Kevin O'Leary: This Daily Habit Is Keeping You Poor. Here's What You Should Do Every Time You Get Paid!

24:39Here you are. Cameras are rolling, tape is running, you know you've only got so many minutes. This is your moment and you're on national television, 100 plus million people will see you in syndication. It's all in your mind, it's all in your mind. It's going through your head. Can you project who you are with your eyes and the way you're standing? Can you project your confidence? Are you looking at the ground? Are you looking away from me because you can't stand me looking at you directly without saying anything to you? Or do you push back? Or do you say I'm going to, I'm going to stake my aura, I'm going to stake my ground here.

25:21I'm going to show you I'm ready. See what I'm getting at? And I can feel it. I can see that they're ready to do battle. They're ready to answer. They're ready to present. They're ready, ready, ready, ready, or they're not. And I've taken that out of the shark tank. I see that every day in life. I see it. So you have to learn how to project yourself in front of your peers or who you want to lead or teach or if you're a general or a preacher. That is maybe an innate something you're born with or maybe you can learn that. I don't know, I don't care. But if you don't have it, you're going to fail.

26:04And you're just, that's before a word is spoken. Before the first word is spoken. And so then what has to happen? Then Eric says, go. You're on. And everybody's just sitting there looking at you. Can you articulate your idea in 90 seconds or less? Can you, whatever props you have or whatever you're going to say, can I get the big idea right away?

26:34The ones that had that aura generally get there. 30 seconds later, I get it. I get what they're here for. I understand their product. Okay, that's good. Unfortunately, great ideas are dime. It doesn't. I mean, there's millions of them. The next phase begins. This is after 90 seconds. Can you explain why you're the right person to execute on this idea and create a business from it? Because you know something about this space. You work for a competitor. You've tried three times before and failed. You figured out what you did wrong. What is it about you or your team that can take this idea and make it happen?

27:15Now, we get those two things together. You can feel the aura of the room. The isotope is sizzling because you've de -rished a great idea. You got an operator in and they, but then the third thing. This is the killer. It's the killer. I've seen it so many times in real life. And you know, shark tanks real life it is. But you got to know your numbers. How big is the market? I've asked it growing with the gross margin. I mean, I've said this a million times so people, I teach this every day. How many competitors are there? When are you going to break even? What month? If you get the first to write and you don't know your numbers, you deserve to burn in hell.

27:49And I'll put you there myself. I mean, you wasted an opportunity for an entrepreneur that did know their numbers that could have been in that spot. That I could have invested in. You're not your numbers. I take you up behind the barn and shoot you. You should have brought somebody that understands the language of business because those three together are the definition of leadership right there. I've never heard someone talk about aura in entrepreneurship quite like that. And I was just trying to, for the people listening that are either trying to figure out if they have an aura or to grow that aura.

28:19What does it, what does it look and feel like? Is it physically? Is it shoulders back? Is it, you said it's eye contact or is it indescribable? And do you think you could take someone who doesn't have that aura in business and teach them it? Does business give you that aura? I think you can teach it. I certainly try and teach it to my children. I try and teach it to my students.

28:46And the best way to do it is to look at yourself in the mirror sometime. You know, just what do you look like to yourself? You know, if you're going to go make a presentation to take down a million dollar line of credit or something, you want to dress the part obviously. But you're in a walk in a room with, you know, a loan officer and maybe an assistant, maybe one other depending on the size of the deal. They'll never met you probably and you're going to have to project yourself in those seconds as you're walking up to shake their hands. What does that take? It takes an aura of confidence and it's in the eyes.

29:21It's in the way you're standing. It's in how the way you're dressed. It's not a joke to be dressed for success. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's something about presenting yourself and keeping your eyes focused on who's talking to you so that they know that you're absorbing the information, that you respect the information, that you're about to get into a narrative with them of respect, even though they're maybe disagreements. All of this is happening in the first 60 seconds and it's setting up for the rest of your life with that person. It could be, you got to marry, it could be where you're going to work with, it could be your partner business, it could be your banker, it could be anybody.

30:05It could be a soldier that's going to give up their life for you. It's sort of, who are you? That's it. Just closing off on the point you made about women being your most successful investments and the companies that have given you the greatest returns tend to be led by women. Does that mean that you focus on hiring women into executive roles? Yeah, I'm practically all women, particularly Asian women. I am a, you know, this whole thing about DEI and all this stuff. I've always had diversity because I only hire on merit. I don't care if what sex you are or what you call yourself or what you're doing.

30:42Or what, where you came from or the color of your skin or what planet you were born on, I couldn't give it shit. Can you execute? And the way I hire people, and that's why I have such a diverse staff in my operating company, I don't hire you. I say, look, you sound good and you look great on paper. But that doesn't mean anything if you can't work within the team. So I know you want a job and you want benefits and all that stuff. I'm not going to do that. If you want to be part of my universe, you're going to work for four to six months as a contractor at a much higher salary. Because you're not going to get stock options.

31:19You're not going to get any benefits. But I just want to see what it's like for you to work with all of the people that we deal with every day, all the lawyers, all the bankers, all of the, you know, CEOs that we have investments in and your co -workers. Because I don't do nine to five anymore. I do project -based work. I don't care where you live. We have people working in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, England, everywhere, everywhere. And, you know, we meet. We try and find an hour every week where we can see each other. But we're just constantly communicating using modern day tools today.

31:58But, you know, can you actually be given a mandate and execute on it? That's it. I don't care when you do it. If you have to get the financials, let's see you're running in finance. You've got to get them out the 15th for taxes. I don't care when you do it. But if you miss the 15th, I care. So I need to find out if those people can fit into that kind of an environment. Some of them make it some of them don't. Sometimes we know right away after 90 days ago. Let's hire them, bring them in the team. Let's give them the whole package. And sometimes after a month or so, you know, it's not going to work.

32:29Here's like, you know, that's it. I think more companies should do that, actually. It's more like the Swiss apprentice system. They bring you into a lot like, you know, I step farther Swiss. I've been going to Switzerland for 50 years. So if you're a giant company, like a Pfizer or a Nestle, you pull them out of high school at 14. You give them a job in the afternoon. They become an apprentice. They want to learn. They want to work. They want to understand what it's like. And then you find the winners while they're still in high school, then you give them summer jobs. And then you bring them into the company.

33:02That's where I got the idea from the Swiss or genius that way. Because you're sort of mitigating the risk, I guess, you're taking less of a risk on this. No, but you're also finding out if their DNA is going to fit with your, I mean, I want my team to make a ton of money. I just, I want them to be successful. I want every person to be proud to work with the other. And just we're almost invincible. We're so damn good at what we do. You have the same thing here. You don't have people that don't work for you. Well, you get rid of them. You whack them. I'm more just formal about it. Boom, you're gone.

33:34With the investments that you've made, how many investments, how many offers have you done on Shark Tank now? Probably like, we know we don't even count it anymore. We look at the portfolio rolling over five to seven year period. A lot. I like a lot. And the thing is what I've learned is you get an exit like a base pause from five years ago or something. Anaskaya from a remarkable woman. That was the Cat DNA. Cat DNA thing. I mean, nobody saw that coming. I thought the thing was a joke. I was so wrong. I mean, that's a whole point. And she, she had the highest IRR. I think of the whole format history.

34:11Nobody's made her. She was around for 36 months and taken out at such an extreme number and all cashed it. There was an NDA sign between Sony and the pharmacy, the little company. I can't even tell you what it was. It was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary. Was it nine figures? Believe me, it's a tough NDA because I understand why they did it. They didn't buy it for the cat DNA testing. They bought it for the data. With AI didn't really, wasn't emerging. It existed, but it wasn't. With the data they have now, they can develop products for animals that are extraordinary in terms of feeds and medicines.

34:54And nobody had that much data on the 110 million cats in America because she got it all during the pandemic. Thousands and thousands and thousands of, you know, it was, it was never about, it was, it was a data company. It's like my son telling me when he got his internship at Tesla. Hey, dad, it's not a car company. It's a data company. Buy the stock. It's, I'm never buying the stock. It's a joke. It's so expensive. He said, you're an idiot. It's not a car company. So I bought the stock and he was right. It became my most successful investment. I had to keep selling it down to 5%. My cost basis is zero on Tesla now.

35:31But before it split and he worked there for five years. One of the personas that I have that watches this show a lot are young people, not always young, but there are on the sofa thinking about being an entrepreneur and they talk about it a lot. You know, they come up to me in the street. Two thirds will never do it. Two thirds will never do it. You might as well do it when you have less burdensome risk like a mortgage in a family. You might as well do it in your 20s. You're going to fail the first time. Maybe a second, maybe a third. You only need one success. You know, I have plenty of failures and I still have failures.

36:05I mean, it's just, you know, that when I talked about this morning, I just, you know, when I, I, you know, I said to the largest shareholders as I was, I was in the car and your system was, you know, looking at me in the limo. I was telling the other two shareholders, listen guys, it's a binary decision. As soon as I get out of this interview, we're going to make a decision. This company is going bankrupt. Oh, on the bankrupt company. Yeah, yeah. And so if we want to save it, everybody's going to have to pony up X million. And we're going to own the whole thing. But we're just going to own it all.

36:37We're just going to do a cram down around it, a fraction of a cent going on the whole thing. You want to do that or you want to let it go bankrupt? You guys choose. I'm one third of it. So it's going to have to be, you know, two against one. And I'll do whatever they want because that's how I am. But it's, you know, you want to get yourself in position in life. And I think most CEOs understand this. You are going to have bad outcomes. They're going to be bad outcomes. But never put yourself in a situation where one bad outcome defines who you are. I mean, for those shareholders, they're going to be unhappy.

37:12But then I got the call on the audio. Those shares will be very happy. They're going to make 400 X. So that was one of my deals. And so it's sort of like learn to live with the idea that you're going to fail. You're going to lose money by taking risk. Will it change relationships permanently? Maybe. But if they're, if you respect it and you're honest and you're transparent, probably not. I think there's a lot of people don't like me for my bloodness. I don't care. I think a lot of people respect me for my bloodness. They may not like me. And you know, it's sort of, it doesn't matter because the only people that really matter to me are probably my 20s, closest friends and my family.

38:02Do you think if you hadn't worked with a nine Steve Jobs, you would be a different person? 100%. Steve changed my life. There's no question. I didn't like him. But I feel so bad that he didn't have to die that way. He just wouldn't go with the modern medicine at the time. This is my view. I was a friggin genius. He was so smart in terms of keeping on track to get getting stuff done and look what he achieved. But he was difficult. Difficult. Because he wasn't always right. But he was right so much that the mistakes just didn't matter. And I thought, you know, the people that spent enough time with him know what I'm talking about.

38:55You know, it occurred to me, because I know wasn't active, not as well as jobs, but they really needed each other. They really needed each other. Because was understood. He was, he understood what the, let me try an analogy here for you. I think it's a good one. Take the situation going on right now with Nvidia, AMD, to a certain extent, Intel, maybe Broadcom, where policymakers in Washington have decided that we can't sell those chips to countries like China or Russia or whatever the list is of adversaries. That's bad policy. And here's why what I learned from, from jobs was the computer, the chip is the queen bee.

39:56It's, it's the, it's the queen bee. But it has no value without the honey bees, which are the programmers around at the form of community, that spend all of their energy writing code that works with the queen bee, which is the chip, that pushes out its influence, because every coder that becomes familiar with that firmware, that was near computer, rights to that platform, is part of the honey bees. Jobs understood that. He said, I've got to get every honey bee writing for the Mac, writing for the OS of Apple. It's the same with the Nvidia chip. We need to sell it to everybody, every even adversaries, because within that country of Russia or China is some genius kid.

40:56You don't know who he is or she is. It's going to write the next piece of firmware or advance AI from the queen bee, the chip, the American queen bee. The minute you shut down a market and you don't, your adversary sends their queen bee in which is Huawei. We can't let that happen, because I don't think the lawmakers understand what jobs understood. You create the hive with the queen in the middle, that's the chip. You convince every bee around to make the honey, which is the software, and that is the AI in this case. You make it off that chip, and when you advance the chip again, everybody knows how to take that set and stay within the American chip, that you're advancing.

41:49Maybe you keep the one generation behind, maybe that's the policy, but you don't ever let an adversary put their queen bee in the middle of the hive. You see what I'm saying? Of course, I mean. That is what jobs did. That was the war between gates and jobs on the OS, on the operating system. Yeah, I was thinking about the App Store and... It's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing. And so when I see this policy now, I go out of my mind. The first thing I do is get on playing go to Washington, because AI is so important for all the investments I've made, I do not want to be putting Chinese honey into my companies at all.

42:26It's that simple. So for that person, that's stewing over their ideas now. If they had just a couple of minutes with you, and they asked you the question, Kevin, I'm about to start this business. I'm about to go on this journey of trying to go from zero to something in my life. Is there anything else that I need to know, as I said, on this sort of next 10 years of my life, I'm 21 years old. Because I think every entrepreneur has their principles. You talked about one which is the signal versus noise thing. Are there any other foundational principles that you think are conducive with success?

43:00That you might have learned that. Yeah, I mean, I've... What I'm telling 20 -21 -year -olds now is, look. Go work for 24 months in a sector you love, that you're passionate about, even if it'll pay you. Go in there and be an apprentice. If you're that passionate, you're going to be able to convince some manager to go work for free in there. They're going to recognize your passion, and they're going to bring you in. Do that first. Most young entrepreneurs say, nah, nah, I don't want to work for anybody. They said, yeah, you do, actually. You do want to work for somebody. You want to just understand how all the cogs move.

43:33Just 24 months. And after that, launch. The first one will probably fail. You're going to start with your parents giving you $10 ,000, whatever it is, friends and family. But you will have the baseline knowledge of your industry. You will know who the participants are. You will understand how it works. And you will have a much higher probability of success. But the key is to launch, sort of, in your mid to early 20s. Because you need to burn a few years failing. And that matters. On the point of how to lead people. When people hear about jobs as approach, they sometimes assume that you also have to be an asshole.

44:14And this is the conflicting thing, because the world has changed since jobs was in a leadership position. Things have gone a little bit more soft, shall one say. Have you seen all types of leadership went out in that regard? The direct signal -focused kind of brush approach. But also the kind approach. I don't think kind works. I think respect works. The same number of assholes are out there being successful now that they were back in the 90s. It doesn't matter whether you're an asshole or whether people like you or not. People get so stuck on this stuff. The team you're building are not your friends.

45:00They are the team you're building to execute on a mandate. Your customers come first. They're more important. And then, of course, the employees. And how are they respected or not? There are people that work for me out of like, it doesn't matter. I respect them. I respect their ability to execute. And that above all is the most important thing. If you start getting into interpersonal relationships, you will fail. Because you may have to fire that person one day. People that hire family take huge risk. Nepotism is a horrible disease. It's some of the greatest private companies on earth. Never let the kids run them.

45:39They just put them on the board and they hire professional management. That's how they keep wealth, multi -generational. Think about tetra pack, for example. People may not know that name, but it's a massive successful company. IKEA. You have to learn those lessons. It's about respect in both directions. It's not about likability or softness or some social metric. It really isn't. And trying to redefine leadership that way because it's on trend. It's not going to work. I started my first business at 12 years old. And I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter.

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47:15What about finding the definition of the word company is group of people? So in terms of finding great people, is there anything that you can offer to entrepreneurs that are listening about how you've done that, and what you've learned over time, the mistakes you've made with assembling your group of people? Yeah, hiring them without testing them first. I've made that mistake. So you now test them first? Yeah. Just because someone says they can execute doesn't mean they can. I mean, of course, you're an interviewer, you're not going to say I can't execute. You're looking at their past, you're saying this looks terrific.

47:45It looks like you can fit in, but it's on a piece of paper. They have them in road tests that they have put in a situation where they have to make individual decisions that have consequence. The people you want are able to make decisions that have consequence. Good consequence, bad consequence. You don't know yet, but they have to have to be able to make that decision on their own without calling you up, because you gave them that mandate. Maybe you've put a set of parameters, you can spend a million bucks and no more without calling me, but whatever it is, I don't want to hear from them. I just want the outcome.

48:18What about resilience and hard work? How much does that matter to you? Because I know you said they can work when, you know, as long as they get the job done, but are you trying to figure out if they are a bit of a psychopath in terms of hard work, if they're possessed themselves? I don't find the ones that are psychopath's hard work are actually the most successful. It's not the case. I find the ones that are eclectic people that have other pursuits that are nothing to do with the business they're in that do crazy stuff. Maybe it's writing motorcycles in the desert. I don't know. These are the examples I'm just using because I'm living with them and say, look, I've got to go and write a bicycle across the desert.

48:59Okay. How many days are you going to be gone? I don't know. Maybe three. Is there anything that is immediate? That tells me that if you look at the years outcome from that person, you're going to find that they're probably outperformed. You want the eclectic ones. You want the ones that are not just robots working. It's going to be cheaper to get a robot if you want a robot. I'm going to buy those two when they come available. But I want people that have creative and unusual solutions that just think outside of the box. It's really interesting that way. The other thing that everybody wants to hear from you about is how to keep and grow your wealth.

49:49Because making wealth, I understand who the lens of entrepreneurship take a big bet. Hopefully have an exit or draw a dividend or make profit from a company you've started. But in terms of what you did and your relationship with your money, what is the most important thing for someone to understand? He's just trying to grow their money. I learned this to my mother and I actually built a whole indexing company around it. When I was very young, I found out something that... So she was fiercely independent. She's one of three daughters of Lebanese descent. My Irish was father. My original father, biological father was Irish.

50:27She didn't... Yeah, there she is, Georgia.

50:34So...

50:56I haven't seen that picture in one.

51:07She was very independent.

51:12She never wanted a man to control her life. So she started at an early age when she was working for her father. They paid the girls' family all work there. She worked in the accounting department in billing. But she got paid cash. And so she would take 20 % of that cash each week. And she would put it into two asset classes. Stocks that paid dividends, large cap, stocks, and telcal bonds. Seven -year telcal bonds paid about six and a half to eight percent back then. She bought the long bonds. She had that portfolio for 55 years. She never spent any of the principal. Only the dividends and the interest she put my brother and I through college.

52:08She took care of her family and her sisters when they fell on hard times. But her rule is very simple. No more than five percent in any one stock or bond of the portfolio. And no more than 20 % in any one sector ever. Ever. So when a stock ran up past five, she'd sell it down. This is not genius. This is just a justification.

52:31And when she passed and I was the older brother and I saw the portfolio. Because the lawyer said, listen, you got to come down here. You're the executive or well. I said, yeah, but my mother was middle class. You said, no, you got to come down here. She kept her account secret from both of her husbands. She wanted her own independent money. And back then you could do that. And damn, I mean, what that portfolio did. The performance was extraordinary. It was beyond any hedge fund guy or anything. 55 years. When I saw the results, I said, that's it. That's how I'm going to invest for the rest of my life.

53:12Exactly the way Georgia did. No more than five percent in any one stock ever. No matter what it is. And no more than 20 % in any one sector with the exception of real estate. Which is a very large part of what I have in net worth. And it's a third. So that's broken the rule. But there's reasons for that. And I'm very happy with that portfolio. But if everybody that's listening to this does that, they will maintain and grow their wealth. But it's people bet. They make big bets. They just think they're so damn right. They put half their net worth into one sector or one stock and they get wiped out.

53:52That's what happens. So would your mother pick the stocks herself or would she invest in an index fund or? She indexed. She used up. So okay. Even back then, you know, they didn't have ETFs. But they had mutual funds that said they're only stock in this mutual fund is doesn't have any debt and it pays dividends. You know, whatever. They were very rudimentary back then. They were just collections of stocks. I think she had like 28 names or something like that in the portfolio. But if you look at that, then they're really boring large cap names. But they were sectorally diverse. There wasn't 10 sectors back then.

54:30There was only, there wasn't 11. There was 10. So they didn't have real estate as a sector. So, you know, I looked at it saying, well, this is really boring. You learned a lot about money from your early upbringing, right? From your fat early context. Yeah, because what she said to me was, look, you know, I even do this today with wealthy people call me up all the time and say, look, you know, they get divorced. This is really how, this is a very wealthy woman that divorced recently. And she said, look, you know, divorce saying, and she was a billionaire. She was dorsing. She was more multi -billionaire.

55:07And so she said, look, I'm getting everybody's calling me up to be my advisor. Because I'm separating from my husband and it's all his guys that did all the management of our family wealth. Would you be my advisor? I said, no, I don't do that. But, you know, I can, I can just give you some basic advice. And you can hire people to stick on the mandate. And I gave her Georgia strategy. But she, I had to do something else too. So let's get a piece of paper, your billionaire. Let's put everything on this piece of paper on the last 90 days that you've spent on, whatever the hell it is. I don't care.

55:43And let's put on, no computer, no spreadsheet on this. Let's look at all the income that you've made off your portfolio as it stands now, whether it's gold you have or land or stocks or bonds. Let's just do a gut check. Do you outspend yourself? She said, why would I give a shit? I said, wouldn't you like to know how much money you're burning, living your lifestyle the way you live it? Just out of interest. Maybe you have enough for the rest of your life, but maybe you want to give some of it to your family when they are, or give it to charity. Wouldn't you like to know? Because one of my rules is never outspend yourself on any 30 or 60 day cycle.

56:21Ever. Ever. I don't have any debt. So, so I'm very careful about that. And we went through this little thing. She freaked out. She was pissing away money. Just bleeding hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. I mean, I don't care how rich you are. You don't want to be stupid. And I said, is that shock you? One of the things has to happen. I mean, you're losing millions of dollars a quarter. Like, why? Why? Like, you don't, you've had nobody restrict what you do with your money. Because you're going to have to sell stocks at some point or sell gold or sell land to keep this up. And are you really that happy?

57:06Like, what's all this shit you're buying? Like, what is all this crap that you don't need? It was my opener for her. So, my point is most people don't do that exercise. I don't care if you're only making 56 ,000 a year or 68 the average salary. So, you in the camp that you shouldn't spend money on the small things. Like, the coffee, if you don't need it, you should make the coffee at home. I just, I can't stand it when I see kids that are making 70 grand a year spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that's just stupid. It's just think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making 8 to 10 % a year for the next 50 years.

57:43What's an index for someone that doesn't? So, okay. I mean, you know, I even have, I even built an app for this purpose just so I could, there's many apps out there. You don't have to use mine. Mine's called Bean Stocks. But you just allocate 15 % of your salary and it automatically puts it into two buckets, some stocks and some bonds. The stocks are ETFs, exchange -rated funds that just track the S &P 500 very simply. Mine's a little... The S &P 500 is the top 500 stocks. Yeah. And so, it's just, you know, people tell me, oh, I can beat the S &P, I can pick stocks. There's so full of crap. Not over the long period they can't.

58:16So, it's better you might as well just own ETFs. I have a version of the S &P that I designed with other people that strips out all the crappy balance sheets. But that's just me. You can just buy the index that you want, you know, the ETF. And then you pay low fees and over time it appreciates. And then if you buy some treasury bills or fixed income, you get that. You should have less of those when you're young and more than when you're older. That's just diversification. But you... You know, the best test I do with my kids' friends too. Go into a closet. Go into your closet. And look at how much shit you have, you know, wear.

58:50Because you either bought it because you thought you were going to wear it. And never wore it or wore it once. And you end up wearing 20 % of your portfolio all of the time. And 80 % you pissed away. I mean, that's really stupid. And so, for a young person, a young woman or man, don't do that. Start putting in just... Buy the minimum stuff. And another thing I learned from my mother, this is interesting because I saw it happen at her death. She, you know, would buy two Chanel jackets a year. Really expensive Chanel jackets. Hand made Chanel jackets. I do business with Chanel because of the legacy of my mother and the whole Coco Chanel thing in watches.

59:32I love those guys. And her theory was this will never get old. And it never did. A classic vintage Chanel jacket from the 50s that's well -capped is worth a fortune today. The classic. It still wears beautifully. They're so well made. So she wouldn't buy crap. She'd buy really good stuff, but a little just small amounts of it. And over the years, she built up this portfolio of amazing clothing. And when she died, the women in our family had a cat fight over her portfolio. Unbelievable. Is that in part why you have so many watches? I've noticed you have a watch on either wrist right now. Yeah, I'm pretty big in watches.

1:00:09I mean, but watches to me, every piece I have marks something in my life that was important. A deal, a child, graduation, you know, something, every piece. I've got a lot of watches. How many of you go? I don't even say any more because of the insurance policy I have. I got a lot. Do you invest in, you're talking about your mother's investing strategy. And one of the things you said is she invested in dividend stocks. Yes. What is a dividend stock? And should I be investing in dividend stocks? Yeah. I mean, you know, a company, if it's profitable and it's operating, and its business plan is working, and it's growing market share, at some point says I'm going to distribute some of the success of our profits to our shareholders.

1:00:50That's a dividend. And so they send that cash to you, and you can either redeploy it in other ways or live off it or whatever. Many tech stocks until recently did not pay dividends, but now the behemoth tech stocks do pay dividends. Because the demand of an aging population is I need to eat. And so I like to own the stock for growth, but I also want to get some of the profits. And so dividend paying stocks used to be utilities, but not so today. Every sector has dividend paying stocks. So I prefer to own dividend paying stocks, div payers. And then I also want fixed income products. I also own crypto now, and I own alternative assets like gold and watches.

1:01:26My watch collection has actually done quite well, even though it's been a correction. There's volatility, but I have some watches that have, you know, I bought for 200 ,000 or worth over a million today. Crypto. So are you still bullish on crypto as an investment? Yeah, I am actually, but people get tripped out confused with its real potential.

1:01:49Let's talk about digital payment systems, because what's about to pass first where our days away from this happening is the Genius Act, which is actually the stablecoin act. It was just passed by the Senate 48 hours ago. It's going back to the house. I actually worked on that bill two years ago. So if that bill passes, it's really nothing to do with speculating on crypto. It's a new form of payment. So if I wanted to order a watch in from Seymour Bridge, who's somebody I buy watches from, he's a master watchmaker. Right now, I have to take US dollars. I've got to get through and know your client prerogative.

1:02:20I'm treated like a criminal by transferring $100 ,000 over. Turn it into Swiss francs. Takes about a week. I get screwed for about 200 basis points and the whole thing. If he accepted USDC, which is actually a stablecoin back with US dollars, it just went public. Very successful IPO. I was a shoulder in that company too. That's one of my best IPOs in the last two years. The transaction would happen in less than a second. And the fees would be at 100th of what the costs are right now. So it's a digital payment system. The price doesn't, it's not, it's not a speculation on it. It's backed by the US dollar treasury bills.

1:02:57So it's sort of a new form of digital payment. That's different than Bitcoin, which is a speculation. If you believe in Bitcoin, you think it's a digital gold and you live through the volatility. I believe in both. I believe that crypto will be the 12th sector of the S &P in some period of time because it provides productivity to all 11 other sectors. So the way I own it is I own the exchanges. My exchange in one called WonderFile in Canada just got acquired last week or two weeks ago by Robinhood. I'm happy because I think Vlad who runs Robinhood is great. And now he's got a million plus accounts in Canada and the market that he'd never participated in.

1:03:41But the point is this is never going away. It's going to stay forever. So how do you participate? You can buy some Bitcoin just like you buy gold. Buy the ETF or actually own it yourself. You can buy the exchanges. You can use, you know, can buy Circle Stock now. It's public. You can Circle makes USDC. You can buy USDC in an account and make 4 .1 % interest on it right now. So there's a lot of ways to participate. But yes, I'm here to stay. But I've grown up. I was around during the period where the crypto cowboys lived. And I survived that all. And I even testified in front of the Senate and the House and whatever else the testimonies were during the tumultuous period.

1:04:20And most of those guys went to jail. You'll put folio in terms of Bitcoin allocation or crypto allocation. What is it now? It's said about all in. We marked a market last month. It was 19 .1%. 19 .1%. I have to keep it under 20. It's a sector. So, but remember, in that is the cryptos itself, Bitcoin, the USDC, and the shares of the infrastructure companies like Circle and everything else. I've got, you know, it was a very successful IPO. One of the first things most people do when they get a bit of money, usually from their job, is they get a mortgage on a house. Because we kind of tore as we grow up that the best way to make all that, not maybe the best, but the most obvious way to create wealth is to buy your first home.

1:05:03Yeah. There's a very basic rule for that. And I understand it, and I did the same thing. But what I made sure again from my mother was never let the mortgage and the cost of maintaining the house be more than one -third of your income, one -third of your income. If it's more than one -third, you bought too much house. So, it's better to buy a house that's maybe it's only going to be 1900 square feet to start in a neighborhood that you may not want to stay for the rest of your life, but start to accrue the benefit of real estate from that point of view. Learn how to manage it. Maybe you rent part of it out or whatever, but it can't be more than a third of your income.

1:05:41The mistake that people made and they're starting to suffer from it now is when money was so cheap, mortgage rates were under 4%, there are 3 .2 % some of them. They bought massive houses. And now they're running into having to refinance those houses at much higher rates, more than 7%, and it's becoming 60, 70, 80 % of their income. They're screwed. They bought too much house. So, it's about making sure that you can manage that. And also, you want some diversification. Yes, a mortgage is okay, particularly if you're having a family, because you're going to pay rents or you're going to pay a mortgage, one of the two.

1:06:16But you want some diversification to start to build up that investment account for when you retire, so that you have something to live up. If you only put aside 15%, if you're making 70 ,000 a year and you put 15 % aside from when you're 25, you'll have over a million and a half dollars. If you just invested it in the stock index and the S &P 500. That's what history has told you. In what time frame? Your whole career. I mean, you're going to be 65. You're 25, 65. You just stick with that protocol. And you'll watch your grow. You'll watch your grow. You go up and down, as the market goes up and down, some years a little flat, whatever.

1:06:53But it's the people that don't even think ahead and find themselves at 45 mired in debt, including a mortgage. You want to get rid of your mortgage in your 40s. Most people's primary investment asset is the house they buy. Yes, it is. But it's also the debt they own. It's a primary asset. How much debt does it have on it? It's only the equity values the asset. So if you're buying a house that's too big and you've only put down 10%, and it's 90 % mortgage, what do you really own? You really own the 10 % at whatever price it is. Sometimes housing goes flat for a while. It's okay, but it's not okay if it's too much house.

1:07:31If you're a 25 -year -old and you're on that 70K that you talked about, and your objective was to make money, you don't have kids, you're not in a relationship, would you buy a house? No. No, I wouldn't, because why do I need a house if I'm only unless I'm renting as an income property? I'm buying a house because I'm getting married and I'm going to raise a family. I need a house. Is that the use case for buying a house? I think it is. But there are many people that say I love real estate. I'm going to buy three houses and I'm going to rent them out. That's a different business. I know people in their 20s do that.

1:08:04In fact, they're successful. That's all they do. And so that their job is to find houses, buy them, fix them up, rent them. And they manage that geographically tight portfolio. It happens a lot in student housing, for example. I've got a good friend who's involved in student housing. He's very successful. He just focuses on one aspect, buildings that rent to students, and he manages it. And he raises a family, he's successful. But that's one thing he does. That's not the same as saying I'm going to buy a house because I just got married. And I'm going to raise a child in the next 24 months. Then you should have a house.

1:08:36But if you're just, you said to me, I'm single, I want to make money. I wouldn't buy a house. That's not the number one asset class. I think I'd get a diversified portfolio and just ride the pony with that for a while until I meet that special person. I'm going to raise a family with. And then I have a little nest egg I can work with. I mean, wealth creation comes down to one world. Discipline. That's it. The ability to look at something and say, I'm not going to buy that. I'm going to keep that money working for me. Not many people have that discipline. Wealthy people have that discipline. You meet them later in life.

1:09:17You realize when they were young and had nothing, even the ones that were employees or whole lives that are now financially free, had the discipline to say no. There's so much stuff you don't need. And you should never buy a watch unless you can afford it. Ever go on debt for a watch. Because people hear this stuff say I'm going to buy watches like Liri's red bands. No, you're not. That's why I wear watches now that cost under $500 to show kids. You want to get into herology. You don't have to spend $50 ,000. Here's a time X for $265. It looks beautiful. Get that. You said don't buy the house until you meet your partner, etc.

1:09:53How much does the person that you fall in love with have an impact on your finances, your money, your chance of success in your view? It's everything. Are you kidding? I mean, it's everything. If you read, I mean, think about this. You need to find somebody. If you're an entrepreneur, so that's for the, we're talking about the third now that want to go on the rocket ship right, you better find somebody that's willing to tolerate the fact that you're never home for the first 10 years. They're going to raise a family by themselves. Because there's no balance in life. That idea of balance is complete bullshit.

1:10:27I mean, it's just bullshit. You have to work so hard to compete globally these days in every sector. You're going to work your ass off. And it's not going to happen over, I mean, Anna Skye did it in three years, but she had worked much harder previously. It was not her first deal. But she was just lucky. I mean, she was just the cop, didn't it? Yeah, I mean, she's working again. She's back, she wants to work. I mean, that's what happens. You never stop working. But the thing is, that partnership, and this is what people don't get about marriage. Marriage is a business. I know people don't, that's when I say that, but it's a business.

1:11:06And the first child you're going to have is money. It's going to be the first child, and it's going to sit at the table with you every day. It's there, sitting there. If you don't have money, you don't have a marriage. I mean, the reason people get married is to form a form of financial stability so that they can afford a family. And you have to figure out, you know, I've been with my wife a long time and we've been separated for a couple of years. But, you know, families are important to me. So we got back together again, and our daughter got us back together. I'm very happy we did it. But it's, we make financial decisions together.

1:11:44We always check in. You know, anything that's material, you know, if we're going to do a renovation or something, and I respect her for that, I have a lot of respect for her because she doesn't just spend money. We didn't have any money when we started. We had nothing. And so, that's why a great marriage can work because you build it together. You really care about it. You care about it. You care about your family. You also care about what you've created in wealth. And I consider my money her money. Because she was the family that let me go and do this stuff. Now, I don't have the same relationship with our kids that she does because she raised them.

1:12:17But that's the thing you give up and you have to give something up. That's it. You can be a great father, great provider, but you're never going to have the closest that she had reading and stories when they were young. I wasn't there. But, you know, the outcome has been good. I think everybody looks at that and says, all right, that's great. But my mother never believed in entitlement. And so I don't believe in it either. I'm not gifting my kids a ton of money, you know. I want them to launch and they've done that successfully. They got to work. You know, they got to do their thing. I've heard you say before that the most important financial decision you'll ever make is who you'll marry.

1:12:50Yes. Why? Because think of the geometric loss of wealth. Every time you get divorced, you pay the woman that you divorced or a man and you pay the government a third often through capital gains and liquidation. Because you can't separate all the assets without liquidating them sometimes. So you've got the government sitting there. You've got the other spouse sitting there. This is the stupidest thing you can ever do. It took your whole life to actually create this nest egg. It could be, you know, your 45 or whatever. You've got a comfortable life. And all of a sudden you don't like your wife or husband.

1:13:31Think about that for a while. Because you are going to wipe out up to two thirds of your wealth. You better really like somebody else a lot. And frankly, sometimes it's not the other person that you're divorcing. It's you. You're the problem. If you're getting married for the third time, you're a guy or woman. It's not them. It's you. There's something wrong with you. And you should probably not get into another economic union. You should probably just date till you drop dead because it's stupid. Marriages are tough. I mean, they're tough. Anybody's been married for more than 20 years now exactly when I'm talking about it.

1:14:10But they have, they accrue more benefit than anything. So if you're happy 51 % of the day with your wife, stay with him or her husband or wife. That's very important. How often do you think divorces are a result of money issues? Well, you may be shocked at this. I wrote a book about this and I decided, men, women, and money. A long time ago, 10 years plus. There it is. And I did some research and I went to meet some of the top divorce lawyers in North America in New York, in Boston, in other cities. And I said, look, I want to kind of do a pie chart of reasons for divorce that seem 50 % seem to end in divorce within five to seven years.

1:14:59Every one of them, they didn't know each other, said, it's not infidelity. Nothing to do with it. Most marriages can survive infidelity. They can't survive financial stress. And so what happens in variable is you fall in love, but you didn't do any due diligence on that person's spending habits or their financial history. Because La Morae is so wonderful in the early days. You didn't do any diligence on their family or them or their brother or bankruptcy in the past or whatever it is. And then you get married. And you know, the euphoria starts to wear off. And you notice that the other is outspending.

1:15:42You just buying a lot of stuff. Beyond your means. And that starts the first friction. And then that credit card comes in with $100 ,000 on it at 23 % interest. And another purse was bought or whatever the hell it is. And you're starting to sink because you may have married somebody who can't stop spending. This is just a typical... There are people that can't have no discipline. They just can't. They got to have the boat. They got to have this. They got to have that. And they pressure their other to say, look, I want to keep up with the Jones' next story. Even though they may only each have a salary of 100 grand each.

1:16:23They can't do it. And they have kids. And they're trying to put them through college. That's divorce. That's why almost 90 % of unions break up is that classic financial pressure. And divorce gets them out of that mess because they can no longer spend on your credit card anymore. But it's a horrible way to go. So I'm an investor in a company called Holo Prenapp. That does divorces for... Prenapp's for women. Prenapp's forced during the euphoric period, diligence. It's that simple. You're going to find out if that person has a financial problem going into the marriage. They have to disclose their financial background.

1:17:09So you talk about these five love languages of money. The mooch, someone who won't pay for anything. Right. Should I date someone like that? It's a warning signal. It's a problem. Or they don't really want you for a companionship. They just want you for financial support. This is spendaholic. Someone who always offers to pay for everything, to appear popular and successful. Bad warning sign. Huge. I mean, that is insecurity measurable by cash outlay. The loafers, someone who has no ambition in drive for money. Avoid with extreme prejudice. The thief, someone who steals. You can have no tolerance for that.

1:17:51And the meany, a balanced spendah who lives within that means. Love that. Mariamini. That's it. That's the... Those are the marriages that last an entire life. That's it. That's what you're looking for. That's great advice right there. Whatever the book costs, that's the best value right there. And then ask yourself, am I dating one of these or not? You know? You know, you should talk about money on the third date. Think about a date. Think about dating. First date. Oh my goodness. This is a really interesting person. Or not. Then there's never a second date. Second date. I want to learn more.

1:18:26I'm really interested. You're going into a third date. There's something going on. There's something going on. You both want to meet again. That's the first time you should say, look, I know this is crazy. But we're here together a third time because something's going on here. And I'm just wondering, what are your long -term goals? I mean, let's not about our marriage or anything else other than we're having a great time. But what are your ambitions? I'm really interested in you. I'd like to know what you think. Maybe the woman says or the guy says, when you're checking me out, you say, yeah. Yeah, I'm really interested in you.

1:18:59It's a form of finding out if the connection, you know, I should be a marriage counselor. That's what I think. I mean, it's really dating is the dance. But it should involve exploring where we're going financially. I've built companies from scratch and backed many more. And there's a blind spot that I keep seeing in early stage founders. They spend very little time thinking about HR. And it's not because they're reckless or they don't care. It's because they're obsessed with building their companies. And I can't fault them for that. At that stage, you're thinking about the product, how to attract new customers, how to grow your team, really how to survive.

1:19:37And HR slips down the list because it doesn't feel urgent. But sooner or later, it is. And when things get messy, tools like our sponsor today, just works, go from being a nice to have to being a necessity. Something goes sideways and you find yourself having conversations, you did not see coming. This is when you learn that HR really is the infrastructure of your company. And without it, things wobble. And just work stops you learning this the hard way. It takes care of the stuff that would otherwise drain your energy and your time automating payroll, health insurance benefits. And it gives your team human support at any hour.

1:20:10It grows with your small business from start up through to growth, even when you start hiring team members abroad. So if you want HR support, that's there through the exciting times. And the challenging times head to justworks .com now. That's just works .com. One of the bigger protagonists in the story of many things we've discussed, money, investing, building businesses now is this thing called artificial intelligence, which you mentioned earlier. Yes. It's like entered the room. Yes. And it's changing lots of these equations in a really profound way. Again, for that person who is maybe at the start of their career, or even, you know, there are a lawyer right now, how are you thinking about AI?

1:20:45What should they be thinking about? Because I don't think we've seen something quite like this, not certainly not in my lifetime. I've not seen disruption of this scale. I wasn't around for the Dr. Kombu, my two young, or 10 or something. I was eight. Yeah. So how should we be thinking about this moment? Is it a huge opportunity for wealth creation or? Yeah, it's immense. It's bigger than the internet. And I'll tell you why. I want to keep it down to earth because I'm actually using it now in use cases. There's every sector of the economy, every aspect of research, every aspect of business has a huge opportunity here.

1:21:17But let's just take use cases that you would understand. Everybody listening would understand. In today's post -pandemic world, most businesses have developed largest small direct consumer strategies, where they try and build relationships with customers and sell them product direct. Yeah, they still use retail. So you're Nike or something. And you were 27 percent direct to consumer before the pandemic. You're now 50 percent. And direct to consumer gets you higher margins, but it also gets you data. It gets you information about the preferences of your customer base, what they like, what they don't like, the flavors, and what they buy when they buy, where they buy it, all that stuff.

1:21:54And it's very interesting that data. And let me give you an example. Line business. If you think about the wine business, the challenge of a thousand -year -old business, you don't know what the weather is going to be like. You don't know what varietals to grow because you don't know what the preference of the customer is because you're selling it through multiple tiers of distribution. During the pandemic, 43 states in America opened up direct to consumer sales from the wineries in the West Coast. For the first time ever, the wineries found out what people buy. Where they buy it, when they buy it, what they drink, what varietals.

1:22:30And I'm in the wine business. I sell with three million bottles a year of wine, one of my companies, actually a Shark Tank company. And we partner with a company called QVC. We sell online. And so I can tell you today, this month, this week, the number one varietal in southern Florida for women ages 44 to 64 is Mascado, a sweet wine. I think it tastes like shit. I don't care what I think. It's the number one wine right now. And I knew that to make that varietal available six months ago, so that I would be able to ship it and put the inventory, the capex, in the right place at the right time to support that demand for the rest of this summer.

1:23:14A sweet cold Mascado wine. That means I spent a lot less money, a lot less risk. I don't have any vrals they don't want this summer. I have exactly what they want. That was AI. It cost me virtually nothing to get that data. Five, ten years ago, it would have cost me a million bucks to go do all the market research. I got that for $18 ,000. So that's using an AI tool. Here's another example. So do I use that tool 100 percent? And there's many tools. You don't have to just use chat. There's many different competing platforms. So we use them all. We check the assumptions by checking it all on all of them, and see the little variances.

1:23:53Number two, I have to shoot an ad. I have to shoot a commercial. I'm going to shoot it here in LA. I'm going to do it in a studio like this with a green screen. And I'm going to spend $250 ,000 for a $15 ,000, $30 ,000, $60 ,000 out of the same shoot. And I'm then going to go into post with the green screen. And I'm going to spend more money in post. I'm going to add whatever I need, whatever background I'm going to need. Or I could fly to Dubai, where they have a giant studio with a 6K digital wall, where AI links up your script to the background. There is no post production. You basically shoot the commercial in four hours, and it's done.

1:24:44The background's perfect. The imagery's perfect. Your script is perfect. And I did that two weeks ago for the first time. I'd never seen that before. We did it for a fraction of the cost of what it would have cost to do it in the old way in post production. But then I'll tell you what freaked me out. They reshought the commercial without me there using Kevin Agent. An AI view? I wasn't even there. And just to show that they could produce a new commercial with the same background for $9 ,000. That would have cost $400 ,000 from scratch. So there's going to be a lot of job disruption then. Because as you said, you don't say.

1:25:29But on the other hand, I've now got content for that particular business. I was shooting that, you know, I got content for that particular business. I was going to shoot that commercial for. And I said, guys, let's tweak it and shoot it again. You said, yeah, we'll do it in two seconds. We'll send you the 15 seconds back. I said, I don't like what I said there. Can I change what I said? You said, yeah, well, do you want it in Spanish? You want it in Japanese? You want it in Arabic? That's the power, the productivity that we're going to get. Our budgets for producing content are going to drop dramatically over the next few years.

1:26:04I'm so fired in everything else, right? Creating everything is going to get. Now, full circle to your thing about the chips, that all came from Nvidia chips. That's not from Chinese chips, whoever controls the chip and the honey bees, the honey bees are, those guys are all Indians and Pakistanis, they're genius mathematicians. That's the team over there running off that platform. If we had let, and it was, I don't want to, I'm just freaked out that we got to control that. We need democracy to control that. Your children, what are you saying to them though about their professional ambitions in a world where creating stuff like that, and whether it's who you want to do your taxes, an accountant or an AI, who do you want to do your legal documents, who do you want to do your, any sort of like white college job, you'll make your videos, edit your videos.

1:26:50I tell them, you know, everybody's got a lot of an extrovert AI. I tell them, listen, everybody chill acts. It's a tool. You know, it's the same classic thing where radio was going to be displaced by television, radio's bigger than it ever has been. It just, it doesn't matter that one thing I concern myself with, with AI is warfare. And I think the country that has the best AI and data centers and the most advanced chip technology will win the wars of the future, which will be fought by drones and robots. I know that sounds kind of crazy. No, it doesn't sound crazy. That's where it's happening now.

1:27:27And that's where it's going to go. So, so when I, when I solicit the ear of a senator, I try and explain to them my honey bee analogy saying, this is about defense. I don't want to live under authoritarian, you know, I know we debate the whole political environment these days, but I don't want to live around Chinese honey. I just don't. And those are going to be the two superpowers. You both, you're in one vertical. Either you let the Chinese make the honey, on AI, or we make the honey, and let the Chinese buy some honey from us. I know where I want to live. I know what I want to do. And I think I can convince a lot of senators the same idea, because you've got to understand the Wozniak jobs analogy that we, that you brought out earlier.

1:28:11That was the genius of jobs. Make the honey. But know who the queen is. The genius of jobs brings me to a question. I've wanted to ask someone like you for a long, long time, which is, do you think Apple is dead? No. You don't. No, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. You know, it's so interesting. People don't understand the genius of Apple, because this is again, came from jobs. You know, he used to say to my team, over and over again, and I mentioned earlier, they don't know what they want until I tell them. And I always, just as close as you and I are right now, you're Steve. Say, Steve, how the fuck do you know that?

1:28:52How do you know that? You don't know that. You don't know what you don't know. He said, show me where I'm wrong. Show me one instance of us working together where I'm wrong. I said, it hasn't happened yet, Steve. It doesn't mean it won't. Get back to work. Don't worry about it. I'll worry about it. You make the software. I have the chips. Make the software. Go make the honey. I have the queen bee. Don't worry about it. And that is pretty interesting because you got to prove it that he was wrong. Let's accelerate instead now. But the philosophy of Apple, and I'll give you the way you win at it, you look at it.

1:29:35I can go buy a $330 laptop right here with the same processing power of this $1 ,800 Mac laptop. Why would I spend 1 ,800 when I could buy this for $300? Why? Brand. I want to be part of this universe. This honey right over here. The Apple Care, the fact that the OS works on all the platforms and the messages are shown on all platforms simultaneously. All the OS, all the honey, that platform is the power of brand. I'm not leaving this universe. Apple is one of the world's largest companies. You may say, oh, an innovation is going to make everybody leave that platform. I don't think so. They let other people sometimes bring in a new market and then they take it over.

1:30:32And I saw Steve do that multiple times. He did it with the phone. I was around for that. That was crazy. I mean, he had the vision that we would someday run our software on the phone. I said, you're out of your mind. This means too small. He said, no. You're going to go vertically. You're going to rewrite all this crap vertically. I mean, I can't fault him on anything, although I kept telling him, you're going to get it wrong one day. You're not going to be right all the time. I can't find when he wasn't right. That's the frustration because I teach this, you know, to a bunch of really smart kids at Harvard, of which, by the way, a third are international students.

1:31:13And they say, well, when did you catch him? I said, what was he doing? Was did he ever practice or principles that allowed him to see around the corner? He spent a lot of time at night, you know, even studying fonts and looking at art and focusing on the signal. I think his wife talked about that a lot. She spent more time with him than anybody else, although was talks about a lot because those guys spent countless hours together. And the job's defined, he would take instances from nature into his head or from Japanese, you know, scripture or text or imagery and redefine it into technology in a way that no one else was doing.

1:32:13And that's the idea of the honey and the bee and the queen and all that stuff. It kind of comes from his view of the world. And I don't know if you can understand this, but because it was so, it came from nature, it was easy for people to assimilate it. It wasn't foreign. When they looked at the imagery and the design, he tried to pull from pleasing images from nature, like the fonts on the first max. I remember when we were writing the code for that saying Steve, this is not what people are used to seeing on a computer screen. He said, no, it isn't. That's what's going to work. If you think about the very first scalable fonts, I saw that first.

1:32:56And I said, see, this is almost foreign. He said, well, how does it make you feel? I said, it makes me feel pretty good. It just looks like it's on a piece of paper. I don't think you weren't even born when this stuff was happening. But it was, he was so far ahead. And this is the same way Elon is redefining whether it's, you know, SpaceX or whether it's, what he's doing in neurosurgery or Tesla or, you know, all of these initiatives, you know, his satellite technologies, they are the same those guys, except, you know, Elon's 100 % signal. I said that earlier. They are the same. And they should be their treasures, their national treasures.

1:33:35It doesn't matter if you like them. It doesn't matter what their politics are. It's irrelevant. The contributions they're making to society and to America, frankly, and the competitive nature of countries. That's why I thought it was so important that Trump made up with Elon. The most powerful man on earth should have a very good relationship with the richest man on earth, because he's the largest industrialist on earth. Maybe there's an inherent inability by way of them being who you just said they are. They're most powerful on earth. But they know they're smart enough to know. It's the same way I felt about jobs.

1:34:10I'm getting back on the plane this quarter. I know he's going to beat me up, but it doesn't matter. The greater good is that we get this software out there, advance and read and math and reading scores. Was he happy? Steve, I don't know the answer to that question. Do you think he was a happy person? I don't know. I've never saw him happy. He was always barking at me. I never saw him happy. I don't think I ever saw him laugh.

1:34:35He may not have been. That's probably something his wife would know, but he looked like a torture guy to me.

1:34:46But that may have been his curse. Do you love him? Yeah. I can see it in your face. 100%. I saw a lot of emotion in your face the first time he spoke about him and I thought, that's surprising for someone that barked to you. Well, he respected me. That's for sure. He wouldn't execute on my ideas. He expected me to execute on his, but he was never wrong. Why did the emotions stem from him? It brings me back into that room with Heidi Rosen and all the crazy crap. I mean, it was just nuts. And, you know, I'd have to spend a lot of time. The only meeting I really remember, the one that's really sticks in my mind, when we were in Cupertino, and we were just, I don't know, we were going after him for 18 million or something.

1:35:35And Heidi was there. Heidi Rosen, she's a famous venture capitalist, but she was also kind of the muse, the person that could actually deal with jobs all day long.

1:35:57And she may suffer as long as he was a smart model, it would work, it should work. I saw a guy going to the shortly after a movie where 120 billion dollars in a particular field and nobody knew how many days they could've touched massive title, like a huge multi -million dollar title on the Mac in every 110 ,000 schools in America. And he was so pissed that in these old buildings, they have a little window where you have a little knob and it only opens up four inches so you can't jump out of it in a hotel or something. So we were, we had a hurts rental and we were the whole team's going out. I'm going to drive the car back to San Francisco and to fly back to Boston.

1:36:47And he undoes the window and he's got his head stuck and there's yelling at me from, from, I'm looking up at him and saying, you know what, what the fuck? Like, what, what, what more can we, we've already kicked us out, you know? And then on the way, we had these old brick, the earliest cell phones, these brick phones. ID calls me, says, okay, he'll do it for 12 million. He said, I do, what do we have to go through all that shit? Like, why do we even have to get him to you? She said, why is this guy blue? You know, just get back on the plane and go do it. It was a huge hit. Like, it just, you know, it's a huge hit.

1:37:31Like, it's just, the guy was, if you looked at it like, he could, he could write the hit songs. That's what he did. You write the hit songs. So you don't, even if you hate to produce, you want the guy that can do the hit songs, right? If you're an artist, you put up with a crazy producer. Could he not have been nice, do you think? Not his DNA. No. Do you think if he was a nice person, he would say about that. That's noise. He gives a fuck. Yeah, it doesn't give a shit. No, it being nice is noise, that for him. I mean, we spend a lot of time talking about him, but I think there's a lot of lessons learned from him that I think managers today, parents today, certainly CEOs today.

1:38:09You know, you're about this shows about CEOs. I wish every CEO had spent the time, the minimal time that I spent with jobs had such an impact on me. I mean, I owe a lot of my success to him, because I think I always think what was Steve and I make decisions like that. It's amazing. The guy still around, I bet you if you talk to, you know, any of the management at Apple, they have that ghost in those rooms, for sure. Including the currency, I think he was doing a phenomenal job. He spent so many hours with jobs. He knows exactly what I'm talking about. Nobody spent more time in business than that guy, for sure.

1:38:52I was just going to go if Steve Jobs was happy, but are you happy? I get happier the older I get, because I'm very comfortable. I found a place that I'm, and I just maybe just what aging does. I mean, it just, you know, when I was in my 30s, I had a lot of trauma and turmoil and just hard time to find it, trying to figure out who I was. And I also suffered from dyslexia, which I've come to think of as a superpower, no, not in affliction. But it was kind of like, it's hard to know what journey you're going to be on until you find it. And then I found it. And then I started on a new journey. And you know, it's, it's something where, you know, you ask yourself, every day goes by, and you know, the noise and signal thing, how much of this day was I happy doing the things that I wanted to do?

1:39:56And I am very happy if I measure it by, is there anything that I spend my time doing that I don't want to do today? The answer is no, because I don't have to. And so I don't waste my time. I do, you know, even coming here to spend two hours with you, when I first, you know, heard about it, I went online and said, oh, yeah, this guy, this guy's great. I'd love to work with him. You know, that kind of thing, you allocate your time. This is, this is, I'm happy to do this. I want to be here. And I think, you know, we had a very interesting couple of hours together. But that's the definition of happiness.

1:40:33What concerns me, and my wife often says to me, we don't need any more money. Why, why are you flying 300 hours a year on an airplane? What are you doing? I said, I'm happy. Like, you know, I'm happy doing this. I want to do this stuff. You know, I, sometimes I do five cities in a day. It's frigging crazy. And it's a wonderful thing about air travel. You can do that. But it's, it's, it's so interesting. I get so many interesting opportunities. I can't turn them down. They're just such, you know, are you driven or you dragged? You know, you used to wear a trauma there. And I often asked myself that question because I came from a, all the area.

1:41:14I was the black kid with the strange hair and the strange family. I was insecure. And I think that resulted in this, this force of will to try and correct the insecurity or to prove something to myself, which then resulted in success. I think there is no drag. There's only driven. I don't understand being dragged. Drag signuates that you don't care about performance. You don't care whether you succeed or not. You're just being sucked into the void of success. You might be able to say that for a rock star that gets a hit song. But most of them doesn't last. You need massive amounts of, of drive.

1:41:50And I love the most, the most exciting thing I like to do is when someone tells me, you can't do that. Like watch insurance. You will never launch a watch insurance company. It, you will never do that. You will never get around the compliance state by state. You will never launch in the Middle East. You'll never launch in England. Bullshit. That's exactly what I did. I found the right team. I found the right partners. I figured it out. I was passionate about it. And I think I'm going to kick ass. I think I'm think two or three years from now, you won't be able to catch up with me. That's what I think.

1:42:24I'm 32 years old. What is the advice that you wish you got at 32 years old, Kevin? What I have learned, and this is something that you should really think about for yourself, your real value, your real brand are your followers. This army of people that have decided to invest their time in you. You know, you've caught across a vast swath of people. So you influence very successful managers, CEOs, and a lot of young entrepreneurs want to hear what you have to say because they're expecting to deliver valuable information across multiple sectors. And you also have your own data, but men and women.

1:43:16And so where do you take that? Because you know, it's do you want to launch a clothing line? Do you want to sell burgers? Do you want to do consulting? You know, it's it's you have all those opportunities, but what fits your brand? And so I have and you'll get to do this. You'll get to do this. You'll be approached by a lot of people that want to ride that network you built. And my advice to you is because this has really worked for me. Is this a product or service that I personally would use that I would actually use? Because you'll get offered a lot of money to talk about one brand or another brand.

1:44:03They will. And you may be weak and take it. But the minute anybody in your network, in your community thinks you're not authentic, you're fucked. And you know that. And so you better be authentic, you better be transparent, you better be honest, even when turmoil hits, whatever it's going to be. I found that saved my ass so many times by just saying, here's what I know, here's what happened. And that actually bonds them even closer to you. And that's that's the difficulty you're going to have is how much do you want to take net? Because you're going to have that opportunity. But if you stay authentic, you say, I'm going to do I'm going to support this brand because I use it.

1:44:51Every single brand or commission I have in supporting a business, I use myself. I'm a shareholder in it. And I believe in it. And I use the product or whatever. Like the wines I make myself with my wife, we drink them in our family. And everybody knows that. So if it's I wouldn't drink if it's shit wine. So it's sort of like that's my advice to you because I meet a lot of people, but you're very rare. What you've built, maybe by happen chance that it occurred, whatever alchemy occurred, you have it now. It's yours to lose. Don't fuck it up.

1:45:33Everything you said is so true. And obviously the things that I the things that we talk about in the show in terms of brands that I promote pretty much all of them I've invested my own money into. And this is like super important. So I talked about my weep. If you look at the investments I have and the things I talk about, there's a really clear through line through them. So there's a really clear through and it's actually reflective of just where I'm in my life. There's actually a sponsor I used to have on the show that I was very big on. And I just stopped I stopped consuming the product. They offered me six million pounds, which is about what eight million dollars to continue for another year and a half.

1:46:04And I said like it just wouldn't I'm about to basically start talking about and investing in the antithesis of what you do. So I had to turn down that seven million dollars, which is a lot of money for anybody. Yeah. But it's because my life shifted and I shifted in a different direction. People don't see those things. They don't see that the this foreign government comes along and offers you four million dollars to go and talk about their country or go do the driver's here in that country. They don't see those decisions that you make. But I think hopefully if you listen to me long enough, you'll see a through line between the things that are authentic to me.

1:46:37Yeah. I think that's so you've already figured it out. And the other thing that I would do and say anybody your age and because I wish I'd done it is start focusing on longevity in your 30s. Start thinking about what you eat and what you drink and how much sleep you do and how much exercise you have. You're you could live to 120 years old. I mean, you know, it's sort of if you understand, be wearing a whoop you know what I'm talking about. It's sort of I'm very, very focused on what I do and exercise and what I eat and all that. But that makes you feel healthier and more and just better about your day as you go through it.

1:47:10But the fact that you figured that out at your age because most people at your age would have taken the seven million pounds or whatever it was. That would have been a huge mistake because now the next product that you do endorse, I will know a certainty that you use it because you told me this. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that was left for you, finally enough, I feel like I'm right about it is where do you believe happiness really comes from?

1:47:43You know, I think the answer is very simple. Consistently achieving your goals because happiness is not a destination. It's a journey. That's what it is. So you have to set those goals whether it's the most distinguishable, painful circle we talked about or long term, whatever it is, it's consistently achieving those goals. You'll be happy consistently not achieving them. You'll be unhappy because it is not a destination. Happiness is not a destination ever. It's a mistake that's so elusive. I mean, it's just not a destination. It's a journey. This is one of the great things you've taught me today.

1:48:27I'm reaffirmed for me today is this idea of like signal and noise, a radical prioritization because kind of dovetailing into what we're just talking about when you have a lot of opportunity, it gets even harder, I think, to know which ones should be taking you 18 hours a day. This is something that I still have a way. You should feel it. You're kind of a weird dude, because you're like a seven year old man in a 30 year old body. You've got the intellect of experience, which most people don't have at your age, but deals, there's a certain feeling that you should feel that it's a good deal. It should be in your gut.

1:49:03And I've learned this. There's many deals that sound great that when I just do the gut check, I don't participate in. They just don't give me, and that came from experience, but you seem to have that in some weird way to avoid that one we just talked about. It's intuitive feeling that you generally get by having a lot of winners and losers over time. But you seem to have accelerated that somehow. It's an intuitive nature of where you want to get to and what it's going to take to get there, and there's going to be sacrifice along the way. It's never about the money. Never. It's not about the money.

1:49:44It's, you know, it's, do I want to achieve that goal? You know, I'm having it. It's just a weird thing because I had a similar situation just a couple of days ago. You know, when someone approached me and said, look, can you get behind this and back it, and I'll pay you a ton, like just a crazy amount of money. And I thought, do I actually want to spend one hour pursuing that? And I went back and said, look, no, it's just not interesting. I can't see myself getting involved in that narrative, which was a complicated situation. But and then he said, look, how about I give you two and a half percent of the copy?

1:50:34I said, no. I just don't want to be associated. It's the same idea. Intuitively, it was noise. Yeah. And what that would do is some opportunity you don't know about down the future that you've pursued some goal that somehow tainted your brand. And that opportunity never comes to you. You're the captain of your brand. You got to, you have to define yourself right through the journey. It's hard. It's really hard. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's really hard. And that if there's going to be a downfall for you, you will have chosen unwisely somewhere. But it better not be for money. That's, there should never be an amount that you would take because if your gut says no, it doesn't matter what the money is.

1:51:28Not after what you've achieved. I mean, you don't need to buy a guarantee anymore. You got it. I'm assuming you've put some away. I mean, it's very simple. If you've got five million bucks in the bank, you can do whatever you want now. I mean, it's, may sound I want more, but that is enough under attack. Always have, always, I have an account that just sits there with five million bucks in it in T -bills. I never touch it. That's my nest egg. Kevin, thank you. You got it. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show. Week after week means the world to all of us.

1:52:12And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 % of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.

1:52:42Thank you.