No.1 Money Saving Experts: Do Not Buy A House! Putting Money In A Bank Makes You Poorer!

When I grew up, everyone said to me that to generate wealth, get a job, get money, then get a mortgage.

That's one of the worst pieces of advice you can give somebody.

And your future self is going to be poorer because of it.

But that's what everyone's doing.

Because we're not taught this stuff.

So what do you think the biggest money mistake the average person makes is?

Being a saver.

So just having your money sat in a bank account.

Yeah.

It's a guaranteed loss to becoming poorer every single day.

But there are plenty of ways to retire early and be financially independent.

And that's including secret hack that makes people fortunes.

So let's talk about making more money.

This is the ultimate money-making masterclass.

As we are joined by three financial gurus with very different opinions and methods to build future wealth.

So I want to talk about pensions, credit cards, renting, bad money habits, debt, passive income, spending money to look rich.

But first, what is it that rich people know that the average person doesn't know?

Rich people are more disciplined, and they're doing the little things that compound into huge results like investing.

But for example, the average American spends more money on Netflix than they do on their investments.

And if I invest $1,000 a month for 30 years in something like the S ⁇ P 500, I will have about $1.9 million.

Or there's no asset in all human history that's ever generated as much wealth in a shorter spirit of time than Bitcoin.

There's one problem.

Bitcoin is high risk.

And if any of those risks happen,

let me finish.

Do you want to have hope that you have the Bitcoin, or would you rather have more security?

You can reduce risk.

It's our job to educate them.

So if someone is $1,000, what would you suggest they did?

I have a different take on this if you're trying to make more money.

I would...

What about bad money habits?

Because when when you look at the stats, money is the number one source of stress for Americans top in work, family and health.

There's a three-step framework, so I want to get into that.

Number one.

Just give me 30 seconds of your time.

Two things I wanted to say.

The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week.

It means the world to all of us.

And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.

But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app.

Here's a promise I'm going to make to you.

I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.

We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show.

Thank you.

I think the first place to start is people want to know how they can make more money.

Because if you you don't feel like you have money, saving and investing in these kinds of things appear to be pointless.

I also understand that that's not necessarily true.

I think you can start investing and saving with very small amounts of money.

But for those people that are asking that question, if they're listening to this now and going, how does one make money?

Like, you know, I've got this job.

I'm working a nine-to-five.

It's paying me £30,000 a year or $40,000 a year, whatever it might be.

Is the right question to be asking, how do I make more money?

And if so, how do I do that?

I always think it's, it's a combination of making more money and also saving more money, but let's talk about the making more money piece.

I think that everyone is unique in their own way, right?

You've probably spent more hours doing some sort of hobby that I have no idea about.

You play paddle, for example.

I've never played paddle in my life.

So let's say you were

Stephen from age 20 and you're a really good paddle player.

You can start to monetize this type of skill, which you have that I don't, but perhaps you know more than me.

I could take lessons from you.

Even if you're not, let's say, the pro paddle player that you are, I might still be willing to pay you 20, 25 pounds an hour for a lesson, right?

Just because you're naturally better than I am.

And so, I would encourage people to kind of lean into what makes them unique and where they've spent a lot of their time.

I think everyone has something that they're good at inherently.

Figuring out what skills you have internally and how you can kind of monetize those.

What do you think, Raoul?

I think one of the hidden things to do is you really are a function of who you're surrounded by.

Invest in your network.

And I don't mean that in a kind of cold-hearted, you know, I want to network with these people, but just surround yourself by people

who are also trying to push themselves to push their income, push their opportunity set.

And it makes it so much easier.

If you're the only one doing it and you're around a group of friends, you're the odd one out and you're castigated for it.

Find other people who want to do the same thing and you kind of help each other in that journey.

So at an early stage, that's just one of the key things is to find people who also want the same journey as you.

That really helps.

Then it's still about the best leverage of your skill set

and being honest with what your skill set is.

Just because you're a doctor, doesn't mean you should be a doctor.

Just because you've graduated, because you can do other things.

And it's figuring that out.

That's not an easy bit, but you figure it out over time by trying stuff.

You know, we've all done multiple jobs and we know what we're terrible at and what we've been good at.

And you kind of over-index on the things you're better at and that works.

So if you're early, it's the time to make bets in yourself and your network.

And that gives you the foundational tools to then earn more income and then invest more.

Was there a pointless, a seemingly pointless job you did that ended up in hindsight making you the most money?

And what I mean by that is I think about my experience doing telesales between the age of 16 and 19 as probably the most important thing I ever did.

Like not only do I spend a lot of time talking now, but sales is a transferable skill across raising investment, persuading employees to come and join you.

And I think there's nothing I did that was more important than telesales.

The single best skill you can acquire in life is to learn how to sell.

To be comfortable around people and to be able to get a message across is the single most powerful tool you can have in life.

Everything you do, finding a partner in life, doing anything you do is basically sales.

And it's all people.

It's all people.

So if I'm this 24-year-old and I'm a 25-year-old and I'm ambitious, I want something big,

you got to find more income.

You got to have more income to do it.

If I'm a 25-year-old and I just want to be okay, I don't mind my job.

I just want to invest, you know, whatever.

You got to find the right investments.

You got to have a system for your money.

And then you got to create a plan.

Anytime you get paid, you know how much money you're going to save.

You know how much money you're going to invest.

And then you spend what's left.

Because the difference between the person that becomes wealthy and everybody else is wealthy people save and invest their money first.

Everybody else, especially in America, I spend all my money.

I wonder where all my money went.

And then if there's anything left, I'll try to save and maybe invest.

And hopefully, I'll get rich.

For me, it's all around based around what is your vision of your future self?

How do you see yourself living?

Because that is what we do.

It's one of the sources of unhappiness is if your current state is not moving on the path of where your future self wants to be, how you imagine yourself.

So, practically and tactically, how do they do that?

How do they create this financial vision board?

Do they need to know certain numbers?

Should they get clear on if they want to be on a private jet or easy jet?

Oh, man, I think you know.

If you have to ask yourself, hmm, do I want to fly on spirit airlines or do I want to fly in a private jet?

I think you already know that question.

But is it important to be explicitly clear with yourself?

Because actually, if I think of most of my life, I wasn't entirely clear.

And so you either end up chasing

generally not a materialistic outcome.

It's generally an emotional outcome.

Yeah.

And that's why it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is.

But you need to position yourself in that future self and say, what does it feel like?

Do I feel secure?

Do I feel this?

Do I feel that?

So it's an emotional thing and not a material thing.

Is that central to a lot of this?

You talked about emotional elements, is being okay

with

what other people think of you.

Yeah, that's the other thing is social pressure, right?

So you may have the vision of yourself and you just say, I want the three-bed house, you know, with the little strip of lawn and your barbecue, and that's great.

And around you, people are like, you should try harder.

Yeah.

So they're questioning your own sense of happiness.

And society does that at scale.

And then even the whole media complex is about kind of how unhappy and how miserable you are and should be.

It doesn't make it an easy place.

We're talking about emotional and psychological barriers here.

How do we get over people not just being scared of what other people think, but so many people are scared of their own money.

When you look at the stats around avoidance, 82% of Americans admit they avoid thinking about their own finances.

And one in four Americans have avoided medical care because they're afraid of the bill and thinking about how much it might cost.

For Gen Z's, 67% of Gen Z and 58% of millennials say they avoid checking their own bank account because it's too stressful, which is compared to only 30% of boomers.

And in terms of mental health, money is the number one source of stress for Americans topping work, family, and health.

36% of people with debt experience clinical anxiety, 23% depression.

So people avoid their own money.

A lot of people avoid it because the financial world is full of jargon.

You need to go to a professional for advice.

That's what people think.

It's intimidating.

You don't feel like you've got enough money.

You're going to let them down, yourself down, your family down.

So there's this whole kind of thing around it.

It's the confidence that you can learn.

Because a lot of people say, no, no, unless you're from an investment bank or you're in a RIA or something, you can't do this.

But just a little bit of confidence to say, yeah, you can do this.

A simple tip that I think people can do is just kind of figure out how much they spend on a monthly basis.

Track your expenses for 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days.

And you're going to learn so much more about just your personal habits of what you do.

Because sometimes I'll forget that I door dashed something for $30, or I'll forget that $15 or $20 Uber charge.

And I'll just kind of file it away because I'm swiping my credit card.

I don't really, I'm not aware of it.

It's like if you're going to the gym and you're not aware of your weight, how are you going to, where's your starting point?

So I like to give people a starting point because then they can kind of have that small step to kind of start working towards their finances in that sort of way.

65% of Americans have no idea what they spent in the last month, according to the U.S.

Bank.

And 60% underestimate their monthly spending by a significant margin.

Right.

And that's exactly what I found.

I tracked my expenses for a month in 2014.

I thought I was spending $1,500 a month.

Guess what?

I was spending $2,800

and I wasn't making that much.

And I was like, how am I off by an order of magnitude of, I don't know, 60, 70%.

And I find that even like all my friends I issue this challenge to, most of them don't make it to the three months.

But I think as long as you have an approximation of what you're spending, that can help because that means then you're going to have a little bit of a difference of what you make and what you spend.

And then you can save that money.

And I think that's one of the bad money habits of Americans is they don't save, right?

So it's a really good point, which is a practical step to just heighten heighten one's awareness because you need to have sort of informational awareness of where you're at to even understand what you need to do to get to where you want to go.

So yeah, I think you need to start with the mindset.

You have to build the basics.

You got to get rid of the credit card debt.

You got to save a little bit of money, but you got to have some breathing room because investing is all about taking the extra money that you have, throwing it somewhere to grow that money.

And this is where there's a three-step framework that I'll talk about because there's a lot of ways to invest.

At the very simplest is I can be completely hands-off.

I can work with a financial advisor.

I can give them my money and they can do everything for me.

If you don't have a lot of money, you're not going to get a very good advisor.

But there's a con and a cost to a financial advisor, which is the amount of money you have to pay because they're going to charge a fee.

So if I invest my money, $1,000 a month with a financial advisor, I get a good financial advisor who beats the market.

They get 11% a year, but I have to pay 1.5% a year.

After 30 years, I'm going to have $1.8 million after paying hundred thousand dollars to my advisor stage number two is i can be a completely passive investor it's a little bit more involved than an advisor but i can just put my money into the stock market something like the s p 500 which is a group of the 500 largest companies in the stock market it's kind of like investing your money into the united states economy this has historically averaged 10 a year

which means if i invest a thousand dollars a month for 30 years, I will have about 1.9 million

A little bit more work than completely hands-off, but still pretty passive.

Then we have the people that want to be more involved, what we call is

an active investor.

And an active investor is somebody who now wants to invest their money themselves.

And I don't mean trading.

I mean actually investing their money.

And now I'm going to be doing the research.

to find which investments I want to own.

Maybe it's real estate that I want to own.

Maybe I want to invest in individual companies.

so it's more risk for more potential return a small edge can give you outsized return

because if now i don't get a 10 return i can get a 13 return which we're not talking about 200 or 50 returns a 13 annual return means that one thousand dollars a month over 30 years is now going to grow to three and a half million dollars so about 1.6 million dollars more than before just with a slight edge and you got to figure out how involved you want to be.

On this point of being an active investor and picking stocks yourself versus being a passive one, the data shows that passive investors who invest in the SP 500, like you said, consistently outperform most stock pickers.

Over a 20-year period, more than 90% of actively managed investors, so talking about funds there, underperform the SP 500 after fees.

So should people be actively investing or should they just put the money in an SP 500 and be patient?

I say most people should not be active investors.

In fact, I say 98% of America should not be active investors.

Just be a passive investor because if you don't want to put in the work,

if you're not willing to put in the time and the effort to research, you're probably going to lose.

And many people do.

So why do people want to be active investors if the probability is stacked against them?

Well, if you get a little bit better returns, if you're willing to put in the work, you can get better returns.

And it is possible.

We do see people that are doing it.

Is there an element of fun and entertainment?

Absolutely.

People like sports betting.

That's the problem.

Because the fun is I like researching versus, oh, I want to see my money go up tomorrow.

If I buy a house tomorrow morning, am I going to go into Zillow in the afternoon and check what is my house price?

Am I checking it in the evening?

What's my house price?

No, because you know that this is something I want to own for the long term.

Well, when I go into the stock market, because it's so liquid, I buy a stock in the morning, I'm checking it 15 minutes later, I'm checking at lunch, I'm checking it in the bathroom, checking it in the evening, and I'm getting anxiety because if it's going up or down, I'm very emotional.

And that's that emotional control as an investor, which is just as important as the research that you're putting in.

I see how fundamentally different all of this stuff is: people are so screwed.

They are coming out of university with massive debts.

We looked at the stat earlier off-camera when we were talking about the fact that

the percentage of 30-year-olds who have a mortgage

and are married has gone from 52% in 1950 to 12%.

Nobody can afford anything.

So if you look at the average millennial in the US and a Gen Z, they generally have a 401k if they've got a job, right?

They have some sort of savings.

But they're taking massive amounts of risk.

A lot of us would look at them and say, this is ridiculous.

Why are they taking risk for anyone that does it?

Because there is no way of closing the gap between buying, getting the deposit on the house, getting into a house, realizing that future vision of themselves.

however reasonable that is, it's so far away because

the cost of assets has gone up so much versus their incomes don't go up.

You mean the cost of buying like a house, for example?

Yes, or even however much percentage share of the stock market the average salary does, you know, stuff like that, that you're getting less for your money.

So your future self is automatically going to be poorer because of it because you could buy less of a house, etc.

Explain that to me like I'm an idiot, like I'm a like I'm 10 years old, and maybe in the context of this mug here.

In terms of the how, why is that worth less now, based on what you said?

The way of explaining it is

money is the medium of exchange, the thing that you buy something with.

If we all have a lot of money, we've all got a stack of cash on this table,

and you want to sell that mug, we can pay anything for that mug because we've got a stack of cash.

So that mug suddenly is worth not the $10 it's supposed to be worth, it's suddenly we're paying $150 for the mug.

Why?

Because that money has no value to us because we've got excess money.

So when you create excess money in the system, it's this debasement of currency.

It's an optical illusion that the value of assets are actually going up.

They're not.

It's the value of your money's going down.

And this is this pain point because your earnings

only grow with economic growth generally, plus your progression of your career or whatever it may be.

But those things, the scarce assets, are going up optically by the amounts they're lowering the thing.

So what you find is salaries go up at about 2% or 3% a year.

And

the cost of the SP is about 12%, 13% up every year.

And a house price is about the same.

Gold is about the same.

And that's because they're printing more and more money.

Correct.

Okay, that makes perfect sense to me.

So I'm imagining you'll have a big stack of paper in front of you, which you're using it to take some notes on.

And if I was saying, I'm going to sell you guys this mug for some of the paper you have there, but then my team said you guys can have unlimited paper, this mug loses value because you can all just offer a gazillion sheets of paper for this mug.

Well, it doesn't lose value.

It optically will give you a gazillion for it as opposed to

three sheets of paper because we've got so much paper.

It matters not.

So I'll be thinking, wow, like this mug, it's worth a gazillion sheets of paper.

But actually,

each sheet of paper is now worth nothing.

Correct.

Okay, got you.

And this is the problem that people are finding: they put money in a 401k, you compound it at 10%.

For my generation, yeah, that was how the world worked, and it was great, and it worked, and now it doesn't work.

So they need assets that go up 50% a year, 100% a year, which is ridiculous.

But luckily, we've been gifted a few.

And so that's helped.

Go on, say it.

Well, it's crypto.

Simplistically, it just outperforms all other assets, even with the excess volatility.

So Bitcoin, for example, produces about, since 2012, it's produced about 145% a year returns.

So that's 10x the stock market.

And that's including three 70% drawdowns in the middle of it.

A drawdown being a drop.

Yeah.

Boy, you feel like you're an idiot, you're losing money, it's all going to go, you know, you've made the biggest mistake in your life, and it recovers, and it keeps going because it's a technological network adoption model that's happening.

So it's just sucking in more and more people.

So there's now 650 million crypto brokerage accounts in the world, which is more than all the stock market brokerage accounts added together in the world.

And we're seeing it all around the world because everybody can buy a share of something.

So as opposed to being able to buy,

nobody can buy a Fifth Avenue apartment here,

everybody can buy a fractionalized share of Bitcoin, which is in theory a $100,000 asset.

But we can all put in $10, $5,

thousand bucks, ten billion dollars.

Let me challenge it then.

So,

Bitcoin isn't based on anything, though.

Okay, I'm being a fudder here.

That's my job.

Bitcoin isn't based on anything.

It is a database in the sky that isn't backed by gold, or it doesn't produce any sort of valuable asset as its byproduct.

So, why, how can we have faith in Bitcoin?

It's essentially, in its essence, before someone clips me, this is, I'm playing devil's advocate because I know they're just going to clip this part out.

It is essentially, many would say, a Ponzi scheme

which is it only goes up if other people take part in it and if everybody decides that it's

not worth anything then it's going to go to zero.

So all money is social consensus.

Everything.

Gold has no real value.

I can build a table with gold though.

I could rest some things on it and it's a good, it doesn't rust.

If you're building a table of gold, then the value is going to be much less if everybody's building gold tables.

Trump has to do with that.

We do.

That's true.

And so, really, it's just social consensus.

What do we as humans ascribe value to?

But the problem with the 145%, like you've mentioned, Bitcoin has fallen by 70 plus percent on multiple occasions.

Let's go back to the SP 500.

A lot of people invest in the SPY, the SP 500, and still lose money.

Why?

Because when

we go through any downturn, people panic and they sell.

And if we look at, I mean, Bitcoin's, I think Bitcoin's 2009, when it started, if I'm not mistaken.

If we look at the crashes from recent history, 2020, stocks fell by 30%.

Bitcoin fell by 50%.

2022, stocks fell by 20%, the S ⁇ P fell by about 20%,

Bitcoin fell by 60%.

So in those times, people who are in the S ⁇ P are freaking out, selling.

Yeah, but here's the thing.

This is the risk reward that people don't understand.

If you've got a time horizon, let's say the average drawdown in the S ⁇ P during

a bear market is 25%.

A drawdown being a drop price.

Yeah, a drop in prices.

You're getting compensated 15% of your returns for that at best.

In Bitcoin, the average...

drawdown over the same period will be about 70%,

but you're getting 150% return.

if you're on the winning side though

if I buy it and I can sell it for a higher price

just hold it that's the key all of these are in a nice trend channel they go up so anybody can buy something and hold it long enough it'll go up well what about let's look at housing we can say the same thing about housing 2008 housing crashed just hold it i have too much debt i'm underwater my bank's taking it from me people are buying bitcoin with debt yeah i mean that would

not recommend that but housing's different because you can endlessly create more housing.

And we have a demographic problem in housing that makes it more complicated.

Demographic problem is, A, everyone's leaving the cities now.

B, the generational gap.

Nobody can afford the boomer houses.

We don't have enough cheap housing for young people.

People are relocating, moving around.

So we've got a very interesting mismatch in real estate now that makes it more complicated than it used to be.

Absolutely.

And I do want to say, I think the part that we fundamentally differ is not that there's value in crypto.

I own crypto, but the difference between you and I is you are all in crypto.

For me, it's a speculative piece of my portfolio.

So I invest in my own business.

I have real estate, stocks, my speculative assets, and then a little bit of gold.

Imagine how difficult to replicate what you've achieved in your amazing career is for the average person listening to this versus buying one thing.

in your Coinbase account, your Robinhood account, and doing nothing.

There's no cost.

It's not like buying a house.

it's not like servicing all the stuff there's no debt involved there's nothing in theory but theory isn't reality how many people end up losing money when things go down how many people panic especially with bitcoin because if we look at especially the early adopters of bitcoin who are those people these are the people that

well a lot a lot of the average person is i want to get rich i want to get rich quick it's i want to make money fast Versus the average person who's buying the S ⁇ P 500, this is somebody who is, I want to invest and build wealth for the long term.

It's a very different mindset.

If the average investor of this is 32 years old, and we say, no, you need to invest for the long run, they're never going to have a house.

So their whole vision of their future selves is utterly destroyed.

But look, so it becomes a logical thing to actually take more risk.

It's logical for them because they've got nothing to lose.

So Bitcoin, you're saying, is 145% a year.

Yeah, and in recent years, as the trend rate of adoption grows, it's probably down to about 100% percent a year let's call it that for easy maths but now let's think about this just from a practical long-term perspective warren buffett is arguably the best investor in the history of time

he has averaged about 19

a year over the course of his decades making him a multi multi multi-billionaire and so when we compare a 20% return from one of the top investors in the world versus, hey, Bitcoin is going to give you 100% a year, there's some sense of

nothing.

So even if I'm wrong by 50%,

you still outperform Buffett.

To put it in perspective, Bitcoin since

2010 has done, I think it's about 90 million percent returns.

There's no asset in all human history that's ever generated as much wealth in the shortest period of time.

And because it's not a random thing, it's actually a technology and it's a network model of technology.

As more people use the network, and we see with Bitcoin governments buying it and asset management firms buying it and everybody else, you have this network adoption model.

And so what it creates is the same chart as Google or Amazon, all of these.

It just goes up in a log trend over time with some volatility.

So you've got a secular bull market, which means that over time prices go up for measurable, understandable reasons.

And it happens to be the highest performing asset of all time.

There's one problem.

And it's volatile.

The psychological thing, you're dead right about.

It's very hard when it falls 70%.

I've gone through three of those.

They're hard.

The problem is,

just like with real estate,

everyone has said real estate only goes up.

Well, how do you make money on that real estate?

You make money when you sell or you lose money if you sell.

Ultimately, this comes down to that.

You make or lose money only if you sell.

Well,

what about everything along the way?

And what if I need to sell?

during that 70% crash?

Because what happens during those crashes?

A lot of times people lose jobs.

A lot of times people lose their income.

A lot of times people need that money during that time.

And so now I'm desperate or I'm panicking.

There's two things happening.

And now maybe it's the end.

And I go in, and now I lose money thinking that I'm going to make all this money.

I think I can appreciate your love for cryptocurrency and your 100% concentration in cryptocurrency.

I'm not saying you're suitable for everybody, right?

I've got my...

the bottom of Maslow Harak of needs taken care of.

I've got houses.

I don't have debt.

It's easy for me.

I've got multiple sources of income that I can take that I'm not saying that for everybody but I can also understand why a 25 year old can do that too because they've got nothing to lose

but do you think that if a 25 year old puts their entire salary and savings into bitcoin and they lose it let's say they run through a 70 drawdown aren't they just putting themselves in a bigger hole for their future as well like

Maybe before there was a glimmer of a chance that they could buy a house, but now they can't.

The most important part of financial markets that's the least understood is time.

It's not just price, it's time.

So if you're 25 years old and you get wiped out, we've all done it.

We've all kind of screwed up and, you know, had to move home to our parents.

We've all done it.

You can do that several times when you're young and it's okay.

You just don't want to do it when you're 50.

At age 50.

You really, really don't.

You become more risk averse, generally speaking.

It just depends where you are and how much time you've got to take that risk.

But now, if I'm investing my money in Bitcoin or really anything, a lot of the value is what some people refer to as like equity.

I bought it for, like, I started buying Bitcoin when it was $3,000.

That other stuff is equity.

It's invisible money, which, in my view, is

theory.

It's not actual money in my bank account.

It's sitting there waiting for me to sell, hoping that when I go to sell, it's going to be a profit versus cash flow.

If I buy a dividend-paying stock.

What's a dividend paying stock?

Some companies have big profits.

For example, McDonald's has billions of dollars of profits.

There's three things that they can do with that cash.

They can save that money for an emergency.

They can take some of that money and reinvest it and open more stores and create better burgers.

Or the third thing that they can do, which some companies do, not all, is they can just give this money away to their investors, the shareholders.

It's called a dividend.

So it's a cash payment for doing nothing except owning that investment.

So if I buy something, whether it's the ETF stock or whatever, that's paying a dividend or a rental property, that's putting money in my bank account every single month or year, that's money I can use to buy food, go on a vacation, do something.

Here's what, let me tell you, getting paid four percent.

Listen, so

I started buying Bitcoin at three thousand dollars a coin

when it was at I went through multiple crashes.

I remember when twenty thousand dollars of Bitcoin was the, oh my God, we did it.

And once they hit around 70,000, I looked at this and I said, wow, I have my real estate, my stocks, my speculative, which is crypto and startups, and the 2% gold, which is now looking extremely inflated.

I need to lower this.

That way I can have some more income.

So what did I do?

I sold some Bitcoin about rental properties.

That now rental property is putting money in my bank account every single month.

The Bitcoin, it's a big number on paper, but it doesn't actually mean anything unless I do something with it.

Could you have staked it, which means you can stake the cryptocurrency and make a monthly yield from it?

You have a loan against it.

Now, that's adding risk.

Well, what happened to if I take a 80% loan, 70% loan,

it's very volatile.

So let's take a 50% loan and Bitcoin falls by 70%, which it has.

Now I'm underwater.

Now what?

Now the bank comes knocking on the door, margin call, you're forced to sell, and it's a foreclosure point being on my Bitcoin.

I mean, I don't disagree.

And really speaking, people should have the ability to have cash flow or cash for if things go wrong, right?

That's really a super important thing to be able to have a long-term view, to be comfortable with drawdowns, to be able to invest in startups or to invest in crypto or technology and all of this stuff.

That makes sense.

But I just don't think a dividend at 4% makes any difference to anybody.

Well, it does if you do it consistently, month after month, year after year.

You need huge huge capital to start with.

It's worthwhile.

No.

If you start investing for a dividend income, I call it a decade of sacrifice.

And this is why it's so hard.

Yeah, but if you're 33 years old now, you're sacrificing until you're 43.

You're going to become 43 at some point.

And imagine if you're 43 and now you have the income to pay for that car, to pay for the house.

You don't have to worry about it.

Well, do you want to have hope that you have the Bitcoin or would you rather have more security?

Again, bitcoin in my perspective high risk high potential return and i'm not saying don't buy it i'm saying allocate it in your portfolio in a way where you understand

you are arguably one of the top crypto experts in the world

i'm not

i also am not the stock expert in the world i'm also not the real estate expert in the world

What I don't know is I'm probably going to be wrong.

If my stocks crash, I have my real estate.

If real estate crashes, I got my stocks.

Crypto crashes, well, that's part of my speculative portfolio.

I really don't care.

And if everything crashes, I got some gold.

So for me, I have to diversify against myself because I know stocks crash.

I know crypto crashes.

I know real estate crashes.

But if you're not starting with a lot of money,

your strategy is the strategy of a rich person.

Oh, I've got houses and I've got dividends and I've got some gold and I've got a bit of this.

That's the strategy of being.

being able to do that.

But I didn't start with all of those.

I didn't start with all those at all.

I started with one.

Where did you make most of your money?

Being an entrepreneur.

What was an entrepreneur?

Taking obscene risk.

I did.

That was me.

Mentally taking obscene risk.

But if I'm making $50,000 a year, the first step, let's assume now I'm putting $5,000 aside, $7,000 aside a year.

I can take high risk, high-potential return,

or I can be conservative or a hybrid.

And not everybody should be taking all the risk

because

Bitcoin has risks.

And again, I'm telling you to somebody who owns it, the government could come in and change policies on Bitcoin.

Quantum could change Bitcoin.

People could stop caring about Bitcoin.

And if any of those things happen and all my money is in this very speculative asset, I'm the one that's carrying all the risk.

So if you, if someone has $1,000 in disposable income to invest,

what would you suggest they did, Humphrey?

My take on $1,000

has changed over the years.

I used to say you could invest $1,000, but as Roll probably mentioned, 10% on $1,000 is not that much, right?

So like, you know, if you invest $1,000 in the SP 500, you get 10%.

Next year, you'll have $1,100.

That $100 is not going to change your life dramatically.

So if I had $1,000, I'm investing in myself.

So trying to improve my skills to make more money at some point.

How exactly would you do that?

When I was still coming up, I was trying to take a lot of courses online.

So, I try to figure out different types of skills that I could use in the marketplace.

So, I took an AdWords course back in the day for like $150 that taught me how to do Google AdWords.

And I would try to consult for businesses out there to try to make more of an hourly income on the side.

And Google AdWords, for anyone that doesn't know, is Google's advertising platform.

Yeah.

And now there's TikTok ads and Facebook ads, but anywhere where I could be more of value to another business, I knew that economically speaking, that I could command more in the marketplace.

So something with that, like that would be great.

So right now, clearly, that is AI.

Because what you saw there is like a knowledge arbitrage with a new technology where most people didn't understand AdWords, and you could be the young guy bridging the gap for people's ignorance.

So most businesses now would be

dramatically more efficient and effective if they understood even the basics of AI.

Yeah.

So a kid could take a course in AI.

And do you know what's crazy?

If you read the top 10 books on AI, you'd be in the top 1% in the world in terms of knowledge.

Yeah.

I mean, if you just read the instruction manual of how ChatGPT or Quad works, you could probably be in the top 1% of prompt engineers, right?

And

that can be a value to a business or service, right?

That's probably where my career came from was we were the kids 18, 19, 20 years old that knew social media because we'd messed around with it.

So we sold it to companies.

Right.

And that started my first business.

And then there was soon hundreds of us.

And there's a lot of these apps right now coming out from 18, 19, 20-year-olds.

Have you seen that one profile of that guy who created Cal AI?

Cal AI is this app where you take a photo of your food and then it sends it to AI and it tells you how many calories are in it.

Well, the guy's making 50 million bucks a year or whatever it is.

Yeah, I saw that this morning, funnily enough.

For $4 million a month, he's making from a...

Basically, it's an AI wrapper, obviously.

I think he has some...

you know, secret sauce that he puts into it, but a lot of the kids these days are using AI to try to leverage that and try try to turn them into businesses.

I do want to say, though, I think with $1,000 and with what Jess Spreet said, I think you can still make a decent income.

If you can make a decent income, you can start to slowly save and invest your way to some sort of semblance of retirement.

I think you can still be able to retire and be financially independent without having to, let's say, bet your life savings on crypto.

I know that I personally bought Bitcoin at $100, but I've sold it many times.

I bought and resold it so many times because when it's up 10x, you're like, oh, like, you know, if you would give me a 10x return when I first bought it, I'd be like, yeah, I'm taking that any day of the week, right?

And so I think that's why it's so hard.

It's like Bitcoin does produce 145% return since 2012, but in 2012, no one knew how to buy it.

I bought it on some random sketchy website.

I got this like, you know, this string of characters for my wallet.

And I tried to buy, you know, I tried to buy a coffee at a cafe in Palo Alto.

And I didn't know that Bitcoin transactions took 30 minutes to go through.

So I sent Bitcoin twice for a $5 coffee.

Now, keep in mind, this is 0.1 Bitcoins, right?

This is 10K for $200.

It's an expensive Bitcoin.

I sent it twice and then didn't get it.

And guess what?

I still had to pay for the coffee with my debit card.

So where do I

go?

You spent what, 20K on coffee?

I spent 20K on coffee.

Yeah, that could be the title of this video.

I spent 20K on coffee.

Yeah.

I literally was, I sent it to Koopa Cafe in Palo Alto if anyone wants to go there.

I think the average person, psychologically speaking,

it's really hard when it goes down 80%.

And if Jasper says you need money, like at that moment, you're going to sell it.

But your point about, I mean, the primarily important thing is income.

Yes.

I mean, and that, and we talked about it last time I was on the podcast.

It's like, how do you just leverage the same skills in different ways that you can earn more money from it?

Like the story I was told when I left university was speaking to a friend of my dad's, he was like, well, what are you going to do?

And my father was in marketing and I liked marketing.

And

but it was like late 80s Wall Street thing was going on and I'm like well I'm thinking about either going to work for somebody like Mars do marketing you know great company or or go and work in the city in London and the guy looked at me and said it's really simple Ral it's the same job you're a salesman in both one you get free Mars bars and the other you get free money and you realize oh there's actually arbitrage in what you can do with the same skill set.

Well, I would say there is a point.

So I agree.

If it was me with $1,000, I'm going to go out and invest in my income, read some books, get whatever I got to do, go start something because that's enough.

But if we look at time, $1,000 compounded is decent.

If you go back 1971.

But how do I pay for my college loan and my house deposit and I want to get married and have kids?

Well, you're telling me I can't do that.

and for another 20 years.

If I took $1,000 in 1971, I invested that into the S ⁇ P 500,

and I did nothing else, I keep doing whatever I'm doing, my job, and I only invest $1,000, and I never invested another penny again.

Today, that would be worth, if I reinvested my dividends, about $330,000.

And I never invested another penny after the first $1,000 investment.

Why?

Because the S ⁇ P 500 has grown by...

a little bit over 10% a year from 1971 to now.

It's something.

Now, imagine if I invested $1,000 a year,

thousand dollars a month now I can't say that about Bitcoin because Bitcoin didn't exist 50 years ago I can't say that about Bitcoin because Bitcoin didn't exist 25 years ago and so how about Amazon what about Amazon that's that started trading in 2000 or even better Facebook 2012

how do I not invest in it because it wasn't around it hasn't been around as long as gold I mean it's been Facebook has been around less than Bitcoin has

short of time creates a profit it has a tangible value that you can see and feel because I can go on to Amazon and order myself a brand new guacamole set.

They'll be there in two hours.

You wouldn't make a single profit until what, 2018?

Well, but that wasn't that wasn't because they weren't producing a value.

It's because they were growing so aggressively.

So you think if you had $1,000, you should invest it in the S ⁇ P 500?

Well, I'm not saying you should.

I think personal finance is personal.

I think if it was me, if I have $1,000 extra and I'm just trying to figure things out, I'm going to go buy some books.

I'm going to buy a class.

I'm going to do something about how do I increase my income, going back to what you said.

But if I'm saying I just want to work my job, I don't want to go out and do all that.

I would do half into the SP 500 and I would go half into individual companies.

So more risk than the SP 500, not as much risk as the Bitcoin.

And the reason why I would do this is because this is something I enjoy.

I like that research side of things.

And I understand this is something that I could see.

returns with like you talked about amazon like you talked about microsoft and whoever there's potential and what about you humphrey if ten $10,000, does your strategy change?

My strategy is a little probably more conservative or traditional.

It's probably 90% index funds.

So tracking the SP 500 and then 10% speculative.

And my whole goal for that 25-year-old would probably be to get to $100,000 as quickly as possible, because at that point, I think they have more options and flexibility, and they're able to kind of use that capital to maybe take more risk after that savings.

That's still 10 years with the SP.

Well, eight years of the S ⁇ P 2008.

About 7.84 years, yeah.

But that also assumes that they're only doing the 10,000 bucks a year.

Maybe they can save and invest a little bit more.

That'd be nice.

But I think for a lot of people in America, if they can get a guaranteed $100,000 in 7.84 years, I think a lot of people might opt for that.

So I agree, but I'd remove the S ⁇ P.

You do all crypto.

No, I just do NASDAQ.

Oh, yeah, you do NASDAQ.

So NASDAQ compounds at 18% a year.

What is NASDAQ?

The NASDAQ is

the NASDAQ 100, which is the top technology stocks in the United States.

We live in a world that tomorrow will be more digital than today, guaranteed.

And so therefore, these stocks tend to generate the most performance.

And we've talked about many of these names.

That is all in the Nasdaq.

So a little arbitrage is if you want to shorten your 7.8 years

to five and a half years, six years,

buy the NASDAQ 100.

It's an ETF.

Zero cost, easy.

And then I would say, and then do 70% that, 30% crypto.

And you don't have to care about anything.

You're fine.

Now, if you have a different risk tolerance, you can tweak those dials.

Or if you are more

risk-averse, then you up your cash dial or some other more stable flow, whether it's gold.

Although gold is still driven by the debasement of currency, they're all the same thing.

They're all driven by the same macro factors.

But so, yeah, similar kind of idea.

And the NASDAQ is great.

Let's just say one thing.

But just like with Bitcoin, the difficult part with the 18% is you got to be willing to go through the downturns.

And I want to make sure that that's clear because, I mean, the big drop, 2000, the NASDAQ fell by 78%

from its peak.

During that time, the S ⁇ P 500 fell by 40%.

So it's a bigger drop.

Not to mention, the NASDAQ didn't get to its level until 2015, 15 years later of no money.

It has still compounded more returns than the SP.

Absolutely.

If you held on

15 years ago,

100%.

It's got to be in the risk-adjusted returns versus the gains.

But how many many people can hold on for 15 years and say, year one, no big deal.

Year two, okay, year three, year five, it's going to go up.

Year 10, it's going to go up.

And by the way, year 10 was also another crash because

all you have to do is dollar cost average.

What's that?

So dollar cost averaging is if you're young and you've got a bit of excess cash now, you've sold your income a little bit, as opposed to just chucking everything in, or you do, you put your large sum in, you've saved up your 10 grand, but now you've got maybe $500 a month of free capital you want to put into your savings.

So when you have these drawdowns, you're actually keep buying.

And what happens is it lowers your average cost over time and you get to new all-time highs in your portfolio much before the market is.

So for example, in the last crypto down cycle in 22,

in 22, All I did was add as much as I could to my crypto.

So I was at new all-time highs in my portfolio well before the market was because I'd lowered my average entry.

That compounds your profits over time incredibly.

And is there something psychological there where if you commit to the habit of just putting $500 in regardless of what happens.

You remove emotion.

You remove a bit of emotion from it.

And the emotion is the thing that people struggle with.

If you're investing in things that are more volatile,

you firstly understand that you will see larger drawdowns when markets go down.

Usually they're all correlated.

They all go down at the same time, all up at the same time.

So you're going to do that.

But if you tell yourself, that's an advantage for me because I can buy more, that's a secret hack that makes people fortunes, compounding.

This is Warren Buffett's thing.

I 100% agree with that.

More companies in a bear market than in a bull market.

I agree.

Yeah, I will 100% agree with that part.

I call it poop.

Panic leads to overselling, leads to opportunity, leads to profit.

So I am on board with that.

But that requires a specific level of financial sophistication.

No.

Even your Coinbase app can just, you can see.

Can dollar cost average.

But how many people can dollar cost average down 70%

for 15 years waiting to see that?

It wasn't 70% in 15 years.

It was 70% in one year and then rallied ever since.

Every single year after year after year, it went up.

And you had it down.

Well, no, after the 2008 crash, the NASDAQ also again crashed more than the S ⁇ P 500.

And then step back and look at the returns of the NASDAQ first.

I agree.

Over the long term, it's a great investment, but volatility is hard for the average person who doesn't have the emotional IQ and the financial sophistication to understand.

That's

our job to educate them.

Yes.

Our job is to help people in this journey

and not get them to make decisions that compromise their future.

We have to help them.

I agree.

And risk-adjusted returns and time horizon are two of the single most important things.

And so, what I hear, I mean, through history, contrarians have made the most money.

And also, I think the other thing that I've really pulled out from what you both were just saying there is you need to set up a system that removes emotion and requires you to not make decisions.

Because it's in making decisions that your amygdala, the emotional center of your brain, is going to make a bad one.

And it's that, I think that self-awareness emerges from what you were both saying, which is, okay, my brain is going to panic.

It's going to poop or whatever you were talking about there.

And I need a system which is panic proof.

So, you know, that the best performing brokerage accounts in the United States are dead people.

That's true.

It's a known fact because they don't do anything.

So they have these accounts that haven't been closed and they're inactive.

They outperform all the active people.

You are 100% in crypto in terms of your investment portfolio.

Yeah.

So you must be sat here thinking that

actually, when I asked that $10,000 question, what should someone do with $10,000?

You must be thinking that the right answer is to put it into crypto.

The right answer for me is that to his point.

But you

look, I actually would say,

but, you know, this is

an audience of people and people misinterpret things.

Yes.

The answer is we've been given the gift of the greatest performing asset.

the world has ever been given.

That's not just Bitcoin.

It's the crypto complex.

If you're very careful in investing in like top projects, you can even have a more broader diversified portfolio of that.

Like you've had Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, SUI, all of these things, great.

They will definitely outperform for a period of time.

And that's based on macroeconomic factors, which is the debasement of currency, which we've talked about.

That means all of these assets go up by a certain amount and some outperform it.

The only two assets that outperform the debasement of currency is the Nasdaq and crypto.

This has been a persistent trend that is observable and measurable.

So this is not a speculative asset.

What it is, is a Metcalf Law adoption model.

Bitcoin is the adoption of, let's say, a money or collateral layer, like digital gold, we'll call it, while the rest of crypto is the new rails for the internet.

So it's a technological investment.

It is growing at twice the speed of the internet in terms of adoption and has been since the first 5 million IP addresses for the internet and the first 5 million wallets.

Twice the speed of the internet makes it the fastest adoption of any technology the world has ever seen, aside from AI now, which is now outpacing it.

If we sit here in 20 years' time

and you were wrong,

what happened, do you think?

Well, firstly, in terms of investments, you have to always, once you have a high conviction bet, your entire job is to question yourself, not to keep reaffirming yourself.

Sure, you end up reaffirming by questioning and then you figure it out.

For it not to have been true, true what would have happened

the ai would have had a new system of money that it created this there has to be a competitor to this because we're now in the game of nation

nations are acquiring this the middle east nations nations in asia the u.

wants to acquire it so we've got and we've got south american nations so it's now the game of nations geopolitics this is real thing

but what changes in 20 years time well in 20 years time we're in a very different world the economic engine is driven by robots and infinite intelligence

we don't know how the economic machine works we don't even know what the value of money is when we go into that world so i've talked about this before the economic singularity past 2030 the economic model breaks down

so the the economy generally grows by a measure of population growth, how many people are in the economy, or or coming into the economy or being born, productivity, how much output they create, and then debt growth is the other lever.

What's happened here is the population of the entire Western world plus Japan, plus China, has been aging.

So the rate of change of population growth is shrinking.

They tried immigration, but that became politically unacceptable.

So that stopped.

So you've got this slowing economy.

GDP growth has been slowing over time.

Productivity, old people make less things.

So it makes less economic output.

So we've got this mess, and then we've got this debt.

And we stopped that whole engine in 2008, and we need to service this debt.

So, okay, so that's the system we're in, and this is why we're printing money to service this debt because we're not generating enough output in the economy.

But after 2030, this population part changes.

We've got infinite

artificial humans.

You're talking about AI agents and robotics.

Yeah.

Infinite.

So what does that do for that

the multiplier of that formula, you know, population growth plus productivity growth plus debt growth?

It breaks because you're going to have 20% GDP growth because you've had a huge rise in the number of AI agents creating economic activity and robots.

And so what does that mean for me as an average person?

For me is like

the economic system starts changing.

We get to this world of abundance.

We don't know what has value.

What we as humans do,

we change and retool to become more humans because ai and robots can't be humans so we have to figure all of this stuff out investing we were talking about this earlier is like well does the the age i is that going to be a better investor than any of us yes artificial general intelligence yeah so that's the next stage where it's smarter than any human that's ever existed and we're very close to that so in which case well how do markets work and when businesses are agents selling stuff to other agents, where do we play a role?

So all I'm saying is my job, my whole life has to be to look into the future, sort of 10 years out, and try and probabilistically understand

paths.

Here I get to like 2030, and it's like a dark curtain.

Just to flip that for a second, how could AI actually positively influence your hypothesis?

I'm very positive about AI.

I think humanity will come out of this just fine.

I think economic growth that explodes is

we can work a way of accreting it to humans or society or whatever we want to do with this.

I'm not an AMI doomer.

Specifically on Bitcoin's value and price, how could AI make it even more important?

Well, in the end, an AI is a

it requires two inputs.

It requires...

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs is basically two things, compute and energy.

And it needs to be paid.

These agents can't, you can't build all this agents of billions of agents running around doing things without paying for them.

And agents will use agents.

So they will, one agent will get another 10 agents to do all this task.

They're all going to have to be paid.

And the way of doing that is using crypto rails.

Stable coins.

Whether it's stablecoins, whatever it is, but that whole crypto rail, you know, all of this new infrastructure for the internet, the blockchain, that's where it works.

Often the difference between a company succeeding or failing isn't down to its product or strategy.

It's down to the people on the inside.

After all, the definition of the word company is group of people.

And some of the best companies in the world have been largely built by A players because I'll let you in on a little secret.

When you hire an A player, they go on to hire more A players and it perpetuates.

The challenge is finding those first few A players.

I found the majority of mine on LinkedIn who are a sponsor of this show.

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Talent with the necessary skills and culture fit that I'm looking for.

Whenever I've paid to promote a role on LinkedIn, I've been able to hire faster and of course, better.

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The reason I went and got my phone is because

I had someone contact contact me that i knew from my childhood used to be one of my best friends frankly not spoke to them in 10 years sent me a text message and

the text message they sent me is

i wanted to get your opinion on this because i i said i ended up saying to him listen i'm not the guy to ask about this i think you've misunderstood who i am

hi mate i hope you're well i got myself in a bit of trouble with some debt about 40,000 pounds.

So more than a bit of trouble.

I'm after some advice and direction in terms of maybe passive income slash an avenue to try and work my way out of it.

Is there some material I should be reading, watching that you might know of?

And I asked him, I said, what kind of debt is it?

And he said, personal loans and credit cards, mate.

And I said, like, how, I need to ascertain how urgent those debts are.

and if it's causing any immediate issues and he said well they're not super urgent but as a result of the high monthly outgoings i'm a month behind my mortgage payment this month so it like is, but it's not because I don't want to keep being in that position moving forward.

It's costing me circa £1,000, £800 a month in repayments at the moment.

And I can't get a consolidation loan.

It's a perfect storm starting because I've just started a new job and my partner is on maternity leave and I have this debt mountain.

It's starting to affect my family if I can't pay the mortgage.

you know so i've got to change moving forward and figure out what to do.

And you're the man to ask for advice.

I was like, fuck me.

I'm not like.

And then he messaged me again within an hour and said, hey, sorry, man, if you're busy, just wanted to nudge this.

Then messaged again an hour later because I was on a flight and said, hey, I really need some help and direction, man.

I'm quickly running out of places to turn.

He's kind of in a hard spot because £40,000 in debt.

with the interest payments of, let's say, your interest rate is 15 to 20%, that starts to spiral out of control a little bit.

Like if he was under £10,000

in debt, it's a little bit more manageable.

But at 40,000, the interest starts to compound quite quickly.

So, you know, you said he had a mortgage.

He might even have to consider moving, selling, selling the home to at least get the interest payments under control or like reduce that amount of debt.

It's kind of one of those situations where you just need to reduce every single expense possible and start really pouring all your money into the highest interest rate debt that he owns.

So like, you know, you can rank your interest rates of all your debts from highest to lowest and start, start at the very top, right?

If it has 22% interest rate, you want to get rid of that first because that's what's killing them.

At those levels of debt, it's really tough because I think a lot of people consider bankruptcy at that point just to kind of clear that amount of debt, depending on what his income is.

I've known, let's say, a waitress or a server that had $50,000 in credit card debt and just unable to get over it because the interest payments were as much as their salary.

So in those cases, unless you can get a personal loan from, let's say, a family member and kind of clear that debt, you're in a really tough spot.

Reduce your expenses as much as possible.

Put any extra money you have towards that debt at the highest interest rate possible, the first, the highest interest rate thing, and then consider selling some assets if he has assets.

Bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy.

When should someone consider bankruptcy and what's the trade-off?

The trade-off is seven years.

I believe your credit is shot in America.

But I believe that

actually, I think if you pull up a chart, someone sent me a tweet the other day of like bankruptcy lawyer searches in America on Google, and it's like been kind of like going up into the right, which is not a great thing.

Bankruptcy, just, you know, there's different types of

bankruptcy that you can file for, but I do know that it usually clears some, if not all, your debt, and you basically have to start over.

But as a result, you lose a lot of your privileges, like, for example, no credit score.

I read some stat, and you might know if this is true, but I read a stat that

it said something to the effect that people avoid going into bankruptcy because of the stigma associated with it.

But when they looked at the financial performance over 10 years of people that did go into bankruptcy, those that did typically were better off than those that tried to avoid it for the next 10 years.

So, yeah.

I don't know.

That could be anecdotal.

I don't know.

That's tough because if you have $50,000 in debt and you make $50,000 a year, it's

different.

Bankruptcy in some ways is a good thing because it forces forces you to do crisis control.

It's like your expenditure, what you're doing, everything becomes hyper-focused.

Like you led in the beginning with about

how people should look at their expenditure, right?

When you're $40,000 in debt, you've not been doing that.

Correct.

And bankruptcy actually forces you to actually discipline that for an extended period of time where it becomes a habit.

So, Stephen, that's why they outperform in the end because you've created the habit that you talked about right in the beginning of this discussion.

Yeah, so I just found the stat here.

It said, yeah, this is one of the uncomfortable truths in finance.

And the answer is often yes.

Those who file for bankruptcy end up in a better place long term than those who try for prolonged periods of time to avoid it.

And the research shows that people who file for bankruptcy typically get their debt wiped out and cleaned.

And they removing unpayable debt.

And bankruptcy can bring immediate mental relief, removing the crushing stress of unpayable debts.

People who avoid it often live in chronic financial stress, which spills into their health, relationships, and work.

So, in short, those who face bankruptcy head-on often recover faster and end up in a stronger position than those who keep limping along, trying to avoid it.

And I think somebody who's listening who may be in a similar or the same situation ultimately wants to know how do I get relief.

Bankruptcy is one option, but at the end of the day, there has to be change.

And that change is difficult.

And that's the part that I think a lot of people have a hard time talking about or comprehending.

There is relief, but it comes with severe, extreme, and quick sacrifice.

What do I mean?

Number one, you got to cut back your expenses as fast as possible in that situation.

You have to sell as much stuff as possible.

I mean, bankruptcy obviously works, but you also lose your house.

You also lose other things along with it.

There's a lot of emotional toll with it.

You have a family, you have a kid.

I mean, it's also a big reason people end up getting a divorce.

So it can also impact your life life in many different ways.

So you have to make extreme sacrifices.

And I mean, get rid of the Netflix subscription, not because it's just costing you $15 a month, but because the average American is spending more than two hours a day watching Netflix.

And if you're in that type of situation and you're spending two hours sitting there watching whatever the heck is on Netflix, how do you sleep at night?

You shouldn't be sleeping eight hours a night.

You better be getting up, going try to get some more money.

I don't care if it's Uber.

I don't care if you're working at McDonald's.

Find some extra money and learn how you can earn some more money.

And I mean, it sounds harsh, but the reality is if you want extreme change, it's not going to happen without extreme change.

So, could he sell his house, do you think, assuming he's making the 50K, which I think is probably accurate, having a vague understanding of his job and where he lives, et cetera, sell his house and then move and rent an apartment?

Would that free up capital?

I mean, that would alleviate his current problem immediately, sure.

He says here, after some advice direction in terms of maybe passive income, this word passive income, I know,

stretches nuts.

Why does it drive you nuts?

It is a, there's like a passive income industrialization complex that is, I mean, it is literally every millennial's dream is, I'm going to get passive income.

And it doesn't exist.

We talked about property.

Property is the least passive income you can imagine.

It is awful.

Every time I've tried to rent out property, there are so many costs.

Everything goes wrong.

It's just endless.

You're paying fees.

And people think

there's a magic passive income.

Everything comes with effort.

There is no such thing as returns without effort.

That's even robbery comes with effort.

There's no way of making money without effort or risking something.

And so when you're 40 grand in debt, how on earth do you think passive income is going to rescue you?

But he's seen that.

on TikTok and on Instagram.

Oh,

we're our millennials in our 30s and we're now living in

Lisbon and we've got passive income from our house it's like it's bullshit it's socio social media dream that doesn't really exist and that's never going to save him from 40 000 pound debt passive income can exist

the perception of what it is is the problem i am struggling with money i have no money i got bills to pay I need passive income.

And that's not how it works.

That's not how it works.

The way it works is

you take extra money, right?

I'm going to work and I'm saving and investing some money.

I take the extra money that I want to put my two investments and I can put it into an asset, an investment that can pay me for owning it without actually working, without going to work to own it.

Now, let me ask you about your real estate because I got to keep coming back to you, man.

Did you manage your real estate yourself?

Or did you have a management?

I'm both.

I've had a management agent and a management myself.

Managing yourself is probably an absolute nightmare.

That's horrific.

And managing it with a manager is also probably a nightmare just in a different scene.

Yeah, because your yield is massively reduced as well.

It is reduced.

And then you take the trade-off between whether you're going to do short-term lets or longer-term rentals.

And

there's the volatility in the short-term lets that you don't know what your yield is going to be.

Long-term, different as well.

Then you've got the tenants and how bad the tenants have been and the damage that they've done.

By the end of it, you walk away and think, really, it just wasn't worth the effort.

Well, I would disagree with that part.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, people can do really well out of property.

The work in real estate investment is learning the process.

When I first started investing in real estate, it was a complete nightmare and it was not passive, anything close to passive.

It was a nightmare.

What you don't know when you start is that there's a good property manager, there's also a bad property manager.

How do I find good property managers?

By going through a lot of bad property managers and learning that process.

And that is a painful process, a very time-consuming process.

But when you do have the right team, it can be extremely passive.

So I invest in real estate.

What kind of properties are we talking about?

Single-family houses and multifamily apartments.

And do you have lots of them?

Not lots, but I have a decent amount.

And how much of your portfolio is in buying properties and then renting them out to families?

50%.

And what do your returns been like over year over year for the last decade?

So the way I look at returns, when I look to acquire property, is I want 7% cash on cash on the money that I put in.

So when I look at return, I don't care about equity.

We talked about this kind of a lot: that if I buy a house for, let's just call it $100,000 and it goes up to $200,000, I don't care.

My goal when I acquire real estate is not to sell it and flip it for a profit.

My goal is to grow the cash flow that I'm generating month after month after month

from rental payments.

It's really difficult, though, because if I, as someone that hasn't done a lot of property rentals and stuff like that, the chance that I'm going to fuck up.

Absolutely.

So did I.

And I'm one of those people that probably screwed up

more than I can count.

It just cost me a lot of sleep, cost me a lot of stress.

So you have to kind of be an expert.

You don't have to be an expert, but you've got to be willing to give

in the beginning, right?

For the first number of years, it was extremely painful.

But today, when I go and acquire a property, I will look for the property just like I do research on a stock or whatever I want to do.

I do the work to research a property.

In today's economy, it's much harder, not not impossible, to find those returns.

Acquire the property, hand over the keys to the property manager, give them the goals, and now I oversee the manager because I have a team now that is

a business.

It's like starting a startup.

But it's not like starting a startup.

Why?

Because starting a startup, when I work at my company, I am working in my company and I work a lot of hours.

So I'm meeting with my employees.

I'm leading the meetings.

I'm coming up with ideas.

I'm leading the vision.

With this, I acquire, I hand over the keys.

I've already set the framework and now you are doing the execution.

That's a mature business.

With my company, there's hundreds of people in the UK.

But you're not the one that's starting that startup.

I was the founder.

And now what have you done?

You've acquired more employees to get there, which is what you did with your property owner.

It's much harder to do that with a startup, though.

How big does a startup have to be in order to be able to displace you as the CEO, to pay for the staff, to make the money, and then to hire a new CEO and to lead it the way?

Depends.

My friend Ash, who was just with me last week in LA, has four people in his startup.

He's out in LA right now in my house in LA with my girlfriend and my other best friend who's still there.

And I watched, he's in the hot tub right now.

I know that because every day at the same time he goes in the hot tub and then they go for this hike and my girlfriend sends me photos.

What he's done is he's set up a team of four people.

They do personal branding on LinkedIn for people and they're running it back for him in the UK.

He's up in bloody the mountain with my girlfriend right now.

That's beautiful.

But how many startups don't dig it there?

No, but I'm saying they start a business.

You described it to me.

I was like, oh, that's just, it's just a business.

It is a business.

It's a steep learning curve to develop expertise.

And then you put systems in place to make it sustainable.

But the systems are kind of pre-established where

you need to rent it out.

You need a good manager.

It's going to find a good tenant.

They got to pay the bills.

And it's not like a startup where I have to innovate and create an idea.

I don't have to go out and build the blueprint.

I am going out.

I'm acquiring an asset that people already need.

It's already existing.

And then I'm going to put use to it by having somebody live there or use it.

And then there's a team just maintaining it.

So what do you think then in terms of passive income?

And

is it real?

But specifically, let's do this point of housing.

Do you advise people to buy rental properties and then generate rental fees from them as a source of income?

Well, you just heard Jasper read how much work it would take.

So I generally don't advise people to.

to get into that business just because of the steep learning curve.

And not everyone is built for that.

And not everyone has capital for that.

So if you're just trying to get started and actually make some money, I just think the stock market is the most liquid and easiest place to get started.

I personally rent and I plan on renting and just instead investing the difference of what my mortgage payment might be in my rent.

I think in on the coasts like San Francisco, New York, I think Miami, that might actually be the more reasonable thing to do.

I was reading a New York Times article that just came out yesterday and it said more millionaires than ever are renting in the United States and that it's tripled between 2019 and 2023.

So in just a couple of years, millionaires are choosing to rent more than ever before.

What's going on?

My guess would be a lot of the millionaires are probably living on the coast because they invest a lot or they have higher paying jobs and maybe it's slightly unaffordable for them to buy a house in say San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.

In the New York Times article, it says they're choosing flexibility and liquidity over ownership

and they don't want to to be bothered with the inconveniences of home ownership, which includes paying a real estate tax and insurance, especially in markets like Florida and California, where we're seeing a lot of natural catastrophes.

Yeah, so the U.S.

is a peculiar market because there's this high real estate tax in owning real estate.

So all the time your returns are being reduced by that you pay.

So whether it's like 1.5% or 2%, whatever the number is.

There's that and then there's the other real estate taxes that come on top of it.

Interest rates have been high they've been high for a while now

so a lot of people have just been priced out of the market just in interest payments but now because of mortgage payments are here the difference is actually with the rental is a lot of rental people aren't trying to cover mortgage costs because they own the property outright so you get cheaper rates so it's to do with price the US economy's not been super strong yet at Main Street level Wall Street's had a great period of time but Main Street hasn't so people don't have excess earnings yet so i think it's a function of that but it's probably a larger trend as well

i think also it's understanding what the opportunities are i mean there's a lot of flexibility with renting i mean i finally bought a house in 2025 i've been renting before this so you bought your first property to live in with your family this year for yes me to live in was 2025.

why didn't you do it sooner

well because when i was renting i could take the capital and buy other rental properties by other investments so it was uh it made more sense for me to put that money to work somewhere else so is buying a property as a means to generate wealth the terrible idea as a means to generate to buy for yourself to live in or to well but you know when you when I grew up everyone said to me that you get money get a job then you get a mortgage and so like that's what you did that's one of the worst pieces of advice you can give somebody but that's what everyone's doing that's still what the vast majority of people are doing and i know that because i look at i look at my friends that um don't have the same financial advice that I have from like my brother and my financial advisors, my accountants.

And the first thing they do when they get a bit of money is they go and get a mortgage.

And

that's because that's what their parents did.

And that's what everyone's always done.

Is that a good idea, Raul?

Yes and no.

No, I think

these days with how the economy has been set up, don't forget when I was 24, 25, I was working in an investment bank.

I wasn't the highest paid guy there.

I was a 25-year-old.

And to buy my first flat in London was three and a half times my income.

That equivalent flat and the equivalent income is 12 times.

So rent makes much more sense now.

And you might as well invest, buy all the stuff that you think will drive returns.

But a house, a primary house, is not an investment, never will be.

Because once you buy it, you don't sell it.

You don't realise the equity.

Maybe your kids do.

if you've got kids.

So it's not an investment, but it can be an investment in your future.

But there's like some optical illusion going on here because when I think about renting, I go, well, that money, I never see it again.

But with buying a house, I'm paying into it.

So it's like me depositing the money in a piggy bank.

So logically, of course, renting is wasting money.

It goes to someone else, I never see it again.

But that's not exactly true.

If you go out today,

I buy a half a million dollar house, I put 20% down.

So I put $100,000 down, I finance $400,000,

I get a 6.5% mortgage.

30 years, my mortgage payment is $2,500 a month.

Now, what am I doing?

I'm not renting.

I'm not giving money to my landlord.

I'm building equity in my property.

But banks also understand the same game.

They front-load your mortgage.

What does that mean?

When I pay $2,500,

it's not $12.50,000 going to principal to build equity in my house and $1,250 for interest.

It's

buying your house back for yourself.

It's not half and half.

It's almost all interest.

In fact,

if you go out and buy the half a million dollar house today at a 6.5% mortgage, 20% down,

for the first 20 years of that mortgage, more than half of that payment is going to go directly to your banker's pocket with interest.

It's not until you're 21 that half of your $2,500 payment is going to go towards equity in your house.

So it's all interest, zero equity, and then slowly it moves like this.

It takes 20 years to get there.

And then what happens along the way for a lot of people, for

not everybody, for a lot of people, is along the way, interest rates go down.

I need some extra money.

So what do I do?

I refinance.

As soon as I refinance, that amortization starts all over again.

And so now I'm paying all this interest again.

And my real equity that I'm building is not there.

This is why I say it's not bad to buy a house.

I think it's great if you buy a house, but don't treat your house like, like you said, don't treat your house like an investment.

Treat it like an expense.

Buy it because you can afford it, because you want it, because you're ready, but not because you're going to build wealth.

I agree with both their takes.

I think that,

you know, a home is an asset that you can't sell very easily.

So that's also a good thing.

Like if you have $100,000 to put into stocks or $100,000 to put on a down payment and you know you are just such an emotional person that the moment that the stock market goes down 2%, you're selling.

Probably better to buy a house, right?

You can't really sell your house in the top of two swipes.

But in terms of an investment, it's like usually it's much more than investment to people.

They buy them for a psychological reason or emotional reasons or the sense of security.

So, I just say, like, if you're interested in buying a house and you can afford it, then that's great.

Yeah.

And let's actually go with the best case scenario.

So, like, I think you were mentioning this.

I buy a house for, let's call it half a million dollars.

It goes up in value to a million dollars.

Oh my God, I'm rich, right?

Well, it's invisible, but but yeah, I could take the cash out refinance, but now I had to pay all that.

But here's the problem.

You now own a million dollar house.

What does that mean?

You have to pay property taxes on a million dollar house.

So you got to pay a lot more property taxes.

You have to pay insurance.

on a million dollar house.

And so now if you pass this house down to your kids, great.

They got a million dollar house.

But if they can't afford the property taxes or the insurance on a million dollar house, now they have to sell it.

Well, insurance is one one of these really hidden costs that you don't realize.

Particularly if you're in a hurricane area like Texas or Oklahoma or something, suddenly your house insurance costs are prohibitive.

On top of the taxes you pay, people don't think about that.

So, Jasper, you're saying buy Bitcoin, right?

Go all in.

You're one coin away from everything.

Zero cost.

They've just clicked that.

Clip that.

That's gone viral.

But no one at this table would adopt buying a house as a wealth creation strategy.

No.

You would all do many things before then.

Yes.

Correct.

Would that be almost at the bottom of the list of things?

Part of its age cohort, who are you talking about?

If you're kind of like 38 years old, you've got a kid, you kind of cleared up some of your student debt payments.

Okay, that security thing is fun, but it's not an investment.

Anybody younger, just know.

Yeah, if you're just talking pure dollar investment returns, I probably would rank it lower on the list for sure.

Is there any such thing as good debt?

Because I remember at the start, you said clear up your debts.

Is there a good debt?

People make a lot of money on debt,

but people lose a lot of money on debt.

I just try to stay away from debt altogether.

Yeah.

I mean, I think,

yeah, there is such a thing as like good debt if it's working for you and you're able to leverage that money to make more money.

But a lot of people, you know, with leverage comes a lot of risk.

And I know a lot of people got wiped out because they took on quote-unquote good debt, right?

What's leverage?

Leverage is, is so for example in jazz breeds example you put 20 down on a house and you take an 80 the rest of it as a mortgage that's technically leveraging your money because you're taking the 100k that you have and now you're affording an asset that's 500 worth five hundred thousand dollars if your home goes from five hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars you have a five hundred thousand dollar gain but you only put in a hundred thousand dollars so technically your profit or your return percentage is much higher it was leveraged by that debt that you carried Well, I don't think most people know that they can leverage their crypto.

That's right.

You can borrow against it.

So anyone can.

You don't need to go to a bank.

No, you can do it instantaneously in what's known as decentralized finance.

Or there's a whole bunch of companies that do this.

Well, you can borrow against your assets.

You can even do it against digital arts.

I mean, I'm a huge digital art collector.

Much like the art market, you can actually go and borrow against the value of the art, maybe 40, 50% against the value.

Explain this to me super simply.

For someone that's never even bought a Bitcoin before and is thinking about potentially buying one, but they would also like some way to have a little bit of cash.

Look, I don't like it.

Okay.

I understand why, but the issue is you've got an asset that does this.

It's volatile.

It's very volatile, and you're borrowing a certain amount against it.

And you don't know whether it falls below that value and you get liquidated, then you've lost all of your Bitcoin.

The whole game is if you're in a secular bull market, it's don't lose control of your tokens.

Own your Bitcoin all the way through and you have a risk of screwing that up for the extra 5% income or 10% income.

In Ethereum, very different world because you're staking.

So you're getting naturally rewarded in the network.

What does that mean, staking?

What it means is in Bitcoin, you actually get

miners basically get rewarded for solving the algorithm, the computation.

In Ethereum, and Solana and SUI and the other big blockchains, you basically get rewarded for securing the network.

So you stake your tokens to secure the network because the more people then have this network connectivity between them and you get paid for that.

So in Ethereum right now, it's probably 4% yield.

Okay, so just I'll try and summarize this like a 10-year-old.

But there's no risk in that.

You're not getting leverage in that.

So if I choose to buy Ethereum, which is a form of cryptocurrency, I can take my $100,000 of Ethereum and on my phone in a couple of clicks, I can move it, I can press a button and move it so that it is staked and when it's staked I am basically using my Ethereum to secure the network to make the whole thing more secure so it can run properly and in return they'll give me four percent of it as a payment every month

well not four percent a month but monthly payments monthly payments of four percent annualized yeah

so you can you can get interest on your crypto yes

and then if you're a little more sophisticated, a little bit racier, there are then yield enhancements.

And we talked about high-yield bank accounts.

There's high-yield versions in crypto, and you can get up to 20%, 30%, but now you're taking risks.

And I can also loan against my Ethereum.

So I actually did this at one point.

I don't do it anymore, but I had 1,000 Ethereum and I put it.

I took it $1,000 or $1,000.

$1,000 Ethereum.

Yeah, fucking.

Yeah, I know.

I actually switched it into Bitcoin a little while ago, so a couple of months back, but probably bad timing.

This is why Melanie.

That was terrible timing.

You should have called me first.

I know.

Fuck.

But yeah, people are emotional.

I had a loan against it.

So I borrowed a couple of million dollars at one point to buy some more other crypto assets against my Ethereum.

And it was surprising to me that I didn't have to call anybody.

I didn't have to ring a bank.

I could just...

click a couple of simple buttons on my phone.

And this 1,000 Ethereum I had, I managed to get a couple of million dollars paid straight away in cash, straight to me.

But I I chose not to do that because the markets are super volatile.

But it is an incredibly efficient, effective way of people,

if you were to, let's say you had $100,000 of Bitcoin, one Bitcoin, to borrow $20,000 against it.

Yeah.

That's not very risky.

Or $5,000 against it.

Or $5,000.

Whatever it is, it's not very risky.

Or if you're in a different currency where you can stake it, very little risk, very, very little risk.

It's like lending to the US government, i.e.

lending to the government of Ethereum, the Ethereum network.

That's a pretty decent way of enhancing it's hard to do that with stocks.

It's hard to get a loan against your stocks if you have

$5,000 of stocks, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's typical.

I mean, when I was younger and I bought $10,000 of Facebook stock when I finally got some money,

I couldn't see a simple way of taking a loan against my Facebook stock.

It wasn't until later when I had a private investment bank in Europe that my private investment bank were like, do you want 50% of your blue chip stocks as a loan?

Yeah, it's probably usually reserved for people with more assets.

But I do want to push back a little bit on the staking yield.

I do understand it's 4% virtually risk-free, but there are always going to be risks with the price of Ethereum, right?

So like you're getting paid in Ethereum.

And so this is a key thing, right?

Your risk is the currency you're staking it.

So if Ethereum goes down 50%, then your fiat value of Ethereum

of your stake could go down versus if you're getting a 4% high yield savings account, it's backed by the FDIC.

It's virtually this risk.

And there is another risk as well is Ethereum is actually annual staking.

Oh, I see.

And most of it is being done via a few businesses like Lido, which are turning into short-term staking.

And so there's a duration mismatch that has some elements of risk in.

Sorry, go ahead, sorry.

I was going to say, when do you get paid?

With the Ethereum staking, you get paid every month or do you get paid on the year?

I was getting paid monthly.

Monthly, okay.

What about pensions?

Retirement.

Retirement.

So in the UK we call it a pension.

I think you guys call it a 401k.

But across the world it's pretty much the same across the Western world anyway.

If I'm 25 or 30 or whatever, should I be paying into my pension as a way to generate, to make myself wealthy someday?

Is that a smart idea?

I don't have a 401k.

I don't have an IRA.

But the reason why people like these accounts and why they can work for some some people is because they are tax-deferred accounts, meaning I can put my money in whether I pay taxes now or later.

The money will then sit there, grow,

and

I don't pay taxes until I pull my money out.

But there's a couple of problems.

Problem number one is

I have very little control where my money can be invested.

Maybe this will change.

The Trump administration has passed a new executive order on 401ks to change what you could potentially invest invest in 401ks, but that hasn't happened yet.

You have very limited options.

They're primarily just mutual funds, and many of them have a fee.

I think NerdWallet said 92% of Americans don't know what the 401k fees are.

So if you don't know what your 401k fee is, this is your notice to go check what the expense ratio is, and you should know that.

So you have very limited options.

You're going to have to pay a fee, which means somebody on Wall Street is going to be paid forever until you retire.

Number two, I can't touch this money until I'm 60 years old, 59 and a half.

If I do, I have to pay a 10% penalty.

And number three, the whole discussion is you're doing this for tax benefits.

But kind of like we talked about earlier, there's a lot of tax benefits that you can get outside of a 401k, which is why for me, I don't like it.

But I'm not everybody.

For some people, it can be a great place because your employer might say, we're going to give you a 3% match.

So if you invest, let's just say a $3,000 into your 401k and they match it 100%,

they might also just throw $3,000 into your 401k.

But you have the same risks and concerns along the way.

I don't think most people even know what a pension is, to be honest.

I think we pay into it, but we don't really know what's working.

And I saw this really interesting debate take place on X the other day where someone was, a guy was saying in the UK, I've paid into my pension my whole life,

so I deserve it, and it will be there when I'm ready.

And then everyone underneath it was telling him that, by the way, it's not like some piggy bank that you get to break open.

The money you paid into a pension was used to pay for the people that needed a pension when you were working.

So you're talking about social security in the United States.

Because as an employee in the United States, you have to pay into social security.

So 6.2% of your income.

So you have a lot of taxes.

You're going to have to pay income taxes on what you make.

And then you have Social Security tax.

So on your income, you're going to pay 6.2% of that separately from your income tax, but 6.2% into this Social Security fund.

And then your employer is also going to pay 6.2% into this fund.

This money, in theory, is supposed to grow and compound.

That way, when you retire, you have this retirement fund that's going to pay you every single year.

You don't get to choose.

I mean, you can choose when you pull it out, but you don't get to do anything with it.

The government's going to be in charge.

This is what is running out of money in the United States today.

Why?

Because people that are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s that are paying into it today, it's not paying for their retirement.

It's paying for the people who are retiring today

to pay for their social security benefits.

And that's what people don't understand.

They think they're paying into a piggy bank that they get to crack open and that will pay for them as long as they live for the rest of their life.

I was looking at the biggest misconceptions around pensions.

And the first one was that my pension is guaranteed money for the entirety of my life once I retire.

Well, there is some truth to that.

The part in the United States, at least, that

you are guaranteed

what the wording is, that you're going to get the Social Security until you pass away.

But the part that they never tell you, and there's no asterisk about this either, is how much that value of the check will be.

So here's what's going on.

People are paying into the Social Security Fund, thinking that they're going to be able to fund their retirement.

Every financial advisor historically has said that retirement is a three-legged stool.

You have your 401k, your personal retirement.

You have your own personal savings, and then you have Social Security.

Well, you pay into Social Security by force because you don't get to opt out of it unless you are an investor.

You don't have to pay your Social Security income or Social Security taxes on your investment income, but you pay into this until you hit retirement age, and then you get to pull this money out.

Well, the government is running out of Social Security money, but people misconstrue that because they say, oh, that means the government's no longer going to pay Social Security.

That's not true.

They'll still pay it, but they'll just print their way to pay it, which is what you've been talking about.

So great, they're giving you a bigger check.

The problem with that bigger check is that bigger check can't buy you as much stuff.

So yeah, you're based off what the United States government says, assuming that they don't default, you're going to get the Social Security check, is it's not going to be able to buy you as much as you thought before.

The other big misconceptions are that people think their employer is putting enough in to cover their full retirement.

They think it's the same as a savings account.

They think they can access it whenever they like.

The government will cover them when it runs out.

And I don't need to think about it until I'm older.

And lastly, my pension pot is tax-free.

So the big shift that happened around 20 years ago was a shift from what's known as defined benefit to define contribution.

So defined benefit used to work for Ford.

or an American Airlines or whatever company.

You retired, you got 60% of your final year's salary forever.

That was bankrupting all of these pension plans because people were living longer, all the other stuff.

And so they kind of changed it to define contribution.

Basically, you get out what you put in plus the investment returns.

But there's fees,

maybe you didn't give it to a good manager.

Maybe you didn't know when they said, Well, do you want to put it in bonds or equities?

You like bonds and it didn't grow as much or whatever it was.

And in the end, you're just not sure that you're the average 401k in the United States for a baby boomer, I believe, is about $100,000.

What age?

A baby boomer, like 65?

Yeah.

I think it's right now around 200,000.

Oh, 200, okay.

200, it's not enough to retire.

That's 10 years of 20 grand a year.

So there's so little money in the U.S.

pension system particularly

that there is no hope for these people.

This whole video on this called the Retirement Crisis became a huge kind of viral success years ago, just explaining there is no way out of this for the pensioners, the boomers, or the millennials.

And everyone's going to have to change within this to figure this stuff out.

I think you said it earlier today.

You were talking about a Ponzi scheme.

Here you have one.

But nobody wants to say that.

But everyone is paying in to keep funding this thing.

But the only way it's running is because people are paying it in.

The problem is there's not enough money coming in.

Because

remember we talked about at the beginning, the demographics?

There's less and less young people.

There's less and less young people because we're having less babies.

But there's tons of these retired people.

And this keeps going in perpetuity because we're having babies.

So that's workers in 20 years' time.

The babies now are workers in 20 years' time.

We can forward project this.

It doesn't stop.

So how the hell are we going to pay for this massive amount of baby boomers, which is, in the United States, 78 million of them, largest cohort in history at the time.

We can't pay for them.

Well, and this is where the proposals are to tax your Bitcoin, the value of your Bitcoin, or tax the value of your assets, or tax your investment income.

But the UK's got the same.

This whole wealth, everybody's got the same problem.

Everybody.

What do you think, Humphrey, in terms of retirement crisis?

I think that, so I have a different take on, well, I think, first of all, I think, Jess Breets and Rowe, you guys were talking, and you were talking about Social Security, right?

Yeah.

But I have a different take on

retirement altogether, I think.

I think 401ks are good for the average person because it's a forced savings mechanism.

A lot of people wouldn't contribute to a retirement account unless the employer offered it, right?

And so the whole match thing is a great thing for

behavioral finance.

It's like, okay, if I do this, I get some free money from my employer, and at least I'm saving some money instead of nothing.

You're working for that money is absolutely free.

A 401k for anyone that doesn't understand is you agree to invest in an investment pot alongside your employer.

It is more like an individual retirement account that is awarded to you because you work for an employer.

You have the option to invest within a 401k, and that 401k is typically tax-deferred, which means that you pay taxes on it later in life.

And what's the difference between that and a social security program?

A social security is a government program where you are required to pay into it every paycheck that goes into this big pot.

And then when you do retire, the government will send you a social security check every month.

Okay.

But I still think that there are plenty of ways to retire and retire with some sort of freedom, retire early.

Have you heard of Coast Fire before?

No.

Coastfire is another

newer thing that's kind of on Reddit, but it's a variation of financial independence, retire early.

And it's essentially you get your nest egg to a point where you don't have to invest any dollar into it after that.

But because you get it to, let's say, a certain number, and that number is usually pretty reasonable, the investment returns, if you're invested in the SP 500, will get you to a full retirement by the time you're able to retire at 65.

So it doesn't mean you retire early completely, but it means that if you get to your Coast Fire number, which is what it's called, maybe you have more freedom of choice in what you're working on.

So, like, maybe you don't have to work for the employer that you absolutely hate.

You can maybe go do something that's a little bit more suited to your lifestyle.

You're still working, but you're not working to save for retirement anymore because you hit that Coast Fire number.

So, for example, at the age of 35, I think the coast fire number is like $150,000.

If you can hit $150,000 by 35, if you have 30 years of investment returns at 8%, you'll have $1.5 million by the time you retire, which is a little bit more palatable for people that are having a hard time wrapping their heads around, am I ever going to retire?

They're not going to retire in that they're not going to be kicking up their feet on the sand beaches of Aruba, but you're still going to be doing something.

And I personally think if I was retired, I'd be so bored out of my mind doing nothing, right?

So I'd like to work on on something.

The idea is you just don't have to work for maybe the job you hate or something like that.

So if I hit the $150,000 in savings and I put it into the S ⁇ P 500 and get the

8% return, by the age of 65, I'll have 1.0 million.

1.509, yeah.

What's that worth then?

That's true.

That is another part of the equation is with inflation, what is it going to be worth?

And is this what you're trying to do?

Because I remember an hour ago, you said, I'm just trying to retire earlier words to that effect.

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to be Fire.

And Coast Fire is, you know, however you would like to define it.

But, you know, I already think I'm pretty close, or if not, I've already reached it, which is like, I get to work on the things that I love.

And I think that my retirement nest egg will eventually grow to a point where by the time I hit 60, 65, I'll be able to coast.

Super chill.

Did you create a number, do the math on what you'd need to get to?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you can project out your expenses of what you think your expenses are going to be on an annual basis and then kind of work work backwards to that number.

Okay.

Yeah.

A lot of math involved, but you kind of have to do it.

Do you want ChatGPT or something?

Retirement crisis.

That's concerning.

That's concerning.

So your approach is to do the Coast Fire thing.

My approach is let's stay disciplined, consistent with our savings and investing, and actually get to a place where retirement might be possible.

I love that idea.

And that's the same as when I started with the manifesting your destiny.

Sure.

You say, well, I need this goal.

How do I do it?

We do this and grow it via investments, right?

It's brilliant to do that.

And then you can take more risk.

Sure.

If you isolate that and say, well, any capital I build now, I can do whatever I want.

That was the same idea that I had with the home.

It's like I've de-risked my life.

Now I can take risk.

And that's a really nice thing to do.

And I love the way that you do it by saying, well, my future self wants this.

For me to do that, I need to do this now.

And then it should take care of that.

Now, it's always risky than you can imagine, but yeah.

And then you have extra dollars to do whatever you want with, right?

But I also love that you've been disciplined on like what you like and what you know.

Yeah.

And

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Because you said I think 90% are in index funds and ETFs.

That's what I would recommend for people.

Oh, sorry.

For me personally, I'm like 50, 60% index funds.

But still, that's pretty high.

And not having that, you know, shiny object syndrome or whatever you want to call it.

I mean, that, that, that's not a problem.

You're accusing me of having shiny object syndrome.

I'm I apologize.

I'm not sure if I'm trying to engage everybody here.

But whatever it might be,

to be disciplined, I think that's such a valuable trait.

And you talked about the scarcity mindset.

I think that's also a disciplined mindset that you have.

So I would reframe that.

I think you've done an excellent job.

I think personal finance is personal.

Alright, guys, we're gonna go get Steve.

The guest is here.

Ready?

Come in.

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I will speak to you there.

On that point of discipline, Humphrey, I have seen a couple of videos from you where you talk about the things that you stopped spending money on.

And there is a narrative that says, you know, in order to get rich or to save,

to get to where you want to go with your financial goals, you should not have the Starbucks coffee.

Sure.

You should not do these things.

What did you stop spending money on?

And what's your framework there?

So

I took a look at my expenses from 2014 and onward and just kind of like saw the differences in how my spending habits have changed.

The first thing I stopped spending money on are Airbnbs.

So Airbnbs used to be a great value.

They used to be a unique experience.

But these days they're all kind of commercialized.

And I feel like with the cleaning fees and all these fees, you end up paying more for less convenience as a hotel.

So that's number one.

I stopped buying food in bulk.

I know that sounds kind of random, but I'm a single guy.

Sometimes I get two gallons of milk and I can't finish it, right?

So I'm pouring milk down the the drain or I'm buying 48 eggs at a time from Costco and I'm just like, dude, like,

I mean, I like the gym, but I can't eat 48 eggs in like two weeks or whatever that time is, right?

So

that's another.

And then

another thing I did was I started to switch my car insurance because I moved into San Francisco, the city.

I'm driving less.

So I used to drive 15,000 miles a year.

I drive 3,000 miles a year now.

And just by calling my car insurance, I was able to save like 40 bucks a month just because my driving requirements are much lower.

So those are like explain that.

Yeah.

So, you know, a car insurance rates are dependent on how much you drive.

And if you drive less and you move to a city, then your rates should come down.

But I think some people are a little bit too loyal to their providers.

They're not willing to compare rates because it's painful.

You don't really want to do it.

It takes time.

But I think doing that, spending an hour calling your insurance provider, looking at different insurance providers, not just for cars, but for homes too, you can save a lot of money because insurance insurance is kind of commoditized.

So it's like you're going to get coverage from many different providers.

You might as well put them kind of in a bidding war for your business.

I used to work selling car insurance.

It was one of my telesales jobs.

I've done that as well.

Yeah, and there was interestingly, I don't think people know this, but as I sat there in the car insurance call center, there's this bar on the screen.

that I can move in either direction to basically give you a discount based on how the sale is going.

So if I really think I'm going to lose your sale, all I do is slide the bar to the left and it brings your upfront payment down and your monthly payment down.

But if I thought this sale was easy, I could bring the bar up in terms of the price I quote you and give you breakdown insurance and all these other upsells.

And so I don't think people realize how negotiable all of their insurances are, even their phone insurance and all these other things.

And sometimes you don't figure out until you say you're going to quit.

And then suddenly they give you some great offer where they're going to give you 50 off yeah yeah and the other way of approaching it is i never really solve for cost

a solft for income

okay and that is saying that is saying okay your lifestyle as long as you're not being ridiculous right is like

do i really want to not

go to a go to a restaurant or get that uber eats or whatever i understand yeah because that's penalizing yourself and that's not a nice thing to do always right it takes a lot of discipline and discipline is hard.

But if you've got an equal, an opposite amount of discipline in solving for income,

you actually move your lifestyle further ahead.

So, you know, the rise of, I mean, I do three, four jobs, you do three, four.

We all do lots of different things now.

You do as well.

We all got different income streams.

You're almost better off to spend your energy.

thinking about how do I increase my income stream than your cost basis.

At a certain point,

we agree, like Stephen's friend who sent him the message, he needs to desperately rescue his cost base.

But generally, if you're looking at a life plan, you'll get to your coast fire or whatever it's called

quicker by solving for income than you will for cost.

I just think lower hanging fruit is solving for expenses, which is like everyone can cut back a little bit, but everyone can't just like say, I'm going to make 2x more tomorrow.

That's kind of a harder problem.

And I think if you want.

Well, you just trade off your time.

Because

you can.

If you're in a lower-earning job, you can drive an uber and earn extra money or you can do a bar oh i see what you're saying yeah it's like multiple revenue streams is now the way the world works because the cost of living has become so expensive that everyone's having to do multiple jobs but with technology we can actually do it much easier to humphrey's point as well though you can get a 30 pay rise today just by maybe bringing a pack lunch or

walking somewhere or whatever else and it's probably harder to get a 30 pay rise

not sure about today

i think it depends on which stage of life you're in because now if you just stick with the lunch

if you're on the lunch example, pack and lunch cost time.

And depending on how much your time is worth, that one hour of time could be $20, it could be $2,000.

And I think that's that key difference.

And I think there's definitely times and places you got to cut.

I fully agree with you on that.

But I think

at a certain stage, look, I am still cheap with my money in multiple places, but

when it comes to time, so our office is in downtown Detroit and my commute there is 45 minutes.

But I don't drive.

What I do is I get driven there.

And the reason why I do that is because I can sit in the back seat and work.

And one of the things that we publish daily financial news.

So sometimes something will be happening with our market briefs where, oh, this is important.

And if I'm driving, I don't want to be texting and driving.

So instead, I pay for an Uber or whatever, and I go that 45 minutes there, 45 minutes back, and it's money out of my account every single day.

But I get back an hour and a half of my time, which is worth way more than whatever I'm paying in my driver fees.

So I think it depends on where you are on the stage of life, because I wouldn't do that if this was way before.

What is the biggest,

this is an open question to everybody, what do you think the biggest money mistake the average person makes is?

They spend all their money.

The two S's.

You're spending all of your money and if you get past that then you're saving all of your money both of them are mistakes both of them are mistakes so just having your money sat in a bank account doing nothing you're becoming poorer every single day i don't think most people know this i've got a friend who's steadily compounded his his bank balance over time and i remember asking him i was like how much money do you now have in your bank account he's taken a really slow approach over time he runs his business as a freelance and he goes i think probably about a million dollars i was like it's just sat in your bank account and he was like, yeah.

And because he's scared.

He's scared.

He doesn't know what to do with it.

So he thinks just putting it in the bank account is the safest possible thing to do.

Well, it's a guaranteed loss.

If your bank account, the average bank account in the United States today, not the high-yield accounts, but the average account is paying 0.1%, 0.5%, I don't know, something super low.

If we just say inflation is 3%,

meaning

the cost you have to spend out of the bank account to buy something is going up by 3%.

And that's the reported numbers, not the real inflation that many people feel.

Well, that means there's a net loss of 2.5% on that.

So if I have a million dollars there, that's $25,000 of lost buying power.

Roll, do you think companies, because a lot of my audience are companies, whether they're one-person companies or big companies, do you think they should be putting their money that they have sat in their account into Bitcoin?

In essence, if you're Microsoft, they have huge cash piles.

What does Microsoft buy with their cash?

Really, they buy

some investment stuff, but it's generally cash-based.

And then they may buy another company, or they may buy real estate, data centers, let's say, or they may buy their own shares back.

All of those three things that they buy are driven by the debasement of currency, and they get more expensive every year, and they're holding a cash return of 3.5%.

So it's stupid what they're doing because actually all your shareholder cash is not buying the equivalent of the actual things that drive the value of the company.

But what about small companies?

What if there's people listening now that have companies where they've got a million, two million in the bank, they probably don't need it all for cash flow reasons?

And so I do think that investing versus saving is misunderstood.

To go back to your original question, I think investing

is much more important.

I made the mistake of being a saver when I was younger because, you know, the fear that, you know, all of that stuff meant I was super risk averse.

And I was an investment banker.

I was investing, but I didn't, so I made money from being in that industry.

So I'm like, I'm just going to hoard cash.

I did worse for doing that.

And then once we saw the banking system fail, I'm like, I'm not doing this anymore.

I'm going to take control of my own finances.

So the same is true of a business.

If they're generating cash, they shouldn't be sitting on a massively large amount of cash, but some liquid investments, I think, massively help because you're going to make your cash grow for you and your shareholders.

And that's important, but don't let go of your liquidity because when you really need it and you don't have cash, that's the worst thing in the world, particularly when you've saved the money.

So, in your business bank account, for RealVision, do you put some of the

money into crypto?

It depends.

A lot of it gets reinvested for growth within the company.

So, you're making the decision:

how's your capital going to grow?

Is it going to grow your share price via reinvesting in the business?

Or is it better to use the savings pool and buy other investments and diversify away?

That really depends on your business, where it is in the growth cycle.

But if you're like a cash-generating, regular non-growth style business,

then you're going to be generating cash.

You might have taken some dividends out and bought a house and done all that thing.

Yeah, there's no reason not to do some relatively conservative investment strategy.

Humphrey, you worked with lots of rich people advising them.

What is it that rich people know that the average person doesn't know as it relates to money?

Because there are money games that you discover when you get to see behind the curtain.

What is it that they're doing with their money that the average person isn't aware of or isn't able to do with their money?

Rich people are typically more disciplined.

They're typically checking their bank account every day.

They're doing little things that compound into huge results at the end of 10 or 20 years.

And they're thinking in decades, not just what am I going to do this week, right?

They're choosing investment choices for themselves in 10 years, 20 years from now, instead of choosing sports betting on the football match for 1,000 pounds

that night.

Because they know that their thousand pounds working for them today will be worth...

10,000, 20,000 in 10 or 20 years.

So it's more just like a long-term mindset versus a short-term mindset.

Like delaying gratification.

Delaying gratification, yes.

What were you writing down there?

I was writing down how the system is rigged in the favor of rich people.

It's extraordinary because

it's the Charlie Munger quote of show me

the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

What people get, once you get, it's not the 100,000, but it's like the people who've got 10 million in their bank account.

They get loans that are called non-recourse loans.

It's an extraordinary thing because unlike your friend, they don't have to pay it back.

So a non-recourse loan means you're not legally liable for the loan in the end.

Now, there'll be some provisions on how to do it, but why are they doing this?

Why are they getting these favourable terms?

Why are they getting the private placements in stocks before they go public?

Why are they getting all the best offers?

Because they pay fees.

Because they pay fees to the investment banks, and the investment banks desperately want these people because they have a lot of financial activity.

And so they incentivize them.

None of us get a look in all of that.

It's the same thing that I talked about with the hedge fund industry in the beginning.

It's like they were incentivized by a phase to get information that was better than everybody else.

And I think part of that is the ability that all we're trying to say to people is you don't have to play the same game.

You don't have to pay anybody's fees.

You buy a Bitcoin, stick it in your Coinbase thing or wherever.

It costs you nothing to run and you're outperforming a venture capital investor.

There's simple things like buying an index fund.

You're not paying the Wall Street complex thousands of dollars for active management.

There's ways of hacking this and it's not that expensive to do.

Just before we move to Jasper, one of the things that I think you've kind of both alluded to a little bit and you said earlier on was about how relationships make money.

And because what I was watching when I sat in that apartment with this billionaire is his friends and his contacts who had done business with him in the past were getting

the allocation, the prime allocation allocation of being able to invest just before this company went public, which means that the next day it would multiply.

But those were relationships.

So if there is a strategy to build wealth, it goes back to what Rael said at the start, being around people and having good relationships is actually, I think, really, really unappreciated.

I've got a friend, I can name my friend, called Harry Stubbings.

He runs a podcast called 20 VC.

And on that podcast, he sits with extremely rich people.

The podcast, Harry's podcast isn't as big as joe rogan's but because harry has had two-hour conversations with the richest people on planet earth and continues to do so he's built one of the biggest investment funds in europe especially as like a guy in his 20s i mean i think he's raised if i'm not mistaken 750 million

just from the relationships and he said to me he said you know the biggest value leverage i've built in the last Five, 10 years isn't like the views.

People have more views than him.

It's he had, he knows everyone rich.

And And I think we underestimate that when we think about wealth creation, because if you can do what Raoul said and get around rich people, help them in some way, build those relationships, it pays dividends, what, forever?

There's a great guy called Divesh Macken who runs a firm, an investment firm in San Francisco called Iconic.

He was a young investment banker at Goldman, around the same time when I started there as well.

But

he was hired into the internet banking team

in 2000.

He turned up the office that a month later, the entire thing was gone.

Everybody was fired and he was too young.

He was kind of too junior to bother to fire.

They fired all the senior bankers.

And

he thought, well, what would I do?

I think he had no bosses left.

So he just basically went to Silicon Valley and hung out in coffee shops and made friends.

The people he happened to make friends with were Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Reid Hoffman, all of these people.

He then became their wealth advisor at Goldman, moved it all to Morgan Stanley and then built his own firm Iconic.

And Iconic is massive, runs all the wealth for these Silicon Valley people from this network of meeting these random dudes building businesses when nobody else wanted to speak to them because

they'd gone through the big bust and he made his entire life on that network.

Genius.

Probably at that cafe where I spent all my Bitcoin.

The one with the gold door.

You were there at the same time sending all zero mom on Bitcoin.

It's interesting because when we talk about systems and all these things for money, nobody ever talks about a system for managing your relationships.

And the way that most of us manage our relationships is we get someone's number

and we hope that we'll cross paths again.

But I think, I even think, I'm thinking about it, obviously doing this podcast where I meet so many great people.

I should have a much better system.

for understanding those relationships, how I can be of service to those people, understanding their birthdays and all these other kinds of things.

And not only would that be good for my mental health and more friends, less like all these kinds of sort of social, psychological things, but in business terms, there's going to be opportunities whether six years from now where I need your advice.

The key to networks is it's what you put into the network, not what you take out.

Yeah.

So the people who have the best networks I've ever seen are always the people who say, how can I help you?

Yeah.

Hey, I've got something for you.

You should meet so-and-so.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're connected.

Never,

hey, listen, what can can you do for me?

Yeah.

That comes back.

Karma flows back always.

Give as much into the network as possible and the network gives back.

I think that's what, in the case of Harry, he's also done because funnily enough, about a month ago, I said, oh, I've got this idea to do this thing.

And Harry turned around to me 30 seconds within WhatsApp and said, oh, I know insert name of this person who's the very top in investing in Europe.

I'll put you in a WhatsApp group with him.

Put me in a WhatsApp group with this guy.

Sent a voice note, said Steve's the best ever.

Then he said, he said, Steve's way better than I am at everything.

This is literally what he said and then he said about the guy who put me in the whatsapp group he goes and this guy's also the best at what he does ever putting you two together good luck and immediately i thought oh harry's what a great guy and then the guy he'd introduced me to goes isn't harry such a great guy

and so i mentioned harry like listen is there's anything i can do for you

but that's the karma

honestly i you know

I really believe in networks.

I think it's the most important thing, your community, your network is everything.

And the absolute answer is you have to keep putting into the network.

Because if you try and extract from the network, it collapses.

Because then you're just that guy who's making the phone call after 10 years saying, hey, Stephen, can I get some money from you?

Because I'm running out of cash.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the UK and the US and geographies generally and how much that plays a role.

Because right now there's lots of political, social conversations about the UK.

People are a little bit doomer about the UK.

Some people are optimistic about the US, some aren't.

How much do you think about geographies when you're thinking about your wealth creation, your finance strategy?

Does it play a role?

So I was fortunate enough to live in London for a little bit over a month or so.

And I did a number of podcasts out there.

And I guess I could just ask you, the interesting thing about these podcasts is when I was talking to them, What they told me is that the majority of their listener base is in the United States.

The majority of their money comes from the United States.

The majority of their sponsors come from the United States.

It's not from the UK.

And I thought that was very interesting because it's a huge market.

But what they were saying is people who are really looking to grow in the United Kingdom, a lot of them, at least, just from what I heard, would prefer to earn from the United States because the dollar figures are much higher.

Now, I don't have a lot of global experience outside of that,

but I do think that the United States is more friendly for people that are interested interested in wealth growth, wealth accumulation.

Maybe not the best, there's tax-free countries out there, but in terms of for somebody who is more entrepreneurial in that sense, I think you have a lot of opportunities here that you don't have other places.

What do you think, Ram?

I'm a huge believer in geographic location for a number of different reasons.

So I've lived in the UK, India, Spain and the Cayman Islands.

I spent most of my working career on this side of the pond in the US.

Spain is lifestyle arbitrage.

The cost of living is even probably half that of the UK and a third of that what it is in the US or the Cayman Islands.

300 days of sunshine, incredible people, culture, climate, cost is very cheap, rent is cheap, to buy is cheap, everything.

Perfect lifestyle arbitrage.

Problem is network.

You're not surrounded by people who are ambitious doing different stuff.

In a globalized world now where we can work online, it's actually doable.

So we're seeing a lot of Americans moving down to Latin America.

That's the arbitrage here or Colombia as as well.

So into South America, Latin America, it's cheap, high quality of life, relatively safe.

And if you're in a business where you can work online,

you can get to your end goal, your Coast Fire thing, super fast by doing that.

If you want, to your point, if you want intellectual capital, there is only one place in the world that has it in such high density as the US.

Capital and intellectual capital.

Asia has it, India has it, it's all around, but they're all missing different forms of it.

So it's using that for your end goals.

What about the UK?

I can't do it

because

the UK's attitude now has become, we just can't have nice things.

They don't want to.

If I speak to my friends, they don't want to invest.

They just want to have the bigger house and the next car on lease.

People are institutionally unhappy in the UK right now, and that has been for a while.

And so we don't have a culture of entrepreneurialism left.

It's been stamped out.

Europe, too.

So it's not just the UK.

Everywhere in Europe, the same thing has happened.

People just don't believe they can have nice things anymore.

When you think about the narrative

that you understand of the UK, like what is the message?

So if it was like a marketing slogan, the UK, you're an investor, you're an entrepreneur.

What's in your head when you think of the UK?

What comes out?

Is it in reality?

Or

how would you sell the UK to others?

No, I'm saying like,

what do you think the narrative of the UK is right now as an investor and entrepreneur?

I think it just feels like a backwater.

Backwater.

Yeah.

It's an economic backwater.

So don't forget, in the late 90s and 2000s, it was this entire centre of the world's financial industry.

It was the centre of the world's advertising industry.

It was some of the, you know, all the creative industries.

It was all based in London.

We lost all of it.

Why?

Regulation.

So you think it's the government's government have misstepped?

Yeah, the government misstepped and the US took the banking system back because how they treated capital requirements in the UK and Europe was different than the US.

And they managed to get Wall Street back to Wall Street.

It had all moved.

I was working for Goldman Sachs.

London was their biggest office.

Same for JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, everybody.

And we just stopped it.

And now we're seeing it again.

We've got new industries rising.

We've got AI, crypto.

You know, AI came out of Cambridge.

I think it was, you know, the Google Deep Mind.

I think it was Cambridge University for most of that stuff.

And we dropped the ball.

We dropped the ball in the finance industry.

We dropped the ball in AI.

We get this massive talent density coming out of Oxford and Cambridge, Imperial College and all these others.

And we don't use it.

They all move to the US.

We had the crypto industry, of which we were part of that.

We dropped that ball too.

We dropped the whole ball on everything.

And Europe is actively shutting the door on every opportunity

by saying, we don't want to do this.

Don't forget, they're a nation of old people now, most of Europe.

So they'd rather just not have any change.

But if we go back to that economic formula for GDP growth, population growth is the key driver.

You need a growing population over time, but it just needs to be done in the right way.

So they're blaming that, but the whole economic machine is because nobody's had kids.

That's the problem.

The demographic problem is the structure of everything.

And the problem is, is nobody's had kids, so you don't have economic growth.

So then you try and bring in new workers to create growth.

You don't want that, so they get thrown out.

Meanwhile, the economy slows down.

People get pulled back.

They don't want to take risk anymore.

The whole system is now having to pay for the National Health Service to pay for these old people.

There's not enough kids to support all of that.

The governments are getting more in debt.

Bond yields are going up.

Everyone's like, what's going on?

It's all been a function of demographics from day one.

Closing arguments, Humphrey, closing position.

What's the most important thing people should be thinking about?

How would you round off?

Is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have asked you?

Yeah, I think that my personal philosophy is just that personal finance just comes down to your income minus your expenses.

So know those two intimately.

Know how to drive both of those two.

And then just really watch what you spend your money on, right?

Like the average car payment in America is $7.45 a month.

Stay away from that if you can.

Try to be reasonable.

Everything is about being consistent and reasonable.

And I think those small decisions compound to a much brighter future.

For me,

first thing is educate yourself.

You don't know, you know, we talked about what do your finances finances look like?

What's your bank account look like?

What are you trying to achieve?

So educate yourself.

Learn about investing.

Invest above all things.

Investing above saving is the only way you're going to get there because if not, your money goes down.

And then just do it.

Make a trade.

Make an investment.

Fail.

Learn.

Do it again and do it again and keep learning.

Educating.

And then surround yourself

by a good network.

Just

whether it's even on Twitter, on social media, find a network of people that you can learn from, add to the network, and those things you will, you'll get ahead.

You can't fail if you educate yourself, just get started and then learn, keep doing it then, and just grow a great network.

And buy Bitcoin,

obviously.

What coins do you own in crypto?

So I am, so this is going to get more contentious now.

So I actually don't, I own just one Bitcoin for posterity's sake.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

So I own.

I'll delete the episode then.

I am own mainly SUI,

which is the

crypto network that came out of Facebook.

But I'm also on the foundation as well.

But I actually put most of my liquid net worth into that.

And then I own a lot of digital art on Ethereum

because that's a long-term store of value for me.

NFTs.

Yeah, NFTs.

And so I've moved around a lot between

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and SUI.

I don't trade.

So these are long-term holds.

I might change once every two years, change my allocation.

but it's all generally all the big, big tokens.

And just briefly, closing statements.

Well, first off, thank you, Raul Humphrey, and Theema, for putting this together.

This is uh, and to add on to everything that you guys said, for me, I think there's a lot of, for lack of a better word, crap, um, on the internet of people romanticizing and fantasizing how easy it is for passive income or for insane levels of wealth, where it becomes

sometimes hard to see how you could actually do that.

And what I'd like to say is: look, nothing comes easy, but change can always be made regardless of where you are, what your background is, where you come from.

But it's going to take work.

And I think the best thing to help your outcome to get to where you want to go is hard work,

sacrifice,

put in what I call a decade of sacrifice.

That way you can have

what most people dream of.

And the only reason why you're able to get there is because you're willing to do what the majority of people are not willing to do.

And in a word, AI, positive about it or pessimistic?

Positive.

Best tool we've ever been given.

Optimistic.

Yeah.

Okay.

Good.

Refreshing.

Very refreshing to hear.

Thank you all so much for giving me your time today.

I'm going to link the top three things that you tell me we should direct the audience to below.

So I'll ask you after this conversation to give me three things where people can find you.

The first is going to be your channels.

So your channels on YouTube.

You're all very large YouTubers and have incredible channels, channels that I've followed for many, many years.

Is there anything else that you guys would like me to link that you think is going to be pertinent to the audience?

Well, we have a free newsletter for investors that we publish every single day called Market Briefs.

I think that would be a great one.

I'll link that one as well.

Anything else?

Real Vision is a simple place, it's a simple home for everybody to find what they need.

So, the website, realvision.com or realvision.com.

Okay, and Humphrey?

And I'm building a website right now that's basically my guide, but it's my guide on different.