Latest / The Hannah Hammond Show / Why 95% of Americans Will NEVER Be Rich (And How to Join the 5%) - Garret Gunderson

Transcript

Why 95% of Americans Will NEVER Be Rich (And How to Join the 5%) - Garret Gunderson · The Hannah Hammond Show

• 0:00
  What do you think is the best way to build wealth quickly?
• 0:05
  Save tax is probably one of the fastest ways.
• 0:07
  So I think they need to pick from one of the big three, real
• 0:10
  estate, which lives 1000 ways to slice that businesses, a lot of
• 0:15
  different ways to look at that. Intellectual properties, the
• 0:17
  hidden gem. But if you're willing to be more
• 0:19
  active now, you'll be able to be more passive later.
• 0:21
  Everybody else is passive now and they end up being in a
• 0:24
  really bad situation in the future.
• 0:25
  So it comes down to responsibility and we give up
• 0:28
  the bullshit saying we don't have time.
• 0:32
  Welcome back to the Hannah Hammond Show.
• 0:34
  I'm sitting here today with Garrett Gunderson, who's a New
• 0:37
  York Times bestselling author. He just released his new book
• 0:39
  called Money Unmasked. And two of your bestselling
• 0:42
  authors were The killing. Yeah, killing the Sacred cows.
• 0:46
  And what would the Rockefellers do?
• 0:49
  And basically, Garrett is I love that you put a comedic twist on
• 0:52
  money. And because a lot of people hate
• 0:54
  talking about money, and they clam up.
• 0:56
  And so it's really cool that you do that.
• 0:57
  And you have a comedy show on Amazon.
• 0:59
  Amazon Prime, as my kids said, why not Netflix?
• 1:02
  I'm like, I'm a rookie. Like, give me a break here, you
• 1:05
  know? I think it's pretty badass.
• 1:08
  I was, it happened on my birthday and it was like it was
• 1:12
  the best birthday my kids took me to like a rap concert keeping
• 1:16
  me young and my special God on Amazon Prime was really cool.
• 1:19
  What's your special called? The American Reem.
• 1:22
  The American Reem got it. Love it.
• 1:24
  Lot of money in it, but I was like, I'm never going to be the
• 1:27
  funniest comedian, but I could be the funniest money comedian.
• 1:30
  I like it. It's a good.
• 1:31
  That's your edge. Yeah.
• 1:33
  Well, and, and what Garrett talks about and, and teaches on
• 1:35
  and what he's passionate about is financial independence and
• 1:38
  helping people break their myths that we're all taught and a lot
• 1:41
  of us believe about money. And you say that 95% of people
• 1:45
  are not financially independent by the time they're 65, which is
• 1:48
  an astonishing number. That's the US Department of
• 1:51
  Labor statistic, 95% of Americans.
• 1:53
  That's crazy. It's just a bad faulty model
• 1:55
  they're following. So what?
• 1:58
  And this is my favorite subject because I came from a household
• 2:01
  of very little money, you know, but not uncommon to where a lot
• 2:06
  of people come from. My dad was a coal miner.
• 2:08
  There you go, living paycheck to paycheck.
• 2:11
  You know, my dad would always be saving for tomorrow and not
• 2:15
  living today. And so there was a lot of
• 2:17
  sacrifice there. And I know you talk a lot about
• 2:19
  that is like, how do you build wealth while still building
• 2:21
  freedom and a joyful life and a purpose driven life and a life
• 2:24
  that you're actually excited about living.
• 2:26
  And it's really hard to live if you're just saying, well, we
• 2:29
  can't afford it or we can't buy it or we can't do it right.
• 2:31
  But people say that all the time, and I've seen people's
• 2:34
  finances that could afford a lot, but they have a poverty
• 2:37
  mindset, so they won't invest in themselves because they're
• 2:40
  trying to build these balance sheets.
• 2:43
  And so when I think of a balance sheet like just assets versus
• 2:45
  liabilities, there's the property value aspect of that,
• 2:47
  right? It could be like stocks, bonds,
• 2:49
  real estate, you have your assets, you have your
• 2:51
  liabilities, might be loans, taxes, whatever it might be.
• 2:54
  But what really creates that is our human life value, our
• 2:57
  insight skills. I call it mental capital,
• 2:59
  knowledge, wisdom, insight strategies, tools like it's our
• 3:02
  mental capital and our relationship capital that
• 3:04
  creates our financial capital. So what happens if you develop
• 3:07
  skill sets and become a better investor?
• 3:09
  And by building your knowledge base, you can actually grow your
• 3:12
  asset base. But it starts with that flow of
• 3:15
  money to yourself first, then to your assets, where too many
• 3:17
  people are kind of like trying to shrink their way to wealth.
• 3:19
  They think that budgeting will get them there.
• 3:21
  Budgeting is good if you're a train wreck, but it's actually
• 3:24
  harmful 'cause it creates A scarcity mindset and it slows
• 3:26
  everything down. Yeah, the the poverty mindset, I
• 3:29
  mean, and it's difficult because it gets passed down generation
• 3:32
  to generation to. Generation.
• 3:34
  How did did it impact you? Oh my gosh, it's great.
• 3:37
  I mean, I took my dad to dinner the other night for the first
• 3:40
  time in like 7 years and I shared because I've been doing a
• 3:43
  lot of inner work and healing and stuff like this.
• 3:45
  And I shared with him, I understand why you did the
• 3:48
  things you did because you were raised that way as well.
• 3:51
  But the poverty mindset and the insane sacrifice and you know,
• 3:56
  not buying your daughter an ice cream cone that was $0.69 makes
• 4:01
  somebody feel like they're not loved and they're not worthy and
• 4:04
  all these things. But regardless of that, it never
• 4:07
  enabled him to build wealth because all his focus and energy
• 4:11
  was on how can I save all, everything that I'm earning,
• 4:15
  which already isn't a lot, so I can have a nest egg for
• 4:18
  retirement. But if he would have put that
• 4:21
  energy into how can I create, how can I attract more money?
• 4:25
  How can I create value then it would have been night and day
• 4:30
  and yeah. I have AI have a really good
• 4:32
  friend that I just saw two days ago in Washington, DC and he
• 4:36
  gave me, I don't know if the book's out yet.
• 4:37
  It's called Let's Retire Retirement.
• 4:38
  He was a, he's a financial guy too.
• 4:41
  And he has this whole concept where he's like, most people
• 4:43
  struggle so much so they can retire by age 65, which the
• 4:47
  concept was embedded 100 years ago where people didn't even
• 4:49
  live that long. And he said, what if you just
• 4:52
  shifted and said instead of trying to retire at 65, you try
• 4:55
  to retire at 75. And then you just spent more
• 4:58
  money and time along the way, like 30 hours a week or 40 hours
• 5:01
  a week rather than 50 or 60. He says, because he's like, I
• 5:05
  would pay $50,000 right now to get a time machine and go cuddle
• 5:08
  my kids when they were little Again, he goes, I would do it in
• 5:10
  a heartbeat. He says, so I'm tired of trading
• 5:13
  $5000 work for $50,000 moments. And like, that's like how cool
• 5:18
  for his kids that he's chosen to be home more even though he's
• 5:21
  very successful and not sacrifice this.
• 5:24
  And when it created was he only work with clients that he really
• 5:26
  wanted to? And he actually made more money
• 5:28
  by doing that by saying I'm not going to work more than this
• 5:31
  number of hours. And so, yeah, I think that other
• 5:34
  generations just didn't know my great grandfather came from
• 5:36
  Italy because he couldn't put food on the table.
• 5:38
  I know entrepreneurs lie and say I'm doing this to put food on
• 5:41
  the table. It's not that hard to put food
• 5:43
  on the table for most entrepreneurs, right?
• 5:45
  But the reality is that's just a lie we say to justify trying to
• 5:48
  fill this void of if we have enough money, we'll feel
• 5:51
  valuable. And it's an external factor
• 5:53
  where my great grandfather actually couldn't do it.
• 5:56
  Gets on a boat, comes to America, goes to Price, UT East
• 6:00
  Carbon, UT to become a coal miner and there's a mine
• 6:02
  disaster. So he doesn't get to be a coal
• 6:04
  miner. He becomes a goatherd, lives in
• 6:06
  a tent. His wife was pregnant when he
• 6:08
  left. So it took him seven years to
• 6:10
  get enough money to get a home and to get them to come over.
• 6:13
  He meets his daughter for the first time at 7 years old.
• 6:16
  That creates a folklore of scarcity that just permeated my
• 6:19
  family. Hold on to what you got.
• 6:21
  My great aunt, she applied for welfare and they found $550,000
• 6:25
  in her savings account because she had every dollar that she'd
• 6:27
  ever earned. Live in a crappy little house.
• 6:29
  It's stunk. She, she stunk, as a matter of
• 6:31
  fact. Like, you know, it's just like,
• 6:33
  it's just that poverty thinking. It's like a disease of the mind.
• 6:36
  Yeah, it is. And I even catch myself because
• 6:38
  that's the way I was raised, you know, turning up the AC in the
• 6:41
  summer where it was really hot in the house.
• 6:43
  Or turning off. I was.
• 6:43
  I was that guy too for the back of the day.
• 6:45
  Yeah, like literally this winter in Arizona, I caught myself
• 6:50
  really cold for a few days in a row, and I'm like, why am I so
• 6:54
  cold? I'm like, I'm not turning the
• 6:55
  heat on because my mentality was ingrained from my.
• 6:58
  Father saving those nickels. You know what I'm?
• 7:01
  Saying and but and then that's where the awareness and the
• 7:03
  meditation and the work and all these things because you, once
• 7:05
  you have the awareness of the behavior, then you can at least
• 7:08
  catch the thought or the. You whatever don't have the
• 7:10
  awareness. I know.
• 7:12
  They're just trapped in that thought pattern.
• 7:14
  They think scarcity is reality. What do you think is the biggest
• 7:18
  money myth that is common belief in the world or the United
• 7:22
  States at least? The finite, it's just that it's
• 7:24
  finite that they believe that it's a 0 sum game.
• 7:28
  One person wins at the expense of another.
• 7:30
  So it's a scarcity belief of you got to hold on to what you get,
• 7:34
  you got to take what you can, and you've got to compete
• 7:37
  instead of collaborate. So there's never enough.
• 7:40
  When people are in scarcity, it's the greatest destroyer of
• 7:42
  wealth. No luck, no saving, no
• 7:44
  discipline, no rate of return will save someone in that
• 7:46
  mindset. So even if they have a lot of
• 7:48
  money, like I just read some article that said only 32% of
• 7:52
  millionaires feel wealthy now. First off, $1,000,000 isn't that
• 7:55
  much anymore. You know, like $1,000,000 in
• 7:58
  1980. That was a substantial sum of
• 8:00
  money put $1,000,000 in today's dollars by the time of inflation
• 8:04
  and when you think about the cost of everything.
• 8:06
  So I understand why they don't feel wealthy, but part of why
• 8:08
  they don't feel wealthy is they're disconnected from their
• 8:10
  money. It's set aside in a plan that
• 8:13
  they're not going to touch till 59 1/2 or later.
• 8:15
  So it's almost like it doesn't exist.
• 8:18
  And so they continue to live in a poverty mindset, operating and
• 8:21
  trading time for dollars, waiting for the one day someday
• 8:25
  where they finally think it's going to be the dream.
• 8:26
  And that's why I call it the American Ream with my comedy
• 8:28
  special. As they get there, they find out
• 8:30
  it's more of a nightmare. They didn't learn how to create
• 8:32
  cash flow. You don't just flip a switch.
• 8:33
  You don't go like, I'm going to pinch pennies my whole life, but
• 8:36
  when I'm retired, I'm finally going to spend money.
• 8:38
  They still have that behavior. No matter, you know, the
• 8:41
  millionaire next door, that book, it's all about how to be a
• 8:44
  broke, miserable millionaire. I'd have a lot of money, but not
• 8:46
  a lot else. And a lot of the kids of people
• 8:49
  that that have these parents that accumulate money, but you
• 8:52
  would never know it, blow it when it gets to them because
• 8:55
  they're never prepared for it. Yeah.
• 8:57
  So what is something that people can do?
• 8:59
  Because I mean, everybody wants to have money, right?
• 9:01
  So if you're somebody, either maybe you've been saving a big
• 9:06
  nest egg or you have a big stock portfolio or 4O1K or something,
• 9:09
  or maybe you don't and you're just starting out.
• 9:12
  Like, what would you say are actual steps for them to take to
• 9:15
  start building wealth and actual financial independence as you
• 9:19
  call it, where they're not having to be a slave for the
• 9:22
  rest of their lives to try to earn a paycheck?
• 9:24
  So I'll, I'll look at this in two phases.
• 9:25
  The first phase is the mindset. And so the mindset is we all
• 9:29
  have a money story and most people's money story is kind of
• 9:33
  a lie, but they don't think it's a lie.
• 9:34
  It's just the words they use to preserve and protect.
• 9:37
  I can't afford it. I don't have the time.
• 9:39
  That's not for me. Like there's like this whole
• 9:41
  language around justifying them not investing money in
• 9:45
  themselves or spending it on things that they enjoy.
• 9:48
  So I had this client, really wealthy client, and he just
• 9:52
  never spent money. And so one day my business
• 9:56
  partners like, hey, I think I found $120,000 of savings for
• 9:59
  him every single month. I'm like, don't tell him about
• 10:01
  it, let me tell him about it. And so I met with him.
• 10:04
  I said, I'm going to tell you about a strategy that's going to
• 10:06
  put 6 figures a month into your pocket.
• 10:09
  But I'll only tell you if you'll promise me one thing, you'll
• 10:12
  take 10% of it and spend it on yourself.
• 10:15
  And he's like, what would I spend it on?
• 10:17
  I'm a smart ass. So I was like, well, I saw you
• 10:20
  on TV the other day, you need a new wardrobe.
• 10:21
  I'm like I called Tyler. He works at Nordstrom right here
• 10:23
  close to you. Go see him.
• 10:25
  He's going to buy clothes. You're going to just go this
• 10:27
  first month and you spend $12,000 on clothes.
• 10:30
  He goes. He's like there's wrinkle free
• 10:31
  shirts. He's getting all these night,
• 10:33
  he's getting excited. He starts feeling better then
• 10:36
  I'm like, look, I'm going to meet with you in like a month,
• 10:38
  in like maybe 3 months. I want to hear other ways that
• 10:41
  you're going to spend this money.
• 10:41
  So I came back. He put a nest system in his
• 10:43
  house. He put a sound system in his
• 10:45
  house. He bought some guns that he'd
• 10:46
  always wanted to buy. He felt like a different person
• 10:49
  off of a fraction. And So what I call it is a
• 10:51
  living wealthy account. You set up a separate account
• 10:54
  and then you put money in it that you have guilt free
• 10:56
  spending. You're like, but here's what I
• 10:58
  do is I say put a certain percentage into a wealth capture
• 11:01
  account, just a separate Peace of Mind fund so that every time
• 11:04
  money comes in a percentage goes to that account, you build up
• 11:07
  some liquidity. But if you're doing that, take
• 11:09
  another percentage that is just for you to enjoy.
• 11:12
  Do you like clothes by clothes? Do you like wine by wine?
• 11:14
  Just don't worry about what your parents think about it or anyone
• 11:17
  else. It's just doesn't make you feel
• 11:19
  good because you're having these healthy habits and you're
• 11:21
  enjoying it along the way. So this helps with kind of the
• 11:24
  money story. What are you telling people
• 11:26
  that's not true? To protect yourself from your
• 11:28
  your scarcity, your false beliefs.
• 11:30
  But here's the real magic. One of the things you tell
• 11:33
  yourself, you never speak out loud about money.
• 11:36
  And if you could find a place where you feel safe and secure
• 11:38
  and you share those, they'll lose their grasp.
• 11:41
  You'll actually be free. And you'll get to this third
• 11:43
  layer of your money story, which is things you can't share that
• 11:46
  are holding you back because they're blind spots and blocks
• 11:48
  that are hard to see, but you can only see them once.
• 11:51
  You share the things that you're telling yourself, which usually
• 11:53
  the things people are sharing with themselves is guilt, shame,
• 11:56
  you know, all these kind of negative emotions.
• 11:59
  But they hold it in. And if they can just speak it,
• 12:01
  they'll actually start to release it.
• 12:03
  So that's the first thing. The second thing is it's just
• 12:06
  being financially fit, independent and free.
• 12:08
  And the three things of that is financially fit is you get your
• 12:10
  financial house in order, you you create financial strength,
• 12:13
  you make sure that you have insurance to transfer risk.
• 12:16
  You make sure you have liquidity to protect.
• 12:18
  You know, if there's a health challenge or cash flow crunch,
• 12:21
  you make sure you're saving on your taxes and you set up your
• 12:23
  corporate structure. You just do the basics and then
• 12:26
  you get financial independence by figuring out your investor
• 12:28
  DNA. Where can someone invest where
• 12:31
  they have knowledge and if they don't have knowledge, get a
• 12:34
  mentor in that arena, learn about it so you become a better
• 12:37
  investor. See, risk isn't in the
• 12:38
  investment, it's in the investor.
• 12:40
  Are they good or bad investor? Well, if they're uninformed,
• 12:42
  they're bad investor and they're not investing, they're
• 12:44
  speculating. So you actually start to develop
• 12:46
  that skill set and create cash flow with your assets versus
• 12:49
  accumulate. If you can create cash flow with
• 12:51
  assets, you can create financial independence and it means every
• 12:53
  active dollar can build more assets.
• 12:55
  That 10 times advantage because most people are just like trying
• 12:58
  to save 10% of their income. I'm like, great, create cash
• 13:01
  flow, then you can save 100% of your income because your cash
• 13:03
  flow comes from assets. Then financial freedom is that
• 13:05
  place where money is not a primary reason or excuse you do
• 13:08
  or don't do something. It's a consideration, but not
• 13:11
  the consideration. So it's like put value first,
• 13:14
  think about the economic 2nd and focus on the price third.
• 13:18
  So an example of that would be I know people that won't pay $1000
• 13:22
  to a tax attorney, but that tax attorney might save them
• 13:25
  $50,000. So the cost is actually
• 13:29
  positive, the price is 1000 bucks, but they end up with more
• 13:32
  money in their pocket and they'll feel they'll have more
• 13:34
  value. So it's just a different
• 13:36
  framework. Yeah, I know.
• 13:38
  I, I did a video on a podcast and I was like, there's two
• 13:40
  people that you do not want to cheap out on and that's your tax
• 13:44
  attorney and your CPA, because they will save you more money
• 13:48
  than almost anything else is going to save you in your entire
• 13:51
  life. And they're, I mean, my CPA,
• 13:54
  he's actually not even ACPA. He's a tax attorney that
• 13:58
  consults me and he was an IRS tax auditor.
• 14:01
  So if anybody knows the legal loopholes and the advantages and
• 14:05
  disadvantages of all these different ways to save on taxes,
• 14:08
  it's somebody that had that position.
• 14:10
  And it's, I mean, I could even, I'd have to look at what the
• 14:13
  returns are. But the whatever his bill is, I
• 14:17
  could care less because I know I'm at least 10 Xing that on my
• 14:20
  taxes and it's pretty cool. I mean, I've never actually,
• 14:23
  some of the things that he's taught me are pretty brilliant
• 14:26
  that no other CPA has ever told me about.
• 14:29
  But for people who I mean, OK, let's talk a little bit about
• 14:33
  taxes. What are cause taxes?
• 14:37
  I always say a dollar. A dollar saved is basically
• 14:41
  $2.00 earned. So because if you earn, then you
• 14:44
  pay tax or or overhead or whatever, it might not even be a
• 14:49
  dollar, right? You might earn 2 and end up with
• 14:52
  less than a dollar. Yeah.
• 14:53
  So there's the earning component.
• 14:55
  You have to go make money you can't save.
• 14:56
  Your save your. Way to, to, to being rich.
• 14:59
  But then when you earn it, you have to be efficient with it and
• 15:02
  save it because that's an easy way to keep more of it.
• 15:04
  So what are some tax strategies that you implement or you you
• 15:07
  teach to help people save on the money that they're earning?
• 15:10
  How about I, I'll give the tax framework and then I'll give a
• 15:12
  bunch of strategy and if you want, I'll just contribute my
• 15:15
  tax navigator to everybody. They literally just DM me and
• 15:19
  they can put Hannah in my DMS Begums.
• 15:22
  But Hannah and we'll just hook you up with the tax navigator.
• 15:24
  It's a checklist that'll have over 100 tax advantages.
• 15:27
  They could just go through and say this applies or it doesn't
• 15:29
  and the framework says there's three buckets that are
• 15:31
  important. First is your team, second is
• 15:34
  the deductions you take, and the third is how you classify your
• 15:37
  income. So the team is just you need
• 15:39
  solid data if it's timely. So whether you're small and you
• 15:42
  just have a part time bookkeeper or you outsource it, there's
• 15:45
  even a really cool AI like puzzle dot IO is really good
• 15:48
  with bookkeeping. Really.
• 15:49
  Yeah, we just started implementing some of our
• 15:51
  companies because it's super efficient.
• 15:53
  So especially like it integrates with Stripe, it integrates with
• 15:56
  with Mercury, which where we're banking with that particular
• 15:59
  company and it saved us from having to go hire another
• 16:02
  bookkeeper because our bookkeepers totally topped out.
• 16:04
  So it does all the bookkeeping. That's insane.
• 16:07
  Yeah, it's awesome. Like, I'm so excited about these
• 16:10
  things because it just makes things so much more efficient.
• 16:12
  Yeah. So the team, the second person
• 16:15
  on the team is a strategist. A lot of accountants are
• 16:19
  historians. Hey, Hannah, you made this
• 16:21
  money. Here's what you have.
• 16:22
  That's a historian. A strategist proactively
• 16:24
  navigates with you during the tax year, not after.
• 16:27
  Most people talk to their accountant in the wrong year,
• 16:30
  like in 2025. You should be meeting with your
• 16:32
  accountant throughout the year and then in 2026, it's already
• 16:36
  done. Most people start meeting with
• 16:37
  them between January and April where they're overly taxed,
• 16:40
  overly busy, and it's all about deferral instead of savings.
• 16:44
  Deferral means you don't have to pay now, but you still have to
• 16:46
  pay later. Savings is it's a permanent
• 16:48
  deduction. It's actually full savings.
• 16:50
  So that's your strategist, then you and that might be ACPA, it
• 16:54
  might be an enrolled agent. I mean, there's a different, the
• 16:56
  third one is an attorney. Now, if you're not making
• 16:59
  $1,000,000 of revenue, just get a corporate attorney.
• 17:03
  If you're making more than a million, it's a tax attorney,
• 17:05
  right? If it's $650,000 of net taxable
• 17:08
  income, a tax attorney every time.
• 17:10
  Below that it, it just depends, but it's probably a corporate
• 17:13
  attorney. They're responsible for the
• 17:15
  classification of income. I'll say what that is here in a
• 17:16
  minute. And if you own commercial real
• 17:19
  estate, then you might want an engineer so you can do a cost
• 17:21
  segregation study, which can accelerate your depreciation.
• 17:24
  Second bucket deductions every time you spend money, just ask
• 17:27
  the question, does this apply to my business?
• 17:29
  If it certainly does, then you just document it.
• 17:32
  If you're not sure but think it, could you bring that up in a tax
• 17:36
  meeting every quarter? Mine are like 20 minutes.
• 17:39
  They're not long meetings. I just let him know where we're
• 17:41
  at for that, like the quarter where we're rejecting for the
• 17:43
  year and if we need to make adjustments.
• 17:45
  And I ask him, I'm like, hey, I'm going to Italy.
• 17:47
  I want to ride off the trip. They laugh.
• 17:49
  I go, no, I'm like, I'll have a client day while I'm out there.
• 17:51
  We're going to go take drone footage where my great
• 17:53
  grandfather was from. I'm going to do all my annual
• 17:56
  meetings because you have to have that for corporate
• 17:58
  compliance. And by the end of that
• 17:59
  conversation, I'm right, not 45% of the trip, right, But I have
• 18:03
  to have that context for that. So here's some deductions that
• 18:07
  are super easy that a lot of people miss. 132 J.
• 18:11
  So if do you have a pool or a cold plunge or do you have a hot
• 18:15
  tub or anything like that? Do you have a gym in your house?
• 18:18
  OK, So if you make that available to employees.
• 18:22
  Now look, I have a company that's just, I employ my kids
• 18:26
  and my wife. So I make those things available
• 18:28
  to them. I can now write off all the
• 18:30
  maintenance of all that. That's all tax deductible,
• 18:33
  right? Another 1280G.
• 18:35
  It's called the Augusta rule. Have you heard of this?
• 18:37
  So you just rent out your home for up to 14 days a year to your
• 18:40
  business. It's tax deductible to the
• 18:42
  business, but you don't have to claim it as personal income.
• 18:44
  So if there's like a big event going on in Arizona, that's the
• 18:47
  time to do it, right? Because if you go look at
• 18:49
  Airbnb's, boom, yeah, like, wait, you go the golf
• 18:52
  tournaments here, you, you, you do it during that time, host
• 18:56
  some clients, film some, whatever it is, you actually use
• 18:59
  it. But then you get that major
• 19:00
  write off Section 199A that is a qualified business deduction.
• 19:04
  So if you have W2 employees, you can get a pass through deduction
• 19:07
  that would lower your taxable income on your portion of your
• 19:10
  income. So I went from 37 1/2 to 29%
• 19:13
  using that deduction. Wait, say that one more time.
• 19:15
  I was, I was thinking about the Augusta rule and I missed that
• 19:17
  whole thing you just said it's. Called Section 199 A OK, so this
• 19:20
  was when the, you know, talks Tax JOBS Act, you know, came
• 19:25
  like that cut came out during Trump's first term and they they
• 19:29
  were talking about they're going to make corporate tax 15%
• 19:32
  instead of normal, but they ended up making it section 199
• 19:35
  A. And So what happens is if you
• 19:37
  have W2 employees, you get credits for that that go against
• 19:40
  your income. It lowers your taxable rate.
• 19:43
  So section 19A yeah, those are a couple deductions.
• 19:47
  Way more on the tax navigator guide.
• 19:49
  The third category is the big category.
• 19:50
  It's the classification or reclassification of income.
• 19:54
  First thing everyone should know is if you are a business owner
• 19:57
  or investor and you don't incorporate and use a schedule
• 20:00
  C, you have a 400% higher chance of being audited.
• 20:03
  So it doesn't make sense. The other thing is you have
• 20:04
  unlimited liability. So instead of using schedule C,
• 20:09
  set up a corporation, LLCS Corp, C Corp depending on what you're
• 20:12
  dealing with. Now, if you're an S Corp because
• 20:14
  you're the only owner of the business, that's about the only
• 20:17
  time I personally and I'm not an attorney, so this is just
• 20:19
  education Go get. Legal advice but I would use an
• 20:23
  S Corp if I'm the only owner. I have a Corp.
• 20:25
  I have a consulting company. I'm the only owner.
• 20:27
  It's an S Corp. I pay myself a salary, plus I
• 20:30
  take dividends, and so those dividends don't get hit with
• 20:33
  self-employment tax. So I could save anywhere from as
• 20:35
  high as 15.3% or at least three-point 2% by just simply
• 20:39
  splitting my income because I've moved it from active to passive.
• 20:43
  That happens with real estate too.
• 20:44
  You know, real estate incomes coming in passive instead of
• 20:46
  active. That's better than getting hit
• 20:48
  with all the stuff employment tax.
• 20:50
  The second thing is ordinary income to capital gains.
• 20:53
  So if someone has a lot of business internationally, they
• 20:56
  can bring it through an international sales corporation.
• 20:58
  That's all capital gains instead of ordinary income.
• 21:00
  If obviously real estate businesses, those things are
• 21:03
  capital gains, they can be a big advantage to that.
• 21:06
  The third one is tax free. So if someone has a business
• 21:09
  that's going to be around for at least five years before they
• 21:11
  sell and it meets certain categories, they can do a
• 21:13
  section 12O2 which allows them to sell that business for up to
• 21:17
  $10 million tax free per partner.
• 21:20
  So it's a tax free opportunity that a lot of people miss
• 21:22
  because they don't set up the right entity or a charitable
• 21:25
  trust. Someone selling the real estate
• 21:27
  can use the charitable trust, avoid all tax on the sell, get a
• 21:30
  small tax deduction, and then they're going to have 2030% more
• 21:34
  cash flow on that asset and. You just sell it under the
• 21:36
  trust. Yep, and you can donate it to
• 21:38
  the trust. First charity of your choice has
• 21:40
  to be a legitimate 5O1C3. But it's a major tax advantage.
• 21:44
  It's a great exit strategy. And then the 4th 1 I call tax
• 21:47
  arbitrage. I spend a dollar, I get more
• 21:49
  than a dollar back. So in Europe, if they're buying
• 21:52
  art for museums, they just buy it.
• 21:54
  In the United States it's all donated.
• 21:56
  So they have major tax advantages on art.
• 21:58
  So I bought art collections since 2006.
• 22:01
  You have to hold it for three years, but then you can donate
• 22:03
  it for the appraised value versus the book value void it
• 22:05
  bought it for. So I average about $2.00 in tax
• 22:08
  credit for every dollar I spent on art.
• 22:09
  I display the art most of the time and then just donate it to
• 22:12
  the museums that the art dealer chooses.
• 22:15
  That's fascinating. I know so many people are in art
• 22:17
  and I haven't gotten down that rabbit hole yet, but that makes
• 22:21
  a. Lot of sense, people think I
• 22:22
  know a lot about art because I always have it, but I don't know
• 22:23
  that much. This is a really good tax
• 22:25
  strategy. I like to display it, yeah.
• 22:27
  Yeah, so you buy a piece for 100,000?
• 22:30
  Dollars collection usually, yeah, spend like maybe 75,000 to
• 22:35
  $300,000 and then when I donate it, it's worth about 6:00 to
• 22:40
  1:00 typically on the deduction, which turns out to be about a
• 22:43
  $2.00 credit. How do you know that it's going
• 22:45
  to appraise for more? I haven't our investor that has
• 22:48
  been doing this forever. OK, so he tells you how do you
• 22:51
  find art to buy? Like how do you know what to?
• 22:53
  Do he's the one that does it. He does OK and then he just gets
• 22:56
  his cut and you hold it for. Three years I have clients that
• 22:58
  have been really good at art, that they've been able to do it
• 23:00
  without an art dealer, an art investor, because they're just
• 23:03
  good at art. But you'd have to make sure that
• 23:04
  you're buying art at a deep discount or that's appreciated,
• 23:08
  or you'd have to like they what they did is they sold part of
• 23:11
  their collection and then that set a price point, then they
• 23:14
  donated the rest. So.
• 23:16
  OK, Yeah. That's interesting.
• 23:18
  And are you getting more of a deduction than you paid for it
• 23:21
  though? Three years ago, OK.
• 23:22
  I would. Hope so.
• 23:24
  If I'm buying a collection, I'm signing with the artist that I'm
• 23:26
  not going to sell it. And so they're giving me a deep
• 23:28
  discount because they're moving the collection at once instead
• 23:31
  of like trying to sell it individually.
• 23:33
  And then it's going to be displayed at a museum, which is
• 23:35
  good for them and their brand. Yeah.
• 23:37
  And that's kind of how the US market works.
• 23:39
  Yeah, how do you go about finding trusted art dealers to
• 23:43
  do? Those I only know one and he
• 23:45
  won't take new clients, unfortunately, because I've been
• 23:47
  trying to send them to him. So I've asked for referrals and
• 23:50
  he doesn't have any right now. So I don't really have a good
• 23:53
  solution to that. For now, he'll let me buy art
• 23:55
  because I'm an existing client, but he's just got aging parents
• 23:59
  that he's caring for, so he doesn't feel like he could
• 24:01
  dedicate the time to to properly buy more art.
• 24:04
  Yeah. What do you think's the best way
• 24:06
  to build wealth quickly? Safe tax is probably one of the
• 24:09
  fastest ways, especially if you're if you're not paying tax
• 24:14
  because you know there's real estate professional that if some
• 24:17
  if you're spending at least 750 hours in real estate and your
• 24:20
  primary function, you can then do a lot that you couldn't do
• 24:24
  otherwise. I know I don't know how people
• 24:26
  do. I mean, I'm in real estate and
• 24:28
  that's I read Rich. I know I I saw you had Robert
• 24:30
  Kiyosaki on your show too. Yeah, I was on his a few times,
• 24:33
  3 or 4 times, yeah. Yeah.
• 24:35
  And he's, that's, he's the, you know, godfather of financial
• 24:41
  education. Right Richard Port adds the the
• 24:43
  OG right like. He's still traveling the world
• 24:46
  teaching the cash flow game and it's amazing.
• 24:48
  I mean that was the. 1st I bought it for my kids for
• 24:49
  Christmas this year. Do they play?
• 24:52
  They haven't played it yet, it's still in the box, but I I hope
• 24:54
  that I could get them to play. You got to play with them and
• 24:56
  tell them you'll give them money to play.
• 24:58
  Yeah, it's just then they'll play.
• 25:00
  But yeah, I mean assets versus liabilities.
• 25:04
  Rich people acquire assets that put money in their pocket.
• 25:07
  Poor people acquire liabilities that they think are assets.
• 25:09
  And then he goes into that whole.
• 25:10
  Controversy about the head of the house.
• 25:12
  Cash flow? Yeah.
• 25:13
  Yeah. So what is your perspective on
• 25:17
  if you are single family like primary residence, home is an
• 25:20
  asset versus a liability because Robert Kiyosaki calls it a
• 25:22
  liability because it always takes money out of your pocket
• 25:25
  and. He says it's a lifestyle choice.
• 25:26
  Yeah, it's, it's, it's not really an asset because it's not
• 25:29
  creating cash flow unless you Airbnb it, which my wife would
• 25:32
  never let us Airbnb our house. Well, yeah, if you live there
• 25:35
  full time too. I know people that I had a coach
• 25:38
  that worked for me in the way that she became financially
• 25:41
  independent was she got a divorce and she's like, I'm just
• 25:44
  going to run out my other home, my other rooms.
• 25:46
  Then she took that cash flow to get another property, that
• 25:48
  Airbnb, and then just kept doing that.
• 25:50
  But she actually rented the rooms in her house.
• 25:52
  I I wouldn't do it. Yeah, but I was it was cool that
• 25:55
  she did. I did that when I was in
• 25:56
  college. Yeah, yeah.
• 25:58
  When I was 19, I bought my first piece of real estate.
• 26:01
  I got a champ loan which paid for the down payment my mom Co
• 26:04
  signed and I rented out to other roommates.
• 26:07
  What's a champ loan? So because I was a first time
• 26:10
  homebuyer, it paid the down payment, so I had no money out
• 26:13
  of pocket. Yeah.
• 26:14
  It was like it was. I don't know if that program
• 26:15
  still around. It was just around when I was
• 26:16
  19. Yeah, yeah.
• 26:19
  That's great. I mean, there's so many
• 26:20
  resources out there. There's so much knowledge out
• 26:21
  there. And now, especially with AI,
• 26:23
  it's like my best thought partner is ChatGPT.
• 26:26
  It's pretty amazing, right? It's amazing.
• 26:28
  It's getting so much. Better.
• 26:29
  It's so good. Someone sent me what they Yeah,
• 26:31
  go ahead. Oh, go ahead.
• 26:32
  Well, they one of my clients said, how would you describe
• 26:35
  Garrett Gunderson? And it was hilarious what
• 26:38
  ChatGPT came up with. I was just going to.
• 26:40
  Say that I could have written. Yesterday I asked it to describe
• 26:43
  me because it came out with that new feature of like, we remember
• 26:45
  all your old chats now because you used to have to repeat
• 26:47
  things. And it was, it was pretty cool.
• 26:51
  Yeah. That's so funny.
• 26:53
  That was cool that they did it from their phone too.
• 26:55
  But so I mean, that's why I got into real estate investing
• 26:58
  because I read Richard Poor Dad and I was, he talked about all
• 27:01
  the tax advantages and the cash flow and acquiring assets.
• 27:03
  And that's really what attributed to me becoming a
• 27:07
  millionaire pretty early on in my life was because I had been
• 27:10
  buying real estate and that real estate was appreciating and the
• 27:14
  real estate was cash flowing and it was paying for my
• 27:16
  liabilities. And I definitely did have that
• 27:19
  very poverty scarcity mentality for a long time until much more
• 27:24
  recently. It wasn't until I had a, you
• 27:28
  know, $1,000,000 liquid in my bank account that I finally
• 27:30
  started to buy myself a dinner or go out to eat or do these
• 27:33
  other things. And that's when I started
• 27:34
  reinvesting in myself or investing in myself and my own
• 27:38
  personal development, physical health, financial intelligence
• 27:44
  networks, like joining groups like Genius Network and these
• 27:47
  other types of groups. And that was the point where
• 27:50
  everything started to take off exponentially.
• 27:52
  Like as soon as I let go of that scarcity mentality and started
• 27:57
  investing in people, investing in myself, investing in my
• 27:59
  health, like everything took off and now saving is not really a
• 28:05
  concern of mine at all other than taxes.
• 28:07
  Like being strategic and having the right partners.
• 28:09
  But now it's invest in the best people on your team that you
• 28:13
  possibly can. Like the, you know, $50,000
• 28:17
  employee versus the $500,000 employee.
• 28:21
  Really look at what they, they can bring to you.
• 28:23
  And obviously that's probably not going to be the the range,
• 28:26
  But still, if it's this employee is cheaper and you're just
• 28:28
  thinking, oh, it's cheaper, you have no idea what you're missing
• 28:31
  out on as far as what it's going to bring into your company.
• 28:33
  I feel like you're so insightful there because is 1, you talked
• 28:35
  about investing in yourself and I feel like that's phase one and
• 28:37
  you never stop that. But Phase 2 is you invest in a
• 28:41
  team and that's the game changer because if you can grow your
• 28:44
  team, you can really grow. If you only invest in yourself
• 28:48
  and try to do it all yourself, you'll burn out.
• 28:50
  So IBM did a study long ago and they said what's the difference
• 28:54
  between an A Teamer and AB Teamer in productivity?
• 28:58
  And they said it's 5200% less productivity with AB Teamer, but
• 29:02
  the difference between hiring AB Teamer and a Teamer might only
• 29:05
  be 1020% additional funds coming out of your pocket.
• 29:10
  Where could you put in 10% or 20% and get 5200% production
• 29:17
  Bitcoin? I mean, it's like that's so hard
• 29:19
  to do, yet people miss out on that because of a miserly
• 29:22
  mindset. And then I watched this
• 29:24
  documentary years ago right when Steve Jobs died, they came out
• 29:27
  with this thing called the Lost Tapes and it was like someone
• 29:30
  had avhs of Steve Jobs interview where they only took a 3 minute
• 29:33
  clip for this Titans program. And then they ended up playing
• 29:36
  the whole interview. And the thing that was most
• 29:38
  memorable in that interview is he said if I took the very best
• 29:41
  stereo system against the second best, the untrained ear couldn't
• 29:45
  hear the difference. Yet it's exponentially more
• 29:48
  expensive for the very best. He said, when I look at when we
• 29:52
  built Macintosh, people thought we had hundreds of people
• 29:55
  building. He says we had we could feed him
• 29:57
  with a pizza. It was like a handful of people,
• 30:00
  but they were so good. It's the most strategic
• 30:02
  advantage I've ever had in investing is having the right
• 30:04
  people. And so it's just insightful.
• 30:07
  You said I want to kind of like give these two examples because
• 30:10
  I think they're really, you know, useful.
• 30:12
  Yeah, and it's hard when you're bootstrapping and you're
• 30:15
  starting out and you don't necessarily have $500,000 to
• 30:19
  give somebody, right? And so it's there definitely is
• 30:22
  that balance and that curve of you do what you can, but I am a
• 30:26
  big believer and do what you do best and hire out the rest.
• 30:28
  And if you focus more and more on do what you do best and hire
• 30:32
  out the rest, then you'll generate more income, more cash,
• 30:35
  more resources to buy back your time, invest in top talent and
• 30:40
  continue doing what you do best. And do you know Garrett?
• 30:42
  Not Garrett, that's you. Do you know Garnett?
• 30:45
  From Canada. Yeah.
• 30:47
  Yeah, yeah, he's a stud. I love Garnett.
• 30:49
  Yeah. So Garnett helps like mentor me
• 30:52
  and stuff and. That's great.
• 30:54
  He's. He's brilliant for the audience,
• 30:56
  he's absolutely incredible, has built an insanely massive.
• 31:02
  He's the guy in Canada when it comes to that, yeah, like the
• 31:05
  biggest, wealthiest people go to him.
• 31:08
  Yeah. And not only is he amazing in
• 31:10
  business, he's just he's overcome.
• 31:11
  He doesn't focus on their health.
• 31:13
  He does all this great stuff. Yeah, like really self
• 31:16
  actualized in every way, which is my mission and my mission to
• 31:19
  bring up everybody else around me and help them reach their
• 31:21
  highest potential, like realize their highest potential in all
• 31:24
  areas. So anyway, he told me that what
• 31:28
  part of the arrow kills the animal?
• 31:30
  The tip? The tip, yeah, that's it.
• 31:33
  And so. Anything.
• 31:34
  I'm a bow hunter so I know. Oh perfect, you and my brother
• 31:37
  would get along well. Anything that you are doing that
• 31:41
  is not the tip of your arrow, you got to be delegating it as
• 31:45
  quickly as possible basically. And so I'm always thinking about
• 31:49
  that when I look at my To Do List is, is this the tip of my
• 31:52
  arrow? Is this the absolute point that
• 31:55
  I should be focused on? Or is there somebody else where
• 31:58
  this is their point and they can be doing this better than me and
• 32:01
  that way I can scale my company faster because it's, it's
• 32:04
  challenging to, you know, when you're trying to wear all the
• 32:07
  hats in the beginning, you have to, I think too many
• 32:09
  entrepreneurs, too many real estate investors, they think
• 32:13
  that they have to do it all and that they're the best at all the
• 32:16
  things and they wait too long to delegate.
• 32:19
  And that's what really inhibits their growth.
• 32:21
  That's why they get burned out, yeah.
• 32:23
  How did you get into like, what specific incident LED you into
• 32:27
  this business of teaching financial intelligence?
• 32:30
  So when I was a 15 year old, I started this car detailing
• 32:34
  business. My dad being a coal miner, he's
• 32:37
  like, hey, the bosses are coming to town.
• 32:39
  I'm going to clean these vehicles.
• 32:40
  You want to help me? I was like, sure.
• 32:41
  So I'm cleaning the surface vehicles with them.
• 32:43
  It's like, you're not bad at this.
• 32:45
  And I was like, huh, I wonder if my mom worked at a credit union.
• 32:48
  So I went, I knew the president of that credit union.
• 32:50
  I'm like, hey, when you guys repossess vehicles, I'll clean
• 32:52
  them. And he's like, cool.
• 32:54
  So I started cleaning those and I went and did this business
• 32:58
  competition called Students in Free Enterprise and I won $500
• 33:01
  and my business has only done $700.00 of net income.
• 33:03
  So I was like I think I became a speaker that day.
• 33:05
  But the next year I won the the 1st place and then I won the
• 33:10
  Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the state of Utah and it
• 33:12
  came with $5000. And I was like oh I want to
• 33:15
  invest this money. I didn't know what how to invest
• 33:17
  but I thought this will Get Me Out of this little town into the
• 33:20
  big city. That's kind of what my
• 33:21
  rudimentary thinking was. But my mom wouldn't wouldn't
• 33:24
  sign off as a custodian because you have to have a custodian
• 33:26
  before you're 18. And then when I was finally 18,
• 33:29
  I made a small investment with it and it was bad.
• 33:32
  And I was like, I got to figure this out.
• 33:33
  And in that process of trying to figure it out, got offered an
• 33:36
  internship when I was 19. And so I just was fascinated by
• 33:40
  money as I could understand it very quickly.
• 33:44
  And because I was young, I could meet with so many really wealthy
• 33:47
  people because they love to pay it forward.
• 33:49
  So I just flew somewhere every month for 26 straight months in
• 33:52
  these meetings, in closed door meetings, meeting with family
• 33:55
  offices, meeting with people that were, you know, advising
• 33:58
  people worth, you know, 10s of millions of dollars, which I
• 34:00
  didn't even know those kind of people at that age and just
• 34:04
  enjoyed it. That's so cool.
• 34:06
  Yeah. And you didn't.
• 34:07
  You mentioned you didn't really come from any sort of money at
• 34:10
  all in your multiple generations of your family.
• 34:13
  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I didn't like grow up in poverty or
• 34:18
  anything, but at the same time, my family was like a let's save
• 34:21
  all the money that we can. And that's all they kind of
• 34:23
  knew. They didn't know a whole lot
• 34:24
  beyond that. And so I like, no, I'd like to
• 34:27
  figure this out when it was. It was fun to figure out.
• 34:30
  And I had a professor at the university I went to that used
• 34:33
  to manage $5 billion in municipal bond funds.
• 34:35
  He was the number one in every category.
• 34:37
  At age 53, he decided to stop managing money and become a
• 34:41
  teacher. He's like, I made enough money
• 34:43
  to last a lifetime, so I'm just going to go teach.
• 34:46
  And so I became friends with him and I worked out with him and I
• 34:49
  learned from him. What's the best thing you
• 34:51
  learned from him? Well, the first thing I learned
• 34:55
  from him is there was a lot I didn't understand, and he
• 34:58
  learned. He showed me how to reduce risk
• 35:00
  rather than take risk. I learned how to read financial
• 35:02
  statements. I learned when to make an
• 35:04
  investment, why he would buy a bond, why he wouldn't.
• 35:06
  He gave our class 250 grand and then you broke up into five
• 35:10
  groups and then we had to invest the actual money and then our
• 35:15
  grade was based upon how we did against our benchmarks.
• 35:17
  Are you serious? And so like, yeah, he's, he's
• 35:20
  awesome. And then he became a client.
• 35:22
  And you invested in the stock market?
• 35:23
  We invest in the stock market and I learned quickly like I
• 35:26
  don't care for the stock market, I don't invest in stock market,
• 35:29
  I don't promote the stock market.
• 35:30
  It's just not been part of who I am.
• 35:32
  So you keep no money in the stock?
• 35:34
  Market I have $0.00 in it. Me too.
• 35:35
  It feels really good right now not to have it in there.
• 35:38
  I don't like to see other people in the fear they're in, but I
• 35:41
  want to be invested in a place where it's aligned with my
• 35:43
  investor DNA, where like I can grow a skill set.
• 35:47
  Because if you grow your money but you don't grow your skill
• 35:49
  set, that gap is risk. There's a lot of people that
• 35:51
  have money. They don't know what to like,
• 35:53
  how to create cash flow with it. They don't know how to protect
• 35:55
  it. They're just relying on things
• 35:57
  and they don't understand it. So when it goes down, their
• 35:59
  mindset follows it. There's people right now, just
• 36:02
  didn't panic. I know, yeah, I I am not a fan
• 36:05
  of the stock market at all. What about what's your take on
• 36:08
  crypto? Bitcoin or nothing?
• 36:09
  Bitcoin's the only real. Curve, I have Ethereum and it's
• 36:11
  done nothing for me and I probably I'm like really telling
• 36:14
  myself why am I staying in it? So I'm probably going to get out
• 36:17
  of it. But I understand why Bitcoins
• 36:19
  valuable and why it will continue to be valuable to the
• 36:22
  point where I've talked to my kids about it and they take 50%
• 36:24
  of their income and put it in Bitcoin right now.
• 36:27
  Yeah, I put, I put a decent amount in Bitcoin.
• 36:29
  I'm a believer. In Bitcoin for.
• 36:30
  Me too. Yeah, yeah.
• 36:32
  I get why other people won't do it and it's fine because if they
• 36:34
  don't understand it, they shouldn't do it.
• 36:36
  I had so many people that would be like jealous of people that
• 36:39
  were in Bitcoin early and I would say, hey, you're jealous
• 36:42
  thinking they were lucky. These were geeks.
• 36:44
  They understood this early on. They understood decentralized
• 36:47
  deflationary. They understood how like there
• 36:50
  would be technology built to make it more efficient to
• 36:52
  transact. They knew that they were
• 36:54
  studying it. They spent hundreds of hours and
• 36:56
  you think it was luck? I turned it down at $200 and
• 36:59
  $300 because it's like, that doesn't make sense to me.
• 37:01
  I was going to put 25 grand in at 200 and they the person I was
• 37:07
  going to buy it from when we meet him in a McDonald's parking
• 37:09
  lot and I was like, I'm out. I was just like what?
• 37:12
  I'm going to get a drive? How do I like it just didn't
• 37:15
  make sense to me. Someone told me about it when I
• 37:17
  was 18. I was just graduating high
• 37:19
  school, and it was a nightmare. I was trying to learn how to get
• 37:23
  into the freaking exchanges and trade it.
• 37:25
  And it was so hard. And I bought some.
• 37:29
  Yeah, I don't know. It was a couple 100 bucks.
• 37:30
  Yeah, I think to 11 years ago. But it was what I sold it all.
• 37:34
  And you know, I reinvested later.
• 37:35
  Right. That's The thing is when we
• 37:36
  don't understand it, we're going to sell it.
• 37:38
  When we think, oh, this is a game.
• 37:39
  I had a client I just consulting do these one day consulting gigs
• 37:43
  and this clients brought a COO. The CEO had 80,000 Bitcoin and
• 37:49
  sold it early before I hit a dollar because he mined it all.
• 37:54
  I know you hear those stories. When you think about 80,000, I
• 37:56
  was like, that's a that's a game changing life.
• 37:59
  I heard someone had like hundreds and hundreds of
• 38:02
  millions of Bitcoin in a security box that burnt down in
• 38:06
  California. They didn't keep their seed
• 38:08
  phrases. That's why I.
• 38:10
  Get. I don't know.
• 38:10
  I don't, I don't know. Like I have I have seed phrases
• 38:13
  in one safe and I have my hard wallets in another safe at
• 38:16
  different locations. That's smart.
• 38:19
  See, I I'm not at the level of having hard wallets and.
• 38:21
  Right and if my and if something happened?
• 38:22
  What is a seed phrase? So a seed phrase, you can have
• 38:25
  like 16 words or even more that if you lose your wallet, you can
• 38:31
  use those phrases to pull it back up.
• 38:33
  Oh, interesting. Right.
• 38:34
  So what's cool about that is if I memorize those, I can take it
• 38:38
  anywhere I want. Back in the day, people would
• 38:40
  hold gold, but if something was chaotic and they had to leave,
• 38:44
  they didn't get to take their gold with him because it would
• 38:46
  be stolen like Bitcoin. As long as you have, you know,
• 38:49
  power and Internet, you're good. How are you?
• 38:53
  Because I just, I still just trade on Coinbase, you know?
• 38:57
  I just pull it off on Coinbase once a month.
• 38:59
  I just put money in every week and once a month I put it on my
• 39:02
  wallet. Same with my kids.
• 39:04
  I use a Trezor. So you just trezor trezor dot IO
• 39:08
  will give you a wallet or I also have what's the other brand I
• 39:11
  have cuz I have a couple wallets.
• 39:13
  I have another one I can't remember but I like the Trezor
• 39:16
  and then I got one for my kids. And then you just literally plug
• 39:21
  it into your computer. Then you download the app and
• 39:24
  then you send to your Trezor from Coinbase and then it'll,
• 39:29
  it'll give you, you know, you when you say receive on you
• 39:32
  click it, it gives you your, you know, code.
• 39:35
  You put that in to Coinbase and then you send it and it moves to
• 39:37
  your wallet. Now it's off the exchange.
• 39:40
  Because I know people, I know of people didn't know them.
• 39:43
  I know one person that lost so much with FTX like like 10s of
• 39:48
  millions, right. So I don't leave anything on an
• 39:50
  exchange. I think exchanges could be
• 39:52
  hacked. I think that, you know, I have
• 39:54
  another a really good friend that I speak at his events all
• 39:58
  the time. He lost 8 Bitcoin on an exchange
• 40:02
  and they they won't give, they won't do anything about it.
• 40:05
  Well, that's what I say with the wallet, Like what if it doesn't
• 40:07
  show up? And who do you call, you know?
• 40:09
  We have your seed phrases. You literally just go plug those
• 40:12
  seed phrases in online. And it's easy to set up, Super
• 40:14
  easy. OK, treasure.
• 40:16
  I have a video on it I could share with.
• 40:18
  You. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to.
• 40:19
  I'm going to do that. I've taught my 19 year old and
• 40:22
  17 year old how to do it. I haven't shown my wife how to
• 40:24
  do it, she just knows where the phrases are OK if something
• 40:28
  happens to me. Yeah, that's another thing, just
• 40:30
  staying organized with all the stuff, like with the will.
• 40:32
  I mean, so I just pretty recently got like, you know,
• 40:36
  multiple trusts set up and I'm learning that whole trust thing.
• 40:38
  So talk, I'm assuming you're a proponent of trust.
• 40:41
  Yeah, I believe in the thing, The Rock.
• 40:43
  I wrote what the Rockefellers do, and that book, when I was
• 40:48
  researching it, they had this belief, own nothing, control
• 40:50
  everything. So a trust removes the
• 40:53
  ownership, but since 2013 in the United States, you could do a
• 40:57
  domestic asset protection trust and you get to select your
• 41:00
  distribution trustee, which means you can still access the
• 41:03
  money through your distribution trustee and if they don't give
• 41:06
  it to you can fire them and hire someone new.
• 41:08
  So it still gives you access to your money and control of it,
• 41:11
  but you don't own it. So if you're sued, depending on
• 41:14
  the state that it's in, it's between six months and three
• 41:16
  years that it becomes untouchable.
• 41:19
  There's like a time where your creditors have a chance to come
• 41:21
  and, you know, make a claim before it seasons.
• 41:24
  Yeah, yeah. It's pretty amazing what you can
• 41:26
  do with trust and asset protection.
• 41:28
  Yeah, you can avoid, you can avoid taxes upon death.
• 41:31
  You can. You know, there's a lot of good
• 41:33
  factors with it. Do you know any of tax
• 41:36
  strategies for using trust for when you exit a company?
• 41:40
  I mean, look, there's things like there's a thing called a
• 41:42
  CAPS trust that can allow you to like take distributions over
• 41:46
  time versus at once. It's not my favorite strategy.
• 41:50
  I'm, I'm more of like, if you're going to sell a business, you
• 41:54
  need to know your tax strategy before you have a letter of
• 41:56
  intent or talk to a broker, because that's where most of the
• 42:00
  strategy can come in. If you've already got that, you
• 42:03
  lose most of your tax strategy and becomes more about delay
• 42:05
  and, and what I would call like income smoothing so it doesn't
• 42:07
  happen at once. So there's a lot of trust
• 42:11
  strategies that I don't believe in.
• 42:13
  Like there's a thing called the charitable LLC.
• 42:16
  I I think it's a problem. It's a way that people avoid
• 42:19
  tax. But there's a thing in there
• 42:20
  called self dealing, meaning it's just a way for you to get
• 42:24
  your money out tax free, but you're the one that set it up
• 42:27
  and receive the money. So I've seen those not hold up.
• 42:31
  There's like a big case study that held up with Mark
• 42:33
  Zuckerberg. But I'm like, cool, if you've
• 42:35
  got billions of dollars, go ahead and fight the government.
• 42:37
  If you don't, I'd be really careful.
• 42:39
  There's spendthrift trust. There's all these trusts,
• 42:42
  complex trusts. I don't get into any of that.
• 42:44
  I'm a down the fairway tax guy. I'm not a Let's get in the Gray
• 42:47
  areas. Yeah.
• 42:48
  What do you think are the most, I mean if you're you don't you
• 42:52
  don't invest in the stock market.
• 42:53
  So as your teach the audience what your approach is, if they
• 42:57
  have money and they want to invest, but they're probably not
• 43:00
  investing, maybe it's in a money market account or something like
• 43:02
  that. Like, and especially in today's
• 43:04
  economy, how do you recommend that they invest in what and
• 43:08
  how? The look, the 1st place to
• 43:11
  invest is in efficiency. We did a study and what would
• 43:14
  the Rockefellers do where we said what if someone could
• 43:15
  double the return of their retirement plan?
• 43:18
  So we took the average amount in a retirement plan double the
• 43:20
  return. And then we compared that to tax
• 43:23
  savings and interest savings. And we found that people had
• 43:26
  400% more money keeping their money safe and stable by saving
• 43:30
  interest in taxes than they could doubling the return.
• 43:33
  Because how do you really double your return in your retirement
• 43:35
  plan? Well, anyway, I know how it
• 43:37
  would be like maybe going to private capital versus like
• 43:40
  public markets, but that's really risky because a lot of
• 43:42
  private capital can go to zero or the public markets probably
• 43:45
  not going to go to 0. So it's that's the tricky.
• 43:48
  So I think they need to pick from one of the big three, real
• 43:51
  estate, which there's a thousand ways to slice that.
• 43:54
  Businesses, a lot of different ways to look at that.
• 43:57
  Or intellectual properties, the hidden gem.
• 43:59
  Like to me, intellectual property is my favorite asset
• 44:01
  class because it's what I do best.
• 44:04
  I like writing books. I've written 10 of them.
• 44:06
  I treat them like a piece of real estate.
• 44:07
  Like What would the Rockefellers Do came out in 2016.
• 44:11
  I rewrote it in 2023. Because if you have real estate,
• 44:14
  you're going to change the carpet, you're going to paint
• 44:16
  the walls. Interest rates have changed.
• 44:17
  I'm a better writer. Killing Secret Cows, my first
• 44:19
  book that hit New York Times came out in 2008.
• 44:22
  I rewrote it in 2023. I just got up every morning for
• 44:25
  hours and wrote those books for that year, you know, and now I
• 44:28
  have re released them. They're doing very well.
• 44:31
  And intellectual property is kind of the game I like to play
• 44:34
  because I can live wherever I want.
• 44:36
  I only pay tax upon the cell where real estate have to pay
• 44:38
  the property taxes. I have like I, I used to do a
• 44:42
  lot of real estate. I'm glad other people do it.
• 44:45
  I found I just talked to bankers, attorneys, property
• 44:47
  managers, maintenance people and every now and again a tenant and
• 44:51
  it was always on their time frame, not mine like I can.
• 44:54
  I took a summer and went to Italy in 2017.
• 44:57
  I didn't have all the real estate so it was easy.
• 45:00
  If I would have been like the old days, I had that full time
• 45:02
  employees to manage my real estate portfolio.
• 45:04
  I'm glad you're good at it. I wasn't good at it.
• 45:07
  It's just not me. You know, I'm even thinking I
• 45:10
  have one property I'm even thinking about selling.
• 45:11
  It's such a beautiful gem of a property, but the renters
• 45:15
  leaving and now I'm like, do I really want to do what it takes
• 45:18
  to manage this? Yeah, and that's where we have
• 45:21
  to focus. And I was talking to Ben Hardy
• 45:23
  about this. It's like what's below your
• 45:25
  floor. You know, if you set an
• 45:26
  impossible goal and give it a short timeline, it forces you to
• 45:31
  think differently about what activities you're going to have
• 45:34
  to do to get that goal. What are you going to not be
• 45:36
  doing? And so as I would think of that
• 45:38
  too, because I've been, I've actually been selling some of my
• 45:41
  real estate and, and thinking about because now it's who not
• 45:45
  how for me before it was, let me buy this one house and manage
• 45:49
  this house. Let me save on property
• 45:50
  management, right? Like all the stuff.
• 45:52
  And then all the sudden you have 5 houses and you're like, OK,
• 45:54
  now this is starting to become a job and they're starting to
• 45:56
  become issues here. And and then there's alternative
• 46:00
  investments now where you can invest in fund managers who are
• 46:04
  doing big developments and who are doing buying all the things,
• 46:07
  doing all the property management, have all the
• 46:09
  relationships, have access to all the deals and you can make a
• 46:11
  really good return. Like, yeah, I just make sure
• 46:13
  that I have clients ask me about those deals all the time.
• 46:15
  I'm like, how many cycles have they gone through and how much
• 46:18
  cash do they have on hand? You know, because the big people
• 46:21
  make it through and the small people don't.
• 46:23
  Yeah, yeah, it's all about the right sponsor, right?
• 46:25
  But I love alternatives. I I think the alternative
• 46:27
  investment space is amazing if you're an accredited investor.
• 46:30
  And I've just simplified my life heavily because I redefined
• 46:33
  wealth. I used to think of wealth as
• 46:35
  like how much I could accumulate.
• 46:37
  And now I think of wealth as like, how present can I be?
• 46:40
  And so if I'm going to make an allocation of money, what's the
• 46:44
  time that goes with that and can be a steward over that?
• 46:46
  Or will it sabotage other things that I would rather be doing?
• 46:49
  So if I'm going to write a lot, I don't want to have a lot of
• 46:52
  things that would distract me from that.
• 46:55
  Because that's your unique ability.
• 46:56
  That's what I yeah, that's what I'm more gifted out.
• 46:59
  Yeah, whether it be on a podcast than talking to an attorney.
• 47:03
  So you said intellectual property is your best
• 47:05
  investment. You're saying people can invest
• 47:07
  in intellectual property? Or mainly creators of
• 47:09
  intellectual property. Yeah, I was going to say, but
• 47:12
  so. It's not for everybody, just
• 47:13
  like real estate, it's not for everybody, just like business
• 47:15
  isn't for everybody. But those are the big three cash
• 47:18
  flow generators that are out there.
• 47:19
  What, what is your opinion on the state of the market right
• 47:22
  now and and just investing in savings and income?
• 47:26
  Like what what do you think the impact is going to be from the
• 47:29
  tariffs and do you see opportunity or fear?
• 47:32
  What's your take? The original plan for tariffs I
• 47:35
  thought was really intelligent and wouldn't have been as
• 47:40
  disruptive. I don't really know what's
• 47:43
  because it's like we're in this game where I don't know what's
• 47:45
  going to happen. Are they going to lower them?
• 47:46
  They get it like there's too many unknown variables moving
• 47:48
  forward. But the original plan was start
• 47:51
  incrementally adding 2% tariffs and then see the response add 2%
• 47:56
  more, which wouldn't have shaken the market up quite as much.
• 47:58
  But maybe it wouldn't have been as effective long term because
• 48:00
  maybe it didn't get people's attention.
• 48:02
  I don't know because we've seen them paused, we've seen them
• 48:06
  suspended. We've seen them like that just
• 48:09
  has major ramifications. But at the same time I'm going
• 48:12
  why are we paying tariffs and other people aren't?
• 48:15
  So I'm I'm not against it. I'm also not smart enough to
• 48:20
  know all the variables and know what the full game is like.
• 48:23
  I'm looking at a piece of the picture with limited
• 48:26
  information, not hearing the conversations and making a
• 48:28
  judgement based upon that. So I don't know.
• 48:31
  But my feelings been the same for a long time about the stock
• 48:34
  market and it's not the most popular opinion, but it's how I
• 48:38
  feel. I think it was a valuable
• 48:40
  resource when they invented the stock market because someone
• 48:43
  could have a big idea that they need funds to make that idea
• 48:46
  happen. So here's the problem.
• 48:47
  If a small company right now decides to go public, they're in
• 48:51
  so much danger because of short selling.
• 48:54
  So they can have a predator out there saying we're going to
• 48:56
  short this company to death, meaning we're going to keep,
• 48:59
  we're going to short this so much that it pushes the pressure
• 49:03
  down so that we get the reward because we have more money.
• 49:06
  That's the sharks. And I've seen it with too many
• 49:08
  small companies. We don't need the stock market
• 49:10
  anymore. It's all funded through private
• 49:12
  capital for big corporations. It used to be that you couldn't
• 49:14
  get private capital like that, but now it's readily available.
• 49:17
  Sure. The rich get richer through that
• 49:19
  process, but we also get the middle class and the upper
• 49:23
  middle class get bamboozled by the stock market all the time
• 49:25
  because there's dark pool investing where there's major
• 49:28
  hedge funds buying at different prices than the public.
• 49:30
  There's flash trading where there's supercomputers that when
• 49:33
  someone goes to buy, they're skimming it all the time.
• 49:36
  There's expense ratios and 12B1 fees that are, you know,
• 49:40
  draining a lot of this. And there's also a lot of false
• 49:43
  reporting. If I buy an S&P 500 fund and one
• 49:47
  of those S&P 500 companies go to business, which I think we're
• 49:50
  going to see that happen more because of AI and the
• 49:52
  advancement of technology, they replace that with a new company
• 49:56
  and say that new company's return is what the overall
• 49:58
  return is. But the reality is my returns
• 50:00
  not that because I lost one 500th completely and
• 50:03
  permanently. And so when we go and put money
• 50:07
  in the stock market, not knowing like these companies are just
• 50:10
  taking money off the table, like if you know, Uber was fully
• 50:15
  funded, you know, we look at all these companies and they get
• 50:18
  media buzz and hype to prop that up.
• 50:22
  And we look at these companies, when they do go public, it's so
• 50:24
  that the owners and the original investors can pull money off the
• 50:28
  table. It's not because they needed the
• 50:30
  capital. So it's an antiquated system
• 50:33
  that we continue to invest in because we've been indoctrinated
• 50:37
  in investing equal stocks. The average investor.
• 50:40
  Here's the word stock. Just like when I say the word
• 50:42
  Kleenex to represent tissue. Kleenex is the brand, but tissue
• 50:46
  is the actual thing. People now unfortunately think
• 50:49
  stocks equal investing, but it actually equals speculation for
• 50:52
  the majority of the population. Why do we still go with it?
• 50:55
  Because people feel they don't have the time or expertise to do
• 50:58
  anything else, and they've been taught to be so passive with
• 51:01
  their investing that they watch money pass them by.
• 51:04
  You're not going to get rich putting money in the stock
• 51:06
  market. The way that all the gurus are
• 51:07
  going to try to get rich is save more money, invest more, start
• 51:11
  early, dollar cost average, all this kind of stuff.
• 51:13
  That's been BS because 95% of the time they're not financially
• 51:16
  independent because what kind of cash flow do they create from
• 51:18
  the stock market? Almost none.
• 51:20
  Now when they get to a place that they have to create cash
• 51:22
  flow, they actually have to redeem shares or take away from
• 51:26
  the appreciation of the stock. Well, what happens if when you
• 51:28
  retire, the market goes down? It's a thing called
• 51:31
  disinvesting. You start to pull more money
• 51:34
  out, exaggerating the losses. So if I have $1,000,000 and I'm
• 51:39
  like, look, the market's averaged 8%, so I'm just going
• 51:41
  to take 6%. But your first year you lose
• 51:44
  10%. Now you're down to 900,000 and
• 51:46
  you take out your 60,000. Now you're down to $840,000.
• 51:50
  Now if the market comes rearing back, it gets 10%.
• 51:54
  It's only 10% of $840,000, and now you're going to take another
• 51:59
  60 out. So that's why there's this thing
• 52:00
  called the 4% rule that says if you take more than 4% out of a
• 52:03
  variable account, you run the risk of depleting that account
• 52:07
  in in its entirety before you die.
• 52:09
  And it used to be that people retired for days or years or
• 52:13
  months, not for decades. People are living a lot longer
• 52:17
  and they think they're going to retire for 30 years off an
• 52:20
  amount that is so minuscule. The average 4O1K has $174,000 in
• 52:24
  it. The 70 million people opted into
• 52:26
  this program only got put in a four O 1K because companies
• 52:30
  destroyed pensions. I don't know how much you want
• 52:32
  the history of this, but. Like.
• 52:34
  Basically, pensions were popularized in 1947 because GE
• 52:39
  was like, hey, we want to recruit the very best talent so
• 52:42
  we could become #1 or #2 in every category.
• 52:45
  The only way we get there is by recruiting other executives at
• 52:48
  other firms to come work for us. And we'll promise them if they
• 52:51
  work for us, we'll give them a pension.
• 52:53
  These guys were dying at 62. So what they would do is they'd
• 52:56
  buy life insurance on them. They'd use the cash value when
• 52:59
  they retired to supplement the pension, and they would
• 53:02
  replenish what they paid with the death benefit.
• 53:04
  Wall Street came and said, why would you go with these anemic
• 53:07
  life insurance policies when the stock market's earning more?
• 53:10
  Imagine if you get 10% instead of 4%.
• 53:13
  What's going to happen is if you pay out 6%, you get to keep the
• 53:16
  other 4%. That's going to be millions of
• 53:18
  dollars in the company pocket. When the market went down, they
• 53:22
  depleted the pensions. The pensions went bankrupt and
• 53:26
  they said we don't want to take this risk anymore.
• 53:28
  We'll transfer that. Instead of a defined benefit,
• 53:32
  we'll have a defined contribution.
• 53:34
  And that defined contribution has let the retirees of America
• 53:37
  down. That 95% of them are ill
• 53:40
  prepared, but they feel warm and fuzzy on the way up.
• 53:43
  They just don't get where they want to get in retirement.
• 53:45
  So they sacrificed their whole life working and doing all this
• 53:48
  work, not getting the 69 cent ice cream cone.
• 53:51
  And when they finally get to retirement, it's not enough
• 53:54
  money. So the entire thing is a ream.
• 53:56
  The entire thing is broken. So what do you do different?
• 53:59
  Cash flow, plug your financial leaks, save on.
• 54:02
  You know, there's four ways that people leak money.
• 54:04
  They tip the government unnecessarily, they overpay on
• 54:07
  interest. There's ways to reduce that.
• 54:09
  They have hidden fees and commissions inside of
• 54:10
  investments they can eliminate so they can get more money.
• 54:13
  And they redesign their insurances to be more efficient.
• 54:15
  And that's 10% of their income that will now come into their
• 54:17
  pocket versus institutions. Second, you learn which what
• 54:21
  your investor DNA is and you start to become a cash flow
• 54:23
  investor. Yes, it takes some time, but if
• 54:25
  you're willing to be more active now, you'll be able to be more
• 54:27
  passive later. Everybody else is passive now
• 54:30
  and they end up being in a really bad situation in the
• 54:32
  future. So it comes down to
• 54:33
  responsibility. And we give up the bullshit
• 54:35
  saying we don't have time, we have time.
• 54:37
  We're watching Netflix, we're on social media scrolling like the
• 54:40
  average person is on their phone for 8 1/2 hours a day and only
• 54:44
  sleeps for 6 1/2 hours. We're just fucked up.
• 54:49
  Yeah, I it's, it's not hard if you just do the things that are
• 54:55
  smart and don't blow money, invest in the right things,
• 54:59
  acquire assets, not liabilities, don't have crazy credit card
• 55:03
  debt. And I just, I mean, it's hard
• 55:05
  out there though. Like things are so expensive and
• 55:07
  I go out there and see, you know, if restaurants are
• 55:10
  starting to get quieter and I mean, some places you go, it's
• 55:13
  $30.00 for a drink. I'm like, I don't know how non
• 55:15
  entrepreneurs or executives with ownership in companies, which
• 55:19
  you could still call an entrepreneur are making it in
• 55:22
  the world. And I mean, I just don't, I
• 55:24
  don't really see how anybody does it.
• 55:27
  Because it comes down to one thing.
• 55:29
  We have to increase our skills. And AI has given us an
• 55:33
  unprecedented opportunity to increase our skills.
• 55:37
  We can be so much more effective and efficient if we learn how to
• 55:40
  use AI to be more valuable, not to replace us, but to remove the
• 55:44
  minutiae so that we can be more effective per hour, per minute,
• 55:48
  per year, per whatever. And it means that we have to be
• 55:52
  active in the pursuit of value creation.
• 55:54
  We can't be passive. Yeah, it's all about value
• 55:57
  creation and that's why I think, you know, before engineers and
• 56:02
  people that had knowledge were well paid, but now knowledge is
• 56:06
  free for the most part 20 bucks a month, that's at GBT.
• 56:09
  And so now it's people who can create are going to be paid that
• 56:13
  zero to 1. It's good news for artists, it's
• 56:16
  good news for entrepreneurs, it's bad news for people who
• 56:19
  want the past to be the future. Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting.
• 56:24
  Well, I know we have to to wrap up here soon, but I'll end with
• 56:27
  a few questions. So let me pull up my list here
• 56:31
  because I was going to ask you something specific.
• 56:32
  OK, I would like to know. This is a fun question.
• 56:36
  What keeps you up at night? My, you know.
• 56:39
  Whether it's personal or business or with your clients.
• 56:42
  Like what's your the biggest thing on your mind that keeps
• 56:44
  you up at night? The when I just like
• 56:48
  relationships lost like mistakes that I've made, like if I wake
• 56:52
  up, that's that'll be the thing on my mind or I'm thinking like,
• 56:56
  am I doing enough for my kids? But like, I sold the business
• 57:00
  and didn't like how that went. I unwound A partnership.
• 57:04
  I didn't like how that went and that that would occupy my mind a
• 57:06
  lot. I feel bad about it.
• 57:08
  What I guess in losing relationships, what part of that
• 57:12
  keeps you up? Like you should have done it
• 57:13
  differently or you it's. Just like there's a lot of pain
• 57:16
  in that because I'm a relationship person and so even
• 57:19
  if those relationships had a season, it doesn't mean it was
• 57:22
  easy. Yeah, particularly in business
• 57:24
  or personal business. Yeah, I haven't really lost any
• 57:28
  personal relationships. So they were business ones, but
• 57:30
  they were. There's still a personal element
• 57:33
  to that I don't really believe in.
• 57:34
  It's not personal, it's business.
• 57:36
  Like everything's personal, right?
• 57:38
  Like when someone says it's not personal, it's business, they're
• 57:40
  about to fuck you over. Yeah.
• 57:42
  Or they just did, right? Yeah, it's not you, it's me.
• 57:46
  It's not personal. It's.
• 57:47
  Business, yeah, OK, what has it been difficult for you to
• 57:52
  because I know I've struggled in relationships as an entrepreneur
• 57:55
  because I'm obsessed with my business and yeah, if you're
• 58:02
  going to have anything be really good, you have to put a lot of
• 58:04
  energy into it. And I've never put a lot of
• 58:06
  energy into like a relationship with somebody that is not a
• 58:10
  business relationship, right. My business relationships are
• 58:13
  personal, but I don't really have energy contribution to
• 58:17
  personal relationships that don't involve business generally
• 58:20
  and so those relationships suffer.
• 58:22
  So did did you experience that as well like with your?
• 58:25
  Oh, when I was first married I was like, just worked all the
• 58:28
  time. Yeah.
• 58:29
  It was hard. I was trying to like make it.
• 58:31
  I was trying to prove myself. I was trying to, you know, I
• 58:33
  said yes to every opportunity. And so my wife was patient and
• 58:38
  we did a lot of work. But like we've had such an
• 58:40
  amazing relationship for the last really like 15 years.
• 58:44
  But early on, I was definitely she was second.
• 58:48
  Yeah, I know that feeling. Yeah.
• 58:50
  I mean, I've been putting people second.
• 58:52
  Yeah. And what about being a dad?
• 58:54
  I feel like I course corrected that pretty quickly because my
• 58:57
  son was born in, you know, basically 2005 and my other son
• 59:01
  was born in 2008 and I, I really got on track by 2010, like I
• 59:05
  really, you know. So he was pretty young.
• 59:08
  Before, Yeah, because when he was my my son was born.
• 59:10
  And by the time he was one, my 2 business partners died and I
• 59:14
  just was like trying to keep everything together.
• 59:16
  We had three offices, 42 employees I like.
• 59:18
  But after four months of doing nothing but working, he was
• 59:21
  asleep when I left. He's asleep by the time I got
• 59:24
  home. My wife just called me out.
• 59:26
  She's like, you know you, you might be pretty extraordinary
• 59:29
  business, but you're just an ordinary husband and father.
• 59:31
  And I was like, shit, I couldn't really argue it.
• 59:34
  Yeah, that that's a knife in you like, oh.
• 59:36
  God, but I it took like she told me that and it still took like,
• 59:40
  you know, it was easy with the kids, but it took me some time
• 59:44
  to regain her trust. By 2012, I just told my, you
• 59:49
  know, my like everybody running in my company, I was like, yeah,
• 59:51
  I'm going to take this year and I'm really going to focus on my
• 59:53
  family. Like, cool, we got you.
• 59:55
  We're going to improve some margins.
• 59:56
  We don't have to have as much revenue.
• 59:58
  My wife by the end of the year, she's like, not even then.
• 1:00:00
  She's like, are we going to be OK?
• 1:00:02
  I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, you're home all the
• 1:00:03
  time. You're like, is the business OK?
• 1:00:05
  I'm like, yeah, we, I wanted to show you like how important this
• 1:00:08
  is. And it was an amazing year, you
• 1:00:10
  know. That's so cool.
• 1:00:11
  And did you find that you grew more once you healed that
• 1:00:14
  relationship with your family and with yourself and actually
• 1:00:16
  get, it's like that 10% rule of spending money on yourself,
• 1:00:19
  right? You were spending time on
• 1:00:20
  yourself. Look, our when I wasn't right
• 1:00:23
  with my wife, no amount of business success mattered
• 1:00:26
  because it's like she's the first person I want to call when
• 1:00:29
  I want to celebrate something. And like, we were just weren't
• 1:00:31
  in a good spot. Yeah, you know, it wasn't like
• 1:00:33
  we were in the worst spot, but it was like a mediocre spot.
• 1:00:36
  It wasn't like, you know, not where I wanted to be.
• 1:00:39
  Oh gosh, you just reminded me of something and I forgot what I
• 1:00:42
  was going to say. Darn it, I wanted to ask you
• 1:00:46
  that. So -1 minute one second.
• 1:00:50
  OK, I'll finish with what's the best advice you've ever seen or
• 1:00:55
  heard, I think. It's probably my dad.
• 1:00:57
  Like we're we're driving. I was like early on in my career
• 1:01:00
  and I was like, I was given that old like, I think Dave Ramsey
• 1:01:04
  says it, which is ironic because I'm not really big fan of his
• 1:01:07
  financial advice. I admire his business success.
• 1:01:09
  But it was like, hey, dad, I'm going to work harder than anyone
• 1:01:12
  else is going to work so I can live a better life than anyone
• 1:01:14
  else in the future. And he was just like, I
• 1:01:17
  understand that sentiment and I appreciate the work ethic, but
• 1:01:19
  like, you can't buy back the memories.
• 1:01:21
  You never have. Not always stuck with me.
• 1:01:23
  It's like really impacted me. Yeah, it's important.
• 1:01:26
  It's everything I struggle with that is getting lost in you get.
• 1:01:31
  So actually I was about took dinner.
• 1:01:33
  I took Robert, he's talking to dinner the other night for his
• 1:01:35
  birthday. And I was telling him about
• 1:01:38
  impossible goals and you know, Ben Hardy's book and scaling and
• 1:01:40
  I get so obsessive and focused on this stuff.
• 1:01:43
  And Robert told me he goes, it's not the goal that matters.
• 1:01:51
  Like he said, see the goal as a rock.
• 1:01:53
  And if you drop the rock in a lake, the ripple from the rock
• 1:01:59
  is what's important. And he shared a story about he
• 1:02:03
  was travelling around the world and was on this really tiny
• 1:02:05
  island. And they all ran up to him and
• 1:02:07
  had the cash flow game. And we're like Robert and knew
• 1:02:10
  who he was. Everything he's like, that's
• 1:02:11
  what matters. Like that ripple effect.
• 1:02:14
  And that feeling matters so much more than selling 40 million
• 1:02:18
  books, right? And so it was.
• 1:02:20
  That one really hit home for me. Yeah, like it's just good to be
• 1:02:23
  liked by the people that you love more than the people you
• 1:02:26
  don't know. Yeah.
• 1:02:27
  Well, thank you for coming on the show today.
• 1:02:29
  Thanks for having me. Of course.