you personally raise your awareness? Do you meditate? No, I can't meditate. I've never been able to. I talk to a lot of people and I think a lot every single day.

I think that there are really four types of professional time. You have management time, which is like what we normally think of as work. It's like emails, meetings, presentation, stuff, whatever, like invoices, processing, admin tasks. Filming this. Filming this. This would be creation. So the second type is creation time. That's like you're creating something.

You're filming this, you're writing, you're coding, you're creating something. The third and fourth types are consumption and ideation. Very few people make any time for those two things. Consumption is like you're reading, you're having conversations, you're listening to things. And then ideation is you are actually thinking about things, totally separate from the other types. Like you were actually stewing on ideas and thinking. Very few people create any real structure around those last two types of time. I create a lot of structure around those.

I have those every single day. And so on a daily basis, I am consuming new ideas that are coming in the top of the funnel, and I'm thinking about those ideas. And that allows me to constantly have the creative output that I need to actually go and make money. And I make money off of writing and sharing ideas. Like most of my income is all around that. Speaking, writing, book deals, all of that stuff. It's really interesting. I feel like Graham is, he's optimized for the management time, like the time where he's actually doing things. I've optimized for, for like the thinking about things time. And I'm like very bad at that. And I think Graham's pretty bad at like thinking of new ideas. How do you carve out time intentionally to create new ideas? The first thing is that, do you just sit down and think? So I'm huge on time blocking.

So my calendar like is separated out like chunks of time for these different things. The first way that you have to do if you're going to create time for these others is you have to like condense the amount of time you're spending on the random BS. like emails tend to bleed out over the entire day as an example. It's like it's called Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. So if you give yourself eight hours to do emails, you'll take eight hours to do your emails. If you give yourself an hour, you'll crank through it incredibly efficiently and get it done. So give yourself uncomfortably time-constrained windows for these like boring management tasks. The fact is the management tasks are not driving you forward. Like they're not creating the same. They're not creating the

step function changes in your life. They're keeping the lights on in general, which is important. You need to get them done, but they're not the thing that's going to create the 10x or the 2x even, you know, jump in your income or wealth. That comes from the other three. That comes generally from consuming interesting ideas, thinking about them and then creating things around that, whether it's creative work or whether it's new businesses or whatever that might be. So batching the stuff is really important. And then just create a structure around it. Like have a window on your every single day for 30 minutes where you're like reading something like free reading have a window for an hour where you're going for a walk where you're just going to be thinking about different stuff i mean i probably walk

several miles a day just like that's my thinking time i don't bring my phone so what do you think for a walk uh the most random things like it's not um i'm not like setting myself up for specific thing sometimes it's thinking about a book structuring issue like that i'm working through i signed my second book deal so like i'm working on that now and it's a lot of structuring time to think about it um Sometimes it's like World War I was really interesting, and I'm like randomly thinking about some World War I stuff that I just learned. Hmm. History nerd.

Could you tell who's not going to be successful or who's going to fail? Yeah. What do you look for in that? Anyone that can't stick to things and finish. I think that's probably the single greatest predictor of failure is someone who jumps from thing to thing. Like if I was looking at resumes, if I was hiring still for anything, like, you know, long term building a firm, I think the biggest red flag is someone who's jumped around to like six jobs over the course of two years. And unfortunately, very few young people get that advice that like that stands out in a negative way.

But it's really important because not just seeing something through. Like I think this is one of the biggest cheat codes for life at this point is just finish things. Just figure it out and finish the thing. And it signals a lot about the type of person when someone has been willing to do that to just keep showing up to do what they said they were going to do. And normally, if someone's willing to do that, they'll find a way to win over long periods of time. So how much of someone's success is determined by their natural biological disposition? And then how can, like directly applicable things can they do to improve those chances? If someone's listening right now and they've failed over and over and over again,

or they've just lived a life where they feel like hasn't amounted to much or what they would have liked it to amount to, what direct things can they do in their life to increase their likelihood? of success. I don't think anyone is destined for failure based on birth. Like obviously we are all born with a different set of, you know, different hand, if you will. Like, you know, a lot of some people can be born on the streets of India and you're like, obviously you have the deck stacked against you. You have to like rise up a whole lot more. But I generally think in the world that we live in now, with access to the internet being what it is, anyone can that has, that is high agency, that is willing to go out and do things,

can go and, uh, you know, live a like baseline good life. I don't think, I don't think it's fair to say that anyone can go from no matter what where they're born to being like a mega billionaire. I think that's, there's,

it'd probably be very difficult for certain people, but you can go live a good life, I think, um, anyone. What would I do? Um, honestly,

I think that, uh, if you take any job, like, if you're going to go, just take, take your first job, whether that's like working at Starbucks or cleaning bathrooms at Starbucks, whatever that thing is, I think if you show an above average willingness to just go above and

beyond what is expected of you in that job, you just like go figure things out and go and deliver value, you will get more and more opportunity over periods of time. The problem for most people is the second they don't feel that they are getting that, some people jump off the tracks. So like if you think about your life as like this chart of sort of the value you're creating and then the value you receive, there are going to be times when you're like doing a whole lot. You're working crazy hard. You're doing all these things. And it's not being rewarded right in that moment. It's not being rewarded. It's called the heaven's reward fallacy. Like we think that all of our efforts should be justly rewarded. But that's not the case. Sometimes you have a boss that sucks. Sometimes you're in a work

situation that sucks. But over the long run, those blips even out. It's kind of like in the stock. market, it's efficient in the long run, but not in the short run. Like, there might be a company that's massively undervalued now. Then there's that same company is going to be overvalued at some point. But in the long run, price and value should align. It's the same thing for your life. Like, the price you are paid for the work that you do and what you can create is going to, in the long run, align with the value that you go and create for people. And so I would just spend all of my time thinking about how can I be valuable in whatever context that I'm currently in. And it doesn't need to be dramatic. Like, like, whatever context you are currently in, just think about the

problems that the people around you have and how you can figure out some slight way to solve those problems. And that applies to any context. It doesn't matter what that job is. What do you think about living very frugally throughout your 20s? I think it's a great idea to live frugally first so that you can live wonderfully, lavishly later. I mean, just logistically, if you're thinking about making money and financial independence, the greatest asset you have in your journey to financial independence is the gap that you can create between your cash inflows and your cash outflows, right? It's like the money you're making versus the money you're spending. There's a gap there, hopefully a positive gap. And that's

the gap that you can invest into things that are going to compound. And if compounding is like the engine of financial independence, then that gap is your greatest asset. Because that's what's going to fuel that engine. That's like the coal that you're going to be, you know, throwing into the steam engine or whatever you want to call it. And living frugally, meaning like not allowing your expenses to grow as fast as your income, hopefully grows,

is how that gap grows that you can then be investing more and more into something that's compounding long term. For me, the fact that I saved money and compounded in the like time period from my 23 when I started working until 28 was how I bought, you know, a million and a half dollar house when I was 27 or whatever. Like I hadn't, I didn't just like make an astronomical amount of money in cash. I had wealth that was building from like the carried interest, but that I wasn't seeing that. It wasn't cash that I was getting. It was all just

that neither one of my wife or I are big spenders. Like I don't, we don't buy jewelry. Like we, we like experiences. So we go on vacations, but we're not like fancy car people really. And as a result, we had a gap and we were investing that gap and stacking in. And we, and small things become big things. Like, it just works. What are your thoughts on buying versus renting a house now? Speaking of saving money. I think that in the vast majority of markets in the U.S., right now,

it is more advantageous to rent than buy. Prices are crazy. And, you know, like the American dream telling you that it has to be about owning a home can be a dangerous thing for a lot of people because I think there's a lot of homeowners in the U.S. who own some expensive home but have zero cushion if something goes wrong. And to me, that's like an inexcusable thing to, you know, take on a whole bunch of debt and be in a situation for your family. Like as a father and someone with more traditional values, like I just think it's inexcusable to leave my family in a place where we don't have a cushion or a safety net if I all of a sudden can't work for six months or something goes wrong. or we have a big health care expense. And a lot of that happens because of this pressure to buy a home, right? You go buy like, oh, I make a million dollars a year. Well, a bank will loan me enough money. If I'm making a million

a year and a W-2 income, a bank will loan me enough money to go buy a four and a half million house, you know, in Newport Beach. And I might be spending 50 grand a month now on like between my mortgage and my property taxes and all the things associated with owning this home. And then I have the like, you know, nannies and I, like the whole life, the expenses. Now every single month, I am break even on this million, like I'm making a million dollars a year and I'm somehow breaking even on that money. So I have no nest egg, no cushion. And if something goes wrong, if I can't work or if I lose my job, we have a month before we run out of money. Like one of my best friends, actually, was working for a long time in a lucrative career track and got laid off

and literally given two weeks notice after 50. 15 years at this company, like, thought he was on the long-term track. And we sat down and I was like, oh, let's talk about your next career trip. But like, let's walk through your numbers first. And he had two months of runway. He's got three kids. He had two months of runway. And it's literally because, like, we've created this culture where you have to buy a home. Now you have to move to the suburbs. Now you need the country club. Now, like these, it's all the keeping up with the Joneses that we've created leads to people making decisions that don't actually make any sense. What happened to him? Did he make any changes after that? He got a new job.

that that sort of insulates him from it on the back end of this. And yeah, they made, I mean, I told him, I was like, dude, you have to make some serious changes to the way that you guys spend money. Because there's no excuse for not having six months of, you've been working 15 years on a lucrative track. You need a six-month emergency fund. What car was you driving? You know, like, Audi's, like nice cars.

But like in a nice suburb. What sort of friend goes to you and says, like, here's my like monthly expense Because even for me, like, I don't think any one of my friends would come to me and say like, hey, go over my monthly expenses and tell me how to save money. My friends do. I literally got a FaceTime call yesterday. I got a FaceTime call yesterday from a friend from in high school. And he was like, hey, man, because he quit his job recently. He's like, hey, man, look, I got this money.

And I'm traveling the world. And I spent, dude, I was in Europe and I spent like 15 grand on this trip. He's like, I don't know if I can afford it. Could you just go over and create a spreadsheet for me? like I know you did for another friend. Because I did it for another friend. And we could go through all of the income, all the expenses. I'm like, great.

List out all of your assets, all of your liabilities, you know, how much money you could be making if you got a full-time job with your engineering degree, et cetera, et cetera. And he's like, okay, cool, I'm on it. Like, the friends do that. Dude, it's extraordinarily valuable for that friend that you did that, too, by the way. Give him Caleb Hammer's number. No, this guy, he's not, he's in a better financial position than most people on a show.

But my friends know that, like, if they're in a spot, then they can come to me and I'll walk him through everything. I mean, for context, this is also like, this is like my brother. This is like my best childhood friend. I've known him forever. I was shocked, frankly, by the whole situation. And, like, now he's making adjustments and he'll be in a much better place. But the point is, a lot of this is cultural.

Again, to the point earlier of, like, your environment, it's all my medic. So, like, if you think that the next step is by a house, then it's have a kid, then it's the country club, then it's the, you know, fancy car, then it's the vacation home. You do all these things. And then 2008 happens. And you see why a bunch of people had all these houses and boats and stuff that they couldn't actually afford. But like we live in a, we live in a country where people will loan you money to buy things that you cannot afford. Just point blank, you can't afford the thing.

Like my rule has always been if you're going to take on debt to buy something, exclude a house. If you're going to take on debt to buy a material purchase, like a car or a boat, you better be able to pay for that thing in cash twice over. Like then it's like, okay, I can afford this thing. definitively, I can afford this thing. So now if I want to play the financial game of taking on the debt because the interest rate makes sense versus what I can invest it at, I get it. Go do it. But if you can't pay for it twice over, the reality is you cannot afford this thing. You are living beyond your means. You're using someone else's money to buy a thing that you can't afford. So you have to be eyes wide open about what that means about your financial situation in buying this.

Like, again, you were doing it. You're doing something you can't afford. Local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us. With less Yes, local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise.

CBC News. Yeah, I'm seeing when it comes to houses, a lot of stories on Reddit right now about people who've bought in like 2022, 2022, 2023, 2023, 24, and they were told or they had the belief that, oh, I was supposed to refinance when rates came back down. And now rates never came down and I have to make this payment. And we want to move now. But I owe more than I could sell the house for. And I would have to come out of pocket to sell my house.

And I can't do that. So my only other option is to rent. But if I rent it, I'm losing $1,500 every single month, you know, to own this house and rent it. So I don't want to do. I'm stuck. And then you hear everyone read it, just going off on this. But I think it's becoming more and more and more common. The market's softened enough where people can't get out of their houses and they're at an interest rate that they can't rent it out profitably.

I think the housing market is going to explode at some point. It just does not make sense to me the way the housing market has functioned. I also think if you're a young person in a major. city or suburban area. Like, the pathway to owning a home at the current prices, I don't know how you're possibly going to save up enough money from like a normal job. You could be doing well, making 150K a year, 200k a year in L.A., let's say. I don't know what the path is to you saving enough money to have a down payment on a legitimate

nice home. It's the great wealth transfer. A lot of people are getting money from parents or financial assistance from parents and then they're buying the house. Yeah. I bought, when I bought our house in New York, I had a, a seven-year interest-only loan on it, that I now have three more years on it. It's at two percent, I think. Wow. But I only have three more years on it, and then it's going to adjust. And so,

like, the cost of living in this house right now is incredible. But in three years, if we're still in the house, if I haven't sold it by then, or if I haven't paid down the whole mortgage by then, I mean, it's going to be insane, the actual, like, market adjustment on the thing. I'm actually shocked, by the way, like, that banks aren't out there paying you or giving you a discount on paying it down to just get you out of these loans. That's what I thought. Like Bank of America should come and pay me to just get out of this. I think they're already getting enough, getting people to take HELOCs out because I always get these flyers in the mail that are like, hey, you'd be surprised at the amount of equity you have in your home. You could get a check for $100,000.

So I looked into this because I had a large, it was a seven-figure loan at 2.8.5. 8, 75% fixed for 30 years. And I wanted to see if I can negotiate paying it off. Yeah, at a discount. Yeah, exactly. There should be, right? There should be a discount. I think the issue there is that those loans are sold and bundled together.

And it's not like you could individually negotiate that one loan. Like, if you had a private investor on the other side, they'd be begging you to pay this thing off. I'm just shocked there's not, like, normally within financial markets, if there's a way to make money, like if there's like clips, like, you know, arbitrage like that, someone is going and doing it. And so I won't be shocked, actually, if, like, you hear about a financial product being created by some enterprising hedge fund or investment banker that allows people to go and do this. See, I want that. I also want to be able to take the mortgage with me to the next property. So if I could afford this mortgage, as long as the next property appraises and there's enough upside on them, I should be able to take that 2.875, take the same amount that I owe and just move it over to another property. And if anything, it could be backed by even more equity.

Like the upside could be even greater in terms of like if I don't pay. They get even a bigger payout. You can do that in certain countries. Canada, you can do that. You can't do it in the U.S. Or it's just very non-standard. I looked into this recently because we were thinking of moving and like to the Boston area. And you just can't do it.

They just, they're not set up to be able to go and do that. But the like, the whole thing that breaks my brain on the housing market is I fundamentally don't understand why. there is this assumption of housing values going up over long periods of time. Like, houses, I understand the land piece of it, but the house itself. So I'm like, okay, I get it. You have land that should be appreciating over time because it's scarce. But the house definitively gets worse. Like the house itself is a depreciating asset, or it should be.

Like, if you go get a 20-year-old house, that house is worse and costs more money to maintain than a brand new house. Okay, I'll give you the counter argument. You have plenty of homes throughout California. that are 100 years old or more, and they're still standing. The foundations are still holding up. They need repairs, obviously,

but they're still functionally there. The counter to that is that labor is more expensive, materials are more expensive, and when you look at the long term over 30 years, it could cost more to recreate the same thing, thereby driving the values up, because you look at the replacement value. It's not all of it, obviously,

but that's a component to it. So you buy into the whole housing prices should just keep going up over long term? No. I buy that they would, they will go up, but is that enough to counteract inflation and opportunity cost and repairs and maintenance? I don't know, but I think when you look at nominal home values and the prices, I think, 50 years from now, they're going to be much higher. But is that enough? You know, like if my, like, here's an example. if home prices go up on average 2% a year, which they, you know, it's been about 1.5% a year

of the last 100 years, but is inflation 3%? Like, does that eat into the value of the home? Now, your real returns are negative, but you're showing a price increase on your house. I just, I also think this overlays into the whole AI discussion from earlier of whether or not we're completely cooked, because if you think about who has bought homes in the United States, it's been knowledge workers, basically. Like, if you think about these, priced homes in like these city areas like these prices have continued to go up it's basically knowledge workers right it's like all these college educated knowledge workers working at these big companies that are hiring tons of college educated kids and uh my question is a lot of those jobs are

going to get just eviscerated these knowledge worker jobs right it's like the first thing that gets eviscerated is like you know social media manager marketing manager like you know all of these like roles that are increasingly using AI to disrupt, especially at the entry level. And so you wonder whether like this whole kind of house of cards that's been created in the U.S. economy with like, okay, we take out huge student loans to go to these overpriced colleges because we know that there are jobs on the back end of it as knowledge workers, which are going to be these high-price jobs, which is going to allow us to do the American dream, move to the suburbs, have a country club and have a house. If pieces of that start to get broken, does the whole thing that,

just start crumbly. I think it does. I just posted a video about this that college tuitions increased the moment they created the Department of Education. And what's crazy is that once they began subsidizing student loans, which I get why they did that to promote people to go to college, once they started subsidizing and giving loans, college tuitions increased accordingly. So now you borrow more to pay more, which required you to borrow more to pay more, and it was this upward cycle. The same thing, to a smaller extent, has been the case with housing that it is subsidized by the government who even backs mortgages. They'll buy the more, they guarantee that they will buy your mortgage, even if there's not an investor, because they want

to make sure there's money flowing into the markets. And studies have found that there is a marginal increase in the homes price when it's backed by the federal government versus homes that are not, all other things being equal, that being the only variable that those homes sell for a little bit more. So there is an upward pressure on housing prices. The fact that that it is subsidized by the government. But now you can also argue wealth creation, the government has an incentive on that. It leads to higher property taxes, higher revenues for the city.

I mean, I'm sure there's some benefits there, but like to what degree? Because I guarantee if you have an investor on the other side of the loan, they would be negotiating, like you said, to pay off those loans faster. Or if they get in a bad deal, they want to get that off the books.

Or they would just say, hey, right now is a shaky market. we're not going to lend money. And if the capital market dries up and people want to sell their house, they can take a huge hint on that. This is like a bitcoiner's wet dream. This whole like, oh, like, you know,

a Ponzi scheme of the U.S. economy that's been based around this inflation target. It's kind of true because the housing market should be efficient. It should be if you're a borrower with a 650 credit score, you should be paying a much higher interest rate than the person with a,

you know, a 680 credit score. Just like, but, but the government looks at these things and if you have a score above 650 and you have, like, all these things, you're treated the exact same. Like, me having an 845 credit score makes no difference compared to the person who has a 780. So, like, I feel like there should be benefits to having a higher score, more income, being a safer borrower. But the fact is, like, you only get rates so low. I feel like the other thing with the whole buy versus rent debate that people miss is life isn't lived on paper. So like whenever you see one of these debates, people lay out the math. And they're like, okay, well, here's what it looks like if I buy and then here's what it looks like if I rent. And generally speaking, when I've seen people lay out this math, it's like, okay, you should rent because, you know, the return you actually got from this home that you owned is not outpacing that same money put into the S&P 500 and you didn't have to deal with the headaches of homeownership along the way. And so there's like, when people live it out on paper, I actually, I understand that. I understand that whole debate. What I think it misses is the same. the part of life that is just not lived on paper that like it makes me feel really good that I own a home

that I have my family come and stay in that I can have friends come and stay in and that I own it. I don't know why I care that I own it versus me renting it but there's something about Saturday morning like I'm cooking pancakes and my parents are playing with my little kid in a house that I bought that like brings me more joy than about anything else in the world and I can't put that on paper. I don't know where that is on this math sheet but it would feel different to me if I rented that. That was the top comment of my video or it went over the math. And the top comment was, I don't view my house as an investment. I just want a place to live. That's my own. And I agree with that. Like, not everyone is seeing a house as an investment. But then you got to put it on the

list of expenses of where do you put that in terms of like driving a nicer car. Where do you put that in terms of like flying first class or eating out at a great restaurant, getting experiences in your life? Like, it's got to now be tracked as not only a place to live, but it is a financial expense that you have to think about. Are you still not flying first class? No. You refuse. No. I've, I've upgraded seats.

He's sat in the big seat in spirit. I've never flown spirit my whole life. What's the big seat? It's phenomenal. It's fantastic. It's like a first class seat. So let me walk through something real quick. Okay.

So you can buy a Delta flight from Las Vegas to New York for say 450 bucks or you could buy a spirit flight from Las Vegas to New York for 300 and then pay $200 for the big front seat. That's like the spirit first equivalent

basically. And now you're at $500 sure you're on spirit. Granted it is Airbus which we all like. Are we pro Airbus? I'm pro Airbus. Yeah. So like you're in the Airbus you're in the big front seat which is only two seats per row.

as opposed to Delta where you'd just be randomly sat. You could even be in a middle seat for $450, and you're in a Boeing, and you're in a three-row seat, or a three-seat row. So I would say Spirit also, by every measure imaginable, if you get that big front seat, you're going to be way better off than just buying a random Delta or JetBlue flight

where you could be sat in the middle. What if it was $600 for first class on Delta? Would you do that? Well, that's just not true. Like, Delta is still, it's like hundreds of dollars. It's a hypothetical. If it was 600 on Delta for first class as opposed to 500 for the spirit big front seat. But you have to fly on a Boeing.

I'd probably take the big front seat. Okay. All right? Yeah. All right. Yeah. I just look at it like the value of every hour. If it's a few hours, I don't care where I sit.

If it's like a six hour flight, having the extra leg room is nice. I don't need the first class ever. Do you work on flights? Yeah. I try to. Yeah. And you don't find that there's a meaningful difference between the two. In the big front seat.

Yeah. Oh, okay. The big front seat on Spirit. So it sounds like I need to be flying big front seat on Spirit. Are you flying back to New York right after this? Yeah, tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yeah.

What time? Because there's a flight that goes to New York. It goes to... But I have a first class ticket on Delta books. That sounds refundable. How much was it? That sounds refundable. I should check.

Now that, I really don't think it was more than like $700. There's a Spirit flight that goes out of here in Newark. Sure, you got to go to New York. But it goes to Newark and it's going to be at like 5 p.m. And you'll go. get there, or no, sorry. Is the, is the big front seat always available? Like, do people not?

No, it's not always available. Oh, trust me, it's a high demand. It is. Oh, yeah. But you could probably somewhat locked. You got to be somewhat lucky if you get that seat. Okay, no, you're right. So my round trip ticket was $1,56.

So just under $800 each way. But that's not that much more expensive, by the way, than what you're talking about. And you're flying out tomorrow? Yeah, I'm flying out tomorrow. Yeah, well, the thing is you're probably picking different times. Like what we do is we'll get that same thing for like 500 ground trip by just picking the times that are the cheapest. And so like if we leave early in the morning, late at night, like, I don't care. I just pick the, like, I could leave whenever.

But it makes you happy to have done that to have like spent the extra energy thinking about it and saving it or because you like, you feel like you need to? I would feel like that's a waste. I would look at because I'd spend extra $1,000 doing that. And I think what else could I have done with $1,000? and I think of all the things I didn't do and I think I could have done those things But it's a weird You don't understand there's like a,

There's a weird cognitive gap here Because like if I offered you like A few thousand dollars to do something that you absolutely hate doing You probably wouldn't do it. What is it? I don't like say I wanted you to come give a talk somewhere And I was like, hey, I'll pay you for an hour of your time I'll pay you $3,000.

No, that wouldn't be worth it. Okay. But you'll like, you'll, you see what I'm saying? Like you do it in the other. direction. Like you're like, oh, that $1,000 that I could have spent and had a way better experience and gotten a bunch of work done. But you're asking me to take now a whole bunch of time and prepare for a speech and like do all these things. Like I count all of that in. It's not just like a, hey, come down the street, show up for an hour. Here's a few thousand dollars. I would, I would strongly consider doing that. You would do that. Like for $500. Let's say it was like around the corner from here and they just want you to have a conversation with someone for an hour. You do that for $500? I guess what I'm getting at is what is your hourly rate in your mind? My point would be. You know what, maybe. My answer would be maybe if I'm not doing anything else that's valuable at that time. Like, if it's me watching TV or doing that, I'd rather do that.

But you could be doing something valuable. There's only so much valuable stuff that I could do in a day before I run out of valuable things. But it's like it goes to that whole, you know, it's like this weird thing that we do with money where like you should just have an hourly rate. And it should just be like you should apply that hourly rate in your mind to all of these things. We obviously don't do that because we're human, right? Like my hourly rate now on speaking since the book came out is ridiculous. Like there's no there's no business that I know of that is better than paid corporate speaking. Like, you know, you can make like as a starting point, you can make like $25,000 for an hour talk.

Corporate speaking on the back of books is typically how most authors I would say end up making their money. Like the book doesn't make money, but they build a brand name on the back of the book. And then they do like this long tale of corporate speaking. But like, you know, speaking goes from 25,000. it just keeps scaling. Like, David Goggins will get a quarter million dollars or a half million dollars to go give an hour talk. And if you apply that, you say, like, well, that's my hourly rate.

It feels insane to even say that. And so, like, to me, being new to it, if someone comes and offers me like $5,000, I'm like, yeah, I should do that. Like, that feels crazy to not go and do that thing. But if it's actually much lower than what your hourly rate is on, you know, on a market level. And so, like, you have to figure out what,

your, you know, sort of personal, like, tipping points are on these things. I just think you would probably be unlocked in a lot of ways if you allowed yourself to not think about those things. If you had someone just handle it for you entirely, do you not think you could be more creative in other work that you do? Maybe. Yeah. And that's how you make money is creative work. Listen, I've had so many expenses come up this last month that I have done my best to apply that thinking because otherwise I ruminate and my like my thinking and anxiety of spending money on things is through the roof so like this last month I've just just paid it well I saw a clip of you guys with uh what's his name Jimmy uh the comedian what's it uh Asian comedian the clip of you guys

yeah Bobby Bobby Bobby Lee yeah uh but the clip of you guys asking him how much money he has and he's like I don't know I have a money guy that just does all of it for me and it's like for him yeah he doesn't want to think about those things because it just allows him to focus on what he loves doing, which is his creative work, and he's like going and doing it. I feel like you would, you would, you should try it for a month. You should make a YouTube video. He said he would do that like so many different times and he's never done. I've been trying to apply it this last month. Trying to. You should make a YouTube video of like, I didn't look at money for a month. Here's what happens. That would be a great video. And honestly, it would be kind of interesting. Like you talk about how

you're stressed about it or whatever, but like I'm going to have someone else do my money for an entire month and see what happens. that would be a good video I like that he said on many different episodes like we had Bill Perkins I was zero we had him on and Graham was like I'm gonna do a month where I just don't think about money

and I'll forgive myself for spending money on anything I want to see you do that because you had some crazy things that you said on that episode you said the thing about eating a half-eaten steak I was like bro I need to have an intervention with this man

you need to set a dollar threshold below which you don't think about the thing but there are so many things that could come up under that threshold that now I just like just don't think about it. Doesn't matter. There's not going to be enough of them. One or two doesn't matter.

But there could be 20, but there could be 20 of them. You're not poor. Like, you're rich. I totally get it. But there's like a threshold for everyone, right? Like if I'm worth a billion dollars, I can't spend all my time thinking about a thousand dollar things. Sure, are the $1,000 thing's going to add up to some gross amount that looks like a lot for most people? Yes, but it's not a lot for me because I'm worth a billion dollars. I'm saying hypothetically, I'm not. If you're worth $10 million, there's a different level.

But like, there's a level where below it. you're spending all of this time focusing on these things. They're creating you stress. That stress is negatively impacting your life. You're not, you know, you're not present in conversations because you're thinking about it. I've been there. I totally get that. Like when I feel tight on things, I'm not like as present with my wife or son or like with work stuff. I'm not as creative. Like, it impacts you in every way. But the way you fix it is you're just like below this like below $1,000, below $500, not going to think about it. I'll think about everything else. But there's all, There's all this random stuff below 500 bucks that has no impact.

Yeah. He comes to me a lot where he's like, hey, I had this contractor. They said this one thing and it ended up costing a little bit more. Do I try to force it so they charge the same amount as their original word? Do I like, you know, let them charge this extra money? And he's coming to me with these problems. And it's like the difference is maybe like $1,000, $2,000, which for him is not a life-changing amount of money. For an average person, yes, it could absolutely be.

And I'll just say, Graham, like, forget about it. It's not a big deal. Every single, I don't think there's been one time where I've been like, that's an amount that you should worry about. Sometimes the principals, like they want to just like I get a little more. I get the principle.

Yeah, but you can live and die by your principles or you can just like be happy. You know, choose one. I also just think like in a relationship, one of the most important things is that you're aligned on this stuff. Like, my wife and I've had to have conversations about this where she would come and ask me like, oh, can I do this thing at the house?

And it would be like $500 or $1,000. And I was like, yeah, yes. And so we just set a number where I was like, below this, just you do it. Like you're the CEO of this household, go and do the thing. And if it's above that, we can have a conversation about it. But like, it was causing me more stress to have to even just, like the just attention disruptor, like having to think about this thing rather than just like handle it if it's below this number. And it's, you know, we do this at companies, right?

Like if you're on the board of a company, you set like there's a delegation of authority. Like the CEO and the CFO can make decisions up to a certain amount of money. This is a common thing in private equity. Like the CEO and CFO that you hire or bring in knows the decisions that they are allowed to make. Like they can make decisions up to $10 million annual thing. And above that, they should go and ask the board. And like having that for yourself in your own life will just provide you a lot of comfort. What are the economics behind writing a book?

Traditional publishing is different, right? There's kind of like two different sides to this world. There's traditional publishing and then there's self-publishing. Um, self-publishing, you know, the economics on a per book basis are going to be better because you're not having to pay this whole like, you know, uh, cost stack that exists within these publishers. But the downside is you don't have the distribution necessary to hit like the New York Times bestseller list. Uh, you can't really self-publish a book and be a New York Times bestseller. Really? I thought it's just an amount of books that you have to sell within a certain amount of time. No, because you have to have a certain amount of distribution. The New York Times list in particular is not, it's not. It's just a lot of books that you have to sell within a certain amount of time. It's not. It's not. It's just based on the number of sales. It's, um, it's subjective. So it's also based on being in enough independent bookstores. You have to be in all of these distribution points, which you can't do if you self-published it. So like, you know, Alex Hormosey has sold tons of copies of all of his different books, um, not New York Times bestselling book. Actually, the best example is Morgan

Household with Psychology of Money has sold 10 million plus copies of that book. It's one of the bestselling books of all time and wasn't a New York Times bestseller. Like, it makes no sense. It's by all definitions it is, but it was published with an independent publisher. He didn't self-publish it. It was independent publisher, but it didn't make the list. So self-publishing is a little bit different. Traditional publishing, the way the model works economically is they pay you an advance to buy the rights to your book. That is an advance against royalties.

So they're paying you up front a certain amount of money. So like, you know, my first book, I got, you know, a couple million bucks to go and write this book. and you get that paid out over four equal installments, you know, like one up front when you sign the contract, one when you turn in the draft, one when the book gets published, and one 12 months after the book gets published. So let's say for $2 million, $500,000 at each of those increments,

and then you go and write the book, you publish it, and it was an advance against royalties. So, like, that is your downside. If I sell zero copies of the book, I still get that $2 million. And once I pay it back via the royalties, from sales of the book, then I start earning royalties above that. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road,

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You get $2 million, you publish it, and just no one buys it. Do you keep the money? You keep this. So that's their risk. Yeah, that's their risk. They're a venture fund effectively. They're going investing in different authors, and a couple of those end up being the atomic habits that sells millions or psychology of money sells millions and millions of copies.

Most of them never earn back the advance. And they're fine with that because they're making tons of money on the ones that did. It's like, it's all power law driven in that way. Yeah. How much, how much have you made from the book so far? I think we've sold to date 400,000 copies around the world. Yeah, so it's done really well. I will earn past the advance.

Ideally, I'll earn past the advance in the first year because there's like bonuses and certain things if you do it fast. But I probably, like, I don't know, globally I've probably made close to, it's a little different globally. So I've probably made close to like a million and a half in royalties. and I need to get to $2 million above that, I would just be getting a, you know, a quarterly check. Wow.

Yeah, and that's been a great outcome. Like, it's very good. The bigger thing, again, with books is, like, the real economics for most people off of a book are on these side businesses, like speaking or, like, you know, courses, mastermind, like other things people do that are sort of around the book versus the book itself.

So why books, though? Because I always looked at a book and I thought, why would I do a book when I could just make a YouTube video and more people are watching YouTube, than reading a book. Yeah, but does anyone gift a YouTube video to their kid on their graduation?

Like, does anyone... Maybe we can make this a thing. No, does anyone, like, you know, does anyone, you know, come back to it and say that, like, you know, they, like, give it to their grandchildren or, like, give it to their partner and, like, sit down and have a...

But maybe the new version of that is, like, they shared the video. I don't think, but it's not permanent, is my point. Like, you could argue that YouTube is the most permanent of all of the media. because there are videos from several years ago that people will go back to.

But there's something very permanent about a book that like, you know, the best books I've ever read. Like I reread once a year. I gift them to people all the time. You know, they like sit there in a physical form. And so there is something that is just sticky about books as a medium. For me personally, why books? I love writing. Like writing is my favorite thing to do. Everything else that I do is just a natural byproduct of the writing that I do.

I signed a second book deal. Two weeks after I published this, I signed the second book deal because I was like, I want to write again. But why I go through a publisher to get the New York Times best? Why is that so important? Because I was talking to someone else who published a book and they went through a publisher and they said, I'm ever doing that again because I would have made tens of millions of dollars doing this on my own. Now, my next book, I'm doing on my own and I'm going to make about 10 million bucks from that.

Do you have an Indian mother? This person does not have an Indian. They don't. And you don't have an Indian mother either. Indian mother, doing, half joking, half serious,

like doing it the name brand, like kind of like credible high reputation way for the first one especially really mattered to me. So it's definitely an title. Yeah, there was a doctor or PhD. Yeah. Okay.

I think people are lying if they say that those things don't matter too. Like everyone's like, well, I don't care. I just want to make the money. And you're like, well,

you are taken seriously by basically everyone that is like of a certain level when you have a title like that. And I can just say definitively, people say like, oh, your life doesn't change from hitting these lists versus not. My life has definitively changed. And that's mainly because people that I respect and admire, like these high, like, you know, high caliber business people, entrepreneurs, CEOs, like all these people that I want to get to know, immediately have like a level of openness to spending time and talking to me. Because I'm like, I have this stamp in a certain way.

How much do you think it is valued to be a New York Times bestseller? If you were to put a price tag and say, like, what would you have to buy it from me for? No, like in the sense of... That would be the way to price it. Yeah, like to take it away from me, how much money would you have to pay me?

Or in the other way, and I can never do it again. Here's how much money I'm giving up for the title of being a New York Times bestseller. To me, personally, it's worth eight figures. It's worth $10 million plus dollars. You would have to pay me you'd have to pay me $10 million probably to give it up.

And to say that I was never allowed to have it. Just because if I actually just think about the long-term residual value of even just the speaking business on the back of having that, it is meaningfully higher than if I didn't have that. Are a lot of people just paying the New York Times to get that title? I imagine that it could be games similar to like the Spotify top charts for podcasts. Like we're not on that. and I know for a fact, like, I look at those top charts. I'm like, I've never heard of any of these people.

It's crazy. I was thinking of the same thing. I'm like, there's no way. And so you know a lot of that is for like paid media because you have to be in Forbes magazine. You have to be in this. You have to be in that. And then finally you get the, you know, top chart.

So do a lot of people pay for that? There was a big, um, there was a big, uh, like sort of discourse around this being a big thing with the New York Times that you could just buy your way onto it. And continue, people continue to say it. If you go look it up, people will say like, oh, you can spend $100,000 and just be on the New York Times best seller list. As far as I saw it, it's not really true. And the reason it's not really true anymore is because the New York Times cracked down on billionaires just buying their way onto the list. And the way people used to do it is they would go buy 10,000 copies of their own book. Like, you just go buy 10,000 copies. Now, they don't count multiple purchases. So like if someone goes and buys a thousand books, that's counted as one on the New York Times list. So if like a single address buys 10,000 copies, it starts to raise a red flag. The way that they claim they crack down on it now is they use social listening. So like if you sold week one of your launch when you're trying to hit the New York Times list,

if you sold 50,000 copies, if that's the number that it says on book scan, like which tracks sales, but there's only like five addresses, 10 addresses that that went to, it's a pretty clear red flag. The other red flag is no one on the internet is talking about it. So you have social lessening where they're like, it should roughly equate to the number of books that are being sold, the amount of buzz that's about this book. And if it doesn't, again, it's like, oh, this person is doing something. So there's been several cases where, like, people got blackballed from hitting the list where, like, they were doing something. Is it totally impossible nowadays? Probably not.

There's always, like, back doors or side doors into all of these things where people are still managing to do it. A lot of people will do, like, they'll do speaking gigs. So if I'm like a billionaire business person, someone will pay me $250,000 to give an hour talk, I could say to that company, like, hey, instead of $250,000, buy $10,000 copies of my book and mail it out to all of your customers, people will go and do that. And there are ways to have those sales still count towards the list. And so, like, that is effectively buying it because you traded $250,000 of income for that. Just a few rapid-fire questions before we end the podcast.

If you don't mind. How could Jack get a girlfriend? Working for free, underrated or overrated? Overrated. Working for free is overrated? What do you mean? Like, should you work for free? Yeah.

Just like go and volunteer. Like, hey, I'm going to... No. No, I don't think you should work for free. I think people should pay you for the value that you're creating. Like, if someone came and did a bunch of work for me, I would pay them for that work, whether or not... What if you didn't need the work and they just say,

hey, I want to do something? Like, they're trying to pitch me to work in the few things. future? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like, to, you know, prospect, but that's just like your prospecting. You're trying to go, that's like a cold, a good cold email. Well, I think that's kind of what it's implied for, like, working for free. Oh, you should do work up front. If you're trying to sell someone on getting to work with them, you should do some research and work up front to go and land that. Yeah. But once you're working for them, people should pay you for the work that you're doing. Index funds are individual stocks. Index funds. What's a luxury purchase you'll never regret.

Ooh, I'm going to say first class for you. You consider that a luxury? I don't even consider that a luxury. Okay. That's different. Different levels. Yeah. First class. Different levels. First class on Emirates.

First class on Emirates is my actual one. I, like, that is way too expensive. It's like $20,000 for a round trip or something, but it's, I will never regret. That's amazing. Buy or rent in 2026. Rent. One money trap most people fall into. Thinking that money is going to be the end all, be all of your happiness in life.

The dumbest thing rich people spend their money on. Trying to impress other rich people. Is having multiple income streams overrated or necessary? Necessary to feel comfortable at night. Is college still worth the price tag? No. Unless you're going to one of like five schools. Are credit card points actually worth paying mine to?

Yeah, in the early days. And then you should stop. Do you believe in having a budget? Yes. Do you keep a strict monthly spending limit? Yes, at my business, no at my house at this point. Is chasing passive income overrated? Yes, passive income does not exist.

What's the minimum income somewhat should aim for to be free? $500,000 a year. How did you arrive to that number? I don't think my life has meaningfully improved post-500,000 dollars a year. I thought like once I got to 500, I could basically do whatever I want, whenever I want, and travel and have cool dinners and experiences with my friends. And, like, beyond that, it's just, I don't know, there's not, my life hasn't changed from any money beyond that.

So that means you're probably spending, let's say, 200,000. And then you're saving 300,000? Well, you're not factoring taxes. Oh, sure. Yeah. No, at $500,000 a year, I think in most places in the country, you know, you live in a nice place, you can afford to travel, you can afford to eat out, you can afford to spend time with your friends, see your family, take care of your health,

you can do all the things that actually drive happiness. And then anything above that is like, you know, it starts to be luxury stuff, which I don't think has moved the needle that much of my happiness. Thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. Really appreciate it. Yeah, we'll link to your book, by the way, down below in the description. That will be linked down below in the description. Also, you should ride spirit first class. I'm just saying, you've got to get that big seat. Big seat. And by the way, for those of you guys listening, as always, Thank you so much. We wouldn't be able to do this. If not for you guys, shout out to Gavin. He helped sit behind, listen to this entire podcast episode. So if there is crackling with the mics, it's not our fault. It's his. Also, big thank you to the members who subscribe to our membership. And Mikey, who's editing this episode. So just comment. Thanks, Mikey. If you made it to this point, he'll really appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Until next time. See you.