Pat Flynn on Profiting from Pokémon, Raising Financially Savvy Kids and Lean Learning

I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.

It's time for some money rehab.

If you know Pat Flynn, you probably know him from the business world.

He's the creator of Smart Passive Income, an OG in the digital entrepreneur space, and someone who's taught millions of people how to build wealth.

If you know that Pat, today you will meet a whole new side of him.

In today's episode, we talk about the strategy that he put together in his new book, Lean Learning, and how it applies to personal finance.

But before we get there, we are taking a crazy detour into a very different kind of finance.

The Pokemon card market.

You guys, this was so fascinating.

The Pokemon verse is a whole wild world that I knew nothing about and it is so crazy.

I loved learning about it, even though it sounds like a totally different language.

Pat breaks down what makes a card valuable, how much money is actually in these cards, and the business Pat has built around it.

Then we flip the script and dive into your financial game.

Pat shares how his lean learning framework can be a powerful tool for building wealth without overwhelm, why just-in-time information is your secret weapon against financial burnout, and how to use something called a voluntary force function to get stuff done.

Plus, he also shares how this framework can help teach your kids about money too.

Here's Pat.

Pat Flynn, welcome to Money Rehab.

Nicole, thank you so much for having me.

So we have many one degrees of separation.

I'm so glad to finally connect with you.

I know you know Jason.

He's like my work husband from the business content world.

I'm so excited to get into your book.

I'm so excited to get into business and all the things that you guys nerd out about.

But first,

In the midst of one of our conversations about you behind your back, which was very good, somehow it came up that you are Mr.

Pokemon.

I need to know everything, please, about that.

Okay.

So to backtrack a little bit, my wife and I, we have an interesting style of parenting, which we love.

We just, whatever the kids are into, we want to learn about that.

We want to get involved with them, right?

And so, for example, between 2018 and 2020, it was actually Fortnite.

The kids were into Fortnite.

And so here's what I did.

And this is a very lean learning principle sort of happening in motion.

I hired a kid on Fiverr who was 14 to teach me in two sessions, two 30-minute sessions, how to play Fortnite.

And it was some of the best money I ever spent because it then enabled me to hang with my kids, speak the same language.

And actually we started to play together a lot.

And that led to a lot of great memories and moments.

Well, they moved on from Fortnite into then Pokemon.

So I was like, okay, same thing.

I want to get involved with Pokemon.

There's a lot of YouTubers who talk about Pokemon.

So let me get involved in that world.

And I started to fall in love with it.

So much so that I became a moderator for certain channels and I offered some business advice just to some of those creators to help them because that's the kind of world I came from, entrepreneurship.

And lo and behold, in 2021, I started a YouTube channel to help support the community and told a lot of stories there and brought some history to some of the cards that I was collecting as a brand new collector.

And today, fast forward, we have nearly 2 million subscribers on that channel, Deep Pocket Monster.

Some videos have gotten upwards of 20 million views and they're like 30 to 40 to 50 minute videos.

I'm getting invited to different like Comic-Con style events now as a celebrity to sign autographs for people.

And I'm recognized in public now more for Pokemon than anything.

And I even have a relationship with the Pokemon company.

And in terms of money, it is the most profitable thing I've ever done because it's a very lean team.

It's a lot of ad revenue from YouTube on top of brand sponsorships and such.

And I'm having the most fun ever at 42 years old opening cardboard with cartoons on them.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Okay.

So this has become a real business for you.

Oh, it has.

Yes, absolutely.

So much so that it even has turned into a live event.

We just hosted our third one in Tampa Bay, Florida.

We had, get this, 5,500 people from around the world, 60 YouTubers and brands like eBay come and sponsor this event.

Just about Pokemon.

All about Pokemon and collecting cards and nerding out.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I know nothing about Pokemon.

All I remember was back in the day, I think it was like peak 90s, it was all the rage, and then it came back.

Yeah.

So how much money are we talking about here?

What are these cards worth?

Can you just even explain to me what the heck you guys are doing?

Yeah, so Pokemon is short for Pocket Monster, which it is the largest media franchise in the world, more than LucasArts and Star Wars and all that stuff.

Disney, it's huge because it's not just the cards, it's the anime, it's the plushies, and the, like, there's so much of it.

There's the video games, there's Pokemon Go now, which in 2016 brought a lot of people into the space.

And now there's Pocket TCG or Trading Card Game, which is Pokemon's latest app that allows you to kind of open virtual cards.

So it's huge.

Wait, wait, wait.

Bigger than all of Disney?

No.

Biggest media franchise in the world.

You could look it up.

It's crazy.

And remember, we're just seeing small components of it here.

It's housed in Japan.

It's huge.

It's all over the world in multiple languages, everything.

It's ridiculous.

And some of these cards that were available to us in the 90s are now worth upwards of, especially if you get a good condition first edition holographic Charizard, which is like the holy grail.

That card recently sold, I think, at a grade 10 because you can get these cards graded for $325,000.

Wait, say that again?

What kind of card?

Whose card?

It's a first edition Shadowless base set, Charizard, and it is graded in a 10 out of 10 out of this grading company, and it's $325,000.

It was once sold.

There's other cards that are even more valuable that came from Japan, that were, for example, handed out to just employees who worked at that company early on.

There's a card called the Pikachu Illustrator card, I think has once been sold for over $2 million.

These things, which were once at one point, just supposed to be used for a game, right?

This is a game that's played between these cards.

These have now become collectible assets that people are using.

There's an app called Collector now where you can scan your cards to see the value of them.

And you can see on the daily, just like literally the stock market, you can see how much your collection has grown or increased or decreased based on how the market is going.

Pokemon's doing their thing.

Everybody's buying it now.

And there's not a lot of supply when you go to Target, if you've noticed, because a lot of people are into this hobby now, which makes them more valuable, more expensive.

But it also attracts not good parts of the hobby, like scalpers and other things like that, too.

There are channels dedicated to just the money investing part of specifically Pokemon cards.

It's kind of insane.

No, I have not noticed, just for the record, on my trips to Target, but what app is the Pokemon stock market app?

There's a few of them, like one called Rare Candy, but the one that I like is Collector without an E at the end, Collect R, I guess you could call it.

And they recently came and sponsored my event, and we've brought some new users over there.

And again, you could just scan your cards and you might have some in your attic or closet sitting there and you might be sitting on potentially tens of thousands of dollars of cards, depending on the condition.

There have been a lot of stories of people bringing out their old collections and going, oh my gosh, I have an entirely new asset here that I didn't even know about.

So what makes it valuable?

If somebody finds some random Pokemon cards, is it the rarity?

The rarity, there is the condition.

There are different kinds of sets.

There's certain versions of different sets.

It took me several years to even wrap my head around all of this.

It sounds like a whole other language.

Whatever you said about that 300 grand card was gibberish to me.

Yeah, that's how it was to me, too.

It is another language.

It's its own little subculture.

And a lot of it is nostalgia for a lot of these people who grew up with these cards and could only buy a pack a week with their allowance.

Well, now they're adults and they have more than an allowance to spend on this.

And they're bringing their kids in on it as well.

And that's kind of where my channel comes in.

I tell a lot of stories.

I try to complete sets in a certain amount of time and it's like a challenge-based channel.

And I've noticed that a lot of families watch the channel together.

They're watching while eating dinner.

They're watching my live stream every Monday or watching these videos when they dropped.

It's really neat and it's provided this amazing joy for me in my life.

And it's, my kids are employees of my company now, by the way, which is pretty cool.

So they're getting the ins and outs of entrepreneurship in real time.

And I get to meet a lot of people from all around the world and see families come together.

And it's cool because probably, and I'll finish with this, my favorite comment are from people who say, I didn't know anything about Pokemon.

My kids were into it, but now I get it.

And now we're doing it together.

And that's a really cool thing.

I love that part.

That's really, really cool.

I have no idea what my daughter is going to be into.

She's seven months.

How old's your daughter?

Seven months old.

Seven months old.

Okay.

We have a minute before she even speaks English.

Yeah.

Now that your kids are employees, did you open them a custodial, Rob?

Oh, absolutely.

They're maxing out every year.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, we're paying them.

There's some financial benefits to hiring your kids.

They have to do work.

You can't just put them on payroll.

They have to do work, but you can pay up to a certain amount without having to report that to the government.

So then I'm shielding that money.

Well, not report, just not pay tax.

Not pay taxes taxes on that.

Right.

They still have to be reported.

And of course, I'm using gusto to help with payroll and all that stuff gets through the right mechanisms anyway.

But through that, I'm able to do a few things.

Number one, they're able to understand how business works and they get paid, but half of that money goes into savings that they cannot touch.

This is us and our rules as parents for them.

25% of the remaining gets put into their IRA.

And then the other 25% they can use, but they have to tell us what they want to use it for.

And it's interesting because I've noticed their buying behaviors are different ever since they they have this kind of budget to now work with because what they buy is their own money.

And so they have to be very smart about it.

And my son, for example, he invested quite a bit of money into building his own PC.

He's like, you could buy it for this much, but it's already built and it costs more than if you were to build it yourself.

So do you think it would be valuable for you if you bought these parts by themselves and maybe did a little research, learned as you went?

There's a lot of great resources on YouTube for building PCs.

So he built his own computer, bought the parts on his own, and is that much better because of it and much more proud of the work that he did and takes much better care of it as well, I will say.

That's so cool.

And I bet if dad bought it, we would have bought a Mac that was

brand new, already made.

So many good lessons there.

How rare is it to even get a card that's worth anything?

If I got a pack, what are the odds?

Is this a lottery ticket type thing?

In a sense, yes.

Again, these things were not meant to be assets used for investing, but they have become that over time, especially as the generation who grew up with it is now older and there's nostalgia and there's a rarity.

A lot of the older sets are no longer being printed, so they are more rare.

However, they're getting more expensive and it's never a guarantee.

In fact, in most cases, you won't get a good card that is worth the value.

And I've proved this to be true because in addition to my long form channel, Deep Pocket Monster, I started a short form channel where I open a pack of cards every single day.

And I do share the value of the cards that are inside.

And 90% of the time, I do not get back what I paid for the pack.

Thankfully, YouTube and the TikToks and reels and all that stuff do help supplement this hobby of mine, but it is a very real account of just how rare it is to pull one of these great cards.

But there is a rush that comes with it.

And of course, the advice, especially for younger people, is if you do want to complete a set or you do have a card that you want, it's always better to just buy it directly.

You could buy it from a local game store or online.

And again, the values aren't always going to hold.

They might drop or they might go up.

It's never guaranteed.

And there are probably safer bets for if you want to do investing in something than with Pokemon, but it is fun.

The only thing I know is that there's some series on the internet.

The premise is something like, should I open this or should I keep it serious?

Yeah, that's me.

That's your series?

That's me, yes.

That's my series.

We just hit one year.

And a lot of people don't know that's me because I don't put my face in it.

It's my thumbs.

My thumbs are famous because I have weird looking thumbs and we make fun of them on the channel.

But yeah, that is me.

And we are getting about 10 million views a day across all the channels together.

Dude.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

So it's kind of actually really cool that you know about that channel because a lot of people don't know I have the other one and vice versa, which is pretty cool.

It's a different audience too when you think about it.

I'm just a guy who likes to try things and experiment, not afraid to fail.

I failed plenty of times, but as I talk about in my book, it's about the learning that happens from the action you take, not from just the absorption of all the things possible and then never taking any action at all, never seeing any results.

You've seen so many results.

So let's talk about lean learning.

I'm not promising that I won't get back to some Pokemon.

Oh,

I hope we get back there.

Tell me just the general framework of what this is, because you seem like a framework, process, system kind of guy.

100%.

Let's define what that is.

So lean learning, how to achieve more by learning less is the subtitle.

And the idea being that We are living in a world now where we have access to all the information we could ever need about achieving anything.

Like all the information is there and freely available to us.

And it's about changing our methods of learning from just in case learning, which is what we've all been doing, absorbing as much about stuff as we can, so much so that we get overwhelmed, we talk ourselves out of it, we aren't going in the right direction, changing from just in case learning to just in time learning.

Leaning out to the things we don't need so we can lean into and go deeper with the things that are going to help us get to where we want to go.

Learning from the right resource at the right time for the right reasons.

Because mentally, we're still treating information like it's a valuable food source.

If you think about like caveman days, right?

If you find a food source, you hoard it because you might not come across another food source for a while.

So you like, you hoard it so you can get as many calories as you want.

And for the longest time, more information equals better, right?

If you knew more, you were the smartest in the class and you were most likely to be successful.

The more information you had, the more valuable valuable you were.

But now, times have changed.

In fact,

it is a commodity.

And we are at a buffet line of information now, Nicole.

And not only are we, because of the way we were brought up, stuffing our plates full with all the information we could ever need.

I mean, this because when we're in the car, we have to be listening to a podcast or we have to be listening to an audio book.

Every spare moment we have, we must learn something which actually can over-inspire us.

It gets us actually to pull ourselves away from the commitments we've already made into something else.

And we get confused, we get overwhelmed.

And even though we have have access to all the information we could ever need, more than ever, and it's not slowing down, many people feel even further behind than ever before.

And so it's about navigating this world now and finding the right information from the right people and utilizing it and understanding some principles like failing is a part of the process.

And no, you do not want to be perfect because you'll never get started if you attempt that.

To collaborative efforts in learning, to the idea of learning through teaching, even though you might not know everything, by teaching it, it'll better help you understand things and so forth.

So there's a lot of principles in the book.

And it's not like a revolutionary sort of way of approaching.

It's almost a way to go back to how things used to be, which is if you imagine like a blacksmith, right, learning how to become a blacksmith, they didn't sit in blacksmithing school for four years and then finally put iron to the fire.

They got in there on day one and felt the heat.

They maybe burned themselves a little bit and they had a master person telling them how to do this, a mentor to teach them.

And I feel like there's a world in which in the tech heavy space that we live in now, there is a combination.

There's some sort of mold of the two-the way things used to be in the apprenticeship model with the amazing tech that we have today.

And unless we get in front of it, we're just going to be feeling left behind because information is not slowing down, that's for sure.

Hold on to your wallets, money rehab will be right back.

And now for some more money rehab.

It's such a good articulation of what I have long felt, right?

You see so much inspiration on social media, on podcasts, on whatever.

You're consuming it.

You're like, oh my God, I need to do this and I need to do that.

But you end up not doing much of anything because you're so overloaded.

And I see this with people in their finances too.

They start investing, they get overloaded with information on like advanced options, moves, derivatives, trading, Forex, and they just don't make a basic trade for an index fund.

It's a big distraction from nailing the basics.

You know, and sometimes the simple, mundane approach can be the best because you're actually finally doing something.

For example, my dad is doing a lot of treasury bonds right now, which might not be the most aggressive and it might not be the most fun for some people.

But man, he's getting returns and they're guaranteed.

And he's building even more of a bankroll now as a result of that and just kind of putting it back in, which is interesting.

So this idea of finding the simple way and asking yourself, if this were easy, what would it look like?

That's a question that is a guiding principle inside of the book that actually came from Tim Ferriss.

If this were easy, what would it look like?

We often try to overcomplicate everything whenever we try something new.

And again, because we have access to all of it and we're not only at this buffet line, right?

We are getting force-fed stuff.

Because as soon as you start looking up, this is the hard world we live in now.

You're on YouTube, you're looking up something like investing in some regard, Forex or whatever.

And then immediately the algorithm says, oh, you're interested in that?

Here is literally everything else in and around that good, bad, ugly, maybe outdated, maybe not.

I don't know, but here's more of it.

And you're just like getting force fed.

And we have to learn how to, you know, what happens when you eat too much?

You get tired.

Yeah, you are in info besity is a real thing.

So let's clearly define just in time information and just in case information.

Sure.

So basically, Google is always going to be there for the information that we're going to need.

It's not going to be scarce.

So are you saying essentially that the way to avoid distractions is to identify what's just in case information versus just in time information?

The method is to figure out sort of number one, what's your North Star?

Where do you want to go?

It's important to have direction, right?

Because if you don't have direction, you're kind of wandering aimlessly.

So having some sort of goal or something you're working toward, great.

You have that.

But then reverse engineering to the very next step that you need to take, whatever that next step might be.

And and then finding the right resource for that very next step,

not worrying about the next steps after, because you have to trust that that information when you need it will be there.

And not only will it be there, it'll probably be even better and updated because you didn't absorb it before you needed it.

There's going to be something new and better and more relevant by the time you need it.

So I'll tell you a story.

When I started my business in 2008, I got laid off from my architecture job.

I started an online business to help architects pass an exam called the LEED exam, very specific niche exam about green buildings and sustainable design.

It was just an exam that I had just recently passed and it was information I knew about.

So I posted it on my website, started to get some traffic.

I was like, oh my gosh, this is great.

And I was told that I should write a study guide or publish an e-book for this audience that was on my website.

And I was like, great, okay, I'm going to start a business.

I'm going to sell a product.

My first inclination, Nicole, was to go to business school, to literally delay the action that I could take to start generating revenue for the thing that I was taught, which is I need to learn everything about business.

I need to go, I need damage.

By also expending the revenue.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

Of course, $40,000 a year to go back to business school in Berkeley, just so I can do what?

Go back and just start building a website or whatever.

So number one, I didn't have the money to do that.

Number two, I needed to make money sooner.

And I had moved back in with my parents to save money.

It's like I was moving backwards in life.

I wanted to move forward.

So I need to take action now.

So then I said, okay, well, if I'm going to publish an e-book, what are all the things I need?

I need to write this book.

I need to format it, a cover design.

I need to learn how to sell a digital product online, which I had never done before.

Then I need to learn how to write a sales page.

Again, even just like focusing in on this, getting very overwhelmed with the entire process.

Oh, there's so much here.

But I knew that nothing was going to happen if I didn't have this book at least written.

So I said, okay, all those other things that I just said, I'll worry about them when the time comes because I know there's stuff available that can help me with that.

But for right now, I just need to write the darn thing.

So if this were easy, what would it look like?

I just opened up Microsoft Word and just started dumping my notes in there.

And at the end, it was messy, but it was all there.

And I said, okay, great.

Now I need to know how to format this thing and make it look nice.

So I went on YouTube and found that there was a way that I could take this really long essay style looking book and turn it into more of a horizontal landscape style with blank areas so people can write like a workbook.

And in two days, I had it done and it was beautiful.

And I was like, great, I have this product now.

Already at this point, I was getting more motivated than ever because I was already chipping away at the process, right?

I didn't learn all the things and talk myself out of it.

I was already making progress.

But then I needed to know how to sell it on a website, which I had never done before.

Well, guess what?

I had a friend who had done that before.

And I just asked him, hey, what tool are you using to do this?

And he said there was this tool called eJunkie, which no longer exists, but it allowed me to upload my PDF file and get back a button that I could put on my website.

And I did that in 20 minutes.

I was like, oh my gosh, I'm almost there.

But now I need to know how to write sales copy.

And oh my gosh, sales copy and copywriting is such a huge thing.

Do I need to go to copywriting school?

Do I need to invest in all these things?

No, again, if this were easy, what would it look like?

Well, it just so happened that there were a lot of people who had shared their frameworks for sales copy and sales pages.

And there was a book called Moonlighting on the Internet that I was pointed to.

And this book is 300 pages, Nicole, of all the different ways that you could make money online back in 2008, everything from like eBay to whatever.

I didn't need any of that.

I just needed the appendix in the back.

that had a Mad Lib style sales page where I can plug my product, my features, and my benefits.

And that is still today the sales page that is used on that website, which has now earned over $1.5 million from selling what started out as a $19 e-book, now a $29 e-book on that website, helping architects.

And it's purely passive.

I haven't touched it in years, and it still continues to generate revenue every single month.

Not because I learned all the things and then implemented it, but by iterating and going and learning as I went and finding the resource when I needed it.

That's some smart passive income right there.

Yes.

So for those who want more advanced lessons, you also recommend putting a for later system in place.

What does that look like?

Part of the idea of lean learning is realizing that you will be bombarded and probably are already being bombarded with a ton of amazing things that are out there that could potentially one day help you.

From articles on social media to whatever gets put in your inbox to algorithms telling you you should watch this or that.

And you have to take control of what your brain will focus on, because if you don't, you're going to get involved in all these different rabbit holes and you're going to go nowhere.

Well, the psychological reason why we absorb everything is because of FOMO.

We're fearing missing out on something.

When we see this article and it gets a lot of likes, our social, just innate humanness makes us want to see what everybody else is seeing too.

So we have to have discipline.

So instead of FOMO, there was once a strategy people used to counter that, the fear of missing out, called Jomo.

Joy of missing out.

Right.

My favorite.

I don't like that either because it felt like I was just pretending.

Yeah, I'm going to be happy that I'm not seeing what everybody else is seeing.

No, that's kind of false, right?

So I found the, there was a compromise that works even better.

The joy of opting out,

meaning I see that, I recognize it's there.

And guess what?

I don't need it right now so that I can say yes again to the thing I've already committed to the next step, to the thing I've already said yes to, right?

It's like.

Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde when she was studying for the bar exam to go to Harvard And all her friends were at the frat parties and sorority parties and she's sitting there and she's disciplined enough to study for the exam so that she could go to Harvard and see her ex-boyfriend and try to get him back, right?

She's not happy that she's missing out on the party, but she's disciplined because she said yes to this and she had motivation to do it.

Well, she's happy because she had the choice.

I feel that way all the time.

I'm like, joy of missing out.

I honestly don't really want to go to your party, but I do want to be invited to it.

Yes.

And we are always invited to the party of other people's content, always.

But it's up to us, like you said, to almost in a way, be proud of the fact that you know what is important and that you're going to focus your time and effort there.

That is something to be proud about, for sure.

And is this like a folder on your phone or computer or how are you organizing this for later?

You know, I didn't get specific because everybody has a different way to do it.

For some people, it's Evernote.

For me, it's Evernote because I'm an old school Evernote user and I just kind of for later put it in there.

So this is how you get around this.

It's okay.

Well, this is coming across my feed.

I will put it away for later.

I will save it in a bookmark bar.

I will put it on in Notions, very popular right now for putting these things aside.

However, the funny thing is, most people never go back to them.

Because again, by the time you need that kind of information, there's something new and better available.

And so what this is, it's literally just a mechanism to help you move forward.

It's almost like tricking your brain.

Yeah, it's there.

So now I don't have to worry about it.

And then you're never going to go back and worry about it anyway.

So again, just like a little hacker or mental trick you could use.

Yeah.

The Instagram reels that I save for later, I rarely go back.

There's rarely a later.

Yeah.

The ones that I only go back to later are the ones I'm like going to my wife to and I'm like, you got to watch this thing.

Oh my gosh.

K-pop demon hunter.

Whatever.

Oh man.

I really love that this has so much application to personal finance.

There's also the idea of voluntary force functions.

Can you explain what that is and how it relates to financial function?

So a force function is a situation in which you are now motivated to do something.

And for me, for example, when I got laid off, it was a force function for me to learn my way into entrepreneurship because I couldn't get a job and I needed to make money.

A voluntary force function is you purposefully putting yourself in a situation to have a little bit more pressure to then take action, to learn about something.

So, for example, speaking of Tim Ferriss, he once had a show in Apple.

where he was quickly learning how to do things because he talks about that kind of stuff in the four-hour work week.

And a lot of my book is inspired by him.

And he and I have a relationship together.

I helped him start his podcast, which is really cool.

And he had a show in Apple where he would have to learn how to do something because there was some event that was going to happen where he'd have to use that skill.

So for example, in one of the first episodes, he had an interview on a news channel in the Philippines.

So they were going to speak Tagalog to him, which is the national Filipino language or the main one.

And he didn't know any Tagalog.

He didn't know how to speak it.

So, of course, there was this force function now that he volunteered himself into where he was going to have to figure out how to learn how to speak to Galog because in a month's time, he was going to be asked questions and didn't want to embarrass himself.

So force functions, voluntary force functions come with a deadline.

There's some added pressure, but there's a reward on the other end that you can be sure that when you unlock this or do it, you will be able to do it.

For me, in the book, I talk about how saying yes to a friend who was putting on an event who asked me to come speak at it.

Even though I was deathly afraid of public speaking, I'd said no to every opportunity, but because this was my friend, it was his first event in 2011.

I said yes to it.

That got me to finally learn.

And actually, it gave me almost sort of boundaries around how much I could absorb before I finally had to take action.

The problem is when we don't have a deadline, we can always put things off till later, yes, but we can always over-learn our way into things as well.

Versus, okay, I have this date where I got to speak on stage, so I need to learn quickly so I can implement this and do this.

The other thing that Tim did in that episode is he ended up moving in with a family that only spoke Tagalog in the household to, again, put himself in a situation where he just was kind of forced to learn.

Of course, he did.

You know, Tim is just like that.

He self-experiments all the time.

But when you speak to people who learn languages quickly, a lot of times things like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone work, but it's when I moved to the city and I just had to learn how to figure it out.

And I did it because you're forced to.

You had no choice.

Another example of this is, for example, and I'm sure there's parallels with personal finance, but and this is more in a hobby that I have, which is with, I love to go fishing.

There's a particular bait bait in fishing called a jig, which is like a big hook with a skirt and you like move the line and it kind of makes this movement.

It's really fun, but you can catch a lot of big fish with it, but it's very hard to fish with.

There's like a skill that comes with fishing a jig.

And every time I tried to fish with a jig, I would always go, okay, 10 minutes in, no bites.

Okay, I'm going to go back to the thing I'm used to.

And I'd get fish there, but I wouldn't get fish with a jig.

So it was just like confirmation bias.

But one day I said, I want to learn how to fish with a jig.

So I'm going to go on this boat and I'm going to take no other lures with me.

Literally, I will only have a jig.

And so I started fishing.

10 minutes later, same feelings.

I'm so bad at this.

Let me go back and change my.

Oh, wait.

I can't change my bait because I literally have no choice.

What am I going to do?

Go home?

No.

I'm going to stay here and do this.

Hours go by.

No fish, but I finally got a bite and I ended up landing two fish that day.

And now the jig is my all-time favorite bait.

I start with it now because I have unlocked that confidence that came from forcing myself to use that and having no other choice during that time period.

So, how many fish did you catch?

I went fishing yesterday with my son at a lake here in San Diego.

He caught 25 largemouth bass and I caught 31.

So, we had a really good time.

Did he use his own money for the bait?

He used daddy's bait, but he's really getting into fishing.

I think when he moves off to college, I might gift him some of my poles so that he'll have them with him for life and for whoever he wants to fish with, too.

Lovely.

Teach your son how to fish, pay his dividends

for many years.

Probably some of the forcing functions also apply to how you've set up their own finances now that they're on payroll.

With 25% is all they get and party's over until next paycheck.

Yeah, and they've experienced that.

They've maybe overspent and they have other things they want to do.

They want to go to Universal Studios with their friends.

We don't pay for that.

And if they have no money left, I'm sorry, this is a lesson you have to learn now.

Maybe you could have saved a little bit more or spent less on your K-pop merchandise and you could have had some more room here.

But, you know, money is not unlimited.

So you have to be smart with it and take these actions.

And again, to teach them at this age in a thing that is lower risk is great so that they can understand them for more high-risk situations down the road.

Oh, it's so important.

Are you teaching them what to do with the, or are you directing what's in the Roth IRA?

I'm directing that currently, although my son is 15 now and he's getting really interested.

He has seen me do pretty well with some individual stock investments and choices that I've made from NVIDIA to other things.

Now, the markets are hot right now.

So, kind of anything you pick is a winner, but he's been getting interested in asking questions.

So, I'm kind of showing him insider look at my own portfolios and stuff.

And I'm kind of, I will pass the baton when he's ready to make those choices himself.

Although, right now, we're in the SP, basically 500, as sort of a general index fund for growth, and it's working pretty well, at least again in the current market.

But how cool is that that he gets to learn that?

I'm assuming, I don't know you well enough yet, but I'm assuming you weren't investing in SPY VOO when you were 15.

No, I was investing in Jinko jeans and trying to be cool so that everybody would like me back at that age.

I admire my son for how little he cares about what other people think about him.

I cared a little too much when I was a kid, I would say.

But no, I wasn't learning these sort of,

not even close.

It was only after I got my architecture job at 21 that I started seeing some paychecks come in and having some surplus money to put somewhere.

And I remember the first time I had learned about investing in this kind of manner, it was a luncheon meeting with somebody from American something or other company.

I can't even remember the name right now, but it was basically one of those luncheons where they pitch you, you get free Mexican food and you get pitched this sort of work with us for your portfolio.

And I didn't know what I was doing.

And so I went with this person and years went by and I did make some money, but also I realized later on, once I started learning about this stuff, that I was paying him way too much in fees and that I had to start maybe learning even more and taking a little bit more control.

And that's when I started to get really into personal finance blogs.

I was subscribed to, I think, like 20 or 30 of them back when RSS feed readers were a thing.

Some of my favorites were Get Rich Slowly with JD Roth, Simple Dollar with Trent, and a few others.

There was one called My Money Blog that I admired so much because he was the only one that was very open with exactly how much money he was spending and on what stocks and stuff in his portfolio.

Like he was opening up his portfolio for everybody, which nobody else did, which is what inspired me when I started smartpassiveincome.com to be very open with my businesses and share exactly how much money my architecture business had made and where that money was going.

Or if the business was down, like share exactly why it was down.

And over the years, be very open with how much money I was generating.

And I was sort of the trend center in the early 2010s for being open with finances finances as a business, online at least.

I love that.

I've also been pretty open with salaries and whatever.

And then made in books and things.

I think it's really important if you're basically preaching, be transparent, be honest.

Of course, I know.

Talk about it with others.

When we invest in a company, you know, we get quarterly reports to see how the company's doing to gauge as investors whether or not we should continue to invest in them or not.

And I think as a creator, especially somebody who's sharing stuff about money and something so personal, I can only follow suit and do that in the same way.

And I I don't have a stock, but I am a person that people are investing time with.

So I best be open with where I'm putting my money and kind of the realities of that.

And that has always kind of carried me forward.

And I think is a big reason why SPI or Smart Passive Income was put on the map in the early days.

Hold onto your wallets.

Money rehab will be right back.

And now for some more money rehab.

And I love the way that you're thinking about these frameworks, vis-a-vis teaching your kids about money to break this sort of financial literacy cycle too.

And I'm sure they're learning to bring it back to Pokemon just for a second about alternative investing.

Because in the world of alternative investing from watches to wine and trading cards and whatever, I'm sure Pokemon fits into that.

Oh, yeah.

Are they actually trading?

Are they making the money or are they working for you in a different way?

They are, but they're more of a buy and hold when it comes to the Pokemon cards.

They're not trading as actively or getting too deep into the market side of it.

For me, with them, especially with something like that, it's just collect what you love, enjoy it.

And my son more recently has gotten into, because he came to card party my event and he was with a bunch of people who were talking about this stuff.

And there's vendor tables and they're buying and selling.

They're negotiating.

All this stuff is happening.

He just got really excited about that.

So he went back into his collection when we got home and was looking up the prices and seeing which ones he could offload that he didn't like.

So trading the cards he didn't want so that he'd get more money to trade for the cards that he did want.

So that's kind of cool to see again in real time, real action here, because this is the kind of stuff that happens with other assets that you might have as an adult from the house that you sell to buy the new house or the cars that you have or other sort of valuables that you may be collecting, jewelry, whatever it might be.

I'm actually in the middle right now.

I'm halfway through a survey because I'm redoing my estate planning, something that's very important to me, especially now.

The kids are older.

It's been 10 years since I've done estate planning.

So I have to update everything.

New businesses have come about.

New assets have arrived that I have to make sure are accounted for when it comes to my will and estate planning and avoiding probate and all that stuff that comes along with that.

It's boring and a lot of it's scary because I'm talking about, okay, well, who's going to pull the plug?

I used to avoid those conversations, but they're really important because peace of mind is very valuable to me.

And that's something that I think a lot of people who are into finances ultimately want, which is peace of mind.

And when I speak to my students who are entrepreneurs, one of the first questions I ask them is, what's your number?

How much money would you need to make in a year to feel comfortable and have peace of mind?

And the number one answer is a million dollars.

It's always a million.

I always ask, why?

Why?

Why have you found?

Well, the answer I get back is just because it's seven figures.

We sort of romanticize this idea of having seven figures, blah, blah, blah.

And it's like, when we go into the calculations, what kind of house do you have or want?

How much do you need to live?

What's your current situation?

how far are you away what's the delta between where you're at now and where you want to be how much would that cost

the numbers aren't even half a million yeah that's exactly what i find too always

like 100 of the time what are you going to do with the million dollars i don't know maybe you need more maybe you need less like first figure out what you want and then figure out the price tag.

I hear the same thing though.

Exactly.

And when it comes to building a business to support that lifestyle, you want building a seven-figure business is totally different than building a high five-figure business, for example, or a low six-figure business.

And it's interesting.

A lot of the psychology just goes along with that.

But you have so many businesses now.

I do.

I have an invention.

I don't know if you knew that.

Oh my God.

It's called the switch pod.

It's a tripod where the legs kind of fold together so you can hold.

Again, just something I was curious about.

And so like the way I divide my time, it might think I'm scrambling everywhere, but the way I do this is 80% of my time is dedicated to things I've already said yes to, things that I know I have responsibilities for.

So smart passive income, getting on the podcast, running that business, all the things there.

And now Pokemon is partly included in that.

But 20% of my time, I call this the 20% itch roll because I've tried the do one thing only forever kind of Alex Formosi approach.

And it's like, I feel dissatisfied.

I feel unfulfilled when I don't have an opportunity to scratch an itch.

But if I scratch all the itches, I'm going to go nowhere and I might compromise the things that are really important that I already have going.

So this 20% itch roll allows me to have 20% of my time to just play, to be curious, to experiment, to scratch that itch.

And if you look at that on a weekly basis, it's like Monday to Thursday, do what I need to do.

Friday is play day.

And I look forward to Friday every time because I get to play.

I get to experiment.

Very similar to how in Google, the way that they run their schedule with their employees is 80% of the time is you do what's on your job description.

20% of the time, you get to create whatever projects you want and use our resources to do that.

And Gmail, for example, was one thing that came out of somebody's 20% of time.

So the innovation happens in that time as well.

So between 2017 and 2019, my 20% of time was the SwitchPod, which is this invention.

It took a couple years to get the prototype right and all this kind of stuff.

We went to YouTube conventions to talk to people.

And we launched it on Kickstarter in 2019.

And we made $418,000 in 60 days from a launch.

Now, I don't get to pocket all that money because the molds to make these things and manufacture them are like 75K each, but that business continues to run on autopilot now on Amazon and our website, switchpod.co.

And it's just, we have a third-party logistics company that we work with so that when a person buys it on Amazon or our website, it's completely hands-off.

It gets fulfilled automatically and we just get more money in our accounts every month.

And that's awesome.

And so that has then bought time back to try something else.

In 2020 to 2021 to now, the 20% of my time was the Pokemon thing, but it's done so well that I've, it might be like 60, 40 now, and I've taken myself out of my other business as much as I could to still have it run and still be me.

So having one additional thing beyond the important thing that I need to do is, has been really great in terms of a rhythm.

It does scratch that itch.

It allows me to play.

And the cool thing is if it were to fail, which it has before, but before the switch pod, I tried a software company and it completely failed.

It's still a learning process and it's not a complete failure because I'm absorbing these hits and I'm understanding them.

I'm becoming a better person because of these failures that I can then put into the next thing that I do.

You're the coolest.

I don't know about that, but my kids would definitely disagree with you on that.

You are the coolest.

Pat, we end our episodes by asking all of our guests for a tip that listeners can take straight to the bank.

It can be one, financial tip, Pokemon tip, smart passive income tip, anything we missed.

I'm dying to talk about.

Yeah, I mean, this is a tip that would be definitely relevant for a lot of Pokemon collectors, but I think anybody who's thinking about purchasing anything, this was something that was taught to me.

And it was to take your credit card, put it in a Tupperware full of water and put it in the freezer.

So that when you purchase something or thinking about purchasing something, you can't right away.

I've had a friend do that, yes.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

I didn't physically freeze my credit card, but I've mentally taken that example and it's been very, very good because a lot of times we are compelled to make these impulse purchases because people are so good at promoting their thing, especially on TikTok with TikTok shop now.

This is, it's insane.

By sleeping on it, if you will,

you can often save a lot of money because you'll realize that having that thing maybe isn't going to be as life-changing as maybe you thought because somebody said it was or made it look really good because they had really good copy or because they were really good on camera.

However, it can be a great validation for, yes, this in fact would have been helpful if I had it yesterday or if I had it coming already, then great, perfect.

You've put yourself through that filter and great.

enjoy it.

Be proud of that money you spent.

I've had to learn as somebody who grew up with not a lot of money around the household, not having access to a lot of things, to

understand

what my version of a

rich life is.

And different people have different definitions of that.

Like for me, for example, I'll be very, very cautious of purchasing many, many different things.

But then there's certain things that I'm totally happy to pay for because they make my life better in some way, shape, or form for me and my family.

For example, one thing that we quote unquote splurge on is valet at the airport.

It's just one of those things that I'm totally happy, even though I, on the surface, I might be overpaying for parking.

But gosh, by being able to just pull up to the airport, get out, and then when I arrive, text message the valet and then my car is there when I come back, such a headache gone because of that, that I'm okay spending that extra money for that.

Whereas I don't really care about the clothes I wear and that's fine.

And some people, you might care about the clothes and that's awesome for you.

So just knowing what makes you happy and what is your version of a life well spent is, I think, a great exercise.

And put it in the cart if you come back to it later and you really wanted to do it.

And I think having the access to anything, but not everything.

And again, just having that conversation with yourself and others around you on these purchases that you're making, especially if they're big ones.

I always worry when I have an impulse buy because I'm like, what's really pulling me in this direction?

Is it somebody else controlling the narrative and what I want to purchase?

Or am I actually in control of this purchase?

That's what I want to know.

So that's why the sleeping on it factor has worked really well for me.

I'm into it.

Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network.

I'm your host, Nicole Lapin.

Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie.

Our researcher is Emily Holmes.

Do you need some money rehab?

And let's be honest, we all do.

So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.

And follow us on Instagram at MoneyNews and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive video content.

And lastly, thank you.

No, seriously, thank you.

Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.