I Was £24,000 In Debt… And Nobody Knew The...

0:00Alex Chisnall:What stops founders from building something meaningful isn't the lack of ideas, it's the fear of getting started. I'm Alex Chisnall and this is Screw It, Just Do It. A podcast for people who are ready to stop waiting, take action and make things happen. If you can learn that you are ahead of 95 % of this country. The dopamine that kicks in isn't the actual purchase of the thing because you've got the thing. It's the actual process of buying it. trading signals and forex and look at me and my lambo life in dubai guys and they're really really dangerous and these kids look up to these guys and they create these personas and again massive massively dangerous the main habit i ask myself is will this actually provide me any value or am i buying it because social status or social media is telling me that i should so my script just do it moment before we get into today's conversation this is genuinely relevant for a lot of founders listening.

0:56Alex Chisnall:Are you running a business that pays supplies abroad, receives international payments, or operates across borders? World First helps founders manage global payments and FX more efficiently with access to competitive exchange rates and tools designed specifically for growing businesses. World First have given us an exclusive offer for podcast listeners to get 50 transactions completely fee-free for 60 days. Head to worldfirst.com forward slash screw it to create a free account and claim now. Now let's jump into the main conversation. Sami, I've got two teenage girls, right? And they've learned basically nothing about money at school.

1:36Alex Chisnall:Yet, they've started asking me about saving, about crypto, obviously, about investing, about the stock market. How have we ended up in a position in society where young people are expected to make adult decisions without ever being taught even the most basic thing when it comes to financial literacy? Yeah, I mean, I have a big problem with the education system as it stands. I mean, I've sat in labour, literal committees about whether or not they're going to be putting it in. It's said that it's going to be made compulsory, but then they don't realise that it's probably going to cost about two, three hundred million.

2:16And that's a very estimated figure to actually train these teachers what they're training them to teach these kids and it's censored by the government and that it just becomes this whole like minefield and so i suggested like why don't you just make a really great digital solution like get the likes of martin lewis or people like that on board pay them a really decent sum of money build a digital solution you can give to these kids utilize companies like go henry and all of these brilliant like um apps that exist for kids and bring them all under one roof spend 50 million quid you save yourself a couple hundred million you can give them a digitized solution because every kid that you know i'm sure you know your daughters are the same they're like that on their phones right they're just up and down scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll that's a digital natives and i think that like that's where you need to meet them to be able to get them to learn um and then for me the second side of it is i actually think that's really positive because at that age i definitely weren't asking those questions i was like where can i get a pack of 10 mayfair from and and drink a lamborini on a park bench somewhere so i was very different so asking questions about saving investing in crypto at that age is great but that's because they have these social media apps and there's even kids at their age that are very good at this stuff and teaching them back to them i mean crypto's one of those things because it's just sexy and it's made a lot of money for a lot of people and it's also um lost a lot of people money which then gives it it's kind of it's uh you know that sexy nature essentially because it's just like it's a bit dangerous and you know obviously when you're 17 18 you're like that's cool um but i always say to kids like start out um as young as you can and and get going because even a pound today if you get that going and compounding we all know what that um works out as but for the average person that doesn't the you You know, the longer you can give it, the more it's going to end up potentially making you over your lifetime.

4:10Even if you're saving alone, it's still a fantastic thing to get started early. Because I was in my 20s. I got myself quite badly into debt. I went the other way. And so if you start, you know, 18, 19, 20 or whatever, and you start saving and moving towards something, even if it's a five or a month, it's going to massively help you when you do start to come and make those bigger adult decisions. Yeah.

4:33Alex Chisnall:Yeah. And I remember telling my eldest when she first started asking, she's 19 next month. But and I think it might have been need to put a pound jar in the swear jar every time I mentioned Diary of a CEO. But I think it was when Stephen had Ramit Sethi on and it might have been. And he was talking about different percentages of your money. But right. When you start actually earning some money, yes, you'll be a student, but you're earning a job. It doesn't matter how much you put. It's just making that taking that action, right, making that conscious decision to put X amount into savings, like whether that's into the, you know, the S &P 500 or whether that's into crypto, whatever it is.

5:13Alex Chisnall:Right. But making that conscious decision to to start that journey. And we must have been in the same part because I was the same, but it was maybe 10 Benson and Hedges and a flag and a strong bow. but yeah yeah they were the good old days of the early 90s essentially so yeah um what's the biggest mistake people make when they first start thinking about money they think that they need to do it all and it can be overwhelming and then there's actual data that backs that up you know a lot of people bury their head in the sand it's really interesting there's a study done so there's 73 % of people think that they're financially literate, but only 23 % of those pass the basic money tests.

5:59So what we do when we come to learn is that we feel like we need to go out. We do it the same with businesses and podcasts and YouTube channels. We're like obsessed. We've got to learn everything. And when it comes to money, that can be quite overwhelming because there's so much conflicting information. It's like when you start a YouTube channel, it's like make a great thumbnail, package it right, do the video editing, blah, blah. It's pretty like packaged up and it's going to be the same for everyone. Whereas with money, everyone's got an opinion. Everyone's got a different tactic, a different thing over here.

6:31And that alone is just like, what the hell do I even listen to? So that's the first thing, I think. And then they're like, I need to invest. I need to save. I need to get good credit score. I need to get on the housing ladder. And again, it's like, wow. So I just say you like start with like really bite sized chunks. Like what's a savings account and how does interest work? like start there and then slowly package these things on and we have six things that we think is really important for people to learn um and yeah it's the savings accounts and interest it's compounding it's stocks and shares isis basic index funds and your credit score right if you can learn that you are ahead of 95 of this country and past that point you don't really need to know much we always say this like that's the 10 the 90 is all up here is how you even think and react and money is largely emotion and energy.

7:22And I am like a big proponent of that because if you tell yourself we're bad with money, eventually you're going to make bad money decisions. If you tell yourself you're good with money and I'm going to be good this month, I'm going to try. At least you are then putting, reinforcing those loops in your side of your head because we do have a monkey brain. It's been proven. And largely that's where the majority of our spending decisions come from, impulse spending and getting suckered in by ads. And the world's changed, right? It's a digitized world, but it's very difficult for the average person to get through the day without being fed an ad, which gets very good and hits them right in, you know, right where it hurts.

7:59And they're like, I need to buy that thing now because it's going to make my life better. Or I'm going to look great in that because I'm going out and I need to impress X, Y and Z boy or gal. Or beat my mate because he's just one up me and got the Audi 25. Right. And so we're all making decisions consciously based on status and and funding that back in. And it just hurts our bank balance. So I think learning and awareness are the two massive problems and common mistakes when people sort of handle their money.

8:26Alex Chisnall:You said a couple of interesting things there. Tell me a little bit more about I think you said money is is is energy and emotion. Right. Yeah. And you alluded to that a little bit then when when you said like the buying decisions we make, you know, those those impulse buys, those emotive buys. But yeah, tell me a little bit more about that and why you believe that the energy side of it as well. I believe money is energy because we regret large parts of what we do and equally as well from an abundance perspective. So I have a vision board. I have it literally right behind this camera as we're speaking right now.

9:09And I change it once a year and almost every single year, I would say a good 90 plus percent of it comes true. there's some things that are on there that never change like the big goals and that's totally fine and again they do occasionally get moved around but once a year I put a few goals and they can be trivial goals like I want to grow by 5 ,000 followers on Instagram because my business is a content business so it reflects me but it should reflect you and small movements which are doable and slightly challenging but you know that they're the things that I'm going to go for and what you'll find is a large part of that's going to happen in a few months so money goals are the same.

9:45And so I really think it's really important to lock in a goal for the year. What can you actually achieve during that year? And then tiny stretch your target as well. Like, can I get, if I put it up by a couple hundred quid, am I going to get there? And you'll find that your brain just starts actively looking at ways to do that. And if you don't want to have a vision board up, if you're embarrassed or you don't want to have these figures in and around people, have a trigger word. So put it on the fridge or put it on a post-it note on your computer. And you remember from that point on because you've already done the exercise.

10:16So it's about tricking your brain into believing that you are set up to grow. Like you've set yourself a goal. You understand that it's either getting your emergency fund together or get on the housing ladder or getting 10 grand in your investment portfolio. Whatever that is, everybody's different when it comes to money and personal finance is personal. But that's going to trigger that for you. So it's that abundance mindset. And going back to what we said about energy as well, is that if you're feeling low and bad and you're a spender and you know that on a Sunday afternoon after a big Saturday night out, you splurge on an ASOS to make yourself feel better.

10:49Well, that's energy, right? That's how you're feeling around that. And you're utilizing spending to try and make yourself feel better in those regards. So you can put limits in place to try and stop yourself from doing that if it's harming your overall financial well-being. And so what we say to people is if things are over 100 quid, wait 24 hours because there's 81 % of impulse spends are regretted the next day. And that's a massive amount of that money is staying in your bank balance because we regret those purchases. And it's actually been studies done on this that shows that it's the dopamine that kicks in isn't the actual purchase of the thing because you've got the thing.

11:26It's the actual process of buying it and the like lead up towards it. It's not the physical transaction. So I've had it before where I've bought myself these gold Air Max 97s thinking I was like super cool. They arrived. I opened the box and I literally looked at them and I was like, are you having a laugh, mate? These are bold even for you. And so they stayed in the box. I had 30 days to give them back. And I gave them back on the 29th day because I couldn't bring myself to do it. I had that battle with myself, right? But it was a figure of regret. I opened the box like, what am I doing? But I just thought they looked cool.

12:03And I saw them on some influencer on some, you know, or Facebook ad or whatever that might well be. And I'm sucking in.

12:10Alex Chisnall:It's so funny you mentioned that because I've literally, when you said like you gave it back on that the 29th day and taking my girls again, snowboarding in France in Chamonix in a couple of weeks. And I've literally got all the gear, right? Got all the gear, bought myself all new gear before the season back in November, right? when we when we went for the first time and um i just i just some i've got i've got two jackets right two snowboard jackets and i've just gone and bought myself a third one right just because it had this like winter camo look and i got these you know winter camo bottoms and i just kind of wanted the contrast and then it arrived and i put it on i was just kind of like huh no not really what i thought it was going to be you know it didn't try to look at the snowboarding god right yeah yeah it looked better on the model on the online shop that's the problem right as well you're like oh definitely gonna look like that and then like i know for a fact because my girlfriend does it she'll she'll spend three four hundred pounds on asos and this massive package comes and she'll keep one item out of about 25 because she's like i don't look like the same as this person on this online ad but a lot of people do that and then they forget and or they keep it because they feel like they need to or it does look good.

13:28And then they're two, three, 400 pounds down and they didn't even need a new jacket or a ski outfit. Like they've already got an old one, which works fine. So it's playing this game with yourself. You want nice things. Everybody does. We all do. And that's why we work and what we do, why we work hard. But there's a balance, right? And there's a balance between I need to think about security and future me, but also I want to live my life now and have fun too and so it's a constant game with yourself and you go through seasons of life and things change and move around you know very different for someone without kids someone with kids or someone with kids who are grown up versus kids with younger kids so again seasons of life you're going to treat money very very differently during that and um it's about being aware of that and feeling that it's it's all right you know we're all trying to figure it out um but trying to give yourself some tools essentially to to allow yourself to to make better decisions for yourself

14:24Alex Chisnall:yeah the first thing i looked at was um how long i had to return it and i was amazed when it said 365 days and i was like then search that again and i was like wow imagine the amount of people who think they've got so long to give it back and then just forget about it and it stays there and i thought there's probably some psychology in that instead of the normal 30 days the 365 days right interesting oh yeah yeah or just wear it for the ski season and then just hope that no holes and something you also said um you know our mindset there those people who um say they're bad with money but by constantly saying it they're reinforcing that that bad money belief or whatever you want to you whatever you want to call it but we all know people like that right you constantly reinforce it and i've you know same same as you you know had that story of um and i always kind of you kind of kind of trace it back and i always remember you know getting into debt but it was from the the bank just extending my overdraft whilst at uni and then before you know it you're living your life what was a 500 pound overdraft it sent a 2 000 pound overdraft and then you going on holiday with the boys in the summer or whatever and it just oh yeah i've been there isn't it literally been there i don't i know that only too well they i turned up day one university they gave me a credit card and an overdraft and i was 18 and never been taught the value of a pound and that was it and i went spiraling off and that was my my relationship with debt and that's largely why i do what i do now because i think it's like i managed to get myself out of it and and sort of I had a flick and a switch and an aha moment, which I was lucky to have because a lot of people don't.

16:11What was that?

16:12Alex Chisnall:Before we go off on the tangent, what was that? A friend of mine. So I was sitting on a beach in Vietnam, 3 a.m., few tequila cocktails deep at this point. Everyone had gone to bed, and there's me and my mate sitting on this beautiful white sandy beach, and we're sitting on these deck chairs with our Hawaiian shirts buttoned down, thinking it was super cool, holding these little drinks. And we just started talking about money and started having like a really open chat. And one of the things he said to me, and it stuck with me, and it was my little trigger, was I'd hidden my debt from all my mates.

16:47They're all quite successful people at young ages. It's really weird, like out of my friendship group, everyone's a head of or a high-flying entrepreneur, like doing really, really cool stuff. And it's quite incredible, really. Like we always say, it's like, it's usually one in the group, right? But with us, it's like, it's all of us, it's mental. um and he said to me oh when do you want to retire and i said oh it'd be nicer 50 would be nice you know yeah it'd be lovely and he goes all right cool like when do you want to when do you want to die and i was like what weird question but uh you know 80 um uh would be nice you know good innings all of that i think 80 would be a solid and he goes all right that's 30 years how much you spend in a year and i said oh you know i'm probably doing about 30 grand a year i reckon give or take um so that's 900 grand have you got that and i was like what you know like i know i don't and i and i hadn't told anybody i was minus 24 grand at that point and i and i did i sort of said to him that you know i'd been burning the candle and got myself in a little bit of a hole and third of my wages at that point were just going on interest payments like i was in i was in a real hole and again you know i hadn't told my girlfriend at the time who she had no idea that You know, she just thought I was quite good with money because I was always managing to buy presents and do cool things.

18:07And my mum, dad didn't know. And so it was a real moment for me. And then when I came back from that, it wasn't like I say a switch. It wasn't like I just became this different person overnight. I just became curious about what was possible for me. And I started to learn and bring things in. And from that point, I started to change my relationship with with money. and it really accelerated for me and in 18 months I managed to clear that debt down for a combination of income and side hustles and little side businesses which I had going at the time and it just you know it was a bit of like okay I'm not going to go out for the pints on a Tuesday night which at 26 you're like I really kind of want to go and do that um but it doesn't you know I went on the Friday pints instead of Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday you know so there's a bit of a difference but you still have to enjoy your life while you're going through that that journey too i think it's massively important and and then when i got to zero it was like well what now do i just kick on or do i go backwards and so that that that sort of 900 grand figure always stuck in my head um and then since then i've you know i've managed to accelerate and now i teach it and talk about it for a living which is mental so yeah um that's really interesting

19:19Alex Chisnall:that's why i stopped you there so um what was your was that the real screw it just do it moment or was there a point where you stopped just being interested in money and decided to build something around it, which is gains, right? So I've managed to always be quite ambitious in whatever I'm doing, and I think that's massively helped me. I was a really young head of marketing and then a director of hospitality business at 28, and I was on it. And I always wanted to be like the best in whatever I did. And I think that massively helped. When I started learning about money, I was like, I'm going to be the best investor.

20:00I'm going to be the best X, Y and Z. And you soon get a cold heart slap around the face and realize that that's actually really quite bloody difficult. But my screw it, just do it moment was that like I realized at the point where I started learning and intercept, you know bringing all this um education into my life that one it was really really difficult to understand most of this stuff it was like oxford dictionary territory to work out what the hell someone was saying or it was an american and so we had martin lewis who was kind of doing fantastic things at the time but wasn't really talking about investing making money online side hustles growing businesses that type of thing he was leaving that alone and i just looked saving money isn't it how can you save how can you save you know ppi car insurance that type of thing um and he's brilliant don't get me wrong but it just sort of leaves that that open um and that since changed there are now quite literally thousands of people talking about this on instagram if you go on there from the uk but we were early um in that journey one of the few that sort of started doing it um but yeah the realization for me was that like even my friends family everyone I was starting to speak to because I was obsessed you know when you just started talking about this stuff and they're just like what are you talking about and that's why I kept getting back and I was like well you don't know this stuff like I thought I was like behind you know and it was the other way um so my script to do it moment was like I'm just going to start writing uh anytime someone asks me a question I'm going to write the article about it to learn myself and then give them something back and then in COVID we had a WhatsApp investment WhatsApp group which quickly grew into like uh friends of family uh friends of their friends we had about 250 people which is the limit in the end by the end of covid and they would just ask questions and i would write the article and then they were like can you make a video about this and i was like oh god video like that's going to be mental and so i started doing that and then it just went nuts and that's where it went like full public mode and we started to get millions and millions of views and it's just been it's just been a real crazy journey since then amazing um and and what

22:10Alex Chisnall:gap did you feel you talked about martin lewis again but what gap did you feel existed in the market when you launched upper gains i just think it was very much like um there wasn't lots of financial education in the uk that was written down for someone to get to understand you know And I think that that was, it was written, it was always written in a way where you would then need to do further research. There was never an analogy or something which the everyday person could put into place. So we use like chocolate and Mars bars and celebrations. And, you know, we'd break a chocolate in half and then show them that this is what's happening with your tax and stuff like that.

22:51And we'd fill up a glass of juice and show the tax levels changing on your income tax. And so just stuff that people could get. Right. and there just wasn't any of that for the uk there wasn't the us and so i just think that was a real like easy way of getting the basic person from zero to one and that was what we tried to tackle that's what we try and do now everything goes zero to one and then we've now led on one to two through two to three etc from there but it is the large part of what we we do it's just that core like basic understanding of of what we feel like the average person needs to know um and it is a little bit more into the investing side it's that growing money through side hustles and businesses one of our big things that we talk about is the gap and so the gap is basically let's say you're paid two thousand pounds and you spend one thousand five hundred pounds and your gap is five hundred pounds as it exists now but if you want to retire with a big fat juicy pot and you know you need to invest 700 pounds a month to get there or your gap is now 200 pounds so you need to then go out and find 200 pounds a month not this like i've got to start a side hustle and bring in 10 grand a week that we see on youtube every single day like it's okay i need to start a side hustle off or do x y and z things to get an extra 200 quid in which is much more doable for those individuals at that point so that's what we we focus on because once you start going over that hurdle if they're like okay i could probably bring in an extra 200 pound a month if you give me three four months to do that i could probably find a way of doing that right um but then when they get there they realize okay 200 pounds is possible so 400 so 600 and that's it they're away and you've just set that person off so it's just like we like lighting basically the match we're like the match that comes in and lights the fire under that person and shows them what's possible because it doesn't matter where you're from what background you're earning what salary you're earning it's just how you're treating your own individual environment and now and then where you're going to go next and so that's yeah that's the big sort of gap that we try and fill really so i wanted to let

24:57Alex Chisnall:you know about something that i see trip founders up all the time if you're running a business with international payments one of the biggest hidden costs is often foreign exchange world first is built specifically for businesses operating across borders, helping you manage payments, hold multiple currencies, and reduce unnecessary FX costs. They're not a high street bank trying to do everything. They focus purely on international business payments and currency exchange. That's their thing. Switching providers is a commitment, which is why they're giving our listeners 50 fee free business transactions to properly test their service.

25:32Alex Chisnall:Plus, signing up for an account is completely free and there are no ongoing monthly fees. You've got 60 days from sign up to use them. Head to worldfirst.com forward slash screw it and get your 50 fee free business transactions. Now back to the podcast. And when you had that question about what age you're going to retire and you said 50, what's the answer these days? Do you know what? Back then I was really unfulfilled and like i think that that's a massive difference now um my goal is actually probably i'm 36 i'd probably say 40 now i want to be out and the reason is because i've gone hard for a serious amount of time now and i don't i don't think i'd ever retire i'm always going to have fingers in pies and doing stuff that's what i was going to say especially now you're you know you're in the content game as well right i just don't see that i'd ever actually stop everything right no it's impossible i know now i have a taste of it and i have first-hand experience of this like my granddad run ronnie scott's uh jazz club in in soho for 50 years and i watched i watched him deteriorate he sold the business left it six months he was a completely different man uh barely could talk, barely could do anything.

26:55And he was like the most sharp, switched on human being I'd ever met before that. And so you stop, your brain stops too. And I'm obsessed with building businesses, doing things. And that's what I talk about 24-7. And so I know that even if I sold this business and moved on and had a big payday, I'd be back in two months, like putting it in. But I'd also probably buy myself a farm in the middle of Kent and spend loads of times pretending that I'm like, you know, the new Alan Titchmarsh. But I definitely won't be out for long. I know that much.

27:31Alex Chisnall:Was there a point where you realised that this was no longer just content or education, but it was a bona fide real business? Yeah, I think it was, we went for an award, which was the British Banking Awards. In fact, we got nominated and I just thought well I'm just going to go for it so I started putting it putting it out and saying that we're doing things and it was we won the award um it was a best money content creator of the year uh 2024 or 524 um and then we after that we got the feedback forms from that and it was quite literally thousands of people writing why they'd voted for us and it was reading all of those and i did i read them i literally like full tears that coming down your face because you i didn't when you put content on social media you have no idea who the hell is listening watching doing any of these things unless you meet them in the street and they tell you they don't really um you know we were discussing this before you tend to stay away from the comment section because that's where the really nutcases go um in the majority don't come for me in the comments then after i say that but that's but that that's largely what we have to do as content creators we have to turn off from the comments because it's not usually a nice place um but those things there reading those was like you changed my life you helped me get on the housing ladder i i now have an emergency fund in place i'm out of debt and i was just like whoa like okay this is real uh i have now not just a responsibility to create content which i think is helping people i have a real responsibility to help these to help more and more of these individuals because this is working look at the tangible proof um and that fills up my cup in such a different way and so i think that's now i feel responsible whereas before i was just trying to sort of throw stuff at the ball and see what worked um so it really sort of hit hit the nail on the head for me and it was last year a friend of mine who's now a co-founder of the of the app that we're building gains he turned around to me and said well what's next and i didn't have an answer for him at that time um i think i'd always sort of thought it'd be lovely to create an app and do go into building something like that but i also knew that the amount of work it would take and what would what would be needed um and then you know some of these ai tools started coming out and i was like well this is now possible um and that's where it sort of triggered that for me and you know when you're on a content you know this better than anyone it's a hamster wheel and you get off for two secs and your business goes and so i was like well how long can i keep that up for forever um at this pace that we're at um and i i couldn't i didn't have an answer And I certainly knew eventually I probably would burn out.

30:31So it made sense to leverage the, you know, the amount of traffic and people that we have following us and create something for them, which would actually change their lives even more. So IP tech was that journey. And I know that's a typical Daniel Priestley phrase, but he was actually the one that inspired that. And I asked him a question at an event and I said, you know, what's the evolution of that? and he just went IP tech and that was it. So I knew that we just had to do it. And yeah, we've been on that journey ever since.

31:06Alex Chisnall:And he'll be coming in your show before you know it, right? Yeah, after months and months and months of DMing him. It'll be worth the wait, trust me. It'll be worth the wait. I'm trying to get him back for a second time and he said yes as well. So we'll see. I've been to so many of his shows, read all his books. is one of those guys I've always just really looked up to and uh he's you know deserved meteoric rise over the past couple of years it's it's incredible the books are fantastic he's a really nice guy you know even when I asked that question to him at the event he a lot of people I've asked questions to at events before you ask the question and they don't talk back to you they sort of see that as their moment to then go off and then talk to everybody about this is what I feel and then but he just stood there and looked directly at me and spoke at me and i i that's a that was stuck in my mind as a real personable character and i try and do that now i try and just address when we do talk from stages and stuff if someone asks me a question i just try and switch at them because i just thought what a nice thing um but it is about this it's about learning off everybody you possibly can and putting it into your own life to build your own tool set and i think that's massively important one of the things that i always remember from um having daniel on on this show was i asked him about key person uh of influence that book and it's it's over a decade old now i think isn't it it's it's it's longer than it might be getting off for 15 years but um but he said it was really interesting like when we were talking about it and he was just like you know um just kind of spitballing stuff and saying stuff off the top of his head and he was just like if i'd actually um you know given more thought into it at the time or put more effort into the marketing of that at the time because I could have been the Gary Vaynerchuk or the Alex Homozi and I was like and now you look back on that interview I did with him was probably three years ago now and then you now look at he's been on Diver's CEO he's just been on it for the seventh time and it's funny isn't it you can kind of see somebody's journey and it's like oh that wasn't maybe the right time you wrote the book but now clearly is your time because his star has just gone stratospheric isn't it it's uh you are where you're meant to be and all that kind of stuff right 100 he he started utilizing short-form content to his advantage and and went on every single podcast that i could possibly ever see and certain people started following him around i think his breakthrough moment was the ali abdahl episode that did like three and a half million views when he like i'll give you 10k build a business and then steven since replicated that and you know and people have taken that idea but it's it's he he is one of those people that just has been there walk the walk and done it and deserves his flowers in my opinion yeah um talking about social do you think social media has helped financial literacy or made it worse because as you alluded earlier certainly everyone thinks they're an expert right yeah yeah it's a tough one um the answer is yes and no there is so many i'll talk about the negatives first you've got the manosphere documentary come out i don't know if you've seen it the louis through thing that came out there's these absolute donuts selling you know telegram and trading signals and forex and look at me and my lambo life in dubai guys and they're really really dangerous and these kids that look at that look up to these guys and they create these personas and again massive massively dangerous get rich quick schemes if someone's going to make you rich in a really small short of tight sport short space of time largely look at that as a complete and utter waste of your time and because it's it is i've been there i've tested some of these things just to see whether or not they actually work because that's my job and they none of them work you all lose money um and so So I just think like with anything in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

35:13But social media has fueled this because they look at their life and think that's how they should be living. And I think that's the dangerous side of financial education on the Internet. There's people like myself that try and keep it clean, try and teach people. And we still take flack from the press and things like that because we talk about investing and growing money and we're not regulated. but we do it from personal experience and you know i've been doing this investing nearly 10 years now and um and there's a massive gap as well the advice gap in the uk is huge like most financial advisors you need at least 10 grand liquid but realistically it's like talking hundreds of thousands liquid for most financial advisors and most financial advisors won't come on the internet and talk because most people don't have 10 grand liquid right so it's like they they're not going to do it because they're not going to get any clients so no one does it and then what happened then how do you get person from zero to 10 grand so they can become your client it's like it's this is sort of at 22 and so that's where we exist we exist in that gap and you know we we we try and stay on the right side of this line and and and educate and we have to put warnings on absolutely everything it's not financial advice it's education and personal experience and what works for me doesn't work for you and all of these things we have to say it all the time because we've got to be careful you know we have a responsibility if someone decides to go and invest in something and loses all their money well that's on us and so we've got to be careful um and so yeah we um we try to do good and i think if you're trying to do good people can see that um and it's you know it's eventually you win out but it's it's it's it's a gray line and a gray area for sure we have you know there's there's certainly a lot of people that step over that line and certainly a lot of people that don't um so it's it's just a case of you know and also it's it is a lucrative business if you get it right right so some of these finance brands paying thousands of pounds um and that can work in people's favor or not again so yeah i think it's been helpful but i also think it's been very detrimental as well okay um so how do you

37:28Alex Chisnall:therefore then talk to specifically young people about things like cryptocurrency about investing and risk without either completely scaring them off or encouraging some form of recklessness right so look i i think it's just about allocating it's about understanding what's risky what's what's what's less risky because there is always risk when it comes to investing i think that's massively important for the everyday person to understand but you can it's about balance right everybody knows that bitcoin's volatile everybody knows that certain other cryptocurrencies are even more volatile so just don't put all your eggs in one basket um is quite simple with that if something's a higher risk asset you know maybe allocate five percent of your money to it rather than 50 or 60 which i know a lot of people do and they're totally okay with that again you might be all right with that and and you know yourself alex you might be like i can't tell you that i'll kill me you know i'd be there every day like worrying about it yeah and i'm one of those individuals right i thought i was really risk on and then it all started going tits up and i'm like actually i really don't enjoy this at all and so i moved away from that um so i i just think for the basic person setting up a stocks and shares isa and putting a bit of money into a global windex fund which is basically the most diverse fund of thousands of different companies all across the world you've got your apples your microsoft your teslas but also all of the uk all of france all of india all of japan or in one thing it's like betting on the world's economy human progress is is you know a quote from andrew craig's book how to own the world and that's like just one of the easiest things you can do and you don't need to do anything else but obviously everybody and especially the young kids want to so i just think you know edge into a few little things find your lane work out your risk tolerance don't put all of your eggs in one basket and generally that's going to fare you quite well over the long term um and you mentioned it before and i don't think we went into much detail about it but um tell me about gains and what you're building now and who's that going to help and how it's going to how it's ultimately going to help them yeah so we identified like two core problems that this app sort of holds the one is the cost of living so it's got gone up and it's getting worse even though it's a it's a buzzword and a cliche word the effects of that are still very visible and increasing so everything's getting much more expensive and it's getting harder to live um you know people are taking on extra jobs or cutting back certain things in in their life that they don't want to cut out.

40:14And that's really hurting families across the UK. So big, big problem there. The second side of it is the current apps which exist to help them manage their money on a day-to-day basis are very judgmental in the way that they're essentially spreadsheets with big red, you've gone over over here and people don't enjoy that. So the second problem is that people don't actually want to look at what they've done because they get judged about it, made to feel worse and they bury their head in the sand and rather not look at it. So what we've done is we've kind of approached this from a financial wellness perspective on one side.

40:50So it's very much like an arm around. It's like, okay, you might well have done this, but it's okay. We've got some money over here, which we can move things around and you're going to be all right if you don't go nuts again, right? Like it's more of an arm around, but also do something about it type of approach. So the app is essentially connects to your banks through open banking. You can see what's going on across all of your bank accounts in one place. You can plan your spending, see your upcoming payments, see what subscriptions potentially you've missed. You can speak to our AI financial coach called Richie on the app as well.

41:22And Richie is going to go out and find you savings here and there. He's going to teach you about money. You can learn on the app. There's financial education built in. And then to solve the cost of living angle is we've built in instant cashback. So there's 180 top major retailers across the UK. And the way that works is Tesco, for example, will give us 5%. We give you 4 % of that. So we take a little bit of the spread. That's how the app sort of stays alive and we pay our bills. And the customer would go on and log in. Let's say you're spending£100 a week in Tesco and you get 5 % off. Let's call it 5 % because it's simple.