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24:23Above that would be some sort of technology. You build the code once in theory. Obviously, you continue to improve the code, but theoretically, you build the thing once and then a million people can use it. And so you want to stack as many types of leverage as you can and as much of them as you can, because like Joe Rogan also has a show and somebody else has a podcast. They both technically are using media as their vehicle for leverage, but he has significantly more of it. So it's not just like, I'm going to use all these, right? Yes, but it's also how much into what do great. But like Facebook had other people's money.

24:54He used media, had other people's work, max leverage, Amazon, same thing, right? They used every element of leverage and they matched all of the amount. And that's at least the curtain that Naval talks about this from the Naval Robocon. He talks about these things as the elements of leverage or four types of leverage. And understanding that for me has kind of been a blueprint for wealth overall. And then, you know, capital, there's degrees of capital, right? Like you first, you can get friends and family to give you money. Then you can get, you know, institutional money. And then you can get public money, right?

25:29Which, you know, you saw like the IPO money, like the fact that the NASDAQ was 4x, the Ducel Dorf exchange somewhere I was, right? There's just significantly more capital in that market. And so it same work more zeros. And so I love this topic because I think that that's fundamentally like the people who move faster in life don't actually move faster. They get more for every step. If right now you want to find where is your unfair bet that can make you your millions with your skill set that nobody else in the world can replicate except you. Here's what I need. I would need a whiteboard. I would need a pen, which I would do if I was you.

26:08And I would need a smart friend. Perfect. Like, so I've got Stephen here. And at the top of the right white board, I would write on this side skills. Oh my God, you're going to see my handwriting like a doctor. And on this side, I would write money. And I would start writing down all the things that we're brilliant at. So let's pretend it's it's Stephen here. It will pretend like you don't have all the things that you have, but your core skill set. You could put your hand on the screen by the way. Oh, my makes me nervous. Am I doing this like a boomer? I am. The handwriting's a little bit. It's giving doctors.

26:37Okay. Oh, yeah, look at that. Okay. So embarrassing. Okay. So social media, right? You're incredible at social media. What else are you probably good at? Well, you know a lot of people you've got a network. What else? Well, it's not just social media though. It's actually a few particular things. It's like YouTube. And I think you're one of the best in the world that short form video, right? You're also one of the best in the world at like a data driven social media strategy. So you can kind of say up front, hey, we think this is going to go viral because the data says this thing over here. What else is Stephen good at?

27:12He's charismatic. He can probably get people to agree to things just by talking to them. You know what else? British accent, you know, so probably you want more in -person interaction because we've got, you know, a very charismatic person. What else is Stephen really good at? Well, he asks a lot of questions. This is my hitch, pray for. By the way, I'm just going to go in and text the next time. Yeah. Good looking, funny. Yeah. Exactly. So, so we'll just say these. There's a lot more deal flow. But let's just pretend that all you're good at is social media. You're good at getting to people, which is a network.

27:47You don't even have to know which people. Just can you get to them? You're charismatic. You're data driven. Okay. Great. We've got all these skills. Now, how could we apply these skills to get the most money humanly possible? And I would do exactly what you said. So, how do you figure out most money humanly possible? It's two things. It's the, how would I do this? It's the size of the problem. It is the value of the solution. Interesting. Okay. And so, if I'm thinking about this for you, if I go and I give your social media skills to a trade or service business, I'm not going to make that much money.

28:27How do I know I'm not going to make that much money? Because I'm going to go look up online. What is the average revenue of this business and the average profit margin? Yeah. Now, you probably didn't even think this way when you were thinking about it. But you guys look online right now. What's the average profit margin of a biotech company and average revenue? Let me tell you what it is. It's going to be like 50 to 80 percent. And it's going to be hundreds of millions that you could potentially get. Trade services business a lot less. And so, that's where I would start. Skills plus money really equals to three things, which is like sector, size of the business, and profitability of the business.

29:13And I would play this game. And what that might look like is you go, okay, I know that I have some friends in, let's go to the places that we know have the most cash in Silicon Valley on Wall Street. If they could make a lot more money, if they had a lot more attention, because what I'm selling is attention, I want to get to the people who can make the most money with the most attention. And that means that I'm not going to go to Walmart. Only has 6 percent margins. I'm going to go to the highest person that I could get to. And it'd be fun. If anybody's listening to this right now, try it. Tag Stephen and I in your stories on Instagram of your little charts.

29:46And let's see. And I'll give feedback. Anybody that tags me in it, if you're like, here's what I think my skill is. Here's what I think the industry is. I'll tell you one way or another. And it can be fun. You can see other people's examples live. So people that are only listening on audio, and then that can't see what the chicken scratch you've just drawn on this iPad. On one hand, you list your skills. And then on the second side, you're listing the ways you believe you could make the most money from those skills based on the size of the problem you'd be solving with them and the value of the solution.

30:19So for example, let me try and play this game with you then. So I am a writer. So I'm going to do my skills on the left hand. I'm a writer. And on the right, I'm going to write money. I'm a writer. I'm really getting writing stuff. And that's it. And I kind of get I kind of get the internet. So I kind of understand LinkedIn blogs and stuff like that. But that's it. I'm a writer. Let's go with what would be the worst. What would be the worst thing you could do if you're a writer to make no money? To make no money. Because sometimes it's easier to do the negative. Okay, working for a local newspaper.

30:50Yeah, local. I was thinking like fantasy books. Like you could write like fiction, you know, really hard to make money in. You could write for a local newspaper. That's an even worse idea. So I like that. So now you've got your bottom tier, right? Which is like 14 bucks an hour or something like that. Now if you look about, I mean, you could Google this. What is the highest paying jobs for writers? I bet the thing you'd find on top. Copywriter. Why? I got a better one. Oh, what's the better one? Do you know why I know this? Because when I was in working in biota, we could hire one, which is a medical writer.

31:19Oh, so smart. Hyper specialized. Honestly, we so a typical copyrights when I was working in my social media company, we might pay entry level 25 ,000 pounds, which is probably about $35 ,000. A medical writer. Someone that can write about the psilocybin compound in my psychedelics business would get paid $150 ,000 or more. We just couldn't find some. We found loads of people that could write. But nobody that had within their skill stack, even though it's quite easy to teach, the ability to write using medical words, slightly medical words. Doesn't mean you need a medical degree. You could probably learn how to write, become a medical writer in a month if you really committed yourself to it.

32:00So that's the top. That's so true. And same with finance. We go to the things we know. So you know biotechs, you know, there's a niche there. I know finance, and I know that again, it's one of the highest paying industries. So a financial writer. But what would that look like? It would look like somebody who knows how to write, probably an investor update. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So hugely lucrative. And then the other thing you could do is I guess I didn't think about this before. It would be like size of the problem. It would be value of the solution. And then it would also be structure of your job.

32:32So like if you're a copywriter, I wouldn't take a job for 35k. What would I do? I would say, Hey, pay me. What is the salary you want to offer? 35 ,000. I'll take 10 ,000. So I can eat because I'm hungry. But can I have a percentage of the upside that I drive above and beyond goal? So if I'm going to write copy that converts into revenue, like I'm going to write a funnel for your biotech company, or I'm going to write a funnel to get investors for you. If right now per month, you get a hundred thousand dollars through that funnel, how about you just pay me an extra 10 % of everything I drive above your 100k.

33:08So I think that's another way you can make more money is getting smarter on deal structuring. Mm -hmm. Well, that's actually when I moved into biotech, how I got paid. And when I talked about that big big paid a thousand times more than I would have previously, it's because the way I got paid was in options in the IPO. So I got given in that particular company, I got given 400 ,000 shares effectively in the company at at a certain price. And so when the company IPO at $3 .2 billion on the NASDAQ in July 20, I don't know, 21 or something, even though I'd only worked in the company for about six months, just helping them build out the marketing team.

33:44I think my like net return was on the equity value at the time was quite close to 10 million. So six months worked 10 million return because I, you know, and the really, really, the reason I did it was because so interested in psychedelics, but it just opened my eyes to the fact that any kid with social media skills and that knew how to structure a deal with these people could have walked in there and said, give me some stock in this IPO and I'll run your social media for six months. You're so right. Could have changed your life. Yeah. And it's something I'm struggling with trying to get people to understand right now is that even if you never buy a business, which is what people fixate on, well, I haven't bought a business yet.

34:16I haven't bought a business yet. It's like, God, you're never going to regret learning how to do deals on your never going to, I think that is the most valuable skill set in the world. I completely agree. And it's so unfair that people don't know about it. It's so unfair, but it's also your fault if you don't know about it because nobody's gatekeeping this information anymore. It used to be gate kept. Like when I first started off in private equity, I wasn't allowed in the rooms where they were actually doing the deals and the terms. And if I wanted to see what the final terms were, like I had to kind of, you know, sweet talk my way in the figuring out how they structured it.

34:48But it's an unknown unknown. So before I knew, I didn't know that I didn't know. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. But now I think there's enough people out there talking about it where you're like, I mean, if you think about whether you like Donald Trump or not, what is he really good at deals? Yeah, the deal. Like it, that's it. And that is I mean Elon Musk. How does Tesla actually make money? They make money through credits, through credits for solar. So he was able to survive for those 10 years of building that company because he has some of the best solar tax credits in the world that he negotiated with the government.

35:21So where does one go then? Where is a 25 year old kid listening to this go to learn how to make deals? Well, I have a book coming out called Main Street Millionaire. Yes, exciting. I know. And we have we have stuff we can tell them about that later. Okay. Well, I'm going to link Main Street Millionaire below so everyone can pre -order it. I've pre -ordered I think 10 or 20 copies of it. Maybe a couple more. But that's like 30 bucks and you learn almost everything you need to know about doing deal to start. And that book is only what you need to know. I made it on purpose not really long, not overly intense.

35:54It is exactly what you need to know. And then if you like learning deal making and you like that book, then you go to contrarianthinking .com and we have courses and free newsletters and a community all about buying businesses. But that's where you should start. The other thing I came to learn is I got money. And I almost like someone pulled the curtain back for me is how wealthy individuals play the tax game. Oh my gosh. And it's a tax game that the average person has no idea is going on. Gotta talk about money. Tax affordances are key skill to building wealth. And by the way, we don't talk about I speak openly about my I won't call it tax avoidance but my tax strategies.

36:36If you're you know it's like they said if you're a prisoner of war, you have an obligation to escape. If you're trying to build wealth, you have an obligation to pay as little tax as possible. Do it legally. But Apple will issue their IP to Apple International in Ireland. And then they will use Apple Ireland. They will license their IP to America. Charts them tens of billions of dollars thereby increasing the income of Apple Ireland at a lower tax rate and decreasing the income in the US. They're by lowering their overall tax rate. That is pure tax avoidance. Every organization, every corporation does this to the help.

37:15And so should you. By the way, I will vote for people who have an alternative minimum tax. We have to raise taxes on corporations. The 25 wealthiest Americans paid between six and eight percent tax rate. What are the tax games they're playing? Oh, the rich people. There's a bunch of them. First and foremost, it's you buy stocks. You never sell them. You borrow against them. Okay, explain that to me like a mittenier. I'll say sure you own a hundred dollars in Amazon stock. Yeah, you need money to buy something instead of selling the stock. And it's it's gone up 50%. I say it's doubled. You would have to realize a capital gain and pay long -term capital gains on that $50 gain.

37:53No, it just borrow against it and let the stock continue to grow. And you pay a little bit of interest hopefully from your current income. But basically, it's invest. Barrow against it and die. Put it into a trust and then pass it on to your kids. There's a lot of state arbitrage. Jeff Bezos just moved to Florida to spend more time with that. Isn't that sweet, Steven? Isn't that nice? No, it has nothing to do with his father. Give me a fucking break. He aggregated $160 billion in wealth. He would pay about another eight or 10 % in state taxes in Washington because he's got to leverage the public school system, the University of Washington, the Seattle Tacoma Airport, the hospital system.

38:33But in the US, you're allowed to piece out to Texas or Florida and pay no income tax. So all the people, shit, posting California in New York, show me someone who's all of a sudden can't handle San Francisco politics. I'm going to show you someone who needs to recognize a capital gain and is all of a sudden decided they like Texas politics. It's really not very, it's very disingenuous. There's the tax loophole I've leveraged in the US or something called 1202 or qualified small business. So when I started L2, what's L2? L2 is my analytics company. I started it. I invested a small amount of money because it was a business worth less than 50 million.

39:14Your business would qualify in the US as QSB small business. If you hold onto that stock in that company for longer than five years, when you sell it, the first 10 million or 10 times the basis are tax -free. So the first 10 million out of L2 was tax -free zero. That makes no sense. If that sounds like we're screwing the middle class, trust your instincts. I invested in a company, brought a company out of the bankruptcy. I invested two and a half million. The first 25 million got very lucky. The company got sold for a lot of money. The first 25 million were tax -free. These are the tax code has gone from 400 pages to 4 ,000 and that extra 3600 pages are to turn rich people into super rich people.

39:58Now the myth around taxes is the following that rich people don't pay their taxes. Actually, the sort of rich pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. So if you make all of your money from current income, that is salary, and you make a lot, you're actually paying more taxes than anyone. So mom's a baller. She's a partner in a prestigious law firm making a million bucks a year. Dad's a chiropractor has three people working for him. He makes $1 .6 million a year, total ballers. In order to make that kind of money, they probably have to live in a urban center in a blue state, where at that level, they're paying 45, 48, sometimes 52 % tax rates.

40:37But if dad decides to raise capital and buy a bunch of chiropractic clinics, and they become investments, and he sells them for $50 million is tax rate plummets. So you don't want to be a super earner. You want to earn enough money to invest so you can become a super owner. The top 25 wealthiest Americans pay about 8 % in tax. Right. So actually the bottom half pay almost no tax. They pay a lot of consumption taxes, but it's the super earners that get screwed, what I call the workhorses. But once you make a jump to light speed and you own things and you make your money from buying and selling assets, your tax rate plummets.

41:19The really sort of actionable thing there for the average person as well is probably the first point where you said, a lot of what rich people do is they'll buy a stock. So I'll spend 10K on Amazon stock. And then I go to a bank and the bank give me a $5 ,000 loan against my Amazon stock tax free. And I just hold the Amazon stock. Now I've got 5 ,000 tax free. If the Amazon stock goes to $20 ,000 in value, then I can go to the bank and say it's gone up now, give me another $5 ,000. And I just spend and live off that money. Now if the Amazon stock collapses, I'm fine because the loan was against the stock.

41:55So they'll sell the stock at a certain point as it's collapsing to get them money back. Yeah, I mean, you know, I want to get into too much trouble, but it leverages how smart people go broke. But the idea is that one of the great tax schemes in history is that stocks grow. Think of yourself as a stock. You go up in value a million bucks a year. You're making a million dollars a year doing a very successful podcast. Every year, the government in the UK is going to take 40 cents of that, 40 % of it. If you want a million dollars in stock, and it goes to 2 million, you don't get taxed on it till you sell it.

42:31Yeah. So just never sell it. Never sell it. And that's what Elon's doing with his company. He's got people say he's got $200 billion, whatever. In fact, he's borrowing tax free against those companies. And then when he finally needs to sell it to pay off some of those loans, he moves to taxes, despite the fact he built all this wealth in California. Smart. I think one of the great advantages of life is as it relates to wealth creation is really getting good tax advice because I've sat here over and over again with people that have great tax advice and some people who didn't have any at all. And the outcomes are quite frankly shocking.

43:03The variants and outcomes are quite frankly shocking. From one person going bankrupt to the other person becoming a multi -billionaire. And it comes down to some of it comes down to their tax strategy and how they thought about tax. And how that, you know, being around a lot of people now that are masters in tax. It was like, yeah, describe it as someone pulled back a curtain that I never knew was there. And all these people were doing magic behind this curtain. And no one ever told me that cut and existed. And it's called tax. We don't all pay the same tax. Because we're not supposed to talk about it.

43:30Yeah, again, not talking about it is rich people trying to keep poor people down. Yeah. Because rich people talk about their taxes all the time. Brightest woman in my entire professional universe is a woman named Lucy Lee who is my tax Yoda who works at a big law firm that I pay $1 ,800 an hour to to figure out the smartest. When I set up a company, I talked to my tax person. And I'm about to get a big payment for my podcast distribution company. I talked to my tax person first. This is it is everything. But the key when you're young is to become an owner, not an earner. You're an earner. You want to bust a move out of earning and develop an army capital that goes out and kills for you at night.

44:09500 bucks is a lot of money when you're 21. 500 bucks when you're 21 is 10 ,000 when you're my age, right? And it's going to go really fast. So just start. And then once you become a super owner, you have 10 ,000, 50 ,000, 100 ,000, a million dollars in assets, then you can become a super tax avoider.

44:40That's not an awful. That's not an awful. Sitting here with your bucket of sand. Oh my god. A bunch of millions. That's right. This is how we fuck the middle class. And this is how we really screw over the little guy. What is your capital allocation strategy? How do you invest your money? This is the thing people want to know most about you. I keep it as painfully simple as I possibly can. So literally my entire net worth is cash, a house, and index funds. And some shares of more KELOL, I'm on the board of directors. And that's it. There's nothing else. My entire, I can summarize everything so easily and so cleanly.

45:26And truly, that's it. And it's not even like I have 20 bank accounts. I have one bank account, one brokerage account and a house. And that's it. So simple. Why index funds? You're the reason I, your capital allocation strategy is almost identical to mine. I want to talk about the housing as well. But after reading your book, I stopped trying to pick stocks. And I invested all of my available capital into index funds outside of investing in starting companies. So I'm a shareholder and I don't know, 50, 60, 70 companies. I, all my available capital is invested in index funds. And then I have a very longstanding large position in Ethereum, which I've held for like six years or something, which has done me very well.

46:08Yeah. That is it. And the Ethereum investment is also based on the fact that I run a software business that is in blockchain. And I could see that developers are building on top of Ethereum more than any other blockchain. So that insight was really beneficial to me. And six years. So even with the big fall of the last two years, you're still up a lot. Yeah. I think your book taught me that successful investing is when you lose the password to your investment account. Yes. That's exactly it. I don't actually think you said that in there. But that's like, when I lose the password to my investment account, I'm so proud of myself because it means I haven't checked it in forever.

46:45And so it was funny because you were coming today. I thought, oh, yeah, well, I have all this money in these index funds. I'll check it. And I thought, I don't know the password. That's good. That's why you're going to do, okay. The reason I do this, what's important is that I am not one of the people who says nobody can beat the market. So therefore use index funds. That's not what I believe. I think there, I think it's extremely hard to beat the market. And very few people will do it. But I think there are really smart people who can do it. And people who I know, who I could invest with, the reason I don't is not because I don't believe it can be done.

47:13It's because the variable that I want to maximize for in my investments is endurance. If I can just earn average returns for an above average period of time, it's going to lead to a amount of success that will literally put you in the top 5 % of investors. My parents are a great example of this. My parents are smart people, but they really, they have no financial background. And they have like minimal financial interest, I would say. And, but they have dollar cost average into index funds for going on 40 years now. And literally if you look at the returns, they've never sold anything ever. And literally if you look at the returns, they'd probably be in the top 3 % of professional investors.

47:48What is for anyone that doesn't know what is dollar cost averaging and what is an index fund? Dollar cost averaging means you buy the same dollar amount of investments every single month come hell or high water. Doesn't matter what the stock market's doing, recession, boom, bust, you say, I'm going to put $100 or whatever it is in the stock market on the first of every month. Now most people who like have a 401k at work are doing this whether they know it or not. They have $100 or whatever removed from every paycheck and it goes into the funds that they own and they don't have to do anything. Whether you know it or not, you're actually doing it.

48:19The contrast to that would say, I'm going to buy and sell based off of how I feel in the stock market. I wake up, I watch CNBC, I decided to sell, I'm going to put it back in when I feel better about the market. It's the contrast to that. An index fund is just a single fund that owns hundreds or thousands of stocks within it. If it's diverse enough, if it's big enough, really what you're doing is you're owning a slice of the global economy, which is how I think about it. It's thousands of individual stocks in there, Tesla, Apple, whatever it would be. But really what you're doing is you're owning a slice of capitalism.

48:48If I was your son and I said, Dad, prove to me that that's a better long term wealth creation strategy than buying crypto or buying companies that I use or like, how would you explain that to your kid? Your ability to do well over the next one year or five years is going to have no role whatsoever on your lifetime ability to generate wealth. All that's going to matter is not what are the best returns you can earn. All that matters is what are the returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time. All that matters is your endurance. It doesn't matter if you can double your money this year or even double your money again the next year.

49:23All that matters is can you stick and keep it going for 50 years? That's where compounding comes from. Previous. Because the formula for compounding is returns to the power of time. That's not quite it, but like more or less, that's it. So in that equation, if you understand the math, all of the heavy lifting comes from the exponent. Give me a case study where someone has followed that strategy and done well. Okay, here's one way to explain it that I use in the book. 99 % of Warren Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday. After he turns 60 years old, 99 % of his wealth has been accumulated after that period because the longer you hold that for, the crazier the numbers get.

50:02When he was 60, I think he was worth about $3 billion. A lot of money, it's a multi -billionaire, but now that he's 90, he's worth over $100 billion and he's given like $100 billion away to charity. So if he didn't do that, he'd be worth, he'd go from $3 billion to $200 billion since he's been 60 because the numbers just get crazier at that point. He's worth $100 billion. So if his net worth goes up 10 % in one year, he makes $10 billion, which is three times that he was worth, when he was 60. So that's when you look at somebody like Buffett, is he a great investor? Is he a great stock picker, of course.

50:32But the real secret to his success is that he's been a good investor for 80 years. And if he had retired at age 60 or at age 50, nobody would have ever heard of him. He would have been like one of the other multi -billionaires who lives in Florida and plays golf, and like even you've never heard of him. The reason he's a household name is because he's been doing this non -stop since he's been 11 years old and he's never stopped. It's just the endurance that's made him so wealthy, not necessarily the annual returns. Patience, it's a difficult thing. It also reminds me of the story that you talk about in the introduction of your book about the janitor, Ronald James Reed, who when he died in 2014, age 92 had a net worth of over 8 million.

51:14And he was a janitor. How did he do that? He took what very little money he could say from his job as a janitor, mopping floors at the gas station. He put it in stocks and he left it alone for 70 years. And that's it. That's all you need. That's all you need to do. If you have endurance in your investing and you can keep it going for years or decades, you don't need to be a genius stock picker. And not only do you not need to do it, if you have endurance, you're going to be literally 97 or 99 % of the genius stock pickers. And what's so interesting about it is like picking the right stocks is hard.

51:48It's supposed to be hard. There's no world in which everybody who tries to beat the market is going to do it. Of course, it's hard. Just like being an MBA player is hard. But having endurance is largely in your control. It's so much easier to just be patient than it is to pick the right stocks every single day. I think some people nature nurture, some people like probably Ronald Reed and my parents just understand it naturally. It's not hard for them to be patient. But there are professional investors who work 80 hours a week for 30 years to try to beat the market and they can't do it. Not only some, that explains like most of them.

52:22And even the ones who can do it are maybe going to beat the market by half a percent per year, one percent per year. But if you can have endurance, that is that's a bigger benefit than you can have by even being like a very successful stock picker. Like somebody who outperforms the market by one percentage point per year and they can do that for 10 years, that's amazing. That's like not rush more investor. But somebody who earns average returns and doesn't for 20 years is going to have way more money. You do it for 30 years, you're going to be filthy rich. You'd be like Ronald Reed, you can be a janitor who leaves $8 million to charity when you die.

52:55He's buying a house, a good or bad financial decision. My brother who works in my company and so he's one that introduced me to your book many many years ago said to me something along the lines of Steve don't buy houses to make money because you have the ability to play a different set of games that very few people can play. Yeah. And what I mean by that is he kind of explained it to me because listen everyone can buy a house. So the returns there aren't going to be huge. Go find a game that like only you can play it. You'll get bigger returns. If you're buying a house because you think it's going to be a good financial investment, stop.

53:27Like even if it turns out in hindsight that it was, it doesn't matter. I think these are just purely lifestyle decisions. And I think so many people get screwed up when they're in a spot in their life where they should be renting because they need to be mobile. They need to move around to a new job, new career, new school, whatever it is. But they end up buying because they think they're going to make money doing it. And that's a problem. So I own a house and if I ended up losing money on it, I don't think I'd care that that's not why I'm owning it. I'm owning it just because I want the stability for my family.

53:56People buy houses because they think they get by making loads of money because there have been periods and time in which people have made loads of money. Historically like that's the anomaly. Historically in the US and the UK, housing prices, adjusted for inflation go nowhere. It's just been the last 20 or 30 years that there's this very brief window of time that owning a house was a great investment. Robert Schiller won the Nobel Prize about a decade ago for his work in showing that over the last 150 years in the United States, adjusted for inflation, most home prices have been flat as a pancake.

54:26It's just the last 20 years that have inflated people's expectations of what a house can do. Statistically, there's going to be at least one person listening to this that has made an offer as we speak for a house under the assumption that it's going to help them stack wealth. If they were purely doing it for those reasons, what would you tell them to do instead? If that's purely the reason, run for your life. Don't do it. Particularly, I mean, it used to be, and maybe it still is like this in many cities in America and the UK, but it used to be that rentals were almost without exception, shitty houses.

55:03There were no good rentals. A big change, at least in America in the last 20 years, is that most big cities have tons and tons of luxury apartments to live in, and there are great places to live. They're in the city centers, and they got beautiful granite countertops, and there are great places to live. Don't fall for the idea that you can't live well if you're renting. I think that's the problem. And realize that if you're doing it for financial reasons, you're probably about to borrow a shitload of money for an investment that historically has been a very bad investment. Like, if you put it in those terms, like, what are we doing here, man?

55:38You're going to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for an investment that historically has been a loss. That's what you're doing here. You feel good about that? That's what I'd say to that person. Godspeed. I would love to be in the room somewhere where that person is just looked at their partner after persuading them to make that offer because it was going to make them rich. Sorry, guys. To make sure I, I and everyone listening, understands what the blockchain is. It's this public can think of it as this database in the sky, and the database in the sky is checked by everybody who has their computer on and is interacting with the database in the sky.

56:19So you no longer need a government or a bank checking the transactions and the contracts in the database in the sky, because now all of our computers that are on interacting with it are in the background checking that if I send you one bit coin, if I do something on this database in the sky, it is in accordance with the history of the database, and it is in line with that database. Yeah. To make it less complicated, it just makes it a source of truth. Okay. In a world where we don't even know who is who online, who owes each other what, any of these things, we now have the source of truth that everybody can agree on.

57:04And everyone can see. And everybody can see. And you don't need to trust anybody. And so that as a technology solves many things, problems that we don't even know we've got, because they're so part of how we exist. So the technology is not about money. The technology is about truth and exchanging value and creating value in a digital age. Now, what is interesting and powerful about this technology is we've seen technology similar before the internet. We've seen broadband. We've seen these big global infrastructure things. Most of those, the internet was a public service good. Broadband was all built private sector.

58:01We didn't get to make money out of these things. Really, Amazon made the money or or whoever it was building the broadband. They all went bust as well. What we've got here is this very clever thing that everybody in this blockchain gets rewarded for their role that they play. In maintaining the blockchain. In maintaining the blockchain. And because these things are scarce, and let's say Bitcoin being the most classic example, there's only 21 million that will ever exist, you've created the scarce asset that is a reward system. So the people who mind the Bitcoin, they use the electricity to solve the algorithms and get the Bitcoins to make sure there's only 21 million or they get rewarded.

58:47The people who verify the chain get rewarded. And then we can buy the asset, which is actually us investing in the future use cases of this thing. Are people going to use it for storing wealth or building stuff? So now you get this global infrastructure layer of which people can invest. Now let's go back to the example of AI. AI, 99 % of people listening to this will not be able to invest in it, apart from buying some of those big public companies. Because they're not accredited investors, they're not allowed, they're not get to see it, it's an insider, all of this stuff. This is the inverse. It is fractionalizable.

59:35So a Bitcoin, you don't have to buy one, that's 60 whatever thousand, but it is today, you can buy a fraction. So remember we talked about property, and the guys who own the big high end property make all the money. No of us can buy the $50 million apartment in Manhattan and then do it up and flip it for $250 million. Now blockchain, we can all put 10 % of our paycheck in it. Do you think people should? Yeah, and more. But the point being, is this is the only globally homogenous asset on earth. It's the same in Nigeria as it is in Brazil, as it is in London, as it is in Silicon Valley, as it is in India, as it is in Papua New Guinea.

1:00:28And everybody is on equal footing. You can put the same percentage of your worth in it. Okay, that is mind blowing. And it bypasses the banking system, the brokerage system, and all the other incumbent things that get in the way of Nigerian buying an international investment. So we've got a playing field that's leveled in the fastest growing technology of all time, in the fastest of pre -testing asset in price terms of all time, in the shortest period of time, that is globally available to anybody. And then you realize, holy shit, okay, this is important. Now, why that's important is because having more investors in it means the asset becomes more valuable, which means you're more likely to secure it.

1:01:22People want to join the network to earn some of these tokens, to secure it. The more use cases get built upon it because people are making money, and it bootstraps its behavioral economics. It's an incentive based system to bootstrap the most ridiculous startup idea of all time, which is I'm going to entirely disrupt money and create a new internet. I mean, that's laughably stupid. And that's what's happening. One of the, I run a company called Third Web, which is a Web 3 infrastructure business. We've raised quite a lot. Money for the company, about $30 million now, and we have a big team, and it's interesting for me to observe the use cases, because people come to Third Web to build on the blockchain.

1:02:03And one of the really interesting use cases we've seen over the last, I'd say 12 months, that's really exploded, is gaming. People building web 3 blockchain based games, because if you think about games like FIFA, which is a huge game, obviously, the UK, where we're big soccer fans, or other games like, you know, runescape back in the day, where you have assets in the game, in FIFA, you have a messy card in runescape, you might have a sword. The thing that the blockchain now enables us to do is to take those assets from the game and actually trade them outside the game. So I can, if the sword was on the Ethereum blockchain, even though I'm not inside the game, I can trade that sword on the Ethereum blockchain.

1:02:44And so one of the most exceptional use cases we've seen at Third Web is people building AI games. That's right. People building web 3 games, because these assets are now valuable. It's great for the game developer. They've now got this brand new economy for their company, and it's great for the people that own those assets in the game, because they've now, those assets are now more valuable, because more people can access them. And if I own Ethereum, if I own an Ethereum token, which I do, by the way, I've been stacking it and refusing to sell. But how do I benefit from the fact that games are now being built as Ethereum?

1:03:18So it's really simple. If we've all been given shares on Facebook when it started, we'd have all been hilariously rich, but we didn't. The VC's got it, and then it went to the public market, and then you have to have a brokerage account. You have to be approved. What this is happening, you buy an Ethereum token today, if Ethereum ends up becoming bigger and more uses, your token value goes up. It's as simple as that. So you get to participate in an entire technological revolution, really simply from your mobile phone. And you don't need anybody to approve it or do anything. Yes, there's regulations up, but simple stuff like that.

1:04:01It's pretty straightforward for almost everybody in the world. So therefore, we talked about how do you invest in your disruption and the future of technology? Okay, here's one where you can really do it. And it's easy to do. I have a couple of questions here then. So you said it's easy to do. Yeah, let's talk with practicalities. How do does one do it? I can do it on my phone. I have to call someone. How do I invest in crypto? You just open a crypto account with one of the big crypto providers Coinbase, Kraken, crypto .com, who are in the Gemini? What about this though? My bank, my digital bank is offering me to buy crypto on there.

1:04:42Should I do that? Yes, you can.

1:04:51And you but you will go down the journey that everybody goes down, which is the easiest on ramp is the best revenue, whatever. I don't care. Let's do it. Get a feel for what it's like to own an asset that goes up and down a lot, particularly down when it goes down. It makes you feel terrible. And you've got to learn about how to deal with it. And then because it goes up over time, if you don't do anything and you've chosen a good quality asset that's provable as an asset in itself, it'll probably go up over time. In fact, highly likely to go up a lot. And then you'll start thinking, do you remember Ralph saying that the bank owns the stuff or I don't own it?

1:05:32And then he might say, oh, but the magic here is unlike the bank where I can't take more than 10 grand out, I can put it all on my little ledger device because - What's the ledger device? A ledger device is - It's actually - It's a company provider, but what it is because this is just an address on a blockchain. And think of it, it's like your mailbox. You can send stuff to it, but you can't actually take it out. Let your email - somebody can't read all your emails, but they can send you emails. Well, that - that part that's private, that secure pass key essentially. Well, you keep that to yourself and it's stored on a device and there's a complicated way of doing it.

1:06:23And you'll have to go through that, which is you have to have this seed phrase that does it. This technology will change quite soon. Fingerprints, face prints, and a bunch of other stuff. But basically, a little USB stick will secure that you can go and put the save or go and take it to your nands house or whatever it is, can secure your money that it's only yours and nobody can take it out. I have mine on a ledger. So I have my Ethereum on a small - it's kind of like a small USB stick and then that USB stick is protected by like 24 words or whatever it is. And those words are on pieces of paper in different countries at the moment.

1:07:02And it means that no matter what happens, no matter where I am in the world, no matter who comes for me, I can always retrieve the X -thousand Ethereum that I have on this ledger device. And like a bank where my account could get frozen by the government or they could empty my bank, they could freeze my bank, I will always have that value. And also, there's a famous example of the compensation of gold in the United States, and it's been done in many countries in the past. The good thing about this magic internet money is you have to physically cross borders with it. Yeah. Think of all the Jewish people who had to take money and diamonds and gold out of Nazi Germany and out of Europe, it was hard to do.

1:07:50Here, you have to do anything. You just need to remember a seed phrase. A seed phrase being basically a string of words. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know for people that are in that paycheck to paycheck cycle, which I was in for many, many years of my life where I'd get paid for my call center, I'd go and spend the money, and I pretty much spend all the money within the first couple of days of getting the paycheck. And I was just waiting the next three weeks for the next paycheck. What advice would you give them about getting out of that cycle? Because it gives you almost full imprisoned by that cycle.

1:08:20If you're in it. Well, before I give the advice, I want to explain to that person what's happening because you are the prime customer for our economic system. Banks love you because they can sell you paid loans, they can sell you credit cards, they can sell you lines of credit, and they can keep you in debt for the rest of your life, which means you keep making the bank rich corporations love you because you're not going to think twice when we show you this nice bag, when we show you this nice vacation, you're going to want this stuff. And so we love selling you this stuff. The government loves you because you're going to pay the highest taxes and employees pay the highest taxes.

1:09:02And so when you're in that situation, you are making everybody else rich at your expense. And so if you want to break out of this, the first thing you should understand, you need to make yourself rich before you make everybody else rich. Because when you're spending on all your money, you are putting your money into their pockets and you have to stop that. You got to keep that money for yourself. You're in a boat. Think about this way. You're in a boat. And this boat has water just flowing in and you are sinking and you got to start by sealing the holes and then you got to stop the spending. So if you are in what I call the financial danger zone, which is you don't have $2 ,000 saved up for an emergency and you have credit card debt.

1:09:46If you are in that situation, you are in the financial danger zone and you have to make drastic changes. That means right now, no more eating at restaurants, no more vacations, no more doing anything that doesn't put money in your pocket and no more Netflix. And the reason why I say this isn't because you're going to save $15 a month. It's so you can save two hours every time a day. The average American is watching more than two hours of television a day. And if you don't have $2 ,000 saved up, if you have credit card debt, you cannot afford those two hours a day being wasted on TV. And that means right now, you have to go out and start using the time to learn, start using the time to work and start using the time to make some extra dollars.

1:10:34So what do you do? Start selling stuff, stop spending money, selling stuff you own, selling stuff you own. So if you have a TV that you're not using, sell it. You have a card that you can't afford, sell it. If you live in a house that you can't afford, sell it downgrade, move smaller and then work to earn more money. I've got to say, the couple of things that I came to mind as you were saying that. And funnily enough, I put myself in the shoes of 18 year old Stephen Bartlett. When I was in that small apartment with three or four immigrants in Mossside, Rushholm. And I was, you know, my rent was nothing.

1:11:11My rent was £150 a month, which I could not afford and I could not pay. And I was intimately working between course enter jobs. And whatever money I got, I spent. And part of the reason I spent it just because like many people watching, especially men who sometimes feel the need because of the way society is, I was trying to get laid at the same time. And it's hard when you're a young man. And I say young men in particular because the stats do support the fact that there is an expectation that men pay. When you're a young man, it's particularly difficult to do all of these things to cut back and also get laid.

1:11:49And what am I going to do? Defer getting laid for 10 years. When I say laid, I'm really saying meeting someone in falling in love and having a life. So what do I, if I'm living in a shoe box, which I was, I can't bring anyone back there. I can't take anyone for dinner. I can't take anyone to the movies. So what do I do? This is why every Indian parents tell their kids to become a doctor so their son can get married. It's the same concept. But here's the thing, you have to pick your heart. Either life's going to be hard now or it's going to be hard for the rest of your life. And you have to pick what's more important to you right now.

1:12:21And you know, if we talk about balance, if you want to have a balance of everything where you want to find a girl and you want to make money and you want to stay healthy, you are dividing your attention everywhere. That's not impossible. But very few people can actually do everything all at once. And if your number one goal is to become wealthy, if your number one goal is to turn your finances around, you have to get serious about it because where you put your attention is where you get the results. And so if you want to be in a better financial situation, you are going to have to make sacrifices.

1:12:56And it's difficult. I can't come here and tell you it's going to be easy because that's going to be me lying to you. I got to be honest. I did make a sacrifice. And for me, the sacrifice was I started a business. And frankly, that meant that I didn't have time to be going out, getting laid or meeting people or socializing. But it's my story arc ends with it going well. And then the romantic situation taken care of itself many years later once it had gone well because I was so focused on myself. And it's funny. There is a bit of a paradox to life that the more you actually focus inward, the more you become a magnet.

1:13:33And the more I focus outward, the more I pursued and chased and neglected myself, the harder it was to get people interested in me. Yeah. And I also want to say that when I talk about building wealth, I'm not talking about becoming a money hungry, this money greedy, this evil person that just cares about money. That's not what I'm talking about because I want you to live a holistic life because money is just one part of your life. But the second part to that is I'm not telling you to never enjoy life. I'm telling you to make a sacrifice for a period of your life that way you can enjoy the rest of your life and never have to worry about money again.

1:14:08It's hard for us to naturally see life for seasons, especially when we're looking forward. When we're looking back, it's very easy to say, oh, that was that season. Like I can sit here now and say all that 20 to 25 was that sacrifice everything in my life to make myself something season. And then 25 to 30 was like building and learning. And then I now can think of it's easier actually now to think forward in seasons now that I've been through some seasons. But for someone that hasn't been through seasons in life, it's hard to think about life in those times. I now think of my life in these five year seasons.

1:14:42And that helps me to say to you even have conversation with my partner where I go, this is the season I'm in. And it will last probably roughly this this long. And I'm going to sacrifice these things and prioritize these things in this season. But it's hard for people to understand this idea. It's difficult. And that sacrifice is difficult, especially during a time where everybody's showing off everything on Instagram. You look at your friends who have a crappy job, but they're driving around in nicer cars, going on better vacations, going to the nicer restaurants. And you're thinking, what did I do wrong?

1:15:18And then especially if you're a guy, you have a girlfriend, you have a wife, she's going to say, how come they keep getting to go, can they keep getting to go to cancun? They keep going to these nice restaurants. How come you can't take me to these nice places? And I feel like you're doing something wrong because where is this discrepancy? The reason why I call my show the minority mindset is because I'm a big advocate of not doing what the majority people do. The first time I made a million dollars in a year, I was in my 20s. I was driving a car worth $500. It didn't have a bumper on it. It was not pretty.

1:15:55My wife sat in that car with me and my employees drove better cars than I did. So you know, you got to be confident. And you got to work for something bigger. And you want to partner that's going to understand it. That's my belief, which is not the easy thing. It's interesting because confidence is such a internal thing. And I just feel like I just probably just didn't have it then because I, I think I was scared for someone to know that I was broke. I was so scared to know for someone to know that I was broke that I just didn't entertain romantic relationships. And that is the reason why so many people will go into debt to buy vacations, to buy things, to buy stuff, to look rich.

1:16:47And ironically, that's the key thing that keeps so many people poor for the rest of their life is because they're scared to look broke. And now when you try to look rich, that's the thing that's actually keeping you broke. There's another element to this, which is my life was pretty miserable. So when you have a relatively miserable life, when you don't have many nice things, because you're working in a course, enter as I was until 11 o 'clock at night time, doing overtime, every overtime hour I could get, then because you're also lonely, you're going home alone, walking home, because you can't afford the bus.

1:17:21Anything that gives you a little dough for me in here, gambling. This is while the gambling shops are in the areas that struggle the worst financially, because those, I mean a lot of people say, because those people are looking for that big payday, that dopamine hit from a payday. My TV in my tiny, tiny little bed sit room was like half the size of the wall. I was making reckless spending decisions, because I think it gave me some kind of hit that I was missing in my life, it gave me like a dopamine rush that was, and there wasn't many things giving me a dopamine hit at that point in my life. And see, here's the thing, during that time, you are making emotional decisions.

1:18:00Yes. As many people are, and it's very difficult to speak logic to emotion. But this is where now you have to be able to understand the difference, because if you're listening to this and you're in that situation, you have to understand that if you want to continue being able to live their lifestyle, you're going to have to make some changes today. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in this lifestyle for the rest of your life. And it's only going to get more difficult. And that's the thing is if you want to become wealthy, the first part is just your own mindset, it's your own discipline. And I'll tell you can conquer that.

1:18:35I can tell you everything about investing. I can tell you different ETFs and index funds to invest in. I can tell you different investment institutions out there. I can tell you which stock brokerages to use. I can tell you just invest 15 % of income into this for the next 10, 20, 30 years and you're going to become wealthy. But I tell you, you can get over that mindset. You're never going to become wealthy. Because then what happens in that situation is when you're in that state of, I just want to look rich. I just want to have the dopamine. I just want to have some nice things because I deserve it.

1:19:04I'll work hard. You know what happens next. You're the one that gets caught up in all the rich, rich, quick schemes. Because someone's going to say, look, put a thousand dollars into this. You'll have $10 ,000 in the next three months. Or I'm going to show you. You can live the laptop lifestyle. You can work five hours a week, make $10 ,000 a month, $10 ,000 a week. You're never going to have to worry about money again just by this program. And I you're a prime candidate. Because now you were driven by this emotion of, I want that. I can't imagine if I had an extra $10 ,000 a month and I don't even have to work for it.

1:19:42Because you can't see past it. You're all you're doing is being sold by emotion. And so you're the one that's going to get caught up in the get rich, quick schemes. You're the one that's going to make the bank rich because you're going to get stay stuck in debt. Corporations are going to love you because they can keep selling you the nicest and newest stuff because you want to look rich. Want to show it off to your friends? You want to show it off to the girls. And you just stuck in that cycle. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Darivisio at the very end of it, you'll know.

1:20:10I asked the guest to leave a question in the Darivisio. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Darivisio into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had. Their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation cards .com. They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.

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